A national institution, Medicare turns 40 this year. But are budgetary changes such as the doctor co-payment the beginning of the end for universal healthcare?

MEDICARE was always a shit-fight. It became law in the most extraordinary circumstances: one of a handful of bills passed during the only joint sitting of federal parliament in the nation’s history, after the double dissolution election in 1974.

As the Whitlam government prepared to introduce the system – then known as Medibank – its opponents rallied.

The Australian Medical Association marshalled a million-dollar “Freedom Fund”, donated by members. Determined to stop bureaucrats interfering with patients, it hired a former Miss Australia to front its publicity campaign. The General Practitioners’ Society of Australia circulated a poster depicting social security minister Bill Hayden dressed in Nazi uniform.

And that’s just the opposition from outside. Dr Anne-marie Boxall, co-author of Making Medicare, says Whitlam had little support, even from within the Labor Party. The party platform advocated a fully nationalised model, along the lines of the British National Health System (even though it may have required a referendum).

By contrast, Whitlam’s plan was for a public insurance scheme. Health services would be delivered by a mix of public and private providers, but paid for by taxpayers and guaranteed for everyone.

“The crucial members of his caucus didn’t agree with him, but he was adamant,” Boxall says. “He’d done a lot of thinking about it. So he waged the war of public opinion and he won.

“It’s an amazing political story.”

Medibank began full operation on October 1, 1975, just six weeks before the dismissal of the Whitlam government. The Fraser government tinkered with the system several times before abolishing it – only for it to be revived by the Hawke government in 1984 in almost exactly the same form.

Thirty years later, Medicare enjoys overwhelming public support. Politicians will swear to defend its honour, no matter their stripes or the system’s shortcomings.

And yet, in the wake of the federal budget, many people believe Medicare is under threat. The target of most ire is the proposed copayment for doctor’s visits, under which even the poorest will have to pay for up to ten appointments each year.

But are these changes the beginning of the end of universal coverage, or another nail in its coffin? Or are they in fact a distraction from the deeper afflictions at the heart of Australia’s health care system?

Health minister Peter Dutton describes the Coalition as “the greatest friend Medicare ever had”, echoing a line Tony Abbott employed during his days as health minister.

The coalition has demonstrated its amity with a host of surprise announcements, including the copayment, which also affects diagnostic tests, such as x-rays, blood tests and prescription drugs. (These charges will be capped for children, low-income earners and the chronically ill.)

More people will pay the Medicare levy surcharge, and fewer will qualify for the private health insurance rebate. Billions of dollars have been cut from public hospitals, and the preventative health agency and other health promotion programs have been shut down. The savings will be directed to a $20 medical research fund.

Dutton says that without these reforms, spiralling costs will jeopardise Medicare’s viability. “The government is very keen to keep Medicare and strengthen it. To keep it universal, we have to make sure it’s affordable. In my view Medicare is only sustainable if those people who have a capacity to pay contribute to the system.

Professor John Deeble, now 82, was one of the original scheme’s architects. He says that although costs have been rising, they’re manageable. Health spending by our governments is low compared with other wealthy countries.

“This is not really about the sustainability of Medicare or anything like it,” he says. “They just want to spend the money on something else, simple as that.”

The Medicare levy – currently 1.5 per cent of taxable income – was established as a premium for public health cover. If the nation’s health costs rise, the government can raise the levy, Deeble says. In that way, people’s contributions are determined by their capacity to pay – their income – not by how often they need treatment.

By introducing copayments instead, the government is embracing something fundamentally different: a ‘user-pays’ notion of fairness in health funding.

In Medicare’s first incarnation, when social security minister Bill Hayden introduced the bill to parliament, he declared that the new health system’s three motivating principles were “social equity, universal coverage and cost efficiency”.

Although the full details of the Coalition’s reforms haven’t been released, public health experts have been unanimous in their critique: as a package, it’s simply bad policy.

“We’ve actually tried all these solutions before, which is why we know they don’t work,” says Boxall, who is the director of the Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research.

“We need to step back and look at the structural problems with our health system.”

Among these are two key vulnerabilities, unforeseen at the time of Medicare’s design: the rise of private health care, and the growing burden of chronic illnesses.

