by Marilyn Lake
Imperial cynicism
Australia’s widely canvassed fear of Japan was both a problem and an opportunity for Britain. She entered into an alliance with Japan in 1902 and it was an important and valued connection which was maintained until after World War I. Their own official strategic assessment of 1906 saw little possible threat to Australia and no likelihood of invasion. But by 1911 the message of antipodean security was no longer useful to the British and while preparing for the Imperial Conference, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir William Nicholson, had become aware of how frightened the Australians were about Japan. He had consulted the Australian Agents General in London and had been told that the ‘possibility of a Japanese invasion of the northern territory of Australia with a view to settlement was viewed with much anxiety’. Such an illusion was just too useful to dispel. So Nicholson was opposed to allowing the Australians to see the relevant memorandum as being ‘likely to discourage them’ in the measures they were now taking to develop their military forces. He continued his observation:
If, as stated in the memorandum, Australia could in no circumstances be exposed to the danger of attack more formidable than could be delivered by a small raiding force, it could not be maintained that a large military force was essential to the security of Australia.26
The cynical manipulation of Australia’s phobia about Japan was maintained right up to the outbreak of war. Early in 1914 the Inspector General of Overseas Forces, and soon to be commander of the Anzac campaign, General Sir Ian Hamilton, toured Australia and New Zealand. He fully exploited local fear about Japan both in public and in private as he reported in letters written to his friend Prime Minister H Asquith. It was important correspondence and needs to be quoted at length:
I had fully meant when I came out here to urge upon the Commonwealth the importance of having some small section of their army earmarked, in peace, for expeditionary Imperial service. But I see now I could defeat my own object and weaken the effect of the whole of the rest of my report were I to touch on that string. The whole vital force of the country i.e. the rank and file of its people, are standing firm together against any such proposition. Play the tune an Australian army for Australia, and they dance to any extent. Not otherwise. Australia – not Empire – is then the string we must harp on. That is to say, we must encourage them to do what they will do willingly and lavishly, namely pay up for safeguarding a White Australia from the cursed Jap. Then, when the time comes, and when we are fighting for our lives in India or elsewhere, I for one am confident that the whole military force of Australia will be freely at our disposal. But tell the Australian that he must contribute to a force which may have to fight outside the areas washed by the Pacific, and he at once begins to talk tribute.
Therefore I am acting on the principle of encouraging Australia to make her land forces as efficient and strong as possible to meet dangers threatening their hearths and homes and am talking as little about overseas Imperial needs as possible.27
Hamilton’s audacious cynicism graphically illustrated two things about Australia on the eve of World War I. She was burdened with an unrealistic fear of Japan and an exaggerated sense of dependence on Britain. But what the British realised, and the Australians didn’t, was that by 1914 they needed Australia more than the new federation needed the empire. Sir Charles Lucas was one of the most experienced and able officials in the Colonial Office and he knew Australia well. In a book published in 1912 he observed that if England was to ‘hold her own as a nation; she must keep the Dominions with her’. In fact, he declared,
it is probably true to say, though it may not be generally admitted, that each succeeding year adds conspicuously to the population of the young peoples of the world, whether inside or outside the British Empire. The value of the Dominions to England increases in much greater proportion than the value of England to the Dominions, because each year each Dominion comes nearer the time when it can defend itself, and each year England without the Dominions, tends to be more outdistanced in population and home resources than some of her foreign competitors.28
Prophesies vindicated
Lucas was visiting Australia when war broke out in 1914. He would have been delighted at Australia’s response. Even though the country was in the middle of an election campaign, an immediate commitment of a twenty thousand-strong expeditionary force was made and it was to be sent, it was assumed, to Europe. All the expenditure of the previous five years, the establishing of ordnance factories, the compulsory training, the education of a cadre of officers at Duntroon, had been undertaken with a hostile Japan in mind and fears of looming racial conflict in the Pacific. Fratricidal warfare between the most advanced members of the white race was not what had been expected.
