Why Australia’s War Memory Sounds Different in Asia
“Within an hour or so the island was bombed. My dad counted the planes and yet went to work. Our life long tragedy began. It was soon evident that the population was not prepared for the onslaught, the carnage and the destruction imposed by war.” (Memoir extraction from Dr Ramanathan Gopalkrishnan 2017, the author’s father)
My father wrote that the year before he died. His diaries are sparse. I see him in my mind walking up a hill he fears, only to climb back down every time, filled with a sense of failure. But I always think that small paragraph is all he needed to say about what the allies call the Pacific War. Sparse yes. But as a simple remembrance of an eight year old child, it succeeds as truth.
I live in Perth. Without consultation or public conversation, my city has become a centre of a major submarine base under AUKUS – a frontline of strategic imagination in a war most of us do not want. For many Asian Australians, this is neither abstract nor marginal. It is a widespread feeling among communities who feel voiceless within our national security conversation.
Jack Holland has argued that AUKUS reproduces the “Anglobal colour line,”[1] meaning the racialised divide that has long shaped Anglosphere power, belonging, and military partnership across the Asia-Pacific, while remaining largely blind to how intergenerational trauma sustains fear and distrust.
For many multicultural and diaspora Asia-Pacific Australians, this is personal. It is experienced less as strategy than as story, and a repetition of older war narratives and racial ordering that lives on through family memory and inherited trauma. Our families carry histories of occupation, mass civilian death, and survival in the Asia-Pacific, including the experience of Imperial Japan’s occupation across much of the region.
Those memories rarely appear in the language that now frames escalation in our own neighbourhood. We have no standing in security and foreign-policy cultures, where civilian war memory is treated as noise rather than the glue which holds together the ‘Pacific Family’.
For Australians with familial, ancestral, and cultural connections to the Asia-Pacific, the term “Indo-Pacific”[2] can feel like an erasure of family trauma. Even painful memories give us a sense of family and belonging. We oscillate between remembering and forgetting, but we do not doubt that those memories also give us strength. That inheritance sits uneasily with the language of “good guys” and “bad guys” that contemporary foreign policy has fallen into. That language itself has a history.
When Shinzo Abe helped popularise the term “Indo-Pacific,” it did more than update a map. It quietly rearranged the furniture of our memories. Older war histories were not argued over so much as filed differently – like a slashed sofa miraculously reupholstered. Pockmarked walls quietly filled in and repainted. War crimes hidden aesthetically within paintings which adorn walls instead of a scarred present.
Trauma in this “Indo-Pacific” can begin to feel like free real estate. For Australia, it risks becoming a new terra nullius – a region reimagined without its full weight of suffering and rebuilding.
Australia is not wrong to observe Asia’s militarisation. It is wrong about where Asia’s strength has mostly come from. Across much of the Indo-Pacific, power did not first emerge through force projection, technological dominance, or strategic doctrine. It emerged through civilian endurance: through occupation, mass casualty, displacement, hunger, humiliation, and the slow, collective work of rebuilding life after rupture. Survival came first; militarisation came later. This mirrors how psychologists treat anger as a secondary emotion. Behind the anger is hurt. Behind Asia’s growing militarism are the memories of my father on the last day he saw his father alive.
White Australia does not share that experience. It was never occupied – and does not acknowledge its ongoing occupation of Indigenous land. Australia did not endure mass civilian devastation on its own soil during the Second World War. This absence matters less morally than analytically. It shapes how Australia remembers war, how it interprets strength, and how it reads the region around it. This gap is not so much a failure of intelligence or goodwill as one of experience, carried forward in how we frame who is family, a stranger or a threat.
National memory is not an abstract inheritance. It is made, curated, and stabilised through institutions. In Australia, the central institution tasked with carrying war memory is the Australian War Memorial. The Memorial performs its mandate seriously and with care. But like all institutions, it reflects the history and inheritance of the society that formed it. It speaks in a language it knows[3].
Australia’s war memory is shaped primarily around service, sacrifice, and national contribution to allied conflict. That emphasis makes sense for a country whose acknowledged wartime experiences were largely externalised and whose armed forces were never embedded in a civilian population under occupation. What does not shape this memory is civilian life under total war. That is not an accusation, but a structural fact. Across the Asia-Pacific, the story is different.
In Singapore, the threads of its national voice are woven inseparably with the experience of occupation. Its modest civilian war memorial does not need to compete with grandeur because it is a symbol of a much longer project to consciously connect civilian memories across communities that otherwise see the world very differently.
In Vietnam, sites such as My Lai are quietly remembered as war crimes against civilians and, again, do not need grandeur or spectacle. Strength there is defined as both loss and endurance.
In parts of Southeast Asia, the end of the war is remembered not as relief but as a further unravelling, when occupation gave way to revolutionary violence and civilians found themselves trapped between collapsing authorities, a memory that sits uneasily beside Western narratives of victory and liberation.
Most nations in the Asia-Pacific have enough memories of occupation to make meaning about the militarisation of our region. They understand that a force posture in this region is more often about engaging with memory. China’s mass civilian suffering during invasion and occupation is understood both at the level of perception and lived experience.
These memories encode a lesson learned early and paid for dearly. Civilian life is where power is first tested, broken, and then rebuilt. Australia’s difficulty is not ignorance but grammar. Its strategic language struggles to recognise civilian endurance as strength. Militarisation becomes the dominant lens. Threat replaces trajectory. All of which shapes its social demeanor and political language towards its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific.
This gap does not only affect foreign policy but has domestic consequences. Australian institutions are not well equipped to see how professional security language can unsettle or endanger minority communities in conflict. Curatorial programming by war memorials is a cultural technology that can either bind or tear at the social fabric. For Australia, managing a multicultural society in a significant regional conflict would be both a communication and structural governance challenge without precedent. In both instances, the role of story-telling and remembrance is vital.
Are there stories we can learn to remember? Are there languages we can learn to speak that move us out of anxiety and away from escalation?
Perhaps if Australia expands its moral imagination to centre multicultural and Indo-Pacific civilian experiences, it could rapidly develop a voice that speaks from within Asian meaning-making, rather than outside it. A nation that can see my father’s unfinished memoirs as a continuity of unresolved justice, rather than a flawed artefact.
Courage, redefined, might see Australia’s military foreground give way to a diverse civilian background of survival, harm, and endurance
Australia’s persistent anxiety about Asia is not a failure of resolve. It is the result of an analytic gap. When civilian endurance, recovery, and prosperity are not treated as serious forms of power, strategy defaults to threat management incapable of recognising opportunity.
Until that gap is addressed, Australia will continue to prepare for escalation in a region whose most decisive strength is not based on experiences of winning wars but of surviving them. Rather than fear this, Australia’s national memorial needs to allow itself to be occupied by a much larger geography of memories to find that, after all, it is not alone.
[1] Jack Holland, “AUKUS and the Anglobal Colour Line: Race, Anglosphere Aphasia, and (White) Military Supremacy,” Australian Journal of International Affairs, 15 September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2025.2555566.
[2] Mihir Sharma, “Commentary: Shinzo Abe invented the Indo-Pacific,” Channel NewsAsia, June 2022, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/shinzo-abe-death-indo-pacific-legacy-militarisation-2798851.
[3] “An Inclusive ADF Or The Dustbin of History?”, By Oliver Jiang, The Forge, 18 January 2022, https://theforge.defence.gov.au/article/inclusive-adf-or-dustbin-history