“What we like about Medicare are the principles it was founded on,” Boxall says. “Things have changed. So what are we doing to improve universality, equity and efficiency?

*

For most of the 20^th century, Australia had a two-tier medical system : a very basic insurance system for the working class and a fee-paying model for those who could afford it.

“Doctors offered quite different services, and in many cases different waiting rooms for each group,” says Associate Professor James Gillespie, from University of Sydney’s school of public health, and co-author of Making Medicare.

The World Health Organisation says “universal coverage” means “all people have access to services and do not suffer financial hardship paying for them”.

But under Medicare, we’re already failing the test on equity. More than one-in-six Australians say they don’t see a doctor or fill prescriptions because of the cost, according to an international study published last year by the journal Health Affairs. Other research has shown that people who live in poorer neighbourhoods are much more likely to delay medical care than those in the wealthiest suburbs.

Even without the new copayments, Australian patients fork out a lot for treatment from their own pockets, compared with other developed countries.

The two-tier system has re-emerged. One reason, says Gillespie, is that “both sides of politics have refused to think seriously about the role of the private system”. Major reviews commissioned by both the Howard and Rudd governments specifically excluded an examination of its role.

When Medicare began, private hospitals were a small industry, run by churches and charities. But in the last two decades, they’ve become big business, where doctors earn much more for their work.

Until the 1990s, private health insurance was in terminal decline. But spurred on by the Howard government’s incentives – the Medicare levy surcharge and lifetime cover discount – just under half the population now has private cover.

“We’ve ended up with a private system that shifts services away from the public and creates more privileged ways of doing things,” Gillespie says.

He says private funding can contribute to universal care, so long as core services are delivered the same way to everyone. Canada has a similar system to ours, but private insurance isn’t allowed to cover the services offered by its public system.

“If there’s a different system for those who can afford better, you end up with a residual service, which gets squeezed and becomes second best,” Gillespie says.

*

The coalition argues the copayment is a “price signal” to alert people to the real cost of treatment. But there’s something unusual about healthcare – even economists say so. In simple terms: you can judge how you’ll feel if you forgo buying a hamburger, but not if you forgo visiting the doctor.

“In the case of healthcare, part of the product itself is giving you that information,” explains Professor Jeff Richardson, from Monash University’s centre for health economics. “You’re not in a position to judge what life would be like with and without it.” All of which means that promoting efficiency is more complex than imposing a price signal.

Likewise, the relationship between health expenditure and outcomes is not straightforward. The nation’s health costs have been rising, but compared with other OECD countries, our total health spending – both private and public – is just below average. It’s half that of the United States, as a percentage of GDP.

“When the government says Medicare is unsustainable, it’s lying,” Richardson says. “The Australian government could spend much more on health if it wished. It’s simply a political and social judgement that it doesn’t want to.”

Curiously, despite Minister Dutton’s warnings about unsustainable health spending, his reforms – which aim to push more people into the private system – will end up costing more overall.

When the government acts as our single-insurer under Medicare, it has the power and incentive to bargain hard: as a result of bulk billing, GPs incomes are low by international standards. But with many different payers – like in the US system – it’s easier to for private insurers increase fees than control costs.

And for now, GPs and pharmaceuticals are the most cost-effective parts of the health system. Increasing their price will push more patients into hospitals, which are much more costly.

The measures are not a question of efficiency, Richardson says, but rather, an ideological choice that health is an individual responsibility, not a shared one, like defence or policing.

“If we swing over to the private sector and push it back on individuals, the health of poorer people will suffer and overall costs will almost certainly rise,” he says.

Dutton, however, maintains the measures aren’t about ideology, citing the Hawke government’s plans to introduce a $2.50 copayment for GP visits in 1991. (Paul Keating scrapped the idea when he took over as prime minister.) “I strongly believe that the changes we’ve put forward will improve access and the standard of care provided by GPs,” he says.

But the biggest challenge to the standard of care now comes from an entirely different source, one his reforms do nothing to address.

In Australia, the greatest healthcare inefficiency is found in a disconnect between the system – the fragmented network of hospitals, specialists and GPs, and their mishmash of state, federal and private funding – and the kinds of illnesses we have.

Where once we suffered acute ailments, we now need ongoing support with chronic conditions, says Dr Steve Hambleton, the outgoing president of the Australian Medical Association.

