Reconciling the Silence: Marching for the Truth on Anzac Day
For fifteen years, a quiet but powerful procession has walked up Anzac Parade in Canberra each April 25, not in defiance, but in remembrance—seeking recognition for the first and longest war fought on this continent: the Frontier Wars.
These were not faraway battles in foreign fields, but brutal conflicts waged here, on Country, where First Nations Peoples resisted invasion, dispossession, and genocide with extraordinary courage. Each year, the march insists on one thing: that Australia must confront the full truth of its history if it ever hopes to reconcile with it.
Professor Ghillar Michael Anderson, Convenor of the Sovereign Union of First Nations and Peoples in Australia and Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic, reminds us that the call for recognition is not new. It is centuries old. “Our people did not have to leave these shores to fight in a war,” he says. “The war came to us.”
The story of frontier conflict begins well before the First Fleet landed in 1788.
Atrocities against First Nations Peoples are recorded as early as the Dutch voyages along the western coast. But it was under British colonisation that the violence took on systematic, calculated form.
Governor Arthur Phillip’s orders were not ambiguous—they called for the killing of Aboriginal people and the public display of their severed heads, placed along the colonial boundaries with chilling intent: “Instill in them an universal terror.”
From the beginning, the colony was built on terror. As land was taken, women were stolen, children abducted, and entire clans massacred.
First Nations warriors like Pemulwuy of the Bidjigal clan, and later Windradyne of the Wiradjuri, resisted with guerrilla tactics that would inspire future generations. Yet history rarely tells their stories.
Instead, official memory centres on foreign theatres of war. The Australian War Memorial has long resisted the inclusion of the Frontier Wars, citing concerns over historical scope and thematic focus. But the truth is harder to avoid each year.
Every Anzac Day, more Australians ask: why are we not remembering the first war fought here?
In 1816, Governor Lachlan Macquarie issued a Proclamation that legalised the killing of Aboriginal people, including non-combatants—elders, women, children—calling such deaths “unavoidable collateral damage.” Macquarie’s order is considered by many to be Australia’s first declaration of martial law.
Governor Brisbane would repeat the act in 1824, targeting the Wiradjuri people after Windradyne led resistance against settler violence. These were organised campaigns of state-sanctioned warfare—yet they remain largely absent from our national war narrative.
The colonisers were armed with more than just muskets. As Professor Anderson notes, the tools of conquest included gunpowder and brandy—lethal forces that ravaged entire communities. When Aboriginal resistance killed settlers, the response was disproportionately cruel.
“For every one white person killed,” the squatters declared, “we will kill as many of you as we can.” Some were shackled in neck chains and marched off Country. Others were drowned, tied to reef anchors, swallowed by the tides.
This history is not marginal. It is central to the question of sovereignty and justice. The refusal to acknowledge these wars is not simply a failure of memory—it is a calculated act of erasure.
The legal logic is clear: if these were wars, then Aboriginal nations were sovereign entities. And if they were sovereign, then under British law, the Crown would have been required to negotiate treaties and peace agreements.
By denying the reality of the Frontier Wars, the state avoids facing the full legal and moral consequences of its foundation.
That’s why, according to Anderson, the War Memorial’s refusal to commemorate frontier conflict is more than symbolic. “Their efforts to avoid recognition of the Frontier conflicts are significantly more important than the public realises,” he says. “They know it and I know it.”
He points to the disturbing irony in the War Memorial’s very architecture. At the Pool of Reflection, just beyond the Eternal Flame, grotesque gargoyles appear to bear the stylised heads of Aboriginal men—stone trophies immortalised in a sacred national space.
For many First Nations visitors, it is not a place of healing but of humiliation. It reinforces, through silence and stone, the message that Aboriginal warriors do not count.
But the marches continue. With each passing year, more Australians are joining. They walk not to erase Anzac memory but to expand it—to ensure that all those who fought for their people, their land, and their survival are remembered.
As the documentary Moving Truth shows, these are peaceful, powerful ceremonies of remembrance. The marchers carry the names of Pemulwuy, Windradyne, and Jandamarra, not as historical footnotes but as national heroes.
Recognition matters—not just in textbooks or museums, but in the stories we tell about who we are. The fight for inclusion of the Frontier Wars in the national war narrative is not just about the past. It’s about the future. It’s about healing a wound that was never allowed to close.
Mabo v Queensland (1992) was a landmark High Court decision that overturned terra nullius—the doctrine that declared Australia an empty land. But Mabo did not address what it might mean if the British Empire had in fact invaded sovereign nations.
That question, Anderson says, was never asked. And because it was not asked, the legal consequences remain untested. The demand to recognise the Frontier Wars could bring that question back into the light.
There can be no meaningful reconciliation without truth. Until we name the wars that took place here, and honour the lives lost, we remain a nation unwilling to face its origins. But as Professor Anderson and others continue to walk Anzac Parade each year, they carry the possibility of something better.
Not silence. Not erasure. But truth.
And with truth, the possibility of peace.
Learn more:
“To forget would be an atrocity in itself. We walk to remember.”
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