by Marilyn Lake
Melbourne historian Stuart Macintyre in his volume of the Oxford History of Australia, published in 1986, followed Ian Turner in characterising the Anzacs in unflattering terms. He noted their bravery and solidarity, but also that the ‘digger was bombastic and self-aggrandizing, given to contempt for the British officer and intolerant of others with whom the war threw him into contact, yet not unresponsive to flattery’.22 Macintyre also followed Turner in noting Bean’s disapproval of the soldiers’ loutish behaviour, quoting his observation that ‘I think we have to admit that our force contains more bad hats than the others’.23 The champion of the ideal Anzac, Bean was clearly more ambivalent about and uncomfortable with the behaviour of real diggers.
With an emphasis on political history, Macintyre argues that out of this ‘nation divided’ by war emerged a stronger sense of nationality, but that this was the work of Prime Minister WM Hughes at an international level, determined to give voice to and secure Australian interests, in particular the protection of the White Australia Policy at the Peace Conference at Versailles. Hughes posed as ‘the little digger’, the friend of the Anzacs, but returned soldiers exercised a reactionary influence in politics that alienated many potential members of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA), which by 1924, represented only nine per cent of all ex-servicemen. Anzacs were a divided and divisive political force in post-war Australia and their official representatives in the RSSILA spoke for explicitly conservative values.
The radical nationalists whose work was influential in the 1960s and 1970s, Bob Gollan, Ian Turner, Geoff Serle and Russel Ward, wrote an Australian history that emphasised the role of those on the left of politics – labour men, bush-workers, trade unionists, republicans, nationalist poets and writers – in forging a sense of national identity and contributing to the idea of nationhood. To the extent that the Anzacs could be part of this story it was not because of their ‘baptism of fire’, but because they were bearers of the values of the bush, the egalitarian Australian ethos.
In the 1970s and 1980s, this celebratory national narrative began to be discredited by a powerful combination of younger historians, critical of its sexism and racism. ‘Australians are now increasingly discovering their past’, wrote Miriam Dixson in 1976. ‘But the explorers are mainly males and what they are uncovering tends to concern the lives and achievements of males … Thus in this proud democracy, women figure as pygmies in the culture of the present and are almost obliterated from the annals of the past.’24 Other historians such as Humphrey McQueen, Ann Curthoys and CD Rowley were pointing to the racism that had in different ways underpinned the growth of the proud democracy. It was clearly the case that the Australian vision of equal opportunity and social justice, as it had been elaborated in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, had been integrally linked to the insistent demand for racial homogeneity. Democratic equality had meant racial exclusion. As WK Hancock wrote in 1930: ‘The policy of White Australia is the indispensable condition of every other Australian policy.’25
It was the White Australia Policy that distinguished Australia from Britain in 1901 and underpinned assertions of sovereignty; it was the White Australia Policy, as Alfred Deakin had proclaimed, that was the founding creed of our nationality. Just as new histories of Aboriginal dispossession and Aboriginal activism made it increasingly difficult to persevere with Australia Day as a day of national celebration, as we show in chapter five, so de-colonisation and multiculturalism demanded the final repudiation of the national ideal of White Australia. Thus a vacuum opened up at the heart of the national story. There was a longing for a proud national history, which would be duly met by the revivification of the myth of Anzac.
New social histories such as Bill Gammage’s fine study The Broken Years (1974) and Patsy Adam-Smith’s popular The Anzacs (1978), drawing on soldiers’ own diaries and letters, paved the way. In particular they would play a crucial role in establishing the innocent young soldier as the face of Anzac, the beautiful boys in the film Gallipoli, Archie and Frank, replacing the reactionary visage of Bruce Ruxton, the omnipresent and vociferous president of the Victorian branch of the RSL.
In these new histories, Anzacs were no longer the aggressive and skilled wielders of the bayonet, vividly rendered in Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett’s eyewitness account in 1915, but the victims of war – and of the British. ‘War is hell’, wrote Patsy Adam-Smith, but ‘we must remember not to castigate the victims of war – and every man who fights is a victim’.26
One of the most perceptive commentaries on the implications of the historical return to Anzac was provided by historian Manning Clark. His account of the birth of the Anzac legend in volume 5 of History of Australia was also a comment on his own times: ‘Some Australians were abandoning their hopes of creating a society free of the evils of the old world, a society where there was equality of opportunity without servility, mediocrity, or greyness of spirit.’ But the turn to Anzac Day as ‘Australia’s day of glory’, he wrote, had made the nation ‘a prisoner of her past, rather than an architect of a new future for humanity. The story of the heroism would be told for generations to come. So the founding ideals of Australia had been “cast to the winds”.’27
Manning Clark proved prescient. With the proliferation of military histories, from the 1980s, national traditions that had incorporated ideals of a more just society were lost to sight. In 1980 an ‘Australians at War cassette’ offered ‘the complete history of Australia’s fighting forces – the courage – the humour – the pathos – the patriotism – through song and verse and yarn’.28 This would be soon complemented by all kinds of military history: the personal accounts of nurses and infantrymen, studies of women at war and prisoners of war, books about the Boer War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Pacific war, Papua New Guinea, the Middle East, the Malayan Emergency, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan. Leading journalists such as Les Carlyon, Paul Ham and Peter FitzSimons made this fertile field their own.
