by Marilyn Lake
The first professional production of the play was performed to a full capacity audience at Sydney’s Palace Theatre for three weeks in 1961. Seymour was pleased with the play’s success and wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald to emphasise people’s positive responses: ‘Night after night people poured backstage to congratulate the players. I received many letters from members of the public, including a most touching one from a Gallipoli veteran’s widow, who was moved by the play.’28 But one irate theatre-goer complained to the Sydney Morning Herald that The One Day of the Year was ‘doomed even before it was written’ because its theme – ‘let’s throw mud at Anzac Day’ – ‘insulted rather than wooed its intended audience.29
The Sydney season was followed by a Melbourne production by the Union Repertory Theatre Company at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne, which then toured regional Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. In federal parliament, the minister for territories described the play’s themes as ‘subversive’ and labelled Seymour a ‘communist’.30 Seymour meanwhile left for London, where The One Day of the Year opened at the Theatre Royal and received a standing ovation.31 Seymour would live and work in exile for some thirty years, joining a wide range of cultural expatriates from Menzies’ Australia.
Under the direction of Rod Kinnear and with John Sumner as producer, the Russell Street production was adapted for television and was named best television drama for 1962 at the TV Week Logie Awards. Such high profile acclaim led to the play’s inclusion on Higher School Certificate booklists throughout Australia and for many years it was prescribed as a text for schoolchildren as an introduction to debates around Anzac Day. In 1966, it was taken to Tokyo for performance in an English speaking theatre that was filled to maximum capacity of six hundred for all eight performances. Sydney actor, Ben Gabriel, who played Hughie in the production, asserted that the play was an ‘inspired choice’ for Japan, despite the young student audience’s lack of familiarity with the Anzac legend they ‘identified strongly with the young people in the play. One young man said to me with great feeling, “I am Hughie Cook” and the girl with him added, “I am Hughie Cook – but different”.’32
In Australia, even as the RSL called for national unity, its own interventions in political and social life had ever more divisive effects. Aware of its reputation for militarism and intolerance, the RSL attempted to craft a new public image more in harmony with a modern national identity as its membership steadily declined. From a high point of three hundred and sixty thousand in 1946, it had dropped to two hundred and forty-seven thousand by 1956. In 1961 Mufti advised returned soldiers in a special article on public relations: ‘If you are addressing a school’ on Anzac Day not to ‘glorify war’ or ‘overdo talk of another war’ and to ‘include the women’, because ‘the whole nation was at war, not merely those in the fighting forces’.33 In 1964, Dr Jim Cairns, member of the House of Representatives for Yarra, told a cheering crowd of his supporters at the Richmond Town Hall that there was a ‘lot of talk about threats to Australia and its way of life’, but ‘the real threat to freedom comes from the RSL and other reactionary organisations’.34
By the mid-1960s the RSL had formally dropped the ‘Imperial’ from its name and adopted the gender-neutral description of its membership – the Returned Services League – but by then satirists at Oz magazine had identified a more general type of Australian in the character of Alf in The One Day of the Year. The racism and bigotry of ‘Alfs’, they thought, were a product of suburban consumerism and conformity that ‘went along with beer, telly and the motor mower’.35 The ‘Alf movement aimed to convert you to a clean living, all-Australian, anti-erotic, healthy, mentally retarded citizen’ and ‘Eternal Vigilance’ (the RSL motto) was the method they employed to crush dissident minorities (including atheists and intellectuals).36
Anzac Day as day of protest
The critique of the RSL among university students that erupted into the public domain in 1958 was influential in shaping the larger critique of Anzac Day and the Vietnam War that developed later in the 1960s. On 25 April 1966 in Melbourne women from the anti-Vietnam War movement SOS (Save Our Sons) wore SOS sashes and carried posies with the words: ‘Honour the Dead with Peace’. Protesters demonstrating against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War and the introduction of conscription staged anti-war demonstrations, sit-ins and teach-ins at universities throughout the country and used Anzac Day as an occasion to make their point. In 1968 Adelaide members of the Campaign for Vietnam Protest carried a placard ‘Lest we forget the Vietnamese’ and the following Anzac Day, the radical group Students for a Democratic Society lay a wreath at the Cenotaph in Sydney with placards that expressed their sympathy for the victims of Australian soldiers: ‘Lest We Forget people who face war, oppression and injustice.’37 Anzac Day services had once again been transformed into battlegrounds.38
The burning of Draft Cards became an emblematic gesture of defiance by ‘conscientious objectors’, who were forced into hiding, while those arrested and imprisoned became martyrs sacrificing themselves for the pacifist cause. As relatively uncensored media coverage of the Vietnam War flooded Australian homes with images of the barbarous realities of the war, including street executions, children with napalm burns and news of the Mai Lai massacre, the traditionally distinct lines between ‘war hero’ and ‘war criminal’ became blurred. Australians were forced to confront a horrific and futile war whose realities stood in stark contrast to the heroism and nobility of battlefield sacrifice talked about on Anzac Day.
