by Marilyn Lake
Another wondered whether the Closer Settlement Board took pleasure from causing ‘fresh distress to a miserable wretch of a Returned man who served with honour in Gallipoli and Flanders – smallest man in the 8th Batt. In action at the original landing at Anzac, and right onwards until crippled … at Pozieres.’ Another reminded the government of its promises:
I suppose this is a sample ‘of a country fit for men to live in’. I gave up a good position and was prepared to put up with a lot of inconvenience when I decided to take up an allotment in answer to the Govt’s cry of ‘Go on the land’ but by heavens I was and am not prepared to be fooled with … apparently a man’s letters are not even worth acknowledgment nowadays, but if there happened to be another war and he was foolish enough to write and offer his services I suppose they would send a motor car or aeroplane for him.6
Publicly feted as heroes, many returned soldiers clearly felt neither adequately compensated nor at all consoled by Anzac mythology. Their anger and sense of betrayal fuelled anti-war sentiment between the wars. It remains a sharp rebuke to the de-politicised sentimentality that has informed so much of the recent writing and political speech-making about Anzac.
The advent of the Depression with its further degradations intensified many people’s disenchantment with an old order in which capitalism and war seemed mutually implicated. Peace groups proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s as political leaders and ordinary citizens, men and women, young and old vowed ‘never again’. As Lord Robert Cecil, founder of the League of Nations Union (LNU) and patron of the worldwide disarmament movement noted, the ‘horror of war’ was an ‘argument for peace’. The World Disarmament Movement joined numerous groups including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the University of Melbourne Peace Group, the Student Christian Movement, the Melbourne Peace Society, the Movement Against War and Fascism and the LNU, in swelling the demand for an end to war. Together they secured one hundred and eighteen thousand Australian signatures for the Declaration on World Disarmament in 1931, one of the largest petitions in the world, which was presented to the Australian prime minister amidst ‘a wave of emotion’.7
The LNU enjoyed an astonishing standing among people on both sides of politics, in universities, churches and women’s groups. Members included prominent Australians such as scientist David Stead, Professor George Arnold Wood and feminist Rose Scott in New South Wales; HB Higgins, Meredith Atkinson, Professor Sir Harrison Moore in Victoria and West Australians, Professor Fred Alexander, Dr Roberta Jull, delegate to the League of Nations in 1929 and Bessie Rischbieth, president of the Australian Federation of Women Voters and delegate to the League of Nations in 1935. Most were idealists and internationalists, fearful of the ‘moral abyss’ into which the world had lurched and critical of the role of nationalist pride and racial prejudice in perpetuating it.
Feminists were deeply committed to international activism, spending much time and money travelling to participate in overseas conferences and join organisations, such as the International Council of Women, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Pan-Pacific Women’s Congress. ‘The Women’s Movement’, explained Bessie Rischbieth, ‘views men and women not so much as members of a particular race or nation, but as members of the human family, each with a special vocation in the world to perform in the cause of human progress’.8 The League of Nations encouraged idealists to explore new ways of living as citizens of the world. Anzac Day provided an occasion to commemorate and grieve for those who died in the war, but it was unthinkable that it should be set aside for the celebration of the nation. Indeed in the 1920s Armistice Day became the occasion for well attended peace rallies.
Reaction against the war converted many leading Australians into convinced internationalists. Justifications of wartime losses with nationalistic appeals to the ‘spirit of Anzac’ or the ‘birth of the nation’ were denounced as dangerous folly. Only by thinking in terms of people’s common humanity and shared sympathies would future wars be prevented. HB Higgins who had famously denounced Australia’s support of Britain in the Boer War and reluctantly supported World War I was beset with recriminations and grief when his only child Mervyn enlisted and was killed: ‘I have been condemned to hard labour for the rest of my life.’ Higgins became an ardent supporter of the World Disarmament Movement and member of the LNU, hoping that international activism would be effective in preventing further waste of life. ‘Even if the Germans were all criminals’, he wrote to his American friend Felix Frankfurter, ‘we have to live in the world with them … Vengeance is a fruitless thing. I feel that the best vengeance my boy could hope for would be an integrated world, an organised humanity.’9 Higgins became president of the Melbourne branch of the World Disarmament Movement formed on Armistice Day in 1928, which attracted one hundred and twelve affiliated organisations throughout Australia.