In What’s Wrong with Anzac? we analyse these movements in Australian history and changes in Australian self-definition. We address the questions of how and why the myth of Anzac has acquired a central place in Australian history and public memory. We show that the rewriting of Australian history has required forgetting as well as remembering. We look at how the desire to recognise those who fought for their country has led not just to proper reward and reparation, but also to the militarisation of Australian history, public memory and national values.
Central to this process has been the transformation of military history into family history, an enterprise made possible by the vast new genealogical resources, including Nominal Rolls, available at the Australian War Memorial and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. In no other country has military experience in foreign wars become so central to a nation’s sense of itself and its national identity. The War of Independence in North America is commemorated because of its profound political significance in inaugurating a new political and social order. In the American war against the British empire, the United States founded an independent republic, the first post-colonial republic in the world. In 1915 our soldiers went to fight for the British empire and its allies, the French and Russians, in their war against the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Rather than inaugurating a new phase of national independence between the wars, Gallipoli served to lock Australia more firmly into the Imperial embrace. Following World War I, British values, education, literature and even the British accent were re-invigorated in Australia.
Critical analyses of the Anzac legend, as we have seen, risk inciting charges of disloyalty and treason. Thus we ask whether the cult of Anzac is now creating two classes of citizen in a process that ironically reflects the divisions opened up in World War I. At that time, lines were drawn between ‘enlisted men’ and those stigmatised as ‘shirkers’. This has now been re-cast as a division between those who themselves or whose relatives went to
war – and thus have a right to speak – and those who haven’t earned this right and must remain silent. As became evident on the Age blog people now feel obliged to preface any remarks about Anzac with a statement of their family’s military service.
Finally, we raise the question of whether the militarisation of our national values – and the proliferation of commemorative days, war memorials and military history – has naturalised our condition of always being at war and thus silenced debate about our participation in current and future wars. When did we last read or hear public debates about whether we should be in the ever more destructive war in Afghanistan? Is our military commitment there simply an extension of our ‘civilising’ role in Iraq and the Middle East? Writing in the Age blog, Dean was troubled by the lack of discussion and clarity: ‘[George] Orwell’s state sponsored never ending war is so close to a reality, does any of us even know who we are fighting, where and why? We just know we’re always at war …’
— 1 —
Are nations really made in war?
Henry Reynolds
‘War is the living fountain from which flows the entire society.’
WG Sumner, War and Other Essays, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1911, p 16
They were quite certain, even emphatic, in their views. And it seemed there was little dissent, although not everyone spoke. I had been asked to talk to a group of bright, enthusiastic senior high school students about Anzac Day and had begun by asking them to tell me why they thought it was important. Two ideas dominated their response. The Anzac landing had made Australia a nation and the young diggers had shown a spirit that was inimitably Australian. These answers didn’t surprise me. It was, indeed, hard to imagine how a class like this one anywhere in contemporary Australia would have come up with other answers, so pervasive was the common view and so constantly repeated in speeches, articles, lectures and lessons.
Leaders in all walks of life affirmed this interpretation of the Anzac landing, even if they disagreed about many other things and they had been doing so across the years. The interpretation had been sanctified by reiteration. As leading war historian Peter Stanley observed recently, the Gallipoli campaign
occupies a central place in Australia’s national mythology, identity and memory. The landing on the Peninsula has been portrayed by commentators across the political spectrum as representing the place and time when Australia became a nation.1
This view is now so powerful and so pervasive that it is rarely questioned. To do so is to show inexcusable disrespect for the dead. Dissent in such a case has rarely been tolerated and as we have noted has provoked accusations of treason. But the idea that the Anzac landing made the nation has raised so many questions and is such a problematic claim it’s a wonder that it has remained for so long beyond the reach of criticism. I suggested to the class that the proposition they favoured could only be tested by considering what had happened both before and after the landing and by an assessment of how and when nations are made and the role of war in that process.
