Rarely is Australia’s penchant for selective historical memory on starker display than on Anzac Day.

And never more so than since Anzac Day 2015, the centenary of the invasion by Australian troops of an obscure finger of the Ottoman empire that has – illogically and never quite explicably – been claimed as this country’s moment of national definition.

It’s the invasion we do talk about and celebrate. Never mind that which began on 26 January 1788, which still shamefully manifests in generational trauma, disadvantage and premature death across Indigenous Australia.

No. Commemoration of Australian involvement in other peoples’ wars has eclipsed any appropriate official remembrance of the Australian frontier conflicts that, by some credible estimates killed many more (mainly Indigenous) people than the 60,000-plus Australians who died in world war one.

Since the 1980s, Anzackery – the hyperinflation of the Anzac in Australia’s cultural narrative – has seen to that. But the hyperbole has never been more pronounced than at present, as Australia’s carnival of commemoration chews through what will, by 2018, probably amount to some $600m-plus of mostly public money.

Since 2013 I, and others, have challenged the war stories that are being told while highlighting the profligate spending and comparing it to what other countries that bore greater human costs in the war have committed to remembrance.

But the party, with its gauche merchandise and its ecclesiastical language (the “spirit” and the “fallen”, “loss” and “sacrifice”) that euphemises battlefield carnage, pervades. Those who challenge or question it are too often dismissed as vaguely seditious fringe dwellers, disrespectful of the dead.

Let me be clear: we should, as a country, respectfully commemorate what happened to Australia and those who fought and died in what was, after all, a global conflagration.

Australia divided bitterly, denying the government twice at plebiscite the power to conscript. From a population of some 5 million, more than 416,000 Australian men – about half of all those eligible – enlisted. Of the 331,000 deployed, some 60,000 were killed. More than 155,000 more were wounded. This excludes the psychologically and emotionally damaged – the tens of thousands who returned with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then there were the horribly disfigured and the limbless who too often lived out grim, shortened lives behind closed doors. Let’s not forget, either, the thousands who returned alcohol and morphine-addicted, and the tens of thousands of terrified women and children as domestic violence played out behind thousands of bolted suburban front doors.

When you walk the Gallipoli peninsula or the Somme, with their rows upon rows of neat bleached headstones and evocative epithets, it’s easy to forget war’s other victims – those who supported or just endured the generation of broken men who returned.

We are hopeless as a nation at sharing those stories.

Just as we are not good at portraying our fighting men (even today) as anything other than a breed apart – white hats fighting unambiguously good fights, albeit stoushes that mostly other people, notably Britain and the US, began. We don’t talk, for example, about the Surafend massacre of 1918 and how blithely Australian light horsemen massacred dozens of Arab and Bedouin in Palestine (today’s Israel).

And we don’t talk about the pejorative references to Indigenous Australians in the diaries and letters of these men – attitudes that informed their poor view of the indigenes of the Middle East. The Bedouin, wrote the official historian of the Sinai and Palestine campaign, Henry Gullett, were “scarcely higher in civilisation than the Australian black”.

We don’t talk about the link between Anzac and the events at Coniston, Northern Territory, in October 1928, regarded as the last orchestrated massacre of Indigenous Australians. Mounted constable George Murray, who led the massacre, was a former light horseman whose military training was adapted to rounding up and killing his victims at Coniston.

Intense focus during peak times of military commemoration such as Anzac Day is invariably the (supposedly superior) performance of Australian troops on (battle) field. Scant attention is paid to reasons why Australia continues to follow major powers into their wars, as we’ve done since late colonial days.

If you read one book during this festival of Anzackery, make it Unnecessary Wars by pre-eminent historian Henry Reynolds. It, rather than a visit to the Australian War Memorial, should be prescribed for Australian school children.

Reynolds, perhaps the most important living Australian historian of his epoch, points out how Australia began defining itself through (non-frontier) wars well before federation and the Gallipoli invasion. He focuses on the Boer war, a conflict our political leaders have wound into first world war commemorations by naming the Africa veterans as the “fathers of the Anzacs”. Reynolds points out Australian troops (600 of whom died in the Boer war) were involved in the widespread looting and burning of Boer properties.

Reynolds writes: “The reputations of the Australian (Boer war) soldiers is carefully shielded. This is done so effectively that few people are aware of their direct involvement in the terrorising of Boer civilians, the burning, looting and indiscriminate destruction. They were also complicit the truly shocking consequences of the imprisonment of women, children and the elderly in concentration camps ... this vast crime against humanity has been treated with an easy insouciance in Australia.”

Some 22,000 Boer children died in the camps, Reynolds says.

Last year the governor general, Sir Peter Cosgrove, a former military man, said: “Our Boer war veterans showed what it was to be an Australian. In this Anzac centenary year, their deeds are as important and relevant as ever and they are widely regarded as the fathers of the Anzacs.”

It’s beyond time that Australia began commemorating its past in conflict honestly – for all its complexities, its good and its considerable bad. And only then can we truly know ourselves.