This change is partly a measure of success. The number of deaths from heart attacks, for example, peaked in the 1970s. But living with heart disease requires continual treatment and adjustment, especially as you develop other conditions. “The system doesn’t treat those people all that well,” Hambleton says.

Patients with chronic diseases need to see a broad range of health professionals and have frequent tests – but they are often seeing them in a piecemeal way with little continuity or communication between experts. Many of these, such as physiotherapists, psychologists or dieticians, are excluded or receive only limited funding under Medicare.

Both parties have attempted limited reforms to address the rise of chronic illnesses and the needs of our aging population. The Coalition brought in chronic disease management plans, which extend benefits to other kinds of treatment, beyond doctors. Labor’s super clinics and Medicare Locals aimed to bring together and coordinate different health services for patients. But the changes have been piecemeal.

“We need a proactive, long-term approach to care, supporting primary healthcare to keep patients out of hospitals, and make sure people don’t fall through the cracks when they move between community and hospital care,” Hambleton says.

*

THE wide, bright, hallway of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service in Fitzroy is humming: people young and old are waiting and chatting; some are on the go, others hovering around a wood heater.

Today, a specialist is visiting today to conduct an ear, nose and throat clinic.

Jason King, the centre’s CEO, says they offer an holistic service. There are GPs, dentists, allied health professionals, visiting specialists, social workers and financial counsellors, all supported by Aboriginal health workers from within the community. “It’s not pumping them out every ten minutes. It’s ‘How’s mum and dad going? How’s uncle going who lives with you?’

“We’re the central hub, this is where people come and see family,” he says.

Last year, the health service celebrated its 40^th anniversary, a history that has coincided with that of Medicare. Each year, about a third of the state’s Aboriginal population pass through its doors.

The centre’s model of integrated care, embedded in the values of its community, is exactly what doctors and experts have ordered – along with the World Health Organisation, the OECD and several Australian inquires going back decades.

But King says the co-payment and cuts to preventative health will either cost the centre patients or take a chunk out of its budget. Either way, that means fewer services.

There are 28 Aboriginal community-controlled health centres around the state. Jill Gallagher, CEO of their peak body, says Aboriginal health remains worse than the rest of the nation, and Victoria is no different.

“The life expectancy in Fitzroy is the same as the life expectancy in Fitzroy Crossing,” she says. “For every dollar spent on Medicare for a non-Aboriginal person, about 60 cents is spent on Aboriginal people. Access to primary healthcare is still not equitable, in spite of the fact there’s four times the burden of illness in the Aboriginal community.”

Dr Mary Belfrage, the Fitzroy service’s medical director, says any barriers to accessing health care cause people show up later, with advanced conditions, which are more expensive to treat. “It all translates to worse health outcomes, but it’s also inefficient,” she says.

“This isn’t about party politics or a particular budget. It’s about the principle of equity and how it impacts on health.”

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Jailed Australian journalist Peter Greste goes to trial in a Cairo court today. His arrest underlines the growing dangers faced by reporters just trying to do their job.

PETER Greste made his last live cross on Al Jazeera’s English network on Saturday December 28. “Egypt is still functioning pretty much as normal,” he said. “But what we’re seeing is a growing sense of unease, of disorder, of insecurity.”

Greste is normally based in Nairobi, Kenya; he had been in Egypt for two weeks of a three-week stint, filling in for a colleague over Christmas.

With the smoggy Cairo skyline behind him, he spoke of the hundreds of people arrested in recent days as police swept through the streets looking for protesters.

On December 24, the military-backed government had declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation. Only six months earlier, it had formed the country’s ruling party under elected president Mohamed Morsi.

On screen, Greste said it wasn’t clear who had been taken into custody – whether they were Muslim Brotherhood members, sympathisers or simply bystanders – but all faced a maximum of five years in jail.

Their fate would now depend on the judges, he said: “It does look pretty draconian.”

He was broadcasting from the balcony of the Marriott Hotel, on the Nile, where the network had established a makeshift office. The next night, authorities raided the hotel.

They arrested Greste, along with the Cairo bureau chief Mohamed Fahmy and producer Baher Mohamed. The three have been imprisoned for 66 days. Their fate, too, now rests with the judges.

