A Shrine is Not a Woke Arts Seminar
The Australian War Memorial exists because nations sometimes need places where argument stops. More than 103,000 names are recorded there, representing Australians who died in war and operational service. Charles Bean's original conception combined memorial and museum, but the moral centre of the institution was always commemoration. It was built so the country could remember its war dead, not so that every dispute in Australian history could eventually be deposited within its walls.
That distinction now matters because the Memorial's council has moved towards incorporating frontier conflict into its pre-First World War galleries. Supporters present this as an overdue recognition of Australian history. Critics, including the Defend Sacred Ground campaign, argue that something more fundamental is happening: an institution created to commemorate Australians who served and died in the nation's wars is being asked to absorb a second and very different national story, one centred on invasion, dispossession and resistance to colonial settlement. That is not a trivial curatorial decision. It goes to the purpose of the building.
The modern progressive instinct is to convert almost every major civic institution into a vehicle for moral instruction. Museums become exercises in reckoning. Ceremonies become statements about identity. Public institutions are expected not merely to perform their original functions but to correct inherited national narratives. The War Memorial matters because Anzac remains one of the few elements of Australian civic life that still commands broad respect without requiring an accompanying apology. That makes it an obvious cultural prize.
The activist argument has been expressed plainly enough. Australia supposedly possesses more than one foundational story. The Anzac story is one. Frontier conflict is another. A mature nation, on this view, should acknowledge both at the institution where national sacrifice is most visibly commemorated. There is an apparent fairness to this, but it conceals the central question: why this building?
There is no shortage of places in which the frontier can and should be studied. Schools can teach it. Universities can debate it. State museums can exhibit it. The National Museum of Australia can give it the space and complexity it requires. Books, documentaries and public inquiries can examine massacres, resistance, dispossession, disease, colonial policy and the prolonged conflict surrounding settlement. None of that requires pretending that every violent episode in Australian history belongs inside the Australian War Memorial.
Indeed, the Memorial itself once recognised this distinction. In 2013 it publicly stated that its statutory definition did not extend to internal conflicts between Indigenous peoples and colonial powers, and that the National Museum of Australia was the more appropriate institution for comprehensive treatment of frontier conflict. That earlier position deserves more attention than it has received.
The Australian War Memorial Act 1980 is not infinitely elastic. Its central commemorative purpose concerns Australians who died on active service or as a result of wars and warlike operations in which Australians were on active service. The Memorial also has museum, collection and research functions, so it would be too strong to say that any frontier-war exhibition is obviously unlawful. That legal question has not been finally settled. But the statutory tension is real. If the Memorial's governing concept has to be stretched until people who died resisting the creation of colonial Australia can be assimilated into the same commemorative framework as Australians who later fought for the nation overseas, then something more than ordinary historical interpretation is occurring. The institution's meaning is being altered.
That is why the phrase "a shrine is not a seminar" matters. A seminar exists to complicate, dispute, revise and reinterpret, while a shrine exists to commemorate. Historical scholarship should be argumentative. Historians should dispute numbers, motives, legal categories and interpretations. They should revise earlier accounts when evidence demands it and examine uncomfortable facts without fear. A national shrine has a narrower job.
This is not historical denial. Frontier violence was real. Massacres occurred. Aboriginal resistance occurred. Colonial violence occurred. None of this needs to be hidden, minimised or romanticised. But acknowledging history does not oblige every institution to commemorate every historical actor in the same moral register. That distinction is routinely blurred, so that refusing a particular commemorative proposal becomes described as refusing history itself. It is nothing of the kind. The question is not whether frontier conflict happened. The question is whether the Australian War Memorial is the institution in which that conflict should be elevated into a coequal national commemorative tradition. Those are different propositions.
The roughly half-billion-dollar redevelopment of the Memorial makes the issue particularly significant because redevelopment is never merely architectural. New galleries embody choices about what the institution thinks Australia should remember and how Australians should understand themselves. That is why symbolic details matter. The more Indigenous ceremonial language and frontier-conflict framing become integrated into national institutions, the more the distinction between historical inclusion and ideological reinterpretation becomes important.
A Welcome to Country at a national ceremony can be defended as an act of respect, but it should not follow that the institution itself must progressively reorganise its identity around an account of Australia in which legitimacy depends upon continuous ritual acknowledgement of dispossession. The same problem appears across Australian public life. An acknowledgement begins as courtesy, becomes protocol, protocol becomes expectation, and expectation eventually becomes doctrine. At that point the absence of the ritual itself becomes politically meaningful. This is how cultural transformation generally occurs in bureaucratic institutions: rarely by dramatic decree, more often through accumulation.
