What's Wrong With Anzac?

by Marilyn Lake

  When all is said that possibly can be said for the war, it is a monstrous crime against civilization and humanity; and the notion that any of the parties voluntarily engaged in it can be blameless is absurd. It is impossible to discuss war practically without a suspension of all ordinary morals and all normal religious and humanitarian pretensions. Even that is not enough: it is necessary to set up alongside of martial law … an outrageous special morality and religion, in which murder becomes duty and patriotism …35

  But the views of pacifists like Shaw provoked mounting hostility as the bloody stalemate continued on the Western Front. Dissent was increasingly viewed as disloyalty; opposition to the war as treason. The introduction of conscription in Britain early in 1916 increased official pressure on conscientious objectors. Prominent opponents of the war like philosopher Bertrand Russell and journalist Fenner Brockway were imprisoned. Peace notes from the Vatican and Germany and plans for a socialist-led peace conference at Stockholm in 1917 all failed to stir the decision-makers. Pacifists were characterised by Australian Prime Minister WM Hughes as ‘peace cranks … and secret agents of Germany, masquerading as pacifists … gathered together as a cunning trap’.36 Pre-war pacifists turned their attention to plans for a new international organisation to be created when the guns eventually fell silent.

  The after-life of Edwardian militarism

  The twin ideas that both nations and their heroes are made in war were sharply contested before World War I. The pacifists pointed out that they could not co-exist with a genuine condemnation of war or the desire to avoid it. If war tested men and nations, as many militarists declared, there must be some good in it. The heroism heralded on the battlefield, and worthy of both emulation and admiration, must be seen as the fine, exalted fruits of conflict. But after the experience of the Western Front and the death and destruction of the war and its aftermath, the militarist writers of the Edwardian era were discredited and quickly forgotten. Glorification of war, fashionable before 1914, was eschewed in most combatant countries. It was left to Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and the Japanese military to keep the worship of war alive during the 1930s. Defeat in World War 2 and the humiliation of occupation saw the final eclipse of attitudes to war widespread before 1914.

  In Australia however tragedy was turned into glory through CEW Bean’s promulgation of the Anzac legend. In his study of war writing called Big-Noting, Robin Gerster observed that war correspondents told Australians at home that the conflict was ‘an exhilarating, if dangerous, adventure’.37 Bean himself showed ‘an old fashioned preference to look at the positive, the “bright,” the heroic side of war’.38 His prose was studded with sporting metaphors. Much Australian writing about the war in magazines such as Lone Hand (and indeed the mainstream media) suggested that Australians excelled, even revelled in battle and that the war hero was the apotheosis of Australian manhood. When the great wave of anti-war publications emerged between the wars – discussed in chapter three – the executive of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) raised the need to set up a system of censorship to be directed against the authors of war books ‘who defame Australian soldiers’.39

  The echoes of Edwardian militarism lived on however, in what Geoff Serle called ‘the liturgy of Anzac Day’. The national investment in Anzac meant a continuing embrace of atavistic ideas about the importance of war in the life of nations. Without such ideas the Anzac landing would have lost its central significance in national mythology. Whether they should be passed on to our children with such determination should be a matter for serious consideration.

  At the heart of the matter is Australia’s distinctive military history which has all taken place overseas. Australia has been engaged in many wars in the last hundred years, but the fighting has occurred in other people’s countries (with the exception of the attacks on Darwin). Our military forces have been involved in conflicts in Europe, North and South Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, East and South-East Asia, recently in Iraq and currently in Afghanistan. But we have been spared the military occupation to which we have subjected others. Experience of war has, with the exception of Darwin, been confined to the military forces. The Pacific war against Japan barely touched mainland Australia. The continent has never been occupied and we have suffered very few civilian casualties.

  In the past century we have not known war in the way that so many others have. We were spared the full horrors of the tumultuous twentieth century. In this way our experience is similar to that of the United States. In a recent article, ‘What have we learned, if anything’, the American historian, Tony Judt, sought to explain his country’s currently bellicose attitude to war. The United States, he argued, was the only advanced democracy ‘where public figures glorify and exult the military’. Such sentiments, familiar in Europe before 1945, were, he believed, quite unknown elsewhere today. The difference was that Europe and many countries in Asia and Africa had experienced invasion and devastation and had suffered enormous civilian casualties. Even Britain, although spared invasion, lost sixty-seven thousand civilian dead during World War 2. Those societies which had felt the full force of the horror of war understood war ‘only too well’. Americans however had been ‘fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance’.40 Judt’s observations about the United States are even more relevant to Australia because the United States did experience the trauma of a bitter and destructive civil war that cost six hundred and twenty thousand lives and its participation in World War I was followed by a protracted period of isolationism. Australia’s distance from the battlefields helps us understand the reason for our continuing romanticism about war and repeated willingness to go to war in the present.