Criticisms of Anzac Day as a drunken orgy and Gallipoli as an expensive shambles prepared the ground for the larger anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was eventually successful in ending conscription and Australian participation in the Vietnam War. Returning Vietnam veterans then felt doubly defeated: by the military enemy on the battlefield and domestic opponents of the war on the home front, whose triumph was symbolised by the election of the radical Whitlam government, in which Dr Jim Cairns, leader of the Moratorium marches – protest marches intended to stop the war – served as deputy prime minister.
The contest over Anzac Day and then Vietnam was part of a larger cultural struggle over the sort of society Australia should become. For the moment a new nationalism flourished that celebrated a progressive, urban, culturally innovative nation committed to the goals of sexual and racial equality, an Australia that was forward looking and multicultural, rather than locked into the British traditions of its past. In 1973 the Australian Labor Party even discussed at its annual conference the desirability of dropping Anzac Day in its current form and replacing it with a day of peace.39 Participation in Anzac Day marches fell away during this period. In 1969 the Age reported that Anzac Day had met a ‘cool reception’ with observers almost outnumbering participants; young people in particular were ‘noticeably sparse’.40 An accompanying photograph showed them to be elsewhere, gathered down the road at the Forum Theatre to see a film featuring the popular rock group ‘The Monkees’.
Women had been active in the anti-Vietnam protests from the 1960s, an experience which propelled many into the burgeoning women’s liberation movement.41 From the 1970s feminists used Anzac Day as an occasion for protest against sexual violence and the rape of women in war. The Women Against Rape collective in Canberra together with similar groups in Melbourne and Sydney were particularly active in protests and laying wreaths ‘in memory of all women of all countries in all wars’ on Anzac Day in the early 1980s, drawing on international feminist discourse to critique the exclusions and repressions of masculine national tradition.42
Rehabilitation of the Anzac as tragic hero
Even as anti-war protest surged, new social histories of Australian soldiers at war were being written, such as Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974) and Patsy Adam-Smith’s Anzacs (1978) which began to shape a new narrative in which the young soldiers themselves became the focus. Cast as the innocent victims of war, as in Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli
, they became the embodiment of youthful sacrifice. As historian Jenny McLeod has argued, whereas the close association of the RSL with the Anzac tradition had alienated progressive historians, once the RSL was increasingly marginalised in the telling of the Anzac story, historians were free to ‘describe it anew’.43
Thus was the ground prepared for dissolving the distinction between attitudes to the soldiers and the wars in which they fought. This was also deemed necessary to the political imperative of providing appropriate recognition and restitution to Vietnam veterans, many of whom felt bitterly exiled from the Anzac legend and the tradition of the soldier’s heroic return. Increasingly all ‘Anzacs’ were cast as national heroes as debate about the justice or legitimacy of the wars in which they fought faded away. The new emphasis on the youth and innocence of soldiers – and their status as victims – was reinforced as children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the fallen and the aged were permitted to join Anzac Day marches. Far from being Anzac’s fiercest critics, the young had now emerged, according to the Sun newspaper in 1981, as ‘the new Anzacs’.44 Distanced by decades from the horror of World War I, the new recruits to Anzac were free to celebrate ‘the Anzac spirit’.
