History Wars

The history wars in Australia are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society (particularly with regard to the impact on Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders). It has resemblances to debates in other countries.

While no historians or major political leaders in Australia would contend that Australia's colonial period was undertaken without a degree of violence or dispossession, the Australian debate often concerns the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since Federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been:

a. marked by relatively minor conflict between European colonists and Indigenous Australians, and generally lacking in events that might be termed 'invasion', 'warfare', 'guerrilla warfare', 'conquest' or 'genocide', and generally marked instead by humane intent by government authorities, with damage to indigenous people largely attributable to unintended factors (such as the spread of new diseases) rather than to malicious policies;

b. or whether the settlement of Australia constituted an invasion marked by violent conflict at the frontier, guerrilla warfare (or other forms of warfare) between Europeans and Aborigines, involving frequent or significant massacres of Aboriginal peoples engaged in defending their traditional tribal lands; a situation which can be said to have developed either nationally, or in certain areas, into something like a war of 'extermination' or something which accords with the term genocide as a consequence of British imperialism and colonialism involving continued dispossession, exploitation, ill treatment and cultural genocide.

The History Wars also relates to broader themes concerning national identity, as well as methodological questions concerning the historian and the craft of researching and writing history, including issues such as the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and the oral tradition (of the Indigenous Australians), along with the political or similar ideological biases of those who interpret them.