The frontier-war debate follows the same pattern. The initial demand is for representation, followed by equal recognition, equal symbolic standing and eventually the argument that existing national rituals are incomplete unless they incorporate the new frame. Some advocates have already gone well beyond the modest proposition that frontier conflict should receive a gallery. Proposals have included much stronger forms of commemoration, including calls for recognition comparable to that accorded to Australians who died in overseas wars. That is where defenders of the existing Memorial are entitled to ask where the limiting principle lies.
If frontier conflict becomes part of the Memorial's central commemorative mission, does that eventually imply a separate tomb, equal ritual status, ceremonial participation or a redefinition of who is being commemorated and why? Those are not paranoid questions. They follow from the logic of institutional parity.
There is also a deeper problem in the attempt to construct numerical equivalence between frontier deaths and Australia's military dead. Estimates of Aboriginal deaths in frontier conflict vary considerably and remain historically contested. The subject is difficult because the colonial record is incomplete, definitions differ and demographic estimates necessarily contain uncertainty. That is precisely why very large headline figures should not be casually placed beside the Memorial's Roll of Honour as if both numbers possess the same evidentiary character.
One records named individuals under an established commemorative criterion, while the other is a historical reconstruction of an extraordinarily difficult period. Treating those figures as morally interchangeable may make powerful politics, but it is not careful historiography.
The debate also exposes a larger division in Australian public life. One view begins from the assumption that Australia is a legitimate nation with a history containing achievement, failure, violence, sacrifice and injustice. The other increasingly treats the nation's legitimacy as conditional upon ritual acknowledgement of an original moral wound. The first can incorporate criticism without surrendering the legitimacy of the whole. The second tends to make confession the price of belonging.
The War Memorial becomes a battlefield between these views because it is not simply another building. It embodies a particular national story. The men and women commemorated there did not die in an abstract seminar about competing interpretations of Australian identity. They served under Australian authority in wars in which the country was engaged. That is the institution's moral centre.
It is entirely possible to believe that colonial violence was real while also believing that the Memorial should retain that centre. It is entirely possible to teach frontier conflict honestly without turning the War Memorial into the principal site of its commemoration. It is entirely possible to recognise Aboriginal suffering without pretending that every national institution has failed until it has been reconstructed around that recognition. Those positions are not contradictory. They become contradictory only within a political culture that treats refusal of symbolic incorporation as evidence of moral guilt.
The great irony is that Australia already possesses institutions designed precisely for historical complexity. Universities exist for dispute, museums for interpretation, archives for evidence and parliaments for political argument. The Memorial exists for something different, and that difference should not be regarded as an embarrassment. A nation is allowed to have sacred civic spaces. It is allowed to have institutions whose function is deliberately narrow. It is allowed to say that one building commemorates one particular class of sacrifice while another institution examines the broader national story. Pluralism between institutions is not censorship. It is institutional clarity.
There is also something peculiar about the contemporary insistence that every remaining national symbol must carry the full weight of historical grievance. If the Memorial cannot remain primarily a memorial to Australians who served and died in the nation's wars, then eventually no civic institution can retain a distinctive historical purpose. Everything becomes a platform for the same moral message. That is not diversity. It is ideological uniformity imposed across different institutions.
The most persuasive defence of the Memorial therefore does not require denying frontier history or exaggerating legal claims. It requires something simpler: keep the distinction between history and commemoration, between studying violence and sanctifying a place, and between a museum capable of examining difficult history and a national shrine whose central purpose is to honour particular dead.
Sacred ground is a phrase frequently used in relation to Country, and it should not be impossible to use it in relation to the Hall of Memory. If every inherited national symbol must eventually be reconstructed until it carries the approved contemporary account of Australia's sins, then the country will have lost something more than an argument about museum displays. It will have lost the capacity to preserve any civic space from politics.
That is why this fight matters. The frontier should be studied honestly, the violence should not be denied and the history should be argued over with all the evidence available. But the Australian War Memorial does not need to become the final tribunal of 1788. A shrine is not a seminar, and a nation that cannot leave even one minute of silence free from ideological reinterpretation has forgotten what silence is for.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/defend-sacred-ground/
