The first recorded pandemic in an Australian colony was the smallpox outbreak that decimated the Gadigal people around Sydney in April 1789. Ben Deacon, ABC News online, 29 March 2020 revisits this controversial event that many people today believe was a deliberate act against First Peoples: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-and-australias-first-pandemic-caused-by-smallpox/12099430 [...]
Owing to the Coronavirus outbreak, Anzac Day, 25 April 2020, will not include commemorations in which the public take part in person. Instead the Australian War Memorial will broadcast a private ceremony to be held at 5.30 am in the Commemorative Area and Hall of Memory. Read more about the [...]
Owing to the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak, the Australian War Memorial will close indefinitely. Read the announcement made on 23 March 2020: https://www.awm.gov.au/media/press-releases/memorialclosure
On 22 November 2019, when Dr Brendan Nelson was still Director of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), many organisations and members of the public called for Australia's 'frontier wars' to be recognised as part of the $500 million expansion of the AWM. Read more at: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6506929/support-for-frontier-wars-commemoration-in-awm-public-consultation/ It remains to [...]
A long-running archaeology project, funded by the Australian Research Council, has been looking into what happened to Aboriginal men who were recruited to the Queensland Native Mounted Police, their involvement in 'the frontier wars' and the resultant trauma that impacted their lives. Read more about this story in EurekaAlert! [...]
Tully Falls, Queensland UNESCO World Heritage listed Wet Tropics, Far North Queensland, Australia. Photo: Wikipedia Australian Terrorism, by Stanley Lenoy, of Stan Lenoy Films, published in September 2018 was a short video about massacres that occurred in the Tully/Innifail region of colonial Queensland. The video included [...]
More information is coming out about the extent of frontier violence in colonial South Australia. An example, Jon Ovan's story 'Bloody history comes to light' appeared in the Port Lincoln Times and in the West Coast Sentinel on 1 August 2018.
Read Paul Daley's story about the true history of Bathurst in The Guardian on 7 August 2018 at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/07/bathurst-where-the-spirits-prowl-and-whisper-painful-bloody-truths
WFE Liardet (1840), Tullamareena escaping from the first Melbourne gaol in 1838. State Library of Victoria collection. Australian Frontier Conflicts: The University of Melbourne's Dr Katherine Ellinghaus, brings to light an 1839 letter that reveals the frontier violence that happened around colonial Melbourne. Read more at: https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/criss-cross-history-hidden-in-a-letter One story [...]
H. Calvert, 'A Deadly Encounter', 1870s. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. (Picture digitally coloured). The University of Melbourne has called for papers by Friday 3 August 2018 for "Colonialism and its Narratives: rethinking the colonial archive in Australia conference" to be held on 10–11 December [...]
