The Australian War Memorial remains one of Australia’s most cherished national institutions, attracting a million visitors, mainly tourists, to Canberra each year.

Those who follow the institution’s fortunes are variously saddened and outraged at its latest own-goal, diminishing its tarnished reputation in refusing to face the reality of Australia’s military experience.

In recent years, it has been plagued by a succession of scandals, beginning with the controversial, expensive, unnecessary and mismanaged expansion, the legacy of Brendan Nelson (director 2013-18). Its dogged defence of disgraced VC Ben Roberts-Smith (even as the evidence mounted that he had been responsible for the deaths of three unarmed civilians in Afghanistan), now pondering whether it can acknowledge his actions honestly in its museum galleries. The Memorial has struggled to justify its unhealthy association with arms makers, and has endured embarrassing gaffes by members of its Council. Most significantly, whether and how it is to recognise the fact of frontier conflict (the Australian Wars) remains unresolved. The Memorial’s management has failed to honestly acknowledge, accept and act on the facts of our changing understanding of Australian military history.

Now, through leaked internal documents, comes the revelation that a recommendation to award the Memorial’s Les Carlyon prize to Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes, Chris Masters’s expose of Ben Roberts-Smith, has been overturned by the Memorial’s management.

Some background. The Memorial commemorates the dead of the Defence Force and its precursors. This it accomplishes by maintaining the physical memorial, creating exhibition galleries and by fostering and supporting research into Australia’s military history. The Memorial is a Commonwealth statuary authority, governed by a Council reporting to the minister for Veterans’ Affairs and run by a director, a public service appointment. (The minister has a portfolio responsibility for the Memorial and receives regular reports from it.)

The Les Carlyon prize has been awarded since 2020 in memory of the journalist and author who had been a member of the Memorial’s council from 2006 till his death in 2019. Carlyon had made a name with two popular books, Gallipoli (2001) and The Great War (2006).

The prize was evidently intended to be awarded to what the literary world calls “emerging” authors, though the first award went in 2020 to Stephen Gapps (for his book, The Sydney Wars), though he had published at least four previous books. The second award, in 2022, went to Christine Helliwell for Semut. She was an experienced (indeed retired) academic anthropologist, and Semut (a new account of the Australian encounter with the indigenous people of Borneo in 1945) was actually not her first book.

The internal committee convened to recommend on the 2024 award (and an external panel including Carlyon’s widow, Denise) agreed that the prize should be awarded to Chris Masters for his 2023 book Flawed Hero, which revealed the inside story of Ben Roberts-Smith’s attempts to contest claims against him. It appeared after Justice Anthony Besanko ruled (at the end of a defamation action that Roberts-Smith had initiated) that on the balance of probability he had been implicated in the three deaths.

That a Memorial committee would nominate such a book does credit to its disinterested judgment, an act that must have taken considerable courage on the part of its members, who included its senior historian, Dr Karl James.

At this point, someone at the Memorial remembered that the prize had originally been intended to recognise emerging authors – even though that criterion had been applied inconsistently in the award’s first two iterations, and the criteria published in July 2024 made no reference to authors’ experience as writers.

The Guardian published excerpts from the leaked documents, in which, in July and August 2025, Dr James and the Memorial’s director, Matt Anderson, discussed the options, in the light of a recent decision by its Council in reiterating that the prize recognise “emerging writers”. (Did Council know of the recommendation? No, they now say. Not formally, perhaps…) But what to do about the recommendation to award the 2024 prize to another established writer?

James’ first option was to urge Anderson to respect the judging panel’s recommendation. That, he argued, would show that the Memorial was “open to difficult ideas and conversations concerning the Australian experience of war”. Anderson replied, “Option 1, is not an option”, though without explaining why.

(He seems to have believed that the Memorial had established its willingness to confront difficult subjects by selling controversial books in its shop and in unspecified displays in the yet-to-open new galleries.)

Noting that “some may consider the winning work controversial”, James also offered the possibility of not awarding the prize in 2024. This, Anderson embraced. “I think the option of a pause,” he minuted, and “a careful review of governance arrangements around [the] Les Carlyon Prize”. He thought two winners could be chosen for 2026, necessarily excluding Flawed Hero from consideration.

Dr James’ warning that the Memorial’s decision risked “reputational damage” indeed proved prescient. Following The Guardian’s revelation, articles and op-eds have canvassed the inevitable conclusion that the decision to defer the 2024 prize was not merely a matter of procedural rectitude. Inevitably, it raises the question whether any other book would have so alarmed the Memorial.

Masters’s book dissected Roberts-Smith’s claims and documented both his several tours in Afghanistan and his various legal cases. But Roberts-Smith had been adopted virtually as a mascot by the Memorial under former director Nelson, and his substantial legal bills were met by wealthy backers, including Western Australian magnate Kerry Stokes, from 2007 to 2022 a member of the Memorial’s Council.

Deferring the prize was surely not simply a matter of terminological confusion.

Masters expressed no surprise that his book had been found ineligible retrospectively. The prime minister issued an anodyne statement acknowledging the Memorial as “sacred”, while the minister for Veterans’ Affairs described the Memorial as being “above politics and partisanship” a claim flagrantly untrue. Kim Beazley, chair of the Memorial’s Council, breezily dismissed criticism, as is his wont.

It seems inescapable that Masters has been denied the recognition of the value of his book (which the judging panel acknowledged) because it honestly challenged the falsity of the claims made by, and on behalf of, Roberts-Smith.

Regardless of the politics, that a government agency can intervene in and upset a prize jury’s recommendation undermines the integrity of the system of impartial awards which are such a feature of the Australian literary scene.

The controversy points to a reprehensible partiality in the management of the nation’s premier military historical institution. Dr James argued that the difficult facts of history should be faced and good (if uncomfortable) writing be acknowledged. His superiors, embarrassed that a man they had lionised should be criticised, evidently put their sensitivities above respecting the rules the judging panel had understood and applied.

This looks like a textbook case of institutional cowardice. As much as it reveres bravery on the battlefield, its management could not find the courage to face the truth in the Memorial’s Council room.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.