Three machine gun posts? Yeah nah, that was only worth a DCM for a Gomeroi bloke ay

The Department of Defence has indicated it stands by the 1918 decision to award Private William Allan Irwin, a Gomeroi man, the Distinguished Conduct Medal for capturing three German machine gun posts during the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin, while awarding the Victoria Cross to another Australian who captured only one in the same engagement.

A senior departmental spokesperson confirmed that on reviewing the records, the department had concluded that the original mathematics employed in 1918 – in which three machine gun posts captured by a First Nations soldier were determined to be of lesser value than one machine gun post captured by a non-Indigenous one – remained consistent with the methodology in use at the time.

“The Australian Imperial Force operated under a long-standing convention that the ratio of Aboriginal-to-non-Aboriginal bravery required for equivalent recognition was approximately three-to-one,” the spokesperson explained. “We have no current grounds to revisit this calculation, in part because the soldier in question has been dead for 107 years and is not in a position to lodge a complaint.”

Private Irwin was struck down attempting to silence a fourth machine gun position. The Department of Defence noted that Australian medal review processes are deliberately structured to be unable to identify historic racial discrimination in award decisions, on the grounds that doing so would create unwelcome precedents for the other ones.

The department added it had no plans to initiate a posthumous Victoria Cross review and had instead allocated funding to develop a virtual reality experience commemorating the soldier’s sacrifice, viewable for the public at the Australian War Memorial during business hours.

Three machine gun posts. One medal short.