What's Wrong With Anzac?

by Marilyn Lake

  more to do with mateship and sacrifice than conquest and power … bloodlust was not the mark of the Anzacs … the numerous diaries written on Gallipoli betray an absence of bloodlust that is hard to comprehend today … the diggers were determined to prove that Australians were as brave or braver than men of any other nation.

  The Anzacs were no longer the soldiers ‘whose blood was up … rushing northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to bayonet’, as reported in 1915 by the British correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Stripped of bloodlust, they were now sanctified as men who preferred to have a yarn with the Turks during ceasefires, crack jokes and swap cigarettes.

  How different this was too, from the Herald’s characterisation of the Anzacs at the beginning of World War 2, when a different historical context demanded an almost Homeric image of the Anzacs:

  These muscular, grim-faced veterans who had scaled the heights of Gallipoli exactly a quarter of a century ago, who later destroyed the Ottoman power and helped so effectively to turn the tide of war in France, symbolized the prowess of Australian armed forces and the indestructible strength of an Empire … this offshoot of Britain in the South Seas has a fighting tradition which it will strive desperately to uphold. Despite the passing of the years, the grey hairs and the spectacles of middle age, these men had the cool, quiet confidence of seasoned soldiers who knew war and victory too … the martial spirit of the Anzac still gleams and glows.10

  There are few better examples of the way in which each generation moulds the Anzac legend for its own purposes: furious killers in 1915, cool and confident killers in 1940, and by 1990, brave boys loyal to their mates, whose virtues the nation might now emulate.

  When Prime Minister Bob Hawke addressed a national television audience of millions in 1988, he could not bring himself to mention the dispossession of Aboriginal Australians. He spoke only of the need for a ‘commitment to Australia’ and of Australia’s success story as a nation of immigrants. Delivered at the Sydney Opera House, only a stone’s throw from where Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack on 26 January 1788, the silences in Hawke’s speech revealed the dilemma that had plagued the bicentenary celebrations since 1980. The history of Aboriginal dispossession, of which Phillip’s landing was the opening act, undercut any attempt to present Australia Day as the rallying point for national pride. Eighteen months later, at Gallipoli, Hawke, like much of the nation’s press, turned to the Anzac story with a sense of relief. After a decade of cultural and political division over 26 January, here at last, was a day that could be shaped into a true source of national communion. The blood spilt in the frontier wars, the taking of Aboriginal land without consent or compensation, the physical and cultural decline of Aboriginal communities, and the political demands of Aboriginal activists, none of these need haunt or spoil the commemoration of Anzac Day.11

  Anzac Cove, not Sydney Cove, was where the right kind of Australian blood had been spilt. Hawke looked up at ‘the steep cliffs’ above ‘the narrow beaches’, and saw the metaphor of heroic struggle the nation pined for. These beaches, he told the crowd, were ‘part of Australia’, as if one small strip of Turkish coastline was somehow more sacred Australian territory than Australia itself. The soil that ran with the blood of the Anzacs was the true site of the nation’s founding moment, a day of mourning held offshore, fifteen thousand kilometres away from the site of invasion, occupation and settlement. And this was not the only advantage. Over the previous decades, the groundswell of new nationalism had been unable to invent a binding post-British myth of national identity. With Anzac’s Imperial origins receding from public memory, the legend could now be refashioned as the Bastille Day or Fourth of July Australia never had, the day which cut Australia adrift from its Imperial past in one fell, heroic swoop, a story clearly yearned for, and much more romantic than the ‘boring’ history of incremental independence, epitomised by Bob Hawke’s signing of the Australia Act in 1986. Six years before the Howard conservative government came to power, in March 1996, Anzac Day had already been re-packaged as the origin story of the green and gold. The ubiquitous photographs of the diggers – their roll-your-own cigarettes hanging from the corner of their mouths, their slouch hats tilted back slightly to reveal the faces of chirpy, fey-like innocents – became the embodiment of Australian masculine character in adversity, whether on foreign football fields, the cricket pitches of England, fighting floods, or in the forests that raged with bushfires each summer.12

  In the 1990s, newspaper and media coverage of Anzac Day increased significantly. Where coverage had previously consisted of a programme of events, an editorial, and a report of the march the following day, broadsheets now began to publish special ‘Anzac lift-outs’ in anticipation, some running up to eight pages in length. As the fiftieth anniversaries of the battles of World War 2 occurred with great regularity, the commemoration of war suddenly became an ongoing enterprise, with current affairs programmes producing finely choreographed odes to the veterans, showing images of the tear-lined faces of old soldiers which segued into shots of enthusiastic spectators waving Australian flags, all backed by the mandatory maudlin soundtrack.

