There is a hole in our remembrance, and it is Black.
We justly remember our dead in wars overseas. But Australia still has no national memorial to both sides of the long and deadly conflict on our own soil. It's almost as if it didn't happen.
Frontier historian Lyndall Ryan has lifted the veil in a new book on Tasmanian Aborigines, which tallies deaths in the colonial Black War. She estimates it cost 878 indigenous lives, and 201 colonists'.
Though a memorial to all the fallen would be another step on the long road to Aboriginal reconciliation, nowhere on the island is there any monument to these, she says.
The well-documented Tasmanian war serves to illustrate absence on the mainland, where records of deadly Aboriginal raids and settler reprisal massacres are much sparser.
In Victoria, Ryan estimates around 2000 Aborigines were killed for the loss of perhaps 80 colonists. She cites work by Raymond Evans on the Queensland frontier suggesting as many as 24,000 Aborigines and 2000 colonists died.
We do know the facts of some of the atrocities. In the 1838 Myall Creek massacre, up to 30 unarmed Aborigines were killed by settlers near Bingara in northern New South Wales. And there is a monument to it.
The last recorded settler murder and reprisal massacre at Coniston in central Australia, as recently as 1928, also has memorials.
But a search of memorials to indigenous conflict finds a very chequered record of past clashes.
Mainly the words on these stones are one-sided. They are either local efforts to highlight settler deaths or Aboriginal attempts to encompass the vastness of past loss.
Take a plaque for the Faithfull massacre near Benalla in central Victoria. It records the day in 1838 when settlers' drays were attacked in a fight that cost eight white lives and one Aborigine.
It doesn't mention years of reprisals that are said to have later resulted in the deaths of up to 100 Aborigines.
Tallying the real figures must be very hard. Outside oral traditions, Aborigines kept few permanent records. Ryan points out that massacres, by their nature, tended to be secretive.
Though a national accounting is important to the truth, what seems to matter more to us today is concrete acknowledgement.
There have been some symbolic tries for Aborigines. The 200 decorated hollow log coffins in the Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery of Australia are a powerful representation of indigenous loss.
But an attempt by Canberra Labor figure Peter Conway in 2007 to raise the notion of a memorial to both sides of the Aboriginal conflict disappeared, he said, into the National Memorials Committee's toohard basket.
We have a popular and moving mausoleum in the Canberra War Memorial. The Anzac Commemorative Site and graves around Gallipoli make it clear that Turkey, too, understands the importance of our distant national holy ground.
Not only has each side forgiven the other, we are binding closer to the Turks as the Anzac centenary nears. In 2015 we will have a Year of Turkey, and it will hold a Year of Australia.
Yet here Australians are, unable to properly honour and remember the extent of past bloodshed on our own soil - some of it still to happen long after the Anzacs engaged the Turks.
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