The journalists have been accused of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood, broadcasting false news to undermine state security, and working without accreditation. Fahmy – who is a Canadian-Egyptian dual citizen – and Mohamed are also accused of being members of the Brotherhood.

The managing director of Al Jazeera English, Al Anstey, describes the charges as “baseless, unacceptable, and wholly unjustified”.

“What is going on in Egypt right now is a trial of journalism itself, so it is critical that we remain resolute in calling for freedom of speech… and for the immediate release of all of Al Jazeera’s journalists,” he says.

The jailing of his employees has been reported all over the world, but in Egypt, it is only one incident among many. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York–based advocacy group, says press freedom has declined there more rapidly than in any other country.

Attacks on reporters had risen under Morsi’s presidency, and continued after the military-backed government took power in July. In 2013, half a dozen journalists were killed, dozens detained and scores assaulted. Al Jazeera was one of eleven news outlets raided.

Robert Mahoney, the committee’s deputy director, says a climate of state- and self-censorship has taken hold.

In that, Egypt is far from alone. The committee recently released its annual risk list, which highlighted increasing violence against journalists in Bangladesh and Russia, and new legislation stifling free speech in Ecuador, Liberia, Russia, Vietnam and Zambia.

In Hong Kong too, the committee says “media freedom is at a low point”. Last week, Kevin Lau Chun-to, former editor of the Ming Pao newspaper, was attacked and slashed with a meat cleaver, only days after thousands of people rallied against increasing censorship. His sacking as editor was one of the sparks for the protest.

In 1992, the committee began closely tracking the number of journalists killed around the world. Its tally has risen to 1044. Other advocates, such as the International News Safety Institute and the International Federation of Journalists, put the number significantly higher.

Until World War II, such fatalities were almost unheard of. Decade on decade, from the 1960s the number of journalists killed in conflict has risen steeply.

Imprisonment and kidnapping are also at record levels. Over 200 journalists spent the new year languishing in jail – that’s the second highest in the Committee’s records, behind 2012.

Mahoney says 80 journalists were kidnapped in Syria alone last year. About 30 of them are still being held there. “We’ve seen kidnappings in conflicts before – in certain parts of Somalia, in Afghanistan and Pakistan – but we haven’t seen anything on this scale.”

*

Robert Capa’s most famous photo, Falling Soldier, shows a Spanish republican soldier with one arm flung back, gun in hand, collapsing at the moment of his death. It was shot in 1936.

The Hungarian photojournalist would cover five wars before a landmine killed him in 1954 during the French Indochina war. By then, he had redefined conflict reporting.

“Capa put himself into a new position: between troops and incoming fire, often shooting fear’s effect on faces, or the fire’s effect on bodies,” says American journalist Frank Greve, who has written about the history of reporters’ deaths in combat. “After Capa, anything less was kind of boring.”

Capa was one of the first journalists to sidestep tight military control and censorship. Given that freedom, he took risks that few had taken before.

But since then, those risks have multiplied. While communications technology and travel have become drastically cheaper and faster, newsrooms and the public have required the stories to match.

Warfare too has changed, he argues. Reporters can find it hard to predict where bullets will come from, and can’t rely on combatants viewing them as impartial observers.

The reporters, photographers and citizen journalists in Syria today still produce work with Capa’s “hot immediacy”, Greve says. “But I suspect they spend more time risking their lives than he did.”

Dr Colleen Murrell is a former international news editor – she worked with Peter Greste at the BBC in the early 1990s. Now a journalism academic at Deakin University, Murrell researches the way foreign correspondents operate.

She says postings with a foreign bureau are the most coveted in the industry. Travelling to a danger zone has always been a way for young reporters to get a break. More people are trying their luck than ever before, but at the same time, those jobs are vanishing.

On-staff reporters always had the benefit of insurance, safety training and gear, and a support network if things went wrong. “Now it’s a lot more dangerous for a larger number of people,” Murrell says.

In the last two decades, a growing proportion of journalists’ fatalities have been among freelancers.

But Murrell says they’re beginning to organise. There are more than 4000 members of The Vulture Club, a hidden Facebook group where people exchange tips on safe border crossings, reliable interpreters and local conditions.