Rewriting The One Day of the Year
These shifting attitudes to Anzac were vividly reflected in the changes Alan Seymour made to his play in anticipation of a new production in the mid-1980s, revisions that not only caused it to lose its sting, but also its audience. In the revised version of The One Day of the Year it was no longer the ordinary returned soldier whom the play’s youthful protagonists blame for the excesses of militarism, but the ‘top brass’ who ran the RSL. In the new version, Hughie and Jan realise that in their ‘smart little expose’ they had been ‘attacking the wrong people’. One of Hughie’s original, most critical, speeches (‘Why go on remembering it? … war’s such a dirty thing …’) had been entirely cut from the script. In a new speech, Jan shifts the blame. The enemy is redefined in class and political terms, with a focus on the RSL:
My father is a very big wheel in those Returned Servicemen’s outfits. And he’s a successful businessman, he is listened to. He and … all the top brass up there in our very attractive little neck of the woods … They tell their members what to support, what to veto as unpatriotic … [they] have so much power – so much bloody power – and do not like it to be challenged in any way. The rank and file – like your father – turn up faithfully to meetings, to the ceremonies, but who arranges it all, makes sure it’s perpetuated year after year? The big men, nice, discreet, behind the scenes men like my father who really do believe – because of their money and position – really believe they’ve a God-given right to say what’s good for us all.45
The criticism of Anzac Day no longer targeted the ‘screaming tribe of great, stupid, drunken no hopers’ who marched every year, but the ‘puffed up, self-important bastards’ who coordinated it.46 By the last Act in the revised version of The One Day of the Year, the ‘big men’ in ‘Returned Servicemen’s outfits’ have been revealed as the enemy ‘behind the scenes’, while the ‘ordinary little man’ – the ordinary Anzac – is redeemed and rehabilitated. In a 2003 interview Alan Seymour had become distinctly defensive about the anti-war message of his original play: ‘The text emphatically does NOT attack or criticise the Australian troops who fought so bravely at Gallipoli.’47
In the later version of The One Day of the Year the blame for the excesses of Anzac Day had been shifted on to the RSL which had been discredited through its reactionary, partisan and sectional politics. It had become an organisation that could be criticised and lampooned with impunity. Clearly Anzac was being tarnished through its association with sectional interests and divisive attitudes. For the mystique of Anzac to survive it had to be rescued from its original custodians to become the property of the nation-state. The RSL had to be sacrificed for the greater good of the Anzac tradition, which would henceforth be conceptualised as both the legacy and heritage of young Australians, who would be entrusted with the revival of Anzac into the new millennium. In the 1990s, the long-established and once powerful RSL would be effectively displaced and disempowered as the federal government, through its agencies the Australian War Memorial and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs assumed national custodianship of the ‘spirit of Anzac’.
— 4 —
Why do we get so emotional about Anzac?
