The evidence is overwhelming – Australia’s Frontier Wars were real, deadly, and long, and a landmark new book lays it out in full. So when will the Australian War Memorial fully face the truth?

What will it take for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) to fully recognise the reality of Australia’s Frontier Wars (the Australian Wars)?

It’s not as if the evidence for what happened in what is Australia’s longest and most deadly war isn’t overwhelming. Ironically the latest book – The Australian Wars edited by Rachel Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds – was recently launched at the AWM following another promotion at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre.

The AWM promo for the book launch said: “It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. This is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. At stake was the sovereignty of an entire country. This history is still alive in those descendants who carry the stories of their ancestors. The Australian Wars brings what for too long has been considered the........

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