Likewise, the Frontline Club, a London-based network of foreign correspondents, recently established a freelance register and support collective.

Murrell says these two groups have also been pushing international media companies to take greater responsibility – either by not encouraging freelance contributors to go to dangerous places, or if they do go, ensuring they’re equipped to deal with the risks.

One way journalists can prepare is by undertaking hostile environment training. In mid-March, 20 reporters – of varying experience – will attend a seven-day intensive program in the Kanchanaburi region of Thailand, on the River Kwai. It’s coordinated by a company called Dynamiq, which works with Reuters and the ABC.

Shaun Filer has been running these courses for six years. Formerly a medic in the US Marines, and then a journalist, Filer leads his charges through sessions on emergency first aid and personal security.

The course culminates in a 24-hour disaster scenario on a Thai military base, in which participants must negotiate a border crossing, meet and vet interpreters, organise convoys, and make sure their kit and accommodation is safe, among other things.

They might need to sleep rough or deal with aggressive people at checkpoints. All the while, they must regularly file video, photos and text. “It’s a really fun week,” Filer says, wryly.

For now, however, few of the attendees are freelancers, and even fewer are local country journalists – yet they’re the ones who bear the most risk.

“Our local colleagues are the majority of the people imprisoned, assaulted and murdered,” Filer says. “But it takes an Australian journalist to be on trial for us to even have the conversation.”

In the past decade, foreign journalists have increasingly become targets. Even so, nine out of 10 reporters killed die in their own country. Most of the deaths are murders, not casualties of war.

“Local journalists are murdered because they’re rummaging around in stories people don’t want aired,” explains Robert Mahoney, from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“That’s always been the case. What’s even worse is that nine out of 10 of those murders go unpunished. When you don’t address the problem of impunity, journalists stop writing stories, because they think they’re going to get killed for it.”

Last year, the United Nations General Assembly voted to establish an annual “International Day to End Impunity” for crimes against journalists, on November 2.

Mahoney acknowledges that drug cartels, corrupt officials and authoritarian regimes are oblivious to such measures. But he says they’re worth pursuing. Some countries with many unsolved murders of journalists – such as Mexico, Brazil and India – are sensitive to international pressure.

“This is human rights work,” he says. “It’s long, it’s slow and it’s a hard slog.”

*

Last Thursday, protestors gathered in over 30 cities to rally in support of the Al Jazeera journalists.

The event was part of a huge campaign for their release, which has played out most publicly on Twitter, where it has attracted hundreds of thousands of hits. Thousands of people, including many prominent journalists all around the world, have posed for photos with their mouths taped shut.

In Sydney’s Martin Place, the federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Chris Warren, called on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to appeal directly to the Egyptian president.

Foreign minister Julie Bishop says she doesn’t believe that would help secure his release. “The advice I have received from other governments in the region is that we should not seek to humiliate the Egyptian authorities. We should seek to work as assiduously as possible behind the scenes,” she says.

“There’s a whole other issue about journalists facing significant risks in places of conflict and tension. I understand all of that, but my focus right now is to get Mr Greste home as soon as possible.”

Bishop says consular officials have met several times with the 48-year-old and his family, and also with Egyptian prosecutors. She had spoken directly with the foreign minister, Nabil Fahmy, but last week the entire Egyptian cabinet resigned.

The Greste family is keenly aware of the fragility of the Egyptian state – after all, that’s why Peter was called in to report from Cairo.

His parents, Lois and Juris, live in the Brisbane suburb of Sherwood. They spoke to him on Christmas day. “He was pretty cautious about going out on the streets, even at that time,” Lois says.

Greste has covered conflicts in the Middle East and worked as a correspondent in Latin America and, for many years, Africa.

“He’s no cowboy journalist,” Juris says. “He’s got a background of dealing with really tough situations.”

In 2005, Greste’s producer Kate Peyton was shot and killed in Somalia while the pair were standing outside a hotel. He returned six years later and his report for BBC from the streets of Mogadishu won a prestigious Peabody Award.

Al Jazeera has published two letters Greste wrote from prison in January. He described his broadcasts from Cairo as “some pretty mundane reporting”.

At first, after he was arrested, he hoped the authorities would understand he was caught up in a political struggle that was not his own.

