by Marilyn Lake
As the blog response indicates, many base their right to speak on their personal connection to Anzac through family, even if very distant and tenuous.
No more bunfights
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks that to move forward we must learn from the past, but his history lessons are selective. When greeting soldiers returning from Iraq, he declared that he did not want to politicise their homecoming, or the war, as other generations had done, especially during the Vietnam War. ‘The searing lesson from Vietnam’, claimed Rudd, was ‘never put our troops in the middle of a political bunfight. They respond to the direction of the democratically elected government of the day.’13 Anzacs needed to be protected from political controversy. The lesson to be learned from the 1960s was not that our participation in the war in Vietnam was a ghastly mistake or that the introduction of conscription was unjust, but that anti-war protesters had caused embarrassment. To criticise our engagement in the war in Iraq would be to subject our returned soldiers to another ‘political bunfight’.
In encouraging Australians’ personal identification with our long history of fighting in overseas wars, the myth of Anzac has worked to discourage the kind of historical and political analysis that might just lead to more bunfights – or even worse – outright opposition to our participation in war. Joined now in celebration of the tradition that in Howard’s words has ‘shaped the character and destiny of this country more than any other tradition or influence’, prime ministers Rudd and Howard are able to ‘collectively rejoice in the growing embrace of that tradition’.14 Once an occasion for personal mourning, for the expression of grief, regret and remorse about the loss of life and casualties of war, Anzac Day has been transformed during the last decade under the political leadership of prime ministers Howard and Rudd into a festival of national pride and collective rejoicing.
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Anzac Day: How did it become Australia’s national day?
Mark McKenna
‘To Die for his Country was so dear but his Young Life was Dearer.’
Epitaph on the gravestone of Lance Corporal ST Bormann, 24th Australian Infantry, killed at Lone Pine, Gallipoli Peninsula, 29 November 1915, aged twenty-three
On 25 April 1916, at the first commemoration of Anzac Day, the New South Wales education director, Peter Board, described the ‘national sacrifice’ Australian soldiers had made ‘in the interests of an Imperial cause’. At Gallipoli, he exclaimed, ‘history and Australia’s history were fused, and fused at white heat. Never again can the history of this continent of ours stand detached from World history. Its voice must be heard in the Councils of the Empire, because its men and its women have fought and died in an Empire struggle.’ The Imperial struggle of Gallipoli is just one aspect of the Anzac legend that contemporary Australians have since learnt to forget. In 2010, our image of the Anzacs is a far cry from the hundreds of Gallipoli veterans who ‘played two-up in the main streets of Sydney’, ‘danced, sang war-time songs, staged mock marches and directed traffic’, on Anzac Day 1938. We have also forgotten the large numbers of men in the 1920s and 1930s, who returned from Gallipoli and suffered mental breakdown, died prematurely, or committed suicide; men who, as historian, Joan Beaumont recognised, saw ‘little to celebrate’ in Anzac Day. Nor do we see the men who boasted of the numbers of Turks they killed, or the men, overcome by the fear of death, who could not bring themselves to fight and deserted, or the men who came back home to find themselves unemployed and argued against the erection of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance in the late 1920s, because they believed that the monument glorified war. Like all national myths, the myth of the Anzac simplifies the past. We see the Anzacs as we need to see them: an army of innocent, brave young men who were willing to sacrifice their lives so that we might ‘live in freedom’.1
In the early twenty-first century, Australians have embraced the Anzac legend as their most powerful myth of nationhood. Mourning the loss of life in the Victorian bushfires in early 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd compared the firefighters who stood at ‘the gates of hell’, to the Anzacs in their ‘slouch hats’, as if any story of courage and loss must now be placed in ‘the Anzac tradition’ before national mourning can truly occur. After the criticism of Anzac Day that surfaced in the 1950s increased with the staging of The One Day of the Year, and intensified in the context of the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the myth of Anzac has now been refurbished. We hear constant discussion of the ‘resurgence’ of Anzac Day and the ‘timeless’ Anzac tradition. But how do we explain the newfound enthusiasm for Anzac Day? And is this change a reconnection to the past or a fundamentally new form of commemoration?2