  Meanwhile, with unusual attention to the power of speech and ritual, Prime Minister Paul Keating wrote his own vision for Australia’s future onto the Anzac legend, arguing that Australia’s ‘modern image’ was formed not at Gallipoli but in the 1940s, in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the waters of the South Pacific. These men and women had realised something new, Keating said, ‘Australians had evolved into a different race’. Keating’s insistence that the Anzacs had fought first for the empire, rather than for Australia, dovetailed perfectly with his republican agenda, just as his government’s push for a more Asia-centred foreign policy fitted neatly with the story of Australian soldiers dying for the country in Asia fifty years earlier. Yet through his government’s response to the Mabo decision (1992), and his Redfern Park speech (1993), he was also directly addressing the history of Indigenous dispossession in a way that no prime minister before him had attempted to do. In the wake of Mabo, the publication of the report into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1993), and the setting up of the Inquiry into The Stolen Generations, which was eventually published as Bringing Them Home in 1997, public debate was dominated by the post-colonial history of Aboriginal Australians, one that conservatives, led in 1996 by conservative prime minister, John Howard, recoiled from, painting it as overly negative and condemnatory of Australia’s British heritage.13

  On 25 April 1996, his first Anzac Day as prime minister, Howard signaled his response to the ‘self-laceration’ and ‘guilt’ of the Hawke-Keating era, announcing that he would enshrine the Australian flag in legislation, thereby ensuring that it could only be altered after a plebiscite or referendum. In the same breath, he wasted little time in identifying Anzac Day as the home of a new, more traditional and patriotic nationalism: ‘It is particularly gratifying’, he said, ‘that some vestige of cynicism over Anzac Day a generation ago appears to have evaporated with young Australians taking more interest than ever before in Anzac Day and what it means for our national identity’. The Australian, as it would do for most of the next decade, responded enthusiastically. ‘In the Anzacs can be found the model and inspiration for the nation’s own self-esteem … Anzac Day is Australia’s genuine national day, transcending any other commemoration.’ Here was the nexus which would be made even more overt in the twenty-first century; national ‘self-esteem’ was not only illustrated through the story of Anzac, it would become dependent on it. To question or criticise the commemoration of Anzac Day would soon be the same as criticising the nation itself. As 25 April became the key pillar of national pride under Howard, Anzac Day ascended to the realm of sacred parable, a body of national myth that rested not on the history of the campaign, so much as it did on Australians’ need for a ‘national day’ which was both a source of pride and one completely free from feelings of guilt and shame.14

  Between 1997 and 199
9, the first years of John Howard’s prime ministership, the national media carried hundreds of first-hand testaments from members of the Stolen Generations. Public demand for an official government apology by 2001 (the date designated for the formal completion of the process of reconciliation) became almost deafening. Howard resisted, arguing that there was no need to atone for policies which had been introduced by previous administrations. Unlike Anzac, the history of past ‘blemishes’ on the national story, he argued, could not be linked to the present generation of Australians. Reconciliation was a practical matter, not symbolic: there would be no apology. Turning away from the ‘Black armband’ of Indigenous history and the symbolism of reconciliation, with its religious language of atonement, Howard embraced Anzac Day as a ‘positive’ counter-narrative, telling the Australians assembled at Anzac Cove for the Dawn Service on Anzac Day 2000, that the Anzacs had left them a national ‘creed’, a heritage of ‘personal courage and initiative’, which had given Australia a ‘common purpose’. Standing on soil ‘rich with the lives of our kin’, Howard vowed to ‘finish’ what the Anzacs ‘began’. As he told Channel Nine’s A Current Affair shortly afterwards, there was a ‘resurgence of national feeling, a passion for the Anzac legend and tradition amongst young Australians’.15

  In the wake of 11 September 2001, and the Tampa election which followed in November 2001, Howard succeeded in harnessing a more defensive national mood, one which, in a time of war and global terrorism, was now even more in need of binding sites of national communion. In late 1999, Australian forces led the United Nations’ International Force for East Timor. Only one month after 11 September, one thousand Australian troops joined the American and British forces in invading Afghanistan. The following year, in October 2002, the Bali bombings resulted in the death of two hundred and two people, including eighty-eight Australians. Six months later, in early 2003, Australian forces joined the American invasion of Iraq. Under attack from Islamic extremists, liberal democracies – the United States, Britain, Australia, and many countries in Western Europe – began to define the democratic values they sought to defend.