The long argument between those who wanted Australian armed forces to be used only for the defence of the continent itself and their opponents who hoped for the creation of an expeditionary force to be deployed wherever it was required overseas by the Imperial government had been decisively settled. While discussing his engagement in the frantic preparations to dispatch the force Senator ED Millen, who had been defence minister until the election of 1914, told his colleagues that it was obvious,
that our defence scheme has been designed solely for the purpose of resisting an invasion of Australia. All the preparation has been made in contemplation of some raiding party coming here, and we have … made no preparation for service abroad. The result is that when this call came there had to be a great deal of improvisation. There was not a single man, officer, uniform, cartridge, or gun earmarked for anything but service within Australia.29
Australia’s leaders dutifully accepted the Imperial argument that the country’s fate would be determined in north-western Europe. Defence minister G Pearce argued that the country was ‘as much involved in war with Germany as if Germany were invading our shores’. He completely identified with the British point of view. A few dissenters took up the arguments of the critics of 1885 and 1899. In the Senate the Queensland Labor member, J Stewart, argued, much as he had done in the Queensland parliament in 1899, that in such uncertain times it would be wise to keep at home ‘our best men for defence purposes’. If the danger to Australia was so great, it was folly to send both men and equipment to the other side of the world. He believed that Australia should confine itself to the defence of the continent. Other senators interjected, saying Australia was already at war, with Pearce declaring: ‘We are being attacked in Europe at present.’ Millen argued that the country was, ‘fighting today for our national existence’, because there was no portion of the empire which was ‘in greater danger than this Australia of ours’.30
Many of the colonial Cassandras who had spoken out against the involvement in the Sudan and South Africa were dead in 1914, had left public life or had changed their minds. In the loyalist mood of the time their foreboding had largely been forgotten. But we might at this point recall the burden of their concern. Britain, they were convinced, was a source, not of security, but of danger. With interests all over the world it was certain at some point that Australia would be pulled into one of her wars. The reverse situation where Britain would enter a war on behalf of Australia was unlikely to be realised. Australia’s geographical isolation was an advantage not a liability. Unlike Britain she had no obvious enemies and the enormous effort needed to mount a sea-born attack made invasion unlikely. Her disengagement from the world in the nineteenth century, her neutrality as some termed it, should be maintained. Commitment to Britain’s wars in Africa would establish a dangerous precedent and make future ventures more rather than less likely. Britain would expect to be able to call on Australia again and would likely make plans assuming that outcome. The prospect of being drawn into a European war chilled many of the dissenters. They correctly foresaw what a catastrophic outcome it would be for Australia, undertaken not from inescapable necessity or immediate danger of attack, but from choice and a failure to distinguish between Australian and Imperi
al interests. HB Higgins warned, with fearful prescience, in 1899, that war implied ‘unlimited liability’.31 The first twenty thousand were only the start. How could Australia limit the commitment once so deeply involved? By war’s end over three hundred and thirty thousand had served; sixty thousand had been killed and one hundred and fifty thousand wounded. Higgins himself had lost his much loved, only son.
Were the dissenters right? Were Australia’s engagements in the Sudan and South Africa mistakes? Did they establish a precedent so vice-like, that it was inescapable? The radical scholar JA Hobson observed, in 1901, that the Imperial leaders, while referring to the Australian involvement in the war, boasted that ‘this confederacy in bloodshed has annealed the colonies to the mother country’.32 Such speculation must inevitably address the question of the Anzac landing. The venture had all the characteristics the dissenters had feared. Instead of keeping the armed forces in Australia for use against threats to the security of the continent, or simply for national development, the leaders of 1914 had accepted the strategic logic of the expeditionary force with its assumption that the best defence was to engage the putative enemy half a world away. They had also taken on board the assumption that Australia’s safety lay in an almost complete identification with British policies and strategic interests. It was not so much an alliance as a familial embrace. They still spoke without any hint of embarrassment of the ‘Mother Country’. But it was not a simple question of whether or not Australia would be caught up in the war, but rather the nature of the engagement. Australia was probably legally at war from the moment of the relevant declarations. But it was not inevitable that Australia would send so many young men to fight in Europe. In their war planning the British had considered the possibility of limiting the engagement of the Australian forces to areas outside the continent. This was not their preferred position, but they may have accepted such a situation if Australia had demanded it. The country was committed in advance to war, but not to the massive involvement beyond our shores. The Anzac venture was, then, not just a flawed campaign, both strategically and tactically, but a tragic and wholly avoidable Australian disaster.
How does this relate to the way the Anzac campaign is remembered and commemorated? Can we, in all seriousness and solemnity, continue to assert that the landing made Australia a nation? In his recent book, Gallipoli, Robin Pryor argued that the time for sentimentalising the landing has ‘long passed’.33 It was a brave call because it is so difficult even at this distance to admit that so many young Australians died needlessly and that their sacrifice produced so little benefit. And that leads inevitably to a consideration of the way the whole engagement in World War I is assessed. If the war itself was, as prominent contemporary scholars now insist, ‘the greatest error of modern history’34 or ‘a tragic and unnecessary conflict’35, it must have been even more so for a small country like Australia on the far side of the world. The nation gave so much in order to maintain the balance of power in Europe and yet many of the countries most directly involved – Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Holland and Spain – remained out of the conflict. Even Britain’s ancient ally Portugal maintained her neutrality until 1917. It is a thought which haunts me every time I see a war memorial in a small country town and am reminded again of the terrible loss of life in World War I. They are not just monuments to Australia’s loss, but to the folly of a generation of leaders who thought that loyalty was a sufficient reason to go to war and believed in the empire, right or wrong. But they may also remind us of those colonial politicians, the Cassandras, who warned that the militant turn had opened the floodgates to future tragedy and the threat of a descent into an ‘abyss of misery and wretchedness’.
— 3 —
Whatever happened to the anti-war movement?
Carina Donaldson and Marilyn Lake
HUGHIE COOK: Why remember it? Why go on and on remembering it? Oh yeah, ‘that’s war’ … Well, war’s such a dirty thing I’d have thought as soon as it’s over you’d want to forget it, be ashamed, as human beings, ashamed you ever had to take part in it.