The Egyptian government believes the Qatari broadcaster – especially its Arabic channel – promotes the Muslim Brotherhood.

But as the days passed, Greste realised that, amidst the broader crackdown on dissent, his arrest was not a mistake. One part of the struggle was his: “As a journalist, I am committed to defending a fundamental freedom of the press that no one in my profession can credibly work without,” he wrote.

“How do you accurately and fairly report on Egypt’s ongoing political struggle without talking to everyone involved?”

His brother Andrew has travelled to Cairo to support him, but despite several visits to Tora prison, his family remains unsure about what will happen when their son returns to court today. The processes of the Egyptian legal system, and even the charges he faces, seem hazy.

“You try to not build up too much hope,” Lois says, “but you can’t help but build a little bit.”

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As Melbourne plans a memorial to Aboriginal resistance fighters, momentum is growing for official recognition that the brutal colonial frontier wars were pivotal in this nation’s history.

THE two Aboriginal men were dressed wholly in white, including white caps and capes, for their public hanging. It was early in the morning on January 20, 1842. Maulboyheenner refused the outfit at first, but Tunnerminnerwait laughed as he was helped with the long white socks.

A gaoler asked why he wasn’t worried about dying. Tunnerminnerwait answered – so the story goes – that he had three heads: one for the noose, one for the grave, and one for Van Diemen’s Land.

The two men were drawn in a cart to Gallows Hill, the site now occupied by RMIT University next to the city baths. A quarter of Victoria’s white population at the time – 5,000 people – attended the execution. The atmosphere was like a “race-course”, the Port Phillip Herald reported, “… with spectators as anxiously awaiting the awful scene as if it were a bull-bait or prize-ring”.

The pair had been condemned to death for the murder of two whalers at Cape Paterson, during several weeks of raids conducted with three women – Truganini, Planobeena (Tunnerminnerwait’s wife) and Pyterruner. Theirs was likely an act of resistance on the violent frontier of newly settled Victoria.

Last December, the Melbourne City Council voted unanimously to establish a permanent marker to the men. It will vote again in late April to decide on the form of the memorial, after consulting with Aboriginal leaders here and in Tasmania.

The council’s decision comes after sustained pressure from a small group of citizens and Aboriginal leaders who have staged a ceremony on the anniversary of the hanging each year since 2006.

“These young men died for our country, for our people,” Boon Wurrung elder Aunty Carolyn Briggs said at this year’s commemoration. “They were put up on show.”

The new memorial will be established amidst renewed questioning of the way Australia commemorates the violence that occurred on the colonial frontier. They are questions that challenge the official military history marked by the Australian War Memorial, and even the sovereignty of the nation itself. 

Adding to this debate is a new book, Forgotten War, by historian Henry Reynolds. In it, he lays out evidence that colonial authorities and settlers regarded the conflict as war, and argues that this history must be acknowledged.

If these seem difficult questions now, it is no surprise; they were such from the earliest days of the colony.

Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner stood trial a month before they were executed. The three women were tried and found not guilty as accessories.

All five were from Tasmania; they’d been brought to Melbourne by George Augustus Robinson, the newly appointed Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip, two years earlier. He had argued they would be “most useful auxiliaries in conciliating the natives of Australia”. None were permitted to give evidence in court.

For six weeks, in October and November 1841, they raided stations in the forest from Dandenong to Cape Paterson, stealing guns and supplies, and eluded the large parties sent to catch them – once, by stealing a boat. Finally, a group of 29, including seven Aboriginal trackers, captured them at dawn near Venus Bay.

In research prepared for the council, historian Clare Land describes the five’s exploits, capture and trial as “the biggest story” in the newspapers of the day. The Port Phillip Herald reported they had committed “numerous depredations” and “unmentionable atrocities”.

Their defence counsel was Redmond Barry, the man who sentenced Ned Kelly to hang nearly four decades later. He argued, unsuccessfully, for a jury partially comprised of people who, like his clients, were not subjects of the Queen. Barry referred to the “destruction” of their nation during “the war” in Tasmania as motivation for their raids: “revenge in minds like theirs was not easily forgotten, and particularly for wrongs like theirs”, he said.

