When Murder Becomes “Tragedy” Tony Abbott’s British-centred dismantling of Australian History
by John T. Patten
Tony Abbott wants Australians to be proud of their history. It’s a reasonable thing to want and promote. The problem however is the history he asks us to be proud of, the moral language he uses to construct it, and the truths he requires First Peoples people to surrender in the process.
On 27 August 2026, the Australian War Memorial released a discussion on the Frontier Wars featuring Abbott, Arrernte and Kalkadoon filmmaker Rachel Perkins, and historian Professor Henry Reynolds. Abbott was introduced not as a historian, but as a former prime minister and the author of Australia: A History. That is an important distinction. Reynolds has spent more than half a century researching “frontier” conflict. Perkins’ work on The Australian Wars brought together years of historical research, archival evidence, first-hand lived-experience, oral history and First Peoples perspectives. Abbott has degrees in economics and law, and a Masters in politics and philosophy, and through the years he has spent approximately 10 to 15 weeks of his life, visiting and working in remote communities in Arnhem Land, and Cape York.
There’s no suggestion that Abbott should be forbidden from speaking about history. History belongs to everyone. His opinions however, should not be treated as an evidentiary. Nor should they serve as a counterweight to lived cultural perspectives, specialist scholarship, and First Peoples historical knowledge, simply because he was once prime minister and has now published a popular history. Public prominence is neither subject expertise, or lived cultural experience. Political conviction is not a reasonable substitute for knowing one’s Mob, spending a lifetime trawling archives, or a dedication to writing our findings, even when they fail to align with what we once thought to be true.
Abbott’s own biography identifies him as a former journalist, political adviser and politician. His book was prepared with research assistance supported by the Institute of Public Affairs. None of this invalidates his writing. It does, however, mark the War Memorial’s framing as rather questionable. A national institution presented a credentialled professional historian, a First Peoples filmmaker deeply engaged with the history, and a conservative politician as three competing “perspectives”, as though the status of “frontier” warfare could be settled by arranging ideology beside evidence, and calling the result balance.
The work done by “tragedy”
The most revealing moment in this discourse came when Abbott accepted that colonisation produced violence, but resisted the moral conclusion that understandably follows from the evidence.
“There is no doubt that this was in a sense a tragedy,” he said. He then asked whether it was an atrocity. While conceding that “some atrocities” occurred, he rejected the proposition that colonisation was, “on balance”, an atrocity.
This is not a minor disagreement over vocabulary. “Tragedy” is a passive word. A tragedy can be unfortunate, unintended, and nobody’s particular fault. It can describe a flood, a fire or a fatal accident. An atrocity has perpetrators, victims and responsibility. It describes an act of extreme cruelty. By preferring tragedy, Abbott softens deliberate human action into national misfortune.
The phrase “on balance” is equally revealing. An atrocity isn’t erased just because friendship, cooperation, or moments of decency exist alongside it. A man who helps a Koori family on a Monday doesn’t acquire a moral credit that cancels out his choosing to murder a Koori family on a Tuesday. First Peoples acting as guides assisting explorers, stockmen working on pastoral stations, and domestic workers labouring in invaders homes do not serve to offset land theft, punitive expeditions, or massacre. Cooperation frequently occurred within a colonial order which First Peoples people had no power to refuse. It cannot be entered on the credit side of a national ledger and used to discount the dead.
There is now a substantial body of evidence identifying exactly what Abbott’s language obscures. The University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacres project defines a frontier massacre as the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people in a single operation. It records 438 verifiable massacres and at least 10,657 documented victims. Of these, 10,374 were First Peoples murdered by colonists. The researchers stress that these are conservative minimums: smaller killings, of which there were many more, fall outside the project’s definition. Many murders were never recorded, and massacres were routinely concealed.
The project documents not an occasional lapse in an otherwise benign settlement, but a continental pattern. Massacres occurred across at least 140 years. Some were carried out by soldiers. Others involved mounted police, Native Police, government agents, settler/invaders, and organised vigilante parties. Groups of massacres were undertaken across extended expeditions with the intention of eradicating First Peoples from particular areas. The victims were not only warriors. They were undefended men, women and children.
If the planned or indiscriminate killing of undefended families is not an atrocity, the word has no useful meaning.
Abbott does acknowledge individual atrocities. In the same discussion he described Coniston, where scores of First Peoples were killed and the official inquiry whitewashed the violence, as a disgrace. But this makes his broader refusal more difficult to defend, not less. He can recognise the parts while refusing to name the system those parts repeatedly served. Massacre becomes an exception, where colonisation remains a story that was, “on balance”, good. This is not neutral historical judgement. It is a political conclusion decided in advance.
