Agey bin

 If the half-billion dollars that is to be spent on extensions to the Australian War Memorial were to be spent on good history, it might conceivably be worth paying. It won’t be.  It will be used to sell the same message as the current displays; that the Australian army was both heroic and virtuous, and that war brings out the best in us. 

No presentation of our engagements in two world wars and after can be taken seriously that does not include any reference to the Battle of Brisbane (where diggers fought GIs), the Battle of the Wazza (where the diggers burned down part of Cairo), or the massacre of Sarafand (where the Anzacs killed forty civilians and burned down a Palestinian village).  

In every war we’ve ever fought, from the Boer War and Breaker Morant to Afghanistan, Australians have been notorious for killing their prisoners. My grandfather’s letters from Gallipoli refer to it unashamedly.  No Australian has ever been prosecuted (by Australians, at least) for war crimes.  If the AWM shows us got a wall of VCs, it also needs to show us the other side of the picture.

The message – the only message - of the War Memorial needs to be General Sherman’s: war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.  When we send our soldiers out to fight, we take that responsibility on ourselves.  We need to know precisely what it means.  

Chris Borthwick