With the rise of Nazism and anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1930s and the international leadership against fascism offered by the Soviet Union, many in the peace movement followed the new direction provided by the Movement Against War and Fascism, with older-style peace workers joining forces with, but agonising over, the implications of the ‘united front’. In 1935 the United Peace Council affiliates included the Australian Aborigines League, the Australian Church, the Teachers’ Peace Movement, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the YMCA. The different strands of the peace movement came together in a peace march in Melbourne in 1936 described in the press as ‘probably the strongest public peace demonstration yet organised in Melbourne and it gained strength as much from its representation as from its numbers’.10
The Australian Peace Congress in 1937 in Melbourne was attended by around four thousand people from diverse social and political backgrounds of all ages. Delegates registered to work with different ‘Commissions’. ‘Youth’ was to the fore at this Congress with its own ‘Commission’ attended by four hundred delegates, who reported:
The prospects of a worthwhile and useful living for the Youth of today depend for their fulfilment upon the progressive establishment of peace based on justice, freedom, economic security, co-operation and goodwill. We deny that war is inevitable and reject the fatalism and inaction fostered by such teaching.11
Self-consciously, those too young to serve in the last war called for a repudiation of old ways of thinking and insisted on their voice being heard in national policies that should work to prevent another war. While old men made the political and military decisions, it was the young who were expected to sacrifice their lives for them.
Youthful idealism survived the outbreak of World War 2, which was widely supported as a ‘just war’ – especially after Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union – and inspired visions for a new national and international world order and in Australia the project of ‘post-war reconstruction’. With the new threat of nuclear war, however and the belligerent international relations fostered by the Cold War, activists once again formed peace councils and joined the international Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Some peace activists were Communists; others were labelled as such by the conservative political forces that ruled Australia in the 1950s, led by the Coalition government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
The most powerful lobby group in Australia
The RSL was a powerful voice in that decade, calling for national unity in the name of national security, lobbying hard to have the Communist Party banned even after the defeat of the referendum on the issue in 1951 and for compulsory military service to be re-introduced. In 1962 it distributed thirty thousand copies of a booklet entitled Subversion: The RSL Case Against Communism in Australia.12 Later reflecting on its strident commitment to what he termed ‘assertive Australian nationalism’, Sir Albert Abbott, Queensland branch president, described the RSL as the ‘the voice of stability in changing times’. While the tone of the RSL was sometimes harsh, Abbott said, ‘sometimes harsh words were needed to protect and defend a principle or a belief dearly held’.
13 Although convinced of its special right to speak in the national interest, its chief business of winning improved war pensions and repatriation benefits for returned soldiers in fact confirmed its status as a special interest group.
The intolerance and vociferousness of the RSL provoked an increasing number of attacks from its critics, including the growing number of students attending universities, who included future historians, Geoff Serle, Ian Turner, Bob Gollan and Russel Ward, who would craft a version of Australian history with the civil and political values of egalitarianism, republicanism and socialism – not the spirit of Anzac – at its heart. In the 1950s, as in the 1930s, university students and their friends criticised war-mongering in the name of the future of young people, whose sense of separate identity was strengthened by the emergence of a perceived ‘generation gap’ between the young and older Australians. For these youthful rebels, freedom meant an escape from parental hypocrisy and they gave vent to their frustration and impatience in the rude tirades against authority that characterised student newspapers in the 1950s.