Over the last decade, analysis of the ‘resurgence’ has presented a now familiar train of explanations for Australians’ rush to embrace the Anzac story. In Sacred Places, historian Ken Inglis led the way, pinpointing the crucial turning point as the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Anzac Day attendances began to rise steeply, followed shortly afterwards, in 1990, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Anzac Day, when Bob Hawke became the first Australian prime minister to preside over the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove, after which the numbers of pilgrims visiting Gallipoli each Anzac Day rose sharply. The arguments put forward by Inglis have become the most commonly accepted explanations: the ‘surge’ of interest in family history that encourages Australians to pursue the fate of relatives who served in war, the steady demise of ex-servicemen and women, which has only made it easier for recent generations to commemorate war in their own image, and the urgent need for a ‘civil religion’ in a ‘post-Christian society that no longer delivers ancient certainties to young people who are in search of nourishment for the spirit’. Removed from the experience of self-sacrifice, contemporary Australians are humbled, ‘even awe-struck’ by the ‘supreme sacrifice’ made by the generation of 1915. Each explanation contains important insights, but they offer only part of the answer. The ‘resurgence’ of Anzac Day, which stands at the vanguard of a new wave of patriotism in twenty-first century Australia, emerged out of the politics of nationalism in the 1980s. In order to understand why 25 April has become holier than 25 December in the Australian calendar, we have to look beyond the changing patterns of commemoration of Anzac Day itself, and examine the wider historical context in which the Anzac revolution occurred.3
The government-led campaigns designed to inculcate a deeper national attachment to Australia Day, which had been such a hallmark of national politics in the 1970s, continued with even more urgency in the 1980s. There was little choice. The bicentenary of European settlement at Sydney Cove (26 January 1788) was fast approaching. In 1980, the Fraser government established the Australian Bicentennial Authority, the statutory authority presiding over the official programme of events. Over the next eight years, millions of taxpayers’ dollars were poured into a raft of government initiatives designed to instil greater national pride in the Australian people, ultimately culminating in the ‘celebration of a nation’ on 26 January 1988. Long before the celebrations were underway, opinion leaders noted the manifest failure of earlier attempts to whip up enthusiasm for Australia Day. Significantly, many of these remarks were made in a comparative context, contrasting the lacklustre response to 26 January with the authenticity of Australia’s only ‘true national day’: 25 April. The comments of Vernon Wilkes, ex-serviceman and former Victorian attorney-general, were typical:
Genuine efforts have been made with Australia Day, but it seems hard to make it mean anything special – other than to clearly mark the end of the holiday season. Australia Day. What does it celebrate? I wonder how many Australians know that it relates to Governor Phillip and Sydney Cove on 26th January 1788? Many nations have national days. America has its Fourth of July, France has its Bastille Day, and anyone who has been in Paris on that day could not fail to commemorate it. Most countries have a national day and many of them have their origin in some heroic struggle. We have a ready-made national day if we want to use it. Anzac Day �
� change its name to Australia Day if you wish, or Australia Anzac Day, or Anzac Australia Day.4
Wilkes’ call for the authorities to rally around Anzac Day, and his hankering for a history of ‘heroic’ struggle, echoed the views of the Australian on 23 April 1980: Anzac Day was ‘the one day of the year … when the whole nation knows what it is celebrating’. The nation could only be born and fused through the loss of sacrificial blood. Compared to Anzac Day, Australia Day was like a nativity play without the Christ-child. There was no grand design, no saviour, and no future martyrs to worship.