First Peoples fought wars here
Abbott also resists calling the “frontier conflicts” wars. He accepts that British soldiers undertook “punitive missions”, and briefly describes the conflict as something like a civil war. Yet he argues that it was not warfare in the same sense as the South African War, the First and Second World Wars, or Vietnam, and says the War Memorial should acknowledge the frontier story without “dwelling” on it.
Of course the Frontier Wars did not resemble twentieth-century industrial warfare. The resistance forces in question did not have a central government, a national command, uniforms, artillery or supply lines modelled on a European army. That observation proves very little. It imposes the military organisation of the invading power as the test the invaded must meet before their defence of Country can be recognised as war.
Guerrilla warfare, irregular warfare and decentralised resistance remain warfare. Aboriginal Nations and Clans fought territory by territory because First Peoples political organisation was based in distinct Countries, laws and sovereignties. People defended water, food sources, families, sacred places, cultural responsibilities, freedom of movement and the right to continue existing on their own land. They attacked livestock and stations that were consuming or occupying their resources. They confronted invaders, police, Native Police and British troops. “Colonists” organised armed parties and punitive expeditions to counter that resistance and secure territorial gains.
During the discourse, Professor Reynolds pointed out that the colonial authorities themselves understood this. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, an experienced soldier, repeatedly described the conflict in Van Diemen’s Land as war. The University of Newcastle project likewise found that soldiers from British regiments participated in early massacres, sometimes under martial law. These were not later activists imposing a fashionable term on the nineteenth century. Military governors and colonial officials knew what irregular warfare looked like because many had direct experience of it.
Ms. Perkins put the issue more plainly. War should be understood by what was being fought over, not merely by whether both sides dressed and organised themselves in the European fashion. To deny the word “war” because resistance did not resemble Gallipoli is to make British practice the universal definition of legitimate conflict.
There is also something deeply perverse in Abbott suggesting that the Frontier Wars do not belong at the Australian War Memorial because they involved “Australian against Australian”. Aboriginal people defending Country were not citizens engaged in a dispute within an agreed nation. They were sovereign peoples resisting the seizure of their lands by the British Crown and its settlers. Treating this as civil conflict projects the Australia created by conquest backwards onto people who had never consented to it.
Abbott said the Memorial exists to build “pride and unity”. But national unity purchased through the exclusion of First Peoples war dead is not unity. It is the continuation of the imposed hierarchy. The Memorial can commemorate wars fought for the British Empire thousands of kilometres away while treating the wars fought on this continent as an uncomfortable subject better housed elsewhere. Black soldiers may be honoured when wearing the King’s uniform overseas, while their ancestors, warriors who defended their own Country and kin at home, remain outside the institution’s preferred national story.
That is precisely why the Frontier Wars belong there.
“Indigenous heritage” and a “British foundation”
Abbott repeatedly describes Australia as having “an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character”. It’s the sort of jarring platitude that unintentionally and immediately invites the audience to examine and properly scrutinise the hierarchy built into the sentence.
Indigeneity is relegated to “heritage”. Meaning something ancient, inherited and safely located in the cultural past. Britain is cast as the suppliers of the “foundation”, the load-bearing structure from which the nation supposedly begins. Migrants then add “character” to the British structure. In one sentence, First Peoples become a preface, Britain becomes the author, and everybody else becomes an extra on set, providing a touch of colour.
Australia did not acquire an Indigenous heritage. This continent was already made up of hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations, with systems of law, diplomacy, economy, land management, kinship, ceremony and governance. British derived institutions form an important part of the present Australian state, but Britain did not lay the first foundation of society here. It invaded existing societies and built colonial institutions over the top of them, whilst failing to erase them.
If Abbott means that Australia’s Parliament, courts and constitutional arrangements are substantially derived from Britain, he can say that. But he doesn’t limit the claim to institutions. He describes the country itself as having a British foundation. That choice converts colonisation into creation. It marks British possession as foundational, and Aboriginal sovereignty merely a hereditary decoration.
This framing is consistent with the selectivity identified by professional historians reviewing Abbott’s book. Professor Jane Lydon describes it as a narrowly conceived account that sidelines First Peoples perspectives, and ignores decades of scholarship about the richness and dynamism of Aboriginal societies. Professor Marilyn Lake similarly identifies a history organised around national pride, political leaders, monarchs, military men and explorers, with vast areas of Australian experience rendered marginal or invisible. Abbott has every right to write a personal, conservative interpretation. He does not have the moral or academic right to present that interpretation as neutral national history or to pretend that its hierarchy of value is merely common sense.
