Many argue Samuel Griffith, twice Queensland premier and our first chief justice, is guilty of colonial war crimes. Raymond Evans searched for the evidence to nail him but found a different story.
The Australian War Memorial’s pledge to recognise the frontier wars is an end to ‘black armband’ rhetoric. It should now investigate the Aboriginal resistance, and see it as a military operation.
Group of Aboriginal people with shields and spears, by Joseph Lycett, circa 1820.
National Library of Australia
The widespread conflict that accompanied Australian life for 140 years was arguably our most important war. We need a museum telling this story, funded on a par with The Australian War Memorial.
Detail from Julie Shiels’ 1954 poster White on black: The annihilation of Aboriginal people and their culture cannot be separated from the destruction of nature.
State Library of Victoria
It is 50 years since anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures in which he coined the phrase ‘the great Australian silence’. How far have we come since?