www.silverguide.site –

Relaxing in his civvies at the cafe in the Australian War Memorial’s newly opened Anzac Hall, retired Group Captain Lyle Holt looks less like a man who spent years as a supersonic strike navigator and more like a man bridging two worlds. Just inside the hall sits his RF-111C strike reconnaissance aircraft, tail number A8-134 – the undisputed centrepiece of this massive new wing and part of the controversial $500m expansion of the national war museum five years in the making.

The aircraft is nicknamed “the pig” due to its long nose and ground-hugging capabilities. Largely defined by its deployment during the 1999 Timor-Leste crisis, the F-111 demanded from its navigators a mastery of high-speed and low-altitude precision, as it roared just metres above the treetops, where the margin for error was measured in milliseconds.

But for Holt, the most important navigation of his life happened on the ground: the discovery that he is a Palawa man. Throughout a decorated career that included tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq and culminated in a posting as the commander of the United Nations command-rear in Tokyo, Holt served a nation that had, for much of his life, kept his own family’s First Nations lineage in the shadows.

“I didn’t know about any of that until about 2015,” Holt says. “What I knew about my family was a bit about my dad ... but it’s always been part of the family, this mystery, this thing to only be spoken of in hushed tones.”

This self-imposed silence was in part a strategy for survival. For the Palawa people of Tasmania, the 19th century was defined by the black war, a conflict many historians cite as one of the most well- documented examples of genocide. The few surviving families, and their descendants, learned to hide in plain sight.

By the time Holt’s grandfather, Harold John Holt, signed his enlistment papers for the first world war, he was categorised by officials as a “natural born British subject” – a bureaucratic label that, for Indigenous soldiers, it functioned as a form of administrative invisibility. By slotting Harold into this catch-all category, the state could benefit from his sacrifice while maintaining the myth that his people no longer existed.

“Historically on the books, [they] didn’t exist,” says Michael Bell, the memorial’s Indigenous liaison officer.

This bureaucratic shield cut both ways. For many Indigenous families, the absence of an official heritage record was a vital layer of defence; it offered some protection from the systemic removal of children that had become official government policy.

But while the “natural born British subject” label enabled authorities to overlook a soldier’s heritage when he enlisted, it was invariably recalled when it came time to distribute land through the soldier settlement scheme. Indigenous veterans were often redirected away from new pastoral blocks and back towards existing missions.

Harold was eventually granted a block on his home of Flinders Island but it was land that was already part of his own father’s holdings. It was a pattern Bell has seen repeated across the archives.

“I’ve found examples of an Aboriginal man being given five acres from an Aboriginal mission as his reward for his service,” he says, describing how blocks were effectively cut out of land already designated for Indigenous use. While white soldiers were being carved out new futures in the pastoral industry, the scheme kept Indigenous veterans contained within the mission system.

Lyle’s discovery of his origins came from trawling official records online. . Until 2013, the entire trail of his ancestry was anchored by a handful of fragile documents: a 1919 wedding photograph of his grandfather posing in his Great War uniform alongside his Scottish-born wife, Bessie; and a 1967 newspaper clipping picturing Harold attending an Anzac Day dawn service, described in the photo as a 74-year-old war veteran.

Newly digitised archives allowed Holt to pierce the veil over his family history by examining the mission records of Flinders Island.

Part of what he discovered was a commitment to the Australian armed forces across multiple generations.

His uncle Pat – Harold’s eldest son – had enlisted in 1940 with the 2/40th Battalion. Known as the “Doomed Battalion”, it was almost totally manned by Tasmanian soldiers and was part of Sparrow Force, which was sent to defend Timor – the same region Lyle defended more than 50 years later. When the island fell to the Japanese in 1942, Pat, along with almost 1,000 fellow Australians, was taken prisoner and forcedto build the Sumatra “death railway”. Upon his liberation in 1945, there was official, as well as social pressure, to move on from that horror.

While the Burma-Thailand railway became a symbol of Australian endurance, the deprivations on the Sumatra line were less discussed. That silence, which Bell calls a hierarchy of suffering, fed into a misplaced sense of shame. There was a feeling, Holt says, that diggers like Pat had “sat out” the war. He believes this trauma may have led Pat to re-enlist in 1950, fighting on the frontlines of the Korean war, in the major battles of Kapyong and Maryang-San. He was joined in that conflict by his younger brother and Holt’s father, Lyle Holt Sr, who served aboard HMAS Anzac from 1952 to 1953.

Both men died young: Pat, at 50, became a casualty of the ghosts he had tried to outrun; Lyle Sr succumbed to a heart attack at 47, when his son was nine.

Their deaths effectively severed the family’s bridge to the past, locking away their Palawa heritage.

The uncomfortable process of unlocking a suppressed past is rattling the foundations of the Australian War Memorial itself. For decades, it has been the site of a fierce moral battle over what constitutes an “Australian war”, fastidiously documenting every foreign conflict but refusing to acknowledge the frontier wars – the century of domestic conflict between First Nations people and colonial forces that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

For many First Nations people, this exclusion is a second erasure. By refusing to depict the campaigns of resistance on home soil, the memorial has, in effect, maintained the 19th-century myth that the land was settled rather than conquered.

A permanent gallery dedicated to the frontier wars is now being planned and is scheduled to open in 2028.

• Indigenous Australians can call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for information and crisis support; or call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Mensline on 1300 789 978