Rhetoric and reality
Historical reality confounds the rhetoric. If the Anzacs made the nation what does this say about the first hundred years of settlement? Was it all merely preparatory, just a prelude? Was there nothing that happened within the Australian colonies before 1915 that had the importance of the Anzac landing? Could the Commonwealth of Australia fairly be described as an inadequate nation? By any measure it was a remarkably successful society, the envy of many countries in the contemporary world. It was peaceful, well governed and prosperous. The average family was better nourished, housed and educated than in almost any other society. For more than half a century the self-governing colonies had developed their economies and their institutions and had introduced progressive reforms which had placed them at the forefront of democratic advance.
The tradition was carried through into the first years of the new Commonwealth, which introduced women’s rights, a living wage, old age pensions and kindred measures which pioneered the welfare state. This story of progressive, innovative legislation was recognised by well-informed contemporaries in Britain, continental Europe and North America. And at the time the White Australia Policy that underpinned these advances was widely admired and emulated. Federated Australia was a collective achievement; the slow cumulative work of innumerable citizens in all walks of life. If all this had failed to create a nation what new, missing element, was added by the young men who invaded Turkey in 1915? The only possible answer is that fighting is more important to the life of nations than farming or legislating, labouring, teaching, nurturing children or any other of the innumerable, unspectacular activities of civil society.
And what of the country after April 1915? War did not unite, but rather divided society. Australia was far more deeply divided in 1919 than it had been in 1914. War tore at the social fabric. The two campaigns fought over the issue of conscription in 1916 and 1917 were bitter affairs, prising apart communities, congregations and families, ruining previously enduring friendships. Class conflict was accentuated and strikes broke out across the country. The fault line between Catholic and Protestant was widened by the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and further exacerbated by the conscription referenda. And as soldiers returned they came into conflict with those who had stayed at home.
Within a few years of the end of the war, Western Australia made a serious attempt to leave the federation, the shared experience of war notwithstanding. And it would be hard to argue that Australia became more independent in the 1920s and 1930s. If anything loyalty to Crown and empire became more rather than less pronounced. If the war had made Australians more self-confident there was little to show for it in the decades between the wars. The bond with king and empire had been sealed and sanctified in blood. The drive by the dominions to achieve independence from Britain was initiated by Canada, South Africa and Ireland. Loyal Australia followed reluctantly in their wake.
Any discussion of the evolution of Australian nationalism comes up against the inescapable problem of sovereignty. Australia was not an independent nation state either before or after 1915. It had no control of its foreign policy, no diplomatic service and the monarch remained the Head of State. The national government had no say in the decision as to where the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) would go, who it would fight and for what reasons of state they would kill and be killed. Australia couldn’t even choose its own enemies. The political and strategic decisions were made in London and the detail of Imperial policy was not necessarily divulged to Australian leaders. This had the paradoxical result of totally obscuring the question of Australia’s own national interest.
If Australia only had the most general reasons for going to war how could success or failure be measured? In some ways this gave an aura of purity to the great sacrifice. It was unsullied by political calculation. Success would be calibrated not by measurable political or strategic achievement, but by the display of character, of courage and stoicism and by the metaphorical creation of a nation. Anything less would make the sacrifice seem more unbearable. The thought that so many young men had died in vain could not be countenanced by grieving families, returned men or the leaders who decided to send them overseas. Such a large sacrifice must have been worthwhile. Anyone who suggested otherwise would attract intense opprobrium.
Killing and dying
The belief that nations are made in war provokes many troubling thoughts. I only alluded to a few when talking to the high school students. They are necessarily and inescapably confronting. But the silence on the subject, so marked in Australia, will not make them go away. Is war, for instance, the only, or even the most direct avenue to national maturity? Does a seasoning war need to be a just one or will any war do? Do nations who have lived in peace lack something important? And how does violence contribute to a nation’s spirit or identity? Australia’s Anzac rhetoric dwells on suffering endured, but what of suffering inflicted? Sacrifice and dying are admired, but what about the killing
? It seems we rarely talk about it. I’m sure the class members found the subject troubling and distasteful. But it cannot be avoided if we talk about war. As Joanna Bourke’s first sentence of her recent book An Intimate History of Killing states:
The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing. For politicians, military strategists and many historians, war may be about the conquest of territory or the struggle to recover a sense of national honour but for the man on active service warfare is concerned with the lawful killing of other people.2
Was Australia’s much celebrated coming of age in 1915 consummated by the killing of Turks? Were the Anzacs applauded because they were good at it? All the courage and bravery in the world meant little if they were not employed in the brutal business of killing. They can’t stand alone without a consideration of their purpose or the circumstances which call them into life. Is that what lies latent inside the common discourse of the period about the Australians being blooded at Gallipoli? And what are we to make of all the talk about manhood which has been so common in Australian rhetoric about war? Did the real man need blood on his hands? The historical record shows quite clearly that soldiers who shrank from the bloody business were commonly thought to be cowards, to be less than men.