It is three decades since white Australia threw an exclusive party for itself to celebrate a bicentenary of European invasion and settlement that trampled on the sensibilities of this continent’s Indigenous people.

While debate around the celebration of Australia Day (Invasion Day) on 26 January intensifies yearly amid momentum for inevitable change, the nation is still remiss when it comes to officially commemorating the many tens of thousands of Indigenous people killed in frontier wars intrinsic to European “settlement” and expansion.

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

Thirty years is an eye-blink when it comes to 60,000-plus of Indigenous continental custodianship and civilisation. But three decades is almost two-thirds of the average life expectancy of Indigenous men in some Australian communities, and a long, long time in a federation sullied by its ill treatment and oppression of Indigenous people, and contemporary political indifference to their rights and welfare.

In Canberra, a capital city of monumental buildings and memorials to the rise of the Australian federation, to British colonialism and to participation in empirical wars, there is but one memorial to the Indigenous people killed in battle or murdered on the frontier. And 30 years after its creation, the Aboriginal Memorial in the foyer of the National Gallery of Australia is more important than ever in its service of national memory.

That’s why the gallery recently had its own celebration of the memorial – an installation of 200 hollow log coffins created by different clans of Arnhem Land’s Yolngu – that was commissioned by curator, writer, artist and activist Djon Mundine as a counter to the 1988 bicentenary.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Djon Mundine in front of the Aboriginal Memorial.

When visitors came to Canberra, where I lived for two decades, I’d often take them to see Mundine’s the Aboriginal Memorial. It is a vast, beautiful, evocative and intentionally haunting work that represents the clans (as symbolised by the burial poles, each distinguished by unique painterly patterns and symbols) who live along the Glyde River estuary that snakes its way from fresh- to saltwater where it meets the Arafura in Arnhem Land.

It evokes questions from visitors and others who might be unaware of Australia’s brutal history of Indigenous dispossession and violence.

The beauty of the memorial is at odds with the horror of the experiences and events it connotes

While it is artistically embedded in specific locality it is nonetheless imbued with a broader continental symbolism as a memorial to all Indigenous people killed in wars with British red coats, militias, raiding parties and police on the colonial and post-federation frontier.

As both an artwork and a memorial it’s a profound aesthetic and political statement – a portal to a violent continental past and to a contemporary commonwealth of Australia that refuses to facilitate the called-for truth telling of history or give federal amplification to Indigenous voice.

Bundjalung man Mundine reflected on the Aboriginal Memorial during a symposium at the NGA to mark its 30th anniversary.

The Aboriginal Memorial, he says, “came as a reaction” in the mid-1980s to the looming 1988 Australian bicentenary celebrations.

“As the bicentenary approached I was aware that lots of Aboriginal artists – and non-Aboriginal artists – were boycotting the bicentenary. To say it [the bicentenary] wasn’t such a boon to Aboriginal people would be an understatement,” he said in a live-streamed conversation with gallery director Nick Mitzevich.

Mundine says at the time he was taken by “the general crassness of certain parts of Australian society who thought, ‘have a monstrous barbecue and a piss-up ... to celebrate your culture’”.

“I decided that that absence, boycotting things, would not be noticed internationally – they wouldn’t take any notice, wouldn’t notice there weren’t any Aboriginal people ... so I thought we’d have to have a presence but the presence had to be on our terms.”

The Aboriginal Memorial is the manifestation of that commemorative/artistic presence. First shown at the Biennale of Sydney in 1988, the memorial stood in the harbour city months after many thousands of Indigenous people and their supporters protested against the Australia Day celebrations – including a tall ships re-enactment – on 26 January 1988.

It was toured overseas, including to St Petersburg, where an estimated 500,000 people viewed it.

It was, Mundine says, an “important statement to show the world”.

“Overseas, people would think, ‘these are beautiful things – it’s like a fairytale thing, a beautiful forest we can all go through like Hansel and Gretel’. But in the end they read the story and understand what it really was. It made enormous inroads in showing what really happened in the colonial wars here, and the fact that you keep it in the front here of the gallery is just amazing.”

The beauty of the memorial is at odds with the horror of the experiences and events it connotes. Just as country, with its rivers and boulders, rainforests, sands and swamps, and its delicate ecosystems, harbours – and to an extent conceals – its bloody history.

Mundine talked about his own country, the majestic northern rivers around Grafton, and the history of violence that belies its beauty.

“I lived in Grafton. We are Bundjalung people. Our family have been very successful in our lives – we have famous sportsmen and women, we have famous actors and film-makers and so on. But the whole of that landscape, which is a great alternative lifestyle place – it’s a beautiful green landscape of the northern rivers ... the whole of it is pockmarked with a whole series of massacres,” he says.

"Wholesale massacre": Carl Feilberg exposed the ugly truth of the Australian frontier | Paul Daley Read more

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra resolutely refuses to depict frontier war in its galleries. On Anzac Parade, the parade ground leading to the memorial, are monuments to the various Australian services and the many conflicts that they have been involved in.

But there is no official monument there or anywhere else in Canberra to mark the Indigenous warriors who resisted European invasion and the theft of their lands.

Meanwhile, the federal government is yet to publicly respond to the urgent need for an official keeping place for the thousands of sets of Indigenous ancestral remains – many belonging to victims of frontier violence – that are kept in makeshift circumstances across Australia.

Which lends added poignancy to the Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery. And makes its conception, three decades ago, all the more prescient.

And it begs an important question: 30 years hence will it remain the lone official memorial in Canberra, the place of national memory, to Aboriginal deaths in the frontier wars?

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist

• Comments on this thread are premoderated to keep the discussion on the topics raised by the author