A nation’s capital should be an outward looking place, a city that faces the world to convey the type of country it represents. What, then, might be the first thoughts about Australia of those who fly into Canberra as they traverse the arrivals hall and concourse at our national capital’s airport?

The giant illuminated billboards advertising the names and wares of some of the world’s biggest manufacturers of combat machinery impart an unmistakable impression: here is an Australia tying its identity to warfare.

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At first glance these luminous behemoths featuring ships and aircraft are slightly confusing. Who are they speaking to and what are they saying? But there is nothing innocuous about them; they are showcasing, albeit as benignly as possible, the machinery of death and destruction.

There’s a lot in our postcolonial social and political history to support a proposition that Australia has long sought to construct a national narrative around militarisation. It pays to begin this week and work backwards.

On Monday the federal government outlined an economically and technologically questionable plan to provide almost $4bn in support to local weapons manufacturers in pursuit of its aim to make Australia one of the world’s top 10 arms exporters. Where once it was the sheep’s back, then farm equipment, cars and minerals now, it seems, Australia is aiming low: let’s build a manufacturing economy and an international reputation on machines designed to kill.

Australia’s colonial and national leaders, with only a few exceptions, have always rushed to beat the khaki drum.

The policy was initially foreshadowed last year with a vow from the defence industry minister Christopher Pyne that Australia would never export weapons “willy-nilly” – that they would only be sold to “appropriate countries and appropriate places”. No such guarantee can truly be made regarding use of military hardware (Australian weapons have, for example, been used to fight insurrection in the Pacific in recent decades) once the arms are in control of another country.

As World Vision Australia’s Tim Costello pointed out in words since reiterated by other NGOs, “The government says this is an export and investment opportunity, but we would be exporting death and profiting from bloodshed. Is that what we want Australia to be known for?”

Australia’s colonial and national leaders, with only a few exceptions, have always rushed to beat the khaki drum.

I’ve written volumes about how Australia’s national narrative has become hostage to the “Anzac birthers”, historians, writers, military leaders and politicians, beginning with Billy Hughes – who have insisted the Australian nation was somehow born on the shores and cliffs of Gallipoli. That narrative has grown ever more pervasive in recent decades, at the expense of other salient elements of continental history – not least, the cultural treasure associated with 60,000-plus years of Indigenous civilisation, the contributions made by women and migrants and, of course, the long and peaceful political negotiations preceding federation in 1901.

In recent years the mainstream, competing narratives of Australian foundation seem to revolve around a face-off between two operations involving the military: the Australian involvement in the failed invasion of, and retreat from, an obscure finger of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and that other invasion (by any other name, please!) in 1788. While both are undeniably significant, the confection of an Australian narrative around one or exclusive elements of both, denies so much more of the depth and texture that Australia’s story has to offer.

The pervasiveness of what Geoffrey Serle presciently labelled “Anzackery”, has, perhaps, inured mainstream cultural consciousness to the militarisation of the Australian story. This was evidenced, perhaps, by the establishment commentariat’s reaction to the government’s stated ambition to become a bigger global merchant of death (most questions related to the economics, rather than morality, of the proposition).

So pervasive, indeed, that in recent years the people that make the planes, drones, tanks, guns, bombs, vessels, bullets and missiles that kill on the modern battlefield also play a major role in helping commemorate the same war dead.

On that score, thanks to the Honest History organisation for a salient reminder this week that, according to the Australian War Memorial’s last annual report the world’s five foremost weapons manufacturers by value of sales (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman) and the 11th largest (Thales) are significant AWM supporters.

David Stephens, Honest History’s secretary, has noted this sinister co-dependence, referring to it as “the military-industrial-commemorative complex: the arms maker provides, the ADF [Australian Defence Force] disposes, the Memorial commemorates, in a continuous cycle”.

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The memorial, charged with helping Australians “remember, interpret and understand” Australia’s war experience, has no compunction under its current administration about accepting funding for its commemorative functions from companies that make the weapons.

Last year former senior Australian public servant John Menadue wrote to memorial director Brendan Nelson asking why the memorial accepted arms manufacturers’ funding. Nelson responded: “We regard it as entirely appropriate that defence contractors support the Memorial in its mission”.

In his blog, Pearls and Irritations, Menadue subsequently wrote that the memorial “has lost its way”.

And so the AWM’s failure continues by seeking and obtaining support from ‘the merchants of death’. With their global power and influence the arms manufacturers are winning in their struggle to keep the US and its allies like Australia continually at war. That is not what the founders of the AWM intended. At the opening of the AWM in 1941 the Governor General Lord Gowrie said the Memorial would be … ‘not only a record of the splendid achievements of the men who fought and fell … but also a reminder to future generations of the barbarity and futility of modern war’.

The memorial stands at the foot of Mount Ainslie as Australia’s secular shrine.

But a shrine, it seems, is little more sacred than an airport when it comes to the reach of the war industry.