Yet in only half an hour, the jury reached its verdict. They recommended mercy on the death penalty, but Judge John Walpole Willis denied it. He told the men their punishment was designed to inspire “terror… to deter similar transgressions”.

In that respect it failed, explains Land. “There was guerrilla war and frontier violence in every district of Victoria at the time,” she says. “It went on from the late 1830s until the gold rush of the early 1850s.”

In his 2005 book, Aboriginal Victorians, Richard Broome concluded it was likely that 1,000 Aborigines and 80 Europeans were killed on the state’s frontier.

One squatter in western Victoria at the time, Nial Black, wrote in his diary that it was “universally and distinctly understood” that settlers needed to kill Aborigines to gain control over their properties.

The best way to get land, he wrote, was to “take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left”.

*

On January 26, thousands of people gathered in a shady park in Belgrave to celebrate Survival Day. It is the seventh time the event has been held, and the theme this year was the frontier wars.

The Yarra Ranges regional museum set up its marquee with a display on the “Battle of Yering”, near Yarra Glen in January 1840. A small memorial stands near the Melba Highway, marking the location of the clash between dozens of Wurundjeri men and troopers of the Border Police.

The Wurundjeri men attacked a homestead where their leader, Jaga Jaga, was imprisoned. While the troopers were distracted in a counterattack, others of the clan broke him free.

Wurundjeri elder Uncle Bill Nicholson says it began with a dispute over a potato crop – a sign that people were going hungry. “The Battle of Yering was a great symbol that Aboriginal people did not just sit back and let people take over their land. They fought for it, and fought hard,” he says.

“People in this city have to know how the Indigenous people were treated in that era, because only then can we move forward in reconciliation.”

The memorial is one of very few recognising frontier conflict throughout the state.

This imbalance in our official history – between our domestic and overseas conflicts – is the subject of Forgotten War, which last week won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction. As he announced the prize, Premier Denis Napthine described it as “a very important book for Victorians and Australians”.

Reynolds says Aboriginal organisations around the nation should be given the opportunity to consider whether or not they want memorials, and if so, funding for their establishment.

“We’ve raised war to be absolutely central to the national story,” he says. “But what about the most important war in our history, the one about fundamental Australian political issues – sovereignty and property?”

He contrasts the earliest campaign recognised by the Australian War Memorial – in Sudan, in 1885 – with the intense fighting that was occurring on home soil at the time.

The New South Wales government sent 770 men to assist the British to quell an uprising. The soldiers saw little or no fighting, but six died of disease.

“The 1880s was possibly the most intense period of conflict and mass killing, because miners, cattlemen and pearl shellers were penetrating right across north Australia,” Reynolds says.

“So you have this extraordinary juxtaposition: the Sudan campaign is treated reverentially, but the much more serious conflict is simply ignored.”

Tim Flannery, Australian of the Year in 2007, recently expressed his “personal sense of outrage” that Aboriginal warriors who fought and died defending their lands and people against white settlers are ignored by the Australian War Memorial.

The memorial’s director, former Liberal Party leader Dr Brendan Nelson, says the story of frontier conflict needs to be told, but not at his institution.

“Our mission is to tell the stories of Australians in the service of the nation in the defence of our country. [It] is not an institution which presents a story of armed conflict within Australia amongst Australians,” he says.

“It’s questionable whether there was a declared war in Australia. After the British garrisons left, the violence, where it did occur, was from police militia, colonial militia and Indigenous militia.”

For two decades, until 2007, Peter Stanley was the principal historian at the Australian War Memorial. Now a research professor at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Stanley says it is not only historians of our Indigenous past who regard the nation’s colonisation as war.

“Australia’s military historians have long accepted that frontier conflict was a part of Australia’s military history. No military historians I know take the opposite view,” he says.

“An armed conflict occurred across the pastoral frontier for about a century: don’t tell me that that’s not an actual military conflict. It resulted in more than 30,000 deaths and involved the British army.”

Stanley says the question of whether the Australian War Memorial should recognise frontier conflict was first raised by Geoffrey Blainey in an internal report in 1979, and Stanley himself presented a paper on it in 1981.

“I gave the same advice as principal historian, but it was declined,” he says.