  — 2 —

  Colonial Cassandras: Why weren’t the warnings heeded?

  Henry Reynolds

  ‘Cassandra, fair as golden Venus standing on Pergamus, caught sight of her dear father in his chariot, and his servant that was the city’s herald with him. Then she saw him that was lying upon the bier, drawn by the mules, and with a loud cry she went about the city saying, “Come hither Trojans, men and women, and look on Hector; if ever you rejoiced to see him coming from battle when he was alive, look now on him that was the glory of our city and all our people.”’

  Homer, The Iliad, Book XXIV

  Cassandra is one of the best-known characters to have come down to us from Greek mythology. She was favoured by the gods who bestowed on her the power to foresee the future. But when she was defiant the gods decreed that while she retained her power she would never be able to convince people that her warnings were of any value, even though she accurately foretold the fall and destruction of Troy. The colonial Cassandras were the politicians who warned their contemporaries of the dangers of becoming involved in Britain’s wars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They foresaw that it would inevitably lead to disaster. But few people took their warnings seriously and their dark foreboding was as little able to change the course of events as Cassandra’s dire prophesies.

  A peaceful prospect

  It was not what Australians expected at the start of 1899. They looked forward to the coming of Federation with the hope of improved economic conditions, new political arrangements and the founding of national institutions. War was far from their minds. Sporadic conflict with the Aborigines continued on the ragged fringe of settlement. Metropolitan newspapers carried occasional short reports if Europeans had been killed and in 1900 the rampage of Aboriginal bushrangers Jimmy and Joe Governor in rural New South Wales attracted intense, prolonged interest. Australians had individually crossed the Tasman to fight the Maoris and in 1885 the New South Wales government had sent a small detachment to the Sudan to support the British expedition tasked with avenging the death of General Charles George Gordon. The expedition sailed from Circular Quay after marching through milling, enthusiastic crowds. But it arrived too late to see any action and returned with little fa
nfare and less glory. Seen from the perspective of the late 1890s it seemed an aberration and one not likely to be repeated.

  Going to war

  But by the end of 1899 Australia was, collectively, at war. All six colonies had committed troops to the conflict in South Africa. The papers were full of reports of skirmishes and sieges and maps of the Cape of Good Hope, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Readers were coached in the evils of the Boers, the intransigence of the president Paul Kruger and the suffering of the so-called Uitlanders (the expatriate British migrant workers). There was surprisingly little reporting of the intense debate arising in Britain about the morality and the wisdom of the war involving many of the leading literary and intellectual figures of the age. The new federal government inherited the engagement and made its own commitment of troops at the end of 1901. It was a portentous decision. The involvement in wars overseas, the dispatch of the expeditionary force and the accompanying apotheosis of the warrior all became deeply characteristic of twentieth century Australia. Indeed among the world’s small powers Australia must have earned pre-eminence for being involved in more wars in more parts of the world than any other comparable country. It was not something that could have been foreseen in 1899. Neither history nor geography suggested such a militant destiny. A century which had seen war scares but no war and a geographical position remote from the world’s trouble spots beckoned in the opposite direction. Why twentieth century Australia took such a decisive, militant turn still remains a question of great significance. It has been often described, but never fully explained.

  A minority of colonial politicians did see the dangers of the involvement in the Sudan in 1885 and in South Africa in 1899–1902 and pleaded with their colleagues to avoid a path which they predicted would lead inescapably to engagement in future, unforseen conflict. Such views were seen by their contemporaries as, at best, displays of irritating dissent or, at worst, as disloyalty. They were in a minority in all seven parliaments which debated the commitment of troops and their importance has, consequently, been overlooked. But their arguments are worth re-considering and in many ways have more contemporary resonance than the opinions of their more conventional colleagues. For convenience it will be best to begin with the debate in New South Wales in 1885 before considering the much more extensive discussions of 1899–1901.

  The responsibilities of empire

  Supporters of the commitment advanced arguments which were to be heard again in 1899 and 1914 and which in modified form are still used to justify overseas engagements. Membership of the empire carried responsibilities as well as rights. An attack on Britain was an attack on New South Wales; humiliation of the Mother Country was humiliation of the colonies. The enemies of the Queen were the enemies of Englishmen everywhere. Australia’s security was totally dependent on the maintenance of Britain’s power and prestige. The colonists were at one with Britain heart and hand. Perhaps even more to the point was the powerful belief that Australia and Britain were united by race and the ties of blood which were more important than political borders or constitutional arrangements. But the Australian colonies had much to gain from involvement in war. The advantages were outlined in 1885. With the expedition to the Sudan, New South Wales had come of age and its real history had just begun. WH Holborow declared in the parliament: ‘Now this country has risen to the stature of nationhood. And we are a nation’s parliament henceforth.’ The sense of excitement was hard to escape. The veteran politician, Sir John Robertson confessed that never in his long life did his blood ‘so thrill with emotion’ as when he saw the crowds farewell the soldiers. There were many contemporary declarations of loyalty and references to the bonds of kinship. But there was calculation as well, Robertson remarking that whatever the rights or wrongs of the matter he held that, ‘if we expect England to stand by us in any trouble we ought to stand by England in her troubles’.1 EA Baker made the same point:

  Depend upon it if the time comes – and God knows how near it may be – when the Australian colonies shall be in danger from a foreign foe. Englishmen will never forget the handsome way in which New South Wales offered this small assistance to them in their time of danger. Well I think great benefit will arise to the colony in that way.2

  How will it end?