In the lead up to Anzac Day in 1958, Geoffrey Havers, a student at the University of Sydney, delivered an attack on what he called the ‘yearly pageant of national necrophilia, which joins Australians in a day of morbid joy and unity’. Anzac Day, he charged, had become a national obsession: ‘the Spaniards have bullfights, the English have soccer and the Queen, the Russians have tractors and the five year plan, the Americans have Hollywood and Americans’. He wondered if ‘the men in the Australians units who landed at Gallipoli 43 years ago knew what they were starting … a festival of hero-adulation unequalled anywhere in the world’:
The words flow, the hymns are sung, the wreaths placed. The old women weep before the cenotaph, while the new generation of the militia finishes its marching and gets down to the serious business of pickling itself in alcohol and accosting prostitutes.
The old generation of militia, not so very unlike their modern counterparts, ensconce themselves in the RSL clubs and also internally immerse themselves in alcohol.14
What seemed to puzzle Havers was the combination of hedonism and mourning, of cenotaphs and racecourses. But what gave meaning to the public ritual was the peculiar status of the returned serviceman in post-war Australia:
Australians as a race seem to be intensely conscious of their armed services. Even thirteen years after the last great conflict, the Returned Serviceman has represented the epitome of Australianism. How often have we heard the statement that ‘Australians are the best assault troops in the world’ or ‘We might not have had the parade-ground discipline of the other troops, but our battle discipline was much higher’. Do not Returned Servicemen get first preference in the ballots for farms, special rates from certain real estate agencies, and other less tangible but never-the-less equally telling advantages? Who will deny that a stranger wearing an RSL badge and walking into a group of Australian men is welcomed as a long lost brother?15
Those who believed that ‘trained assassins are Australia’s foremost export’ comprised, he thought, the main supporters of Anzac Day. Other Australians enjoyed the holiday, but didn’t really give a damn. They were hypocrites and simply took advantage of a day off work. The only people who won Havers’ respect were the aging parents, but their mourning merely served as a reminder of the pointlessness of war, its ‘sadness and horror and idiocy’. In sixty years time, there would be none left who grieved: ‘Perhaps this will be the time to do away with Anzac Day.’16
Havers’ article attracted immediate attention and was widely condemned for its insulting portrayal of returned soldiers as pickled in alcohol and accosting prostitutes. The federal president of the RSL condemned it as ‘complete and utter filth’. The University of Sydney Senate summoned the editor of Honi Soit, David Solomon and demanded that the Student Representative Council discipline the paper, which it refused to do.17 Freedom of expression was surely one of the Australian values that returned soldiers had fought to preserve. Gallipoli veteran WC Smith, who had heard about Havers’ article on the radio, wrote to Honi Soit: ‘I have nothing to do with Anzac Day. To me it is a glorification of war. There are many ex-servicemen who share my views. In my immediate vicinity there are three ex-AIF members … none of us take part in Anzac Day celebrations’.18
The RSL noticed the combined indifference and hostility to Anzac Day and resolved to defend it. CW Joyce, NSW State Secretary of the RSL explained that the reason their magazine Mufti included so many articles promoting the observance of Anzac Day was because ‘the Press so frequently and unremittingly puts the opposing view’.19 In 1961, Mufti featured a double page spread called ‘The story of Anzac – Foster the day and keep our national unity intact’ arguing that Australia would lose its soul and character completely if national pride, gratitude and emotion became weaknesses to be ashamed of, and if youth gathered ‘no obligation from the past’.20 By rushing to the defence of Anzac Day, however, the RSL itself increasingly became the target of radical criticism for seeking to impose its outmoded views on the rest of society.