Joy Damousi
‘Calm down all emotional responders … [and] consider ways we can identify and shape our collective consciousness about our nation, its past and its future … Perspective, and consideration of views, not hotheaded defensive reactions, please …’
Gail, Age blog, 23 April 2009
Gallipoli is ‘part of our national consciousness, it’s part of our national psyche, it’s part of our national identity’, said Kevin Rudd defiantly, in November 2008, ‘and, I for one, as Prime Minister of this country, am absolutely proud of it’. He was responding to the view of former Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, that the ‘truth’ of Gallipoli was ‘shocking for us’: ‘Dragged into service by the imperial government in an ill-conceived and poorly executed campaign, we were cut to ribbons and dispatched – and none of it in the defence of Australia’. The idea that ‘the nation was born again or even was redeemed there was an utter and complete nonsense’.1
As we have seen, few historical myths continue to arouse such a deep and passionate response in Australian contemporary life as Anzac. Debate over the most appropriate form of remembrance is ongoing, while many people object to it being debated at all. Some argue that any questioning is profoundly disrespectful of those who gave their lives. Others believe that without such a debate, Australian national identity will be framed by an unquestioning acceptance of a national war story that is exclusive rather than inclusive and based on a narrow representation of Australian achievement. Its chief proponents, including leading voices in the daily press, argue that ‘Anzac Day is a crucible of shared sentiments, it is about the values Australians would want to exhibit in adversity and about aspirations they hold for their peace and freedom’.2 The Age editorial on 25 April 2009, however, expressed a bold note of dissent: Anzac Day was ‘a day for the nation but was not our national day’.3
This chapter looks at how this debate draws out many emotional responses that seem to defy historical or political engagement. As a result, we have a mythic tale that doesn’t allow – indeed resists – an engagement with some of the key historical and political issues in understanding the genesis of the commemoration and its subsequent ramifications. Yet it is the role of the historian to provide analysis and explanation. History is a critical and intellectual practice. Historians also have an ethical responsibility to engage with a range of perspectives that do not simplify but complicate the story of Gallipoli and the memory of war. Family members of those who served identify with battles and battlefields in particular ways, while journalists and political commentators have different interests. In recent times, some historical writing itself has begun to reflect the sentimental turn evident in wider community responses to war commemoration. Mark McKenna and Stuart Ward recently pointed to the tendency of historians to become complicit in the sentimentalising of war while failing to analyse the production of these emotions.4
What do these public emotional responses suggest about the way we commemorate Anzac Day? Expression of strong emotion is a way to avoid discussion and circumvent debate. Most significantly, such reactions de-politicise war commemoration by reducing the event to an emotional story of sacrifice and service. In his Armistice Day address at the Australian War Memorial on 11 November 2004, Prime Minister John Howard rejoiced in the way that young people were ‘seeing in the sacrifice of their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers a wonderful Australian saga’.5 With the actual wars receding into the background and young Australians relating to them through their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, sentimentality and nostalgia are perhaps now the prevaili
ng modes of relating to Anzac Day. It is present in the responses of backpackers who travel to the battlefields, and who recall youthful loss and heroism on the beaches at Gallipoli with little apparent knowledge of the reasons the soldiers were sent there or the role they played in the events of the Great War.
The history of the response to Australia’s involvement in overseas wars has clearly been characterised by deep emotions. Whether it be anger, revulsion, fear or patriotic enthusiasm, in commemoration and memorialisation, war has until recently attracted passionate engagement. As we have seen, earlier generations were disturbed by the destruction caused by war and questioned its purpose; they were angry with their elders for condemning young men to a futile war and the waste of lives. For those in the 1960s and 1970s, Australian engagement in the war in Vietnam became the rallying point of opposition against all the forces that conspired to send men to die in Vietnam and that led, also, to the systematic abuse and rape of women. A resistance to critical debate on this subject today – and indeed a hostile response to the suggestion of debate – represses alternative narratives about the meaning of war and what it means to be Australian. A critical examination of the costs and consequences of war, its horror and waste, the mistakes and massacres is resisted and repressed.
What has led to this shift in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? One of the major changes is the merging of military and family history, in a way that encourages identification with our military past – with the experience of grandfathers and great-grandfathers – and a proud investment in that nationalist history. Those who speak from the perspective of a familial connection seem to claim a special authority to speak – sometimes as those who inherit the Anzac tradition. Even as World Wars 1 and 2 recede into the distance, the descendants of those who served necessarily multiply in numbers – the grandchildren of Vietnam veterans now attend university – and these proliferating family connections sustain the new wave of commemoration and national identification. Thus have discussions of Anzac, war and nation-building become increasingly devoid of historical analysis, yet it is analysis that is urgently needed to understand the emotional dynamics of the new wave of popular pride in the Anzac story. ‘I’ve been to Gallipoli’, reported one Aussie backpacker on the Age blog, ‘and the sense of pride and spiritual emotion was enormous. It made me proud of our fallen [heroes].’