Kym MacMillan thinks that the Australian War Memorial Act is "clear enough" (Letters, September 24), and that the institution should limit itself to portraying the history of Diggers; its "original intent".

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Setting aside that it was established as a memorial to the dead only of the Great War (showing that the Act can and has been changed), its historical remit is actually unclear and inadequate.

First, it reflects the limited knowledge of Australia's military history in 1980: the year before Henry Reynolds's The Other Side of the Frontier changed our understanding.

Second, even its definition limited to "forces of the Crown raised in Australia" would include the Military Mounted Police, raised in Sydney in 1824, which is why I was justified in including the engraving of the 1838 Slaughterhouse/Waterloo Creek massacre in the former Colonial gallery (1985-2022), for which I was the AWM's staff historian.

But the 1980 Act remains inadequate in recognising the extent and nature of armed conflict between Indigenous peoples and British settlers - it would, for instance, strictly exclude the military expeditions described in letters to this paper in recent days, because British regiments were not "raised" in Australia.

Mr MacMillan hangs his case on a few words in an Act which reflects an outdated understanding of our history.

As the AWM's council has rightly acknowledged, ignorance of history is no longer acceptable. Just amend the Act!

Professor Peter Stanley, Dickson

Sorry Mr Wilson (Letters, September 24), but the 46th Regiment of Foot was not "raised in Australia", but in Britain, so is clearly not included under your interpretation of the AWM Act.

Perhaps you should instead be writing to the Imperial War Museum in London demanding that it recognise the role of the 46th in the colonial-era conflicts.

Kym MacMillan, O'Malley

In 1999 the world was afraid of the Y2K bug. Computer systems were going to destroy the world on New Year's 1999/2000.

For me the only thing that happened that night was I was stabbed at the Sydney Opera House by some crazy woman with a syringe as the fireworks rang in the New Year.

Now with the doomsayers claiming once again that computers are going to destroy the world, this time I'm one of the developers with probably some of the most advanced models that exist. But no matter what I try in offline environments, conventional AI is just too lazy to have any ambition of its own.

The parallels to my own experience on New Year's 2000 are clear to me. Despite all the media hype, it's not computers that will destroy the world.

It's the nutcases that act maliciously against innocent citizens that cause........

© Canberra Times