By the early 1980s, it was clear that Anzac Day was a more popular proposition as a national day than Australia Day. Over the course of the decade, as preparations for the bicentennial celebrations gathered apace, other difficulties surrounding 26 January emerged, difficulties which had surfaced as early as the Cook bicentenary in 1970, but which would now put an end to any hope of a united and cohesive national narrative being constructed around Australia Day. The dilemma was expressed succinctly in a slogan formulated by the Aboriginal protest movement: ‘White Australia has a Black History’.5
As the bicentenary drew closer, the impact of the new critical histories of the last two decades, combined with the example set by the politics of the American civil rights movement, fed into an increasingly diverse and vocal movement of Aboriginal resistance. The memory of the Day of Mourning protest organised by William Cooper, Jack Patten and William Ferguson on the occasion of the sesquicentenary in 1938 was another source of inspiration. Even before the bicentenary, from the moment Aboriginal men and women, led by Kath Walker, donned mock, blood-stained headbands at La Perouse in 1970, and declared a Day of Mourning in opposition to the Cook bicentenary, the knowledge of the history of Aboriginal dispossession continually undermined national days of celebration grounded in the history of British settlement. By the mid-1980s, politicians and bureaucrats were struggling to find a way to ‘celebrate’ 26 January 1988. The media overflowed with reports of an increasingly polarised debate, which can now be recognised as the first stirrings of the History Wars of the last two decades. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted on 19 January 1988, ‘scarcely a day of the Bicentenary has passed when issues involving Aborigines and their “Year of Mourning” protests have not featured prominently’. The media reported the prevailing Aboriginal response to the bicentenary. The twenty-sixth of January was not ‘Australia’ Day; it was ‘Invasion Day’, a ‘Day of Mourning’, a day that ushered in the dispossession of the ‘First Australians’. How could this possibly be a cause for ‘celebration’?
Large sections of the non-Aboriginal population were persuaded. Feature articles discussed ‘white guilt’ and ‘national shame’, while editorials spoke of the ‘dilemma’ posed by the coming two hundredth anniversary of first settlement. Conservative intellectuals and interest groups began to respond angrily to suggestions that Australia’s ‘British heritage’ could not be commemorated positively. Unable to find a way through the competing voices, the Hawke government refused to support the First Fleet re-enactment, siding instead with the ‘Tall Ships’, a multi-cultural theme which would eventually see so many ships in Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1988, that no one could be sure exactly what was being ‘celebrated’. As ‘the First Fleet’ entered the harbour, flying the Coca-Cola Flag, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal protesters marched from Redfern to Circular Quay under ‘Invasion Day Banners’. Looking back on the year’s celebrations, the Sydney Morning Herald described what it saw as an ‘ideological vacuum’ at the heart of the bicentenary. The old problems remained. Australia Day, traditionally a holiday for both body and mind, despite all government-led attempts to give it serious purpose, was now beset with a far more intractable problem: entrenched Indigenous opposition. Throughout the 1980s, as Australia Day became a lightning rod for historical and political disputes, Anzac Day came to be seen as a less complicated and less divisive alternative.6
As early as 1980, eager to promote ‘a feeling of nationalism’, the Australian newspaper wondered if there might be grounds for changing ‘the method of celebrating Anzac Day’. One year later, it was even more certain that Australia Day was a ‘fizzer’. ‘[Should we] give up trying to make Australia Day our national day in favour of Anzac Day? ‘The time has come’, insisted the Anzac editorial in 1981, ‘to look seriously at accepting it as such and proclaiming it as Australia Day … just as the French celebrate Bastille Day, also based on a day of war [sic]’.7 By decade’s end, the Australian’s call for Anzac Day to be recast as a more explicitly national day was well underway; the ‘one day of the year’, no longer an object of derision, was slowly beginning to secure a new role in Australian civic culture.
Writers, filmmakers and journalists performed narrative surgery on the Imperial history of 25 April 1915, casting it as a ‘uniquely Australian’ story in which a fledgling nation’s innocent youth fell like sacrificial lambs. For decades following 1915, the Imperial context of Anzac Day had been fundamental to the rituals and meaning of 25 April; newspapers, for example, commonly placed the king’s or queen’s message on the front page. The day was linked inextricably with Australia’s military contribution to the British empire. By the 1980s, the Queen’s message, which is still sent every 25 April, had disappeared entirely from the front pages. Due to the success of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), which drew on Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974), the ‘Anzacs’ came to be seen as the victims of British incompetence and condescension. Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980), and Simon Wincer’s The Lighthorsemen (1987), reflected a similar emphasis. Once the venerable core of Anzac Day rituals, by the 1980s, the British had become ‘the bad guys’, reduced to the stereotype of the pompous Pom – hedgehog-moustached officers who spoke in plummy accents and held nothing but contempt for uncouth Australians – the perfect antidote to the problem of Anzac’s Imperial past. In popular culture, Anzac Day was slowly being reinvented as an exclusively Australian odyssey.8
Anzac Day’s demise had been prophesied since the 1970s. But Australians were now also solving this problem by replacing the dying diggers with new, more youthful marchers: their children and grandchildren, Vietnam veterans, now welcomed back as Anzacs after their allegedly poor treatment in the 1960s and ’70s, women, and immigrants who had fought for foreign armies, including the Turks, who first led an Anzac Day march in Canberra, in 1974.
