The Australian War Memorial (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

When even the deadenders at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) acknowledge the need to recognise the conflict between white settlers and the country’s First Peoples at our primary national military commemorative site, you can be sure the remaining resisters are deep in denial.

And when it comes to denial, few do it better than Barnaby Joyce, the dumped Nationals leader now enduring the obscurity of being opposition veterans’ affairs spokesman.

Yesterday Joyce announced that shadow cabinet had decided that the wars of invasion and colonisation had no place in the War Memorial. “The fundamental element is that the War Memorial was built in sacred recognition of wars that Australians fought as a nation, unified against an external foe. It is not to be a memorial for conflicts within Australia,” Joyce said.

The Coalition was presumably motivated by the sight of its erstwhile leader, Brendan Nelson, revealing on 7.30 that the AWM had been dragged, kicking and screaming, from the position it held when Nelson was director to a new position, under Nelson as chair, that “will have a much broader, much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Aboriginal people, initially by British, then by pastoralists, then by police and by Aboriginal militia”.

Joyce’s statement, however, isn’t focused on the central issue of whether the AWM should recognise Australia’s first and worst conflict, in which invaders butchered and dispossessed First Peoples. Instead, for Joyce, it’s all about “placing the Australian War Memorial amidst partisan debate”.

Yes — according to Joyce and his Coalition colleagues, this is all about the politicisation of the War Memorial. These are the people who, in government, appointed to the AWM council:

  • Brendan Nelson, former Liberal leader
  • Tony Abbott, former Liberal leader
  • Glenn Keys, founder of Liberal donor Aspen Medical
  • Josephine Stone, life member of the Country Liberal Party

But that’s just run of the mill Joycean stupidity. Examine the Coalition’s formal view on the subject, however, and things get worse. “Conflicts within Australia that pitted Australians against other Australians in our own land, in some instances internecine, should be represented and discussed in a memorial that takes into account this significant difference, and not at the Australian War Memorial,” Joyce claims.

It may come as a shock to Indigenous people, and indeed the rest of us, to discover that the Coalition believes the occupation and seizure of Australia from its First Peoples was a case of a conflict that pitted “Australian against Australian”. If we’re talking in blunt terms, only one side was “Australian” in the wars of dispossession and occupation, and it wasn’t white people. They were from Britain and Ireland. Indeed, the Coalition still clings to the idea that we’re a British offshoot, ruled by a king from an island off the coast of Europe.

Recasting the white invaders and colonisers as “Australian” not only defies history, it defies how those invaders and colonisers saw themselves and described themselves, and defies how many white Australians saw themselves up to the late twentieth century.

The Coalition believes “conflicts involving First Nations’ people are best remembered at Ngurra, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Precinct, for which design work is already underway”, Joyce blithely assures us, to the extent Barnaby can do blithe. The word Joyce was really looking for in that sentence is “forgotten”, rather than “remembered” — downgrade the invasion, genocide and dispossession of First Peoples to a non-existent museum far enough away from the AWM to prevent any taint.

The RSL, which is represented on the AWM council by its president, Greg Melick, agrees that reference to the colonisation wars should be banned from the AWM. For Melick, any mention of those wars should purely be in service of the greater glory of service in white armies: “while some frontier conflicts have been featured in Australian War Memorial galleries and touring exhibitions, these have been mounted to provide some context to the subsequent service of First Nations personnel in the ADF.”

You can understand the Coalition’s dismay over the AWM finally acknowledging the first wars of modern Australia. Its project in government, via a stacked AWM council and half a billion dollars in funding, was the transformation of one of Australia’s sacred, unifying spaces into a military amusement park, sponsored by weapons companies, celebrating white Australia’s long participation in wars of imperialism, including our disastrous 21st century imperialist ventures into Afghanistan and Iraq. Needless to say, our hideous record of war crimes and atrocities in Afghanistan is carefully ignored.

It is this attempt by the Coalition to own the War Memorial as a military theme park that is divisive, not the recognition of Australia’s true history of bloodshed and dispossession. It is only the recognition of our history of colonisation, and the resistance by our First Peoples, and the continuing legacy of both, that can restore the War Memorial’s role as a unifying national place of commemoration.

Instead, the Coalition — which will presumably seek to ban mention of frontier wars from the memorial if it is returned to government — wants to continue to use our military history as a tool of politics and division.