ALF COOK: Ashamed? Ashamed? To fight for your country?
Alan Seymour, The One Day of the Year in Three Australian Plays, Penguin, Ringwood, 1963, p 27
It was with such provocative dialogue that Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year erupted onto the Australian scene in 1960. Its pointed criticism of the militaristic and antediluvian values of the Anzac legend, as well as its condemnation of the uncouthness of the annual celebration of Anzac Day, fiercely divided an Australian nation in the midst of rapid social and cultural change. Banned at the first Adelaide Arts Festival in 1960 on the grounds of its perceived insensitivity to returned servicemen and with bomb threats levelled at theatrical companies daring to produce it, The One Day of the Year incited one of the most significant literary controversies to that date in Australia. When Seymour came to revise the script for a new production in the 1980s he decided to delete the critical anti-war passage quoted above.
Although provocative in its attack on the annual ritual of Anzac Day, The One Day of the Year was not the total aberration it might now seem. That war was ‘a dirty thing’ and mass slaughter an ‘obscenity’ were the messages that Australian peace groups, whose members bore witness to the unprecedented loss of life in World War I, had been propagating ever since. Thus did a young Victorian Methodist minister, Hubert Palmer Phillips, who had campaigned for conscription, later reflect on his change of heart when he encountered returned soldiers in the 1920s: ‘when the boys began to come home and talk to me of the horrors and obscenities of modern war, my whole outlook changed and before long I had become a convinced pacifist’.1 As did many thousands of other Australians.
The long anti-war movement
Just as the Anzac legend was born in an attempt to comprehend and transcend the terrible loss of life in World War I, so too was the widespread anti-war movement. Indeed revulsion against war and the rejection of long-held ideas that a nation’s worth must be proven through blood sacrifice were among the most significant outcomes of Australian participation in World War I. As Eleanor Moore, who became leader of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom wrote of the effect of the study circles she joined: ‘Our hearts had told us the war business was all wrong; now we began to see it with understanding also.’2
The view propagated by Anzac mythology that World War I was a creative experience for Australia in that it made us a nation was an obscene idea for many in the 1920s and 1930s. Few families were untouched by the huge toll of death and injury. More than sixty thousand had died and many thousands more would die from their wounds in the years to come. In 1924, the Victorian Methodist Conference established a special committee to inculcate hatred for war and the following year ruled that war was ‘un-Christian’. At the same time, the newly elected Victorian education minister instructed his department to ban all articles extolling wars, battles and military heroes from their publications and school textbooks and to replace them with publications that promoted peace and internationalism. A ‘No More War’ demonstration sponsored by the Society of Friends in 1926 was attended by fifteen other organisations, including the Socialist Party and the Women’s Central Committee of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party. Even New South Wales’ governor, Sir Philip Game, used the occasion of an unveiling of a war memorial in 1930 to state: ‘None of us can say that the world is better for the Great War.’3
With so many dead and wounded talk of ‘the great blood bath’ pervaded post-war life. The searing critiques of the English poets, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves spoke to Australian as well as English audiences and the sense of disillusionment with modern civilisation was profound. Anger increased with the large number of exposés of the profits generated by the armaments industry: titles included Patriotism Ltd: An Exposure of the War Machine, The Bloody Traffic, Death and Profits, Iron, Blood and Profits and Merchants of Death: A Study of the International
Armaments Industry. The Australian authorities worried about the long-term effects of the anti-war mood. Nettie Palmer thought that Australian publishers discouraged authors from writing anti-war books, while the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (hereafter abbreviated to RSL) called for all war books to be censored by the official historian. In the 1920s and 1930s ‘war books’ were usually ‘anti-war books’.4 The New South Wales and South Australian governments tried to ban All Quiet on the Western Front, with its depiction of the shared humanity of German soldiers and it was not alone in attracting the attention of censors.
Despite the heroic account of Australia’s engagement in the war by official historian CEW Bean, many private memoirs and letters – including those written by returned soldiers – expressed anger and disillusionment with a post-war experience that didn’t seem to justify the terrible cost of war. George Johnston captured the mood in his classic novel My Brother Jack:
Much bitterness had built up out of the war and by the time I was about thirteen all the retuned soldiers we knew had come to see the whole conflict as a monument of disorganisation and waste and political chicanery. They had had their years in the trenches but the world of mufti to which they had returned had hardly become a fit place for heroes. Life, in their own words, was a ‘fair cow’.5
Many returned soldiers were cynical about the cant and hypocrisy surrounding their new-found status as Anzac heroes. As unemployment worsened in the 1920s and 1930s and soldier settlers were forced off their farms, many returned men felt duped and betrayed. ‘After wasting 10 years of the best part of my life on a proposition which the Commission admits is hopeless from a wheat growing point of view I do not want to be forced out with a debt chasing me’, wrote one returned soldier. ‘Simply because I was an 18 year old hero in the war and upon my return had sufficient faith in human nature to believe the lies told of the Mallee …’