  Within this broad international context John Howard elevated the Anzac legend. So much of the theatre and ritual of his prime ministership was performed on a military platform; he became the prime-ministerial impresario of countless welcome-home parades for returning Australian troops, the leader who spoke of an ‘Australian military tradition’, and the politician who sensed that in a volatile international climate, the Australian people were particularly receptive to the ‘Anzac spirit’ as the means through which they could express their common values and their dependence on one another. Schools were instructed to fly Australian flags, while ‘Australian values’ posters, which included a silhouette of Jack Simpson and his donkey, were also distributed. From the moment he was elected in 1996, until he was finally defeated by Kevin Rudd in 2007, Howard publicly encouraged the increasing numbers of Australians visiting Gallipoli each year. His Anzac Day speeches reflected the spirit of the times, yet at the same time, they attempted to cast the Anzac legend in the image of conservative nationalism, elevating 25 April to such an exalted position, that it became a completely new type of national day. Contrary to popular belief, this change was not a ‘resurgence’, rather, it was a revolution, a complete transformation of the traditional language and patterns of commemoration associated with the day.16

  In attempting to mould the Anzac story, Howard offered the usual examples of rhetorical excess, claiming that Anzac Day occupied an ‘eternal place in the Australian soul’, and insisting that Gallipoli had shaped the character and the destiny of this country ‘more than any other tradition or influence’. But the most significant change occurred after 2001, when he introduced a ‘celebratory’ tone into Anzac Day. He began to see Anzac Day as an occasion for ‘the celebration of some wonderful values’, and urged Australians to ‘collectively rejoice in the growing embrace of that great tradition’. ‘On this day’, Howard proclaimed in 2003, ‘we enrich ourselves’, ‘a nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but by the men it honours, the men it remembers’. Broadsheet editorials chimed in, describing Anzac Day as a day which ‘salutes the country itself’, the day on which Australians ‘celebrate’ their ‘founding generation’. Never before had Anzac Day been seen as a day of ‘celebration’. Since the first Anzac ceremonies in 1916, words such as ‘commemorate’, ‘remember’ and ‘mourn’, together with phrases like ‘pay our respects’, reflected the tenor of the day. Far from a resurgence of ‘the Anzac tradition’, Howard was using Anzac Day as a vehicle for national self-congratulation. Australia Day was also infected, reflecting a growing culture of unreflective, patriotic display, best illustrated in Howard’s Australia Day address in 2007, in which he declared without irony: ‘We think we’re pretty good and we are’.17

  Some of the Anzac ‘pilgrims’, who were indulging in what Howard called ‘a patriotic rite of passage’ by visiting Anzac Cove, echoed the prevailing mood, providing the media with vox pops which suggested that the last thing on their minds was the history of World War I: ‘It wasn’t about the Empire it was about us’; ‘I am here because it’s just great to be so proud of our history’; ‘the diggers would be happy if they knew we were here’; ‘they fought for us so that we could have a free life’; ‘they’re the reason why we live the way we do’. With Australian troops serving in several theatres overseas, Howard went to great lengths to place the fight against terrorism in ‘the Anzac tradition’. The soldiers who ‘died for our freedom’ on the beaches of Anzac Cove in 1915, he argued, were the antecedents of the men who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Australia’s ‘military tradition’, said Howard, was continuous and ‘peaceful’. We were not invaders. We were not killers. As he told an audience at Australia House in London, late in 2003:

  Australians are not by nature a war like people. There is no tradition of conquest or imperial ambition. We’ve had no history of bloody civil war, of winning our independence through armed insurrection or fortifying our borders against some constant military threat … and Gallipoli itself, the ultimate symbol of our military tradition, was not a glorious victory but a bloody stalemate and then a forced withdrawal … Anzac Day remains more evocative of the Australian spirit than any other day in our calendar.18