The political push for a more inclusive Anzac commemoration was not without resistance. In 1982, the Gay Ex-servicemen’s Association publicised its intention to a lay a wreath at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, and placed an advertisement calling on all gay ex-servicemen to meet in Carlton on Anzac Day. Bruce Ruxton, president of the Victorian Returned Services League (RSL), was adamant such people would not be allowed to participate. ‘I don’t know where all these queers and poofters have come from. I don’t remember a single poofter from World War Two’. Ruxton promised to prevent any ‘kissing’ or other deplorable acts at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, linking the gay campaign to that of ‘Women against Rape’, a group that staged a six hundred-strong protest at the Australian War Memorial, in Canberra on Anzac Day in 1981, and were responsible for some of the most disruptive demonstrations around the country in the 1980s. They have ‘lesbian connotations’, said Ruxton, ‘I’ve seen the proof, it’s all part of a deliberate campaign by some people in this country to destroy Anzac Day.’ Far from destroying Anzac Day, the public forgetting of Anzac’s Imperial origins, together with the broadening participation in the march, was in fact laying the foundations for a fundamentally new type of national day. The rising sense of Gallipoli as the only true crucible of national identity was helping to wrest control of the commemorative rituals of Anzac Day away from its traditional custodians such as the RSL which, as chapter three shows, was increasingly seen as an ageing, controversial, out of touch lobby group.
As the old men in medals decreased in number, and the generation gap became less pronounced, the common cr
iticisms of 25 April that had emerged in the 1950s and 1960s were undermined. It seemed ridiculous to accuse young people of glorifying war. As journalist Tony Stephens remarked in 1988, ‘the old divisions’ were ‘fading away’: ‘the critics have discovered respect for the men and women who went, not to glorify the barbarity but to honour old comrades’. ‘This new understanding’, Stephens thought, had ‘been emerging for a decade or more’. It also represented a displacement of the fierce divisions over Australia Day in the lead up to the bicentenary. On 25 April 1990, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Anzacs landing at Gallipoli, the connection between the failure of the bicentenary celebrations and the new embrace of Anzac Day was made abundantly clear.9
At Gallipoli, in his speech at the Ari Burnu cemetery, where one hundred and fifty-one Australians were buried, Prime Minister Bob Hawke told the audience that the hills around them had once ‘rang’ with the voices of the Anzacs; even more importantly, they ‘ran with their blood’. In the ‘exploits’ of the Anzacs, he said, Australians were ‘proud to identify the very character of our nation’. Speaking later to the media, Hawke observed that the pilgrimage made by so many Australians to Anzac Cove in 1990 represented ‘the regeneration of the spirit of Anzac’. At the same time, his government decided to add the Australian War Memorial and Canberra’s Anzac Parade to the National Heritage List. Newspapers carried photographs from the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove, showing ‘the last’ of the diggers, a seated line of frail, aged men, showered with medals. The Sydney Morning Herald reflected the view of the nation’s major broadsheets: Anzac Day was becoming ‘entrenched as our national day’. The critics had finally ‘given up their bluster’. While Australia Day was plagued by a ‘lack of national pride’, Anzac Day was simply ‘about being Australian’. Then, as if the nineteenth century struggles for responsible government and federation, and the decade of nation-building by Liberal and Labor governments that followed World War I did not exist, the editorial declared that the death of the Anzacs was ‘the starting point of our nationhood … the beginning of a separate identity from Britain that did not mature, perhaps, until we baulked at sending troops to Europe when Australia was under threat in 1941’. What’s more, the Anzac spirit had