Bias is not demonstrated simply by loving Britain. It is demonstrated by the unequal standards Abbott applies. Colonial intentions receive repeated consideration, while colonial outcomes are softened, and National pride becomes a reason not to “dwell” on the people murdered in the process of invading the continent.
Abbott, a devout monarchist, presents a British-centred prejudicial framework in which British action remains presumptively constructive, even when its construction required First Peoples dispossession, brutalisation, and death.
A week in a remote community doesn’t make you a national authority
Abbott frequently points to the time he has spent in remote communities. He deserves acknowledgement for going beyond ceremonial visits. He spent weeks working in Cape York communities, visited the APY Lands and, as prime minister, took senior officials to East Arnhem Land. Direct engagement is better than governing entirely from Canberra.
But time spent with particular communities does not confer authority to define the history or experience of First Peoples nationally. No Koori, Murri, or Noongar person could spend several weeks with one or two European Nations and claim expertise over them, and every other Nation on the continent. A former prime minister should not be granted that licence either.
The remote-community lens also distorts who First Peoples are. According to the 2021 Census, only 7.5 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lived in the Northern Territory, and the Top End accounts for only part of that figure. Nationally, 84.7 per cent lived in non-remote areas, including 41.1 per cent in major cities. Almost two-thirds lived in New South Wales and Queensland, while substantial populations lived throughout Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania.
Remote communities face important and distinct conditions. They are not a living museum of “authentic” Aboriginality, and they are not a representative sample of the national population. The experiences of Yolngu people in Arnhem Land cannot stand in for those of Yorta Yorta people on the Murray, Bundjalung people in northern New South Wales, Noongar people in the south-west, Palawa people in Tasmania, or the generations of First Peoples families living in Melbourne, Sydney and regional towns.
Nor does personal familiarity erase ideological bias. A person can work beside First Peoples, sincerely believe he is helping, and still approach us through paternalism, selective listening and a predetermined political philosophy. Proximity is not the same as understanding. Service is not consent. Friendship with some black individuals is not a mandate to define the history of all First Peoples.
History does not owe us comfort
The task of history is not to make Australians ashamed, but neither is it to manufacture pride. Its task is to investigate what happened, how we know, who exercised power, who bore the consequences and how those consequences continue.
Abbott begins from a different position. He wants a national story whose final balance is positive. Evidence of violence may enter the account, but it must not be allowed to change the verdict. That isn’t balance. It’s containment and subjugation.
The indiscriminate murder of Aboriginal men, women and children was atrocity. The sustained armed defence of Country was warfare. The seizure of land without treaty or consent was invasion and dispossession. Cooperation, adaptation and relationships across the frontier are also part of the story, but they do not reverse those facts.
Australia is mature enough to honour those who served overseas and those who defended Country here. It is mature enough to acknowledge British institutional inheritance without pretending Britain created civilisation, or that it had done so on an empty continent. It is mature enough to understand that truth does not weaken a nation. What weakens a nation is insisting that First Peoples accept a softened, white blindfold account of their own dead so that others can remain comfortable with the past.
Tony Abbott is entitled to his version of Australian history. He is not entitled to have it mistaken for an authoritative one.
References
Abbott, T. (n.d.). Biography. Retrieved August 31, 2026, from https://tonyabbott.com.au/biography/
Abbott, T. (2014, February 12). Statement to the House of Representatives—Closing the Gap [Speech transcript]. PM Transcripts. https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23242
Abbott, T. (2025). Australia: A history. HarperCollins.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022, August 31). Census of Population and Housing—Counts of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2021. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-peoples/census-population-and-housing-counts-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-australians/latest-release
Barrington, J. (2026, August 27). The frontier wars [Podcast transcript]. Australian War Memorial. https://wm.awm.gov.au/podcast/frontier-wars
Lake, M. (2025, November). The men who made the nation. Australian Academy of the Humanities. https://humanities.org.au/power-of-the-humanities/review-of-tony-abbotts-australia-a-history/
Lydon, J. (2025, November 3). Tony Abbott’s history of Australia wants us to be proud of men like him. The University of Western Australia. https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/article/2025/november/tony-abbotts-history-of-australia-wants-us-to-be-proud-of-men-like-him