  Howard had found the narrative of ‘national pride’ he had yearned for since his first years as Opposition leader in the 1980s, when he had distanced his party from the history of shame promoted by the left in the lead up to the bicentenary. Turning his back on the frontier warfare that accompanied the history of settlement in Australia, he saw in Anzac, an ‘uplifting’ history of ‘honour’. Anzac allowed him to speak in mystical language in a way no other aspect of Australia’s past could do. He described Australians on 25 April as being ‘drawn together almost by instinct, by a great silent summons to repay a debt to the past … [to] those they seek to honour’. The Anzac story was entirely free from the ‘blemishes’ and ‘stains’ of Australia’s colonial past, and it contained all the ingredients that neither the foundation of a penal colony, nor the undramatic story of Federation could ever equal; a heroic history of sacrifice and action, a history of service and duty, a history that could be cast in the image of contemporary Australian liberalism – loyal, patriotic, and entirely free from the taint of rebellion – a glowing ‘national inheritance’ which could be cherished and revered.19

  During Howard’s last term (2004–07), one of the most common features of the Anzac-led nationalism was a tendency to condemn the unpatriotic past of the 1960s and 1970s. Introducing Today’s Anzac Day report in 2006, Tracey Grimshaw could barely contain herself: ‘In the 1960s, many historians predicted that Anzac Day would go into decline as the diggers themselves died away. How wrong they were!’ Presenting the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club, in 2007, and discussing the opposition to Anzac Day in the 1960s and 1970s, Jennifer Byrne remarked ‘we’re over all that now, aren’t we?’ In 2005, conse
rvative commentator, Gerard Henderson, suggested that the time had come to stop singing Eric Bogle’s folk ballad ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. Quoting the last line from the penultimate verse of Bogle’s song: ‘And the young people ask “What are they marching for?” and I ask meself the same question’, Henderson accused Bogle of failing ‘to anticipate the revival of interest by Australians in their history’. ‘The ninetieth anniversary of Anzac Day’, he argued, ‘would be an appropriate time to despatch Eric Bogle’s message to the musical graveyard’. Between 1996 and 2007, conservative politicians frequently cast their own patriotic virtue against the image of a radical, disloyal past. Howard, for example, often bemoaned the failure of Australians in the 1960s and 1970s to ‘welcome home’ those who had fought in Vietnam, just as he regretted that generation’s criticism of Anzac Day. By 2007, Howard’s view had shaped the dominant popular memory of the 1960s and 1970s. By representing Anzac Day as under attack by radicals of earlier decades, Howard could more easily assume the mantle of its saviour.20

  As chapter three shows there was certainly much opposition to Anzac Day, which began in the late 1950s, with attacks in student newspapers well before the movement against the war gained momentum in the late 1960s. There was also the expectation that the ritual of Anzac Day might well die with the diggers, as the final words of Eric Bogle’s anthem assumed: ‘… year after year those old men disappear, soon no one will march there at all’. In London, on Anzac Day 1968, protesters at the Cenotaph in Whitehall laid their own wreath: ‘Vietnam explodes Anzac myth’. They also carried banners demonstrating their support for the Vietcong. ‘Angry Anzac veterans ripped down and trampled the banners, and fights broke out’. The following year in Perth, student protesters attempted unsuccessfully to lay a wreath remembering ‘the murdered Vietnamese’, before scuffles broke out with police. In 1966, when a Sydney woman ran from the crowd during a welcome home parade for soldiers returning from Vietnam, and tried to smear marching soldiers with red paint, her action was shown live on ABC TV, and the image gradually came to be seen as the embodiment of opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet until the last years of the war, the overwhelming response of Australians was largely supportive. Vietnam veterans were officially welcomed home and they were not poorly treated. However, they had been militarily defeated fighting a war that aroused considerable opposition. Their sense of exile and exploitation fuelled their sense of grievance, which would later play a powerful role in securing their recognition as Anzacs. While numbers watching Anzac Day parades in the 1960s and 1970s fluctuated wildly, never did the number of spectators reach such a critically low point that the day was in danger of disappearing altogether. In 1965, on the fiftieth anniversary of Anzac Day, the Sydney Morning Herald captured the anxiety and uncertainty in the country’s commemoration of the Anzacs.