  But it was indeed the precedent which worried the small band of dissenters. ‘Can anyone say’, asked James Fletcher, ‘where this sending our men to fight in a foreign land will end, or what the expense may be?’3 His colleague AJ Gould wondered how long the war might last and how great the commitment could become. But there was a larger question to face:

  We have, therefore, to look at the future liability, at the great departure we have taken, and also to remember that we have laid down the principle that we are now prepared to enter into England’s wars, and to assist her with troops. Having done it now we shall be expected to do it again in the future.4

  ‘Will it end in this one act?’, asked the radical David Buchanan, ‘or shall we not be bound to interfere in all of England’s quarrels?’ And the problem was that if the Imperial connection was maintained, ‘every enemy of England became an enemy of ours’. The ties with Britain were a liability and a source of danger. He assumed that Britain would inevitably come into conflict with one of the great European powers and in those circumstances the colony would be committed in advance:

  We can see at a glance how absurd the whole action is. But what was the use of sending assistance to England unless we are prepared to continue it … If you bind yourself to replace them, [soldiers killed or wounded] what an enormous burden will you fasten on the people of the country, and into what a fearful abyss of misery and wretchedness you will plunge the whole country.

  The duty of the colonists was to ‘stand upon this ground’ and never send a soldier from their shores. Their obligation was to defend themselves against attack by repelling invaders. There was no duty to do anything else.5 Several dissenting members took the view that New South Wales hitherto had an implicit policy of neutrality and had ports that were open to every country in the world. ‘We have been neutral’, declared Fletcher, ‘neutrality has been our safeguard’. The colony had been at peace with the whole world. But with the commitment to the Sudan all that had changed:

  What have we done now? We have published to the world that New South Wales is prepared to assist in fighting the battles of England whether England is in the right or in the wrong. We have thrown down the gauntlet, and who will dare say that other nations will not retaliate when the proper time arrives.6

  The dissenting minority expressed a deep concern about where the military venture would ultimately lead. MJ Hammond predicted that it would ‘involve the country ever after in European complications that we should be much better free from’. What good, he asked, could the colony gain by becoming wantonly mixed up with the ‘hereditary troubles of England?’ By venturing far from Australia’s shores the government had compromised the country’s isolation which was its greatest asset. Angus Cameron regretted that by ‘foolishly thrusting ourselves to the front’ the government had compromised our geographical position which ‘almost gave us immunity from an attack from an enemy’.7

  But it was James Buchanan who asked the questions which probed the morality of the intervention itself and questioned the right of the Australian colonists to involve themselves in countries half a world away. He is worth quoting at length:

  I said that the war was an unjust war. The Arabs are fighting for their liberties … What patriotism, then, is it in our soldiers to go and fight against those patriots, who have never done them any harm, and have no … desire to do them harm. If we were fighting for our rights and liberties against an infamous government and a foreign state which had no part in the matter came to fight against us, how would we relish it? … Our troops are called patriots by fighting against men who have never done harm to them and have never seen them in the face.8

  Buchanan gestured to one of the persistent criticisms of
those who have opposed many of Australia’s military ventures overseas. There was, at the time, demonstrably no immediate or direct threat to Australia. The putative enemies had no capacity to harm Australia and no interest in doing so. The soldiers sent overseas knew nothing about the country where they were sent to fight or about the culture of their would-be opponents. Their antipodean innocence made them more than normally receptive to whatever propaganda the Imperial authorities wished at the time to propagate. The colonial politicians had neither the means nor the capacity or, often enough, even the interest, to assess the judgment of the Imperial government or the legitimacy of the conflict in question.

  War on the Veldt

  The fear of the few in 1885 that a precedent was being established was borne out in 1899. While preparing the ground for war against the Boer Republics the secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, sought the armed assistance of the white settler colonies. He needed their political support to counter opposition to the venture within Britain itself. Using the colonial governors and the senior British military officers, serving in Australia, he solicited, and eventually received, what was made out to be a spontaneous expression of colonial loyalty.9 The problem for the colonial governments was that if one held back this would give the impression of disloyalty. All of the colonies fell into line, even little Tasmania. A message of thanks from the old Queen sprang the diplomatic trap. Realpolitik was wreathed in royalist sentimentality.