by Marilyn Lake
Many Australians are no longer willing to regard the day as a national day, but see it simply as a commemoration of a bloody – and unsuccessful – campaign on a remote peninsula … certainly the day is no longer taken for granted as it was in the years between the war … [yet] the numbers of the marchers all over the country and, more importantly, the size of the crowds which watched them, surely showed that the day has not lost its grip on the hearts and minds of Australians … its form may change in time, but it will not die.21
Two years later, Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, the Australian, which began publication in 1964, condemned the ‘crippling artificiality’ of Australia Day, but insisted that Anzac Day had survived ‘the boredom of an older generation’ and even ‘the scepticism of a younger’, to bind Australians ‘in a mysterious even unwilling communion with one another’. ‘Anzac Day’, argued the Australian, ‘expresses, as no other day or symbol can, something that we understand and nobody else can’.
Despite the criticism of Anzac Day at this time, the press remained firmly behind the retention of 25 April as Australia’s only national day, largely for three reasons. The political class, together with most opinion makers, knew, as the Australian suggested on 25 April 1969, that the Australian people had yet to reach ‘definitive agreement’ on the form their new national identity would take. With Australia Day little more than an excuse for a holiday, it was unthinkable to allow the grasp of 25 April on the nation’s imagination to slip. Australians were wrestling not only with anti-war protest movement in the 1970s, but also with the challenge of reinventing Anzac Day, trying to change it from an Imperial ritual, to a crucible of purely Australian national identity. It was for this reason, during Anzac Day ceremonies in the early 1970s, that there was such fierce resistance to ‘Advance Australia Fair’ being played as the national anthem instead of ‘God Save the Queen’. As the Australian recognised, it was crucial to show that Anzac Day, and the rising wave of ‘new nationalism’, presented ‘no contradiction’. Moreover, in the absence of widespread monarchical allegiance, only Anzac Day contained the necessary elements of mystery and spirituality that could truly bind the Australian people. Finally, at a time when Australia’s foreign policy priorities in the wake of Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community were undergoing rapid transformation, many commentators were acutely aware of the potential political utility of Anzac Day. In 1965, the West Australian saw the purpose of Anzac Day as helping Australia to face ‘the perils’ of the years to come, ‘whether it comes militarily from Peking or Djakarta, [or] diplomatically from the new and fumbling forces at work in Asia and Africa’. In 1967, as national servicemen and regular army volunteers marched together on Anzac Day for the first time ‘as veterans of Vietnam’, the Sydney Morning Herald saw the advantage of retaining Anzac Day as a focal point of national unity.
We face, with the contraction of British power, the prospect of very much heavier regional defence responsibilities. Whether or not Britain, after joining the European Common Market, decides to pull out of Asia altogether (except for a token force in Hong Kong, and perhaps a few bombers in Australia) it is now abundantly clear that the scale of her troop withdrawals will be much greater than was indicated earlier. This does not mean that Australia will have physically to take over Britain’s role; but it does mean that we will be much more exposed and will have to make a greater defence effort.22
Australians were suddenly confronted with a new framework of national and international politics, and they struggled to adapt the language of their traditional mythologies to a profoundly different set of challenges. In the Anzac Day ‘resurgence’ of recent years, much of this past has been misremembered. Just as we have grown accustomed to using Anzac Day as a means of inflating national pride, so we have grown more adept at forgetting our history. While the history of Aboriginal dispossession and cultural annihilation is wheeled out for ceremonial apology before we ‘move on’, the Anzac legend is held in a state of perpetual remembrance. We have forgotten earlier stories of national self-definition and national values and the struggles waged by those who have come before us to build a distinctive, democratic and egalitarian society. And we have forgotten the divisions caused by our participation in overseas battles and more generally the terrible costs of war. We have misremembered the past in order to bury a history of debate, both around Anzac Day and the politics of war, fearful perhaps, at a time of global uncertainty, that similar divisions might erupt and disturb the ranks of our present-day patriotic army.
As our political leaders increasingly mimic the public performances of American politicians, smiling and waving to the cameras as they pass through the church gates on Sunday morning, one wonders if the Anzac revolution has occurred not because we are a post-Christian society, but because we live in a time of religious revival. Before Anzac, we bow down, we close ranks and we remain silent. So sacrosanct has Anzac Day become, that no political leader dare risk qualifying, let alone doubting, the absolute centrality of its position to our national identity and national values.
In our rush to participate in the Anzac ‘resurgence’ as the centenary of the Gallipoli invasion approaches in 2015, we appear to have forgotten to ask the most fundamental question of all. After the horrors of war in the twentieth century, in which so many millions of people died, does Australia, a modern pluralist democracy in the twenty-first century, still wish to cling to a nineteenth century concept of nationhood: the belief that a nation can only be truly borne through the spilling of the sacrificial blood of its young?
— 6 —
How do schoolchildren learn about the spirit of Anzac?
Marilyn Lake
‘Anzac history certainly generates more education funding than any other areas of Australia’s past.’
Anna Clark, History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, p 49
During the last ten years a veritable tidal wave of military history has engulfed our nation, generating the torrent of curriculum materials sent to primary and secondary schools by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA),1 the endless stories and supplements in newspapers and other media, new documentary television series, live broadcasts of the Dawn Service from Gallipoli, travelling national and local museum