Forgotten War by Henry Reynolds, 280 pp, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2013, ISBN 9781742233925 (pbk), $27.95.

An insurgent may, in the eyes of some, be a freedom fighter. Armed conflict is often seen differently according to one’s experience and perspective. After the Second World War, many new nations in Africa and Asia emerging from the ruins of colonialism and imperial ambition rewrote their histories to incorporate and acknowledge those who fought for and achieved independence and national sovereignty. These were the former plantation colonies, areas grabbed by European powers for their resources and strategic value, not as the future homelands of colonisers.

In the settler-colonies, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, a very different attitude to Indigenous resistance became entrenched. A greater contrast is hard to imagine. Acknowledging Indigenous efforts to repel intruders might mean admitting that dispossession and invasion had actually occurred, something that legal and political frameworks could not easily admit. Giving respect to those who defended their country against colonisers, according to some, threatened the entire basis of the new settler-nations that evolved from the imperial exercise. Far too much was at stake.

Henry Reynolds’ latest book, Forgotten War, asks how Australia will reconcile those who died – at home – in the defence of their countries with the soldiers who fell during the nation’s overseas battles. In some ways, this represents a return to one of Reynolds’ original themes, discussed in his 1993 chapter ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland’, in Race Relations in North Queensland (James Cook University, Townsville). Twenty years later, the same questions remain unanswered.

Two main issues are presented in this book: how should Australians acknowledge frontier warfare, and how could our national military history be made more inclusive? Along the way, important issues such as sovereignty and national commemoration enter the debate. The book has great importance for the teaching of history in our schools and universities, as a timely corrective to the seemingly never-ending deluge of ‘war histories’ and ‘military celebrations’. For that reason alone, I am grateful to Henry Reynolds.

My own archival research supports Reynolds’ contention that the frontier, rather than exploration or pioneering was ‘the central thread of Australian history’ (p. 172). Frontier warfare, as Reynolds argues, is central to ‘an understanding of both the past and the present’ (p. 3). He notes that both the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the Australian War Memorial, the two main institutions fostering the ‘militarisation of Australian history’, are ‘silent about frontier war. It is as though it didn’t exist’ (p. 234). This oversight means Australians ‘have the extraordinary situation that Aborigines who died fighting on the other side of the world are recognised while those who were cut down defending their homelands are studiously ignored’ (p. 234).

As far as Reynolds is concerned, Australia’s continued failure to acknowledge that a form of warfare took place when Europeans invaded this continent means the violence and the deaths that occurred during the frontier wars are forgotten. This ongoing omission has powerful implications for settler memorials, as well as for Indigenous people. If the sacrifice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, in defence of country, cannot be admitted, then the deaths of settlers also remains as a continuing silent scar on national history. One cannot be dealt with without admitting the other.

The alternative, as far as he is concerned, is the criminalisation of the settlers themselves: ‘If there was no war then thousands of Aborigines were murdered in a century-long, continent-wide crime wave tolerated by government. There seems to be no other option. It must be one or the other’ (p. 136). In the mind of this reviewer, the serial killing was not only tacitly allowed, but actively encouraged by colonial government and society. How else would the murderous activities of forces such as Queensland’s Native Police be permitted to continue, despite public knowledge of the full extent of the violence?

Reynolds’ previous writing on the militarisation of Australian history has been criticised by conservative commentators and some within the armed forces, and no doubt the same arguments will be trotted out again in response to this book. Did Australia exist before European settlement? If not, then the only alternative is an admission that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who died did so in defence of their own sovereign nations. However, as Reynolds notes, sovereignty is ‘a fundamental flaw in Australian jurisprudence’ (p. 193). Similarly, to reject what happened on the frontier as ‘not really war’ means rejecting the opinion of every credible military historian in Australia today, because none omit the frontier from their list of Australian battlefields.

This is an important and timely book that should be read by every teacher and history student in Australia. The fundamental disconnect between the community and the historical profession, and the institutions charged with remembering war and conflict, speaks loudly about the profound gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perceptions of and understandings of our national history. We will only go forward, as a nation united, when all the war dead are acknowledged, honoured and remembered.

Disclaimer: My book The Secret War is acknowledged as a source by Henry Reynolds.

Jonathan Richards

University of Queensland