Stop Kim Beazley & company’s ‘Indigenisation’ of the Australian War Memorial

A NATIONAL petition signed by more than 43,000 Australians is calling on the administrators of the Australian War Memorial (AWM) to stop the blatant politicisation of its activities by Memorial Council chairman Kim Beazley, the former Labor deputy Prime Minister, Opposition Leader and Governor of Western Australia.

As part of its major $550 million redevelopment project, Beazley and his woke colleagues on the War Memorial Council have incorporated plans for a permanent gallery dedicated to the Australian Frontier Wars, the series of violent clashes between pastorialists, British military forces, police and Aboriginal tribes across the state colonies in the early 1800s.

These historical conflicts involved organised and bloody raids by both Aborigines and colonists, such as the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838, which resulted in seven of the white settlers involved being charged and hanged – a fact that goes against the modern-day activist narrative that the entire colonial establishment was bent on genocide.

The establishment of Aboriginal protectorates in the 1830s to watch over the rights of Indigenous Australians, protect them from violence and assimilate them into European ways of life, is further evidence against the narratives of the modern-day Marxist-inspired activists.

The petition, which can be signed at the Defend Sacred Ground website and at change.org, was launched by retired Lieutenant Colonel and Vietnam veteran Peter O’Brien and Roger Karge, the researcher and editor whose Dark Emu Exposed project, revealed the fraudulent claims of indigenous heritage made by Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.

The petition demands that the Federal Government, the AWM Council and Memorial leadership halt and remove plans for a gallery featuring frontier wars and other contested colonial history, arguing it contravenes the Australian War Memorial Act 1980.

“Kim Beazley chairs the council that snuck politics into the Australian War Memorial. Don’t let him get away with it,” a petition supporter posted on social media.

“He says the Memorial told Australians a fiction by not having indigenous politics in it.That is Beazley’s line.He says the Memorial told the country a fiction about our past, then the council he chairs used that claim to load politics into our place of mourning.

“They never asked the public, they never won the argument in Parliament. An unelected council, with Beazley in the chair, made a decision Parliament never put to a vote.”

The petition supporters say activists want a second tomb beside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – “a new slab in the Hall of Memory for a political claim.”

The petition supporters maintain that the National Museum already holds this history and that the War Memorial is for the fallen.

“Beazley chairs the body that turned it into a soapbox.They are overtly breaching the Act.”

At the Senate estimates meeting in November 2022 the War Memorial director said there were no plans to take legal advice because they believe they had the right to go ahead with the plans.

The petition supporters note that more than 103,000 verified names sit on the AWM’s Roll of Honour.

“Half a billion dollars went into it’s redevelopment, then Beazley’s council snuck indigenous politics into the shrine that belongs to us all. Nobody voted for it, nobody was asked,” a supporter said.

AWM supporters were also insulted when the new Anzac Hall opening back in June featured a Welcome to Country lasting up to 15 minutes. The speeches, performances and tours did not include a single rendition of Advance Australia Fair.

“At Australia’s most sacred place of remembrance, where we honour those who fought and died under the Australian flag, our national anthem was left out,” the supporters said.

“Our diggers didn’t fight, bleed and die so future generations could forget the very nation they served. They fought for Australia, for our freedoms, for our way of life, and for the flag and country we all call home.”

Beazley’s woke activist friends are making the ambit claim that some 100,000 Aboriginal people were killed during the so-called Frontier Wars in pre-Federation, colonial Australia.

But Karge’s Dark Emu Exposed site points out that these Aboriginal people are unnamed and the 100,000 figure is fictitious because it is “a number pulled out of thin air for political purposes by the activist historians, who rely on mathematical formulas in their calculations”.

“They have never presented any real evidence or records to support their death toll guesses,” says Karge.

“In reality, none of these Aborigines could in any way be deemed to meet the War Memorial criteria: none of them were members of the ‘defence forces’ raised by the Crown; none wore an Australian military uniform; none swore an allegiance to our ‘Sovereign Lord, the King or Queen’; and, far from ‘resisting His Majesty’s enemies’, the activists openly admit these Aborigines were in fact His Majesty’s enemies, in a claimed ‘war of resistance’ against the British colonisation of their lands.”

Karge says it is patently absurd to memorialise and honour, on an equal basis, those Aboriginal “enemies” of the Crown alongside the 103,140 Australians who gave their lives defending Australia from the Crown’s enemies.

“Are we now expected to consider honouring other enemies of the Crown at our national shrine also – the Germans, Japanese and Viet Cong perhaps?”