Magna Carta Place was opened on September 26, 2001, and this week it will be the 25th anniversary of the opening by John Howard, the prime minister of the day.

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Why is it that not many people in Canberra seem to know where Magna Carta Place is situated? How many people drive past but all they see are the traffic lights and Parliament House up on the hill ahead?

Yet this is our symbol of freedom, of the rule of law, of trial by jury and justice for all.

The project for a monument was the brainchild of Air Vice-Marshal Desmond Hall, who was president of the Canberra branch of the Australia-Britain Society. In the 1990s Desmond, who was also the bursar of the Gabriel Foundation at the Canberra Girls Grammar School, became the chair of the Magna Carta Committee.

It was this committee that raised the funds for the project.

The Australia-Britain Society Foundation was formed for the purpose of fundraising. When it looked like a shortfall was probable Desmond went to the deputy high commissioner of the British Embassy. Great Britain covered the shortfall with a fine donation to celebrate 100 years since Federation.

The MCP is situated on Langton Place, appropriately named after the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, who joined the barons who convinced King John to sign the charter. In 2015 the CEO of MC800 (the British Committee's celebration of the 800th anniversary) came to see it and exclaimed, "We have nothing as good as this in Britain."

The NCA has installed a gateway through to the Rose Garden on the Senate side of Old Parliament House. Definitely a tourist destination.

Richard Forster, chairman of trustees, Australia-Britain Society Foundation.

AWM and frontier wars

Having attended the Imperialism and Resistance conference at the Australian War Memorial last week I believe the appropriate place to recognise our frontier wars is not only there but also in the school curriculum and films, and online.

There were two military musters of able-bodied male convicts in 1828 and 1835 in the Colony of NSW

These excluded convicts on ironed gangs such as my great-great-grandfather Martin Pike, a transported member of the Whiteboy movement who was perceived threat to the colony. The musters also excluded female convicts.

The military authorities had identified the convicts who would be armed if the colony was threatened externally or internally. Among the convict population were a number of former members of the military. Each mustered convict had an individual identifying number, so by any measure they were more than irregulars.

Dr Nicholas Clements made an excellent detailed presentation on the military campaign in Tasmania at last week's conference. The AWM is the historically appropriate place to mark these moments in our military history.

Kym MacMillan once again rushes to defend the AWM from itself (Letters, September 19). Dr Sam White (September 18) offered an authoritative demolition of one of the key objections raised by those who deny the fact of the Australian Frontier Wars, a distillation of a paper he presented at the "Imperialism and Resistance" conference the AWM held last week.

Mr MacMillan's letter echoes the argument offered at that conference by Tony Abbott, alone among actual historians to oppose the AWM depicting frontier wars in its galleries.

Mr Abbott's paper and Mr MacMillan's letter define........

© Canberra Times