The attack on Anzac Day and the RSL continued in university newspapers. The new editor of Honi Soit, David Ferrero defined ‘The spirit of Anzac’ as ‘one of the most pernicious which the human spirit possesses. The RSL calls it patriotism. Perhaps a better word would be jingoism – the same feeling that motivates Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan.’ Condemning the ‘annual ritual of national narcissism-cum-Bacchanalian revel’ the editor took particular aim at the ‘blood and thunder and syrupy sentimentalism of RSL propaganda’.21 When an abbreviated version of ‘The spirit of Anzac’ was published in the University of Melbourne student newspaper, Farrago, the RSL denounced the editors as ‘the scum of our so-called intelligentsia’ and demanded that the students ‘be taught a lesson’.22
The University Chancellor duly reprimanded the students for being ‘wild, youthful, irresponsible and silly’ – for behaving like students – and rebuked them for their ‘disgraceful ingratitude’, but subsequent correspondence in Farrago showed that there was considerable support for the editor’s viewpoint. While some correspondents took him to task for ‘the desecrating gripes, the gratuitous insults and offensive fulminations of a pack of student upstarts’ and demanded they be punished for the ‘sickening tirade of the most insulting type’, others congratulated them for their defiance of tradition and applauded their honesty in uttering views many had held for years.23
Alan Seymour, a young ABC writer who had recently moved to Sydney from Perth, noted the controversy and saw in it the generational clash – and the clash of values – that would become the basis of his controversial play. He told a Sun journalist: ‘Something was simmering in the young people I met.’ Australia was in ‘a transitional phase’, he later recalled, ‘and young Hughie sums up his generation’s distaste for old customs and institutions’.24 Anzac Day came to symbolise all that students wanted to change in society. Rather than feting the returned soldiers as heroes, students mocked them as relics from a past they wished to leave behind.
The One Day of the Year dramatised the widening gap between young university-educated Australians, such as Hughie Cook and older Australians such as his father Alf, a World War 2 veteran and a proud Australian, who champions the Anzac tradition as he asserts he is ‘bloody Australian and will always stand up for bloody Australia’.25 His son Hughie, on the other hand, is clever and cynical. The first in his family to attend university, his admiration for Australia’s proud soldiering past has been corroded by his exposure to a campus atmosphere driven by the forces of modernity and change.
In the ensuing conflict between father and son, Hughie denounces Gallipoli as ‘the biggest fiasco of the war’ and ‘an expensive shambles’ that resulted in ‘men wasting their lives’. The Anzac myth was simply a ‘face saving device’. He tells his father: ‘Every year you still march down that street with that stupid expression on your face you glorify the – bloody wastefulness of that day.’ Together
with his middle class girlfriend, Jan Castle, he produces an illustrated article for the university’s student newspaper which draws attention to the uncouthness and bibulousness of Anzac Day, a day that now ‘disgusts’ him and makes him ‘ashamed’ to be an Australian. He tells his mother Dot:
We’re sick of all the muck that’s talked about on [Anzac Day] … the great national day of honour, day of salute to the fallen … It’s just one long grog-up … It’s a lot of old has-beens getting into the RSL and saying ‘Well, boys, you all know what we are here for, we’re here to honour our mates that didn’t come back’. And they all feel sad and have another six or seven beers.26
At the end of Act Two, a dishevelled and drunken Alf arrives home after an Anzac Day ‘on the grog’. For Hughie, Alf’s appearance confirms his contemptuous judgment of Anzac Day, but his attitude ignites a bitter family row that leads Alf to give his son a backhander. Alf responds with violence to his son’s taunts, but the play doesn’t go all Hughie’s way: in the end there’s a suggestion that there may be wisdom on both sides of the argument.
The choice of The One Day of the Year by the Adelaide Arts Festival’s Drama Committee in 1960 as the Australian play with which to open the festival caused immediate protest by the festival’s board of governors, which included prominent members of the local RSL, and it was banned before it could go into production. But immediately after the festival, Jean Marshall, director of the Adelaide Theatre Guild, chose to defy the conservative views of the ‘Adelaide Establishment’ and to stage The One Day of the Year at a small hall in suburban Adelaide. The production opened with a plain clothes police presence in the audience and outside the hall after they had received ‘threats of a bomb or some other disturbance’.27