Stanley argues that the memorial’s public position is based a narrow reading of its legislation and a flawed view of history: the ongoing denial that frontier conflict constituted war.

“It has come up repeatedly during the terms of successive directors and governments, but has been either outright rejected or avoided as too hard,” he says. “I think the war memorial’s council fears that acknowledging the truth of frontier war will somehow bring Anzac into disrepute. But the two are completely separate.

“It is not an aspect of Australia’s military history that Australians take pride in, but you can’t always cheer your history – sometimes you just have to accept it,” he says.

On the anniversary of the Melbourne hangings, Tasmanian writer and filmmaker Jim Everett said the council’s memorial would “be a very big step towards white and black Australia coming together and hopefully [to] a recognition that Aboriginal people are indeed their own people”.

“I’m a Plangerrmairreenner man,” Everett said to the crowd. “I hold my sovereignty as my shield.”

For his part, Everett doesn’t covet a place for Indigenous resistance fighters in the Canberra memorial. “If they asked me, I’d say ‘no we don’t want to be stuck alongside you mob – we had to fight you’,” he says. “If we want to remember our heroes, then we should be doing it ourselves.”

But wrangling over the appropriate place to recognise the wars doesn’t undermine the need for it. “I think this is the most important thing that Australia needs to think about,” Everett says. “You can’t have your roots in Gallipoli.”

*

When the five Tasmanian Aborigines began their raids, in October 1841, they had been in Port Phillip for nearly two years.

Clare Land says researchers have long debated their motives for fighting, but the remaining written documents are not definitive. Historians have speculated that they may have been driven by hostility towards whalers, disillusionment with their “protectors”, or by the overarching desire to resist colonisation.

All had been alienated from their land, witnessed the deaths of their families, and had direct or indirect experience of sexual violence by whalers and sealers.

Immediately before quitting Melbourne, Tunnerminnerwait had toured the western districts for several months with George Augustus Robinson, collecting testimony about frontier violence. On that journey, Robinson recorded evidence of the Convincing Ground massacre, near Portland in 1833-34, in which whalers killed between 60 and 200 members of one Gunditjmara clan.

The group’s reasons may have been many, Land says, but “it is likely they saw themselves as part of the colonial resistance of their countrymen in Tasmania and in Victoria”. Given their experiences, the question isn’t just “why they did what they did”, but rather, “why not?”

She argues the story is important not only for the past, but the future, because it illustrates the conflict over land and the legal status of Aboriginal people.

“It tells us about what Aboriginal people suffered in Tasmania and Victoria and about their resistance, and it stretches forward to the struggle for land rights today.”

The three women – Truganini, Planobeena and Pyterruner – left Melbourne within months of the executions. They returned to Flinders Island, where in 1846, their community petitioned Queen Victoria for the removal of their white superintendent.

The hanging of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner was botched: the trap did not fall fully at first. The newspapers reported it “a gross insult to public decency”.

Robinson, the Protector of Aborigines, did not attend. He waited beside two open graves, outside the boundary of the cemetery. The location is thought to be between sheds E and F of the Victoria Market. So far, it goes unmarked.

Read this article at The Age online

Memorials to frontier conflict in Victoria

Port Fairy: a stone monument to “the thousands of aboriginal people who were massacred between 1837 and 1844 in this area”.

Sorrento: a plaque in memory of “Aborigines who were killed or wounded during the first British visits to Port Phillip Bay” in 1803.

Yarra Glen: a plaque commemorating the “Battle of Yering”, which took place on January 13, 1840, between 50 Wurundjeri clansmen and troopers of the Border Police.

Orbost: a stone commemorating Dan (The Cook) Dempsey who was speared by Aborigines in 1851.

Benalla: a memorial at the site of an attack on settlers William and George Faithfull and their men in 1838. Eight of the settlers and one Aborigine died.

Peterborough: a memorial on “Massacre Hill”, five kilometres west of town along the Great Ocean Road, to Aborigines killed at that location.

Mt Dispersion: a cairn commemorating the naming of the area by explorer Major Thomas Mitchell in May 1836 after he ambushed and shot at a large group of Aborigines between Robinvale and Mildura. There is also a plaque to this incident in Shepparton, at the Bangerang Cultural Centre.

Source: monumentaustralia.org.au