Remembering and memorialising Australian peacekeeping

As Allan Thomas, the National President of the Australian Peacekeepers and Peacemaker Veterans Association writing in The Australian reminds us "all those who die in service of this country were considered equal". The Australian War Memorial's purpose is to commemorate sacrifices of Australian's who died in war. Australian journalist and war correspondent Charles Bean argued for a memorial to remember those killed equally and without rank. Reflecting Bean's conceptualisation of remembrance, public and official remembrance should occur without bureaucratic or political classification of war.

Australian journalist and recipient of the U.N Media Peace Prize, Geraldine Doouge, is a Patron of the Australian Peacekeeping Memorial Project, aimed at raising public recognition of peacekeepers killed in service. Doouge argues the idea of Australian peacekeepers has "not entered our psyche" in the ways conjured by the narratives or images of fallen diggers or ANZACS. The Australian peacekeeper, if anything, counters those narratives and for this reasons it challenges the normative view of the Australian solider.

Again according to Doouge, peacekeepers similarly have displayed digger-exemplified notions of egalitarianism, less concerned with hierarchy. Peacekeepers similarly want to get on and "fix things" just not necessarily in a "military way". It is here the national imagery of the peacekeeper parts ways with the soldiers celebrated in our national culture and commemorated in prose, film, and in national monuments.

In their death, regardless of the classification of conflict, Australian peacekeepers, argues Doouge, means "we all benefit from peace". For Thomas, "Equality in service and equality in death" is something that should be publically acknowledged in commemorating Australian peacekeepers. However, political labels of war driven to protect the sacredness of the digger myth and their place in the war and national mythologies, means peacekeepers remind us of counter-discourses of peace. As such, the fallen peacekeeper is missing for our public and cultural institutions of remembrance.