First of all, my humble thanks for the warm reception my first essay in this forum on Tuesday received from Echidna readers.
Almost 50 of you responded with your thoughts on the frontier wars and whether or not they should be given full recognition in the Australian War Memorial. While, as I expected, some comments fell into the "shit happens" camp of which I was once a member, more than three-quarters of the respondents, many of whom grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, identified with the journey I described.
That is, after having been taught little or nothing about the darker side of European settlement at school, they had come to learn about the massacres, brutality and settler-inflicted violence as adults and now acknowledge the conflict was widespread, that Indigenous deaths numbered in the millions and that this chapter in our history needs to be acknowledged.
