Australia has a memory problem.

What it chooses to publicly remember through its special officially sanctioned days and events of remembrance illustrates equally its capacity for wilful forgetting.

This has been a big year for official Australian remembrance: 230 years since British invasion on 26 January 1788, and a century since the end of the first world war, a global conflagration that Australia has nonetheless chosen to mark with a parochial $600m, four-year festival of commemoration, Anzac 100.

Myall Creek: here, in 1838, a crime that would not be forgotten took place Read more

No other country has gone so over the top (pun intended) or spent so much money on each dead soldier as part of its first world war commemorations.

Other critical elements in Australian history, meanwhile, conveniently escape the official memory in all its manifestations. This is especially so of the thousands of massacres, shootings and poisonings of this country’s Indigenes in the name of European civilisation – an oxymoron on this continent when it came to the devastating impact of colonial “settlement” on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Still, dozens of unofficial monuments have been erected – symbols of community-inspired commemoration of the darkest events in our colonial and post-federation history. On certain days of the year people gather at these places to remember happenings that the Commonwealth would gladly keep confined to memory’s outer corners, subsumed into the category of “other” history, overshadowed by Anzac and the myths of benign settlement around 1788.

This weekend it is 180 years since white stockmen murdered 28 unarmed Aboriginal men, women and children at Myall Creek in northern New South Wales.

The Myall Creek massacre was part of a pattern of violence against Indigenous people; hundreds of such massacres happened across the continent from 1788 as British soldiers, settlers and pioneering explorers clashed with Indigenous people resisting pastoral expansion. By some credible accounts at least 60,000 Indigenous people – roughly the same number as Australians killed in the first world war – died.

Myall Creek was, however, remarkable for another reason. It was the only time on the colonial frontier that non-Indigenous men were successfully prosecuted for murdering Aboriginal people. Seven perpetrators were eventually hanged.

Each year the commemoration at Myall Creek gains more official recognition

Year after year for almost two decades crowds have been steadily growing each 10 June at Myall Creek. Last year about 400 people, including direct descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators, turned up.

One of the event’s organisers, Graeme Cordiner, estimates up to 1,000 people will turn up this year from different parts of the country to take part in what is evolving into a significant moment of black/white conciliation and an act of broader remembrance for all killed in Australian frontier conflict.

Cordiner, from the organisation Friends of Myall Creek, says that on Saturday buses are bringing people from as far as Canberra and Toowoomba. A delegation is also coming from Appin outside Sydney, where at least 14 Aboriginal people were massacred in 1816 by British troops at the instruction of Lachlan Macquarie, the then governor whose official legacy remains, paradoxically, one of enlightened compassion towards Indigenous people.

“The striking thing about Myall Creek is its capacity to draw together white and black – and a rainbow of others, one year including a busload of Koreans from Sydney who donated $1,000,” Cordiner says.

“For Aboriginal people - and non-Aboriginal people – rather than a site to avoid it now has become a place of healing, a totally different energy. Myall Creek does not exist in a vacuum. It is prominent in Australian consciousness because it was the one and only massacre brought to book. But there were so many more. As such we have a national responsibility, with others, to tell the story of the Frontier Wars.”

Each year the commemoration at Myall Creek gains more official recognition. Cordner says Gwydir Shire Council is effectively the commemorative partner of Friends of Myall Creek. Inverell Shire is also supportive.

An illustration of the Myall Creek Massacre made 40 years after the event. Illustration: Mitchell Library. Photograph: Mitchell Library

Meanwhile, the NSW Labor opposition has pledged $3m towards the construction of a Myall Creek Education and Cultural Centre that would be dedicated to public education of the massacre and frontier war.

There is little at Myall Creek but an old overgrown tennis court. Symbolic of the growing tensions between Australia’s Anzac foundation narrative and the growing national awareness of the violent frontier, a first world war commemorative hall stands close to the newer Myall Creek massacre memorial.

The tone of commemoration at the annual Myall Creek remembrance ceremony was set in 2000, when Aunty Sue Blacklock and Des Blake, direct descendants respectively of massacre victim and perpetrator, embraced.

Cordner says, “We have a Myall Creek saying – ‘The path to the future passes through the past.’ Until there is that honest reckoning with the past which Myall Creek represents we are doomed to repeating the past.”

Massacres and protest: Australia Day's undeniable history Read more

The Myall Creek commemoration is emblematic of a broader push for the official recognition of frontier war deaths. Each year the crowds, black and white, who commemorate frontier war killing on Anzac Day and Australia Day, continue to grow. This year tens of thousands gathered in some capital cities.

Public museums, galleries and other institutions (with the exception of the Australian War Memorial, which will not depict frontier war even though the conflict happened on Australian soil and involved some locally raised paramilitary, military and police units) continue to dedicate more resources to the story of the violent Australian frontier.

But as yet there is no official Commonwealth memorial to the dead of the frontier wars in Canberra, the capital, whose monuments and institutions also serve as a national memory.

But it will happen, just as inevitably as the date of Australia Day is bound to change from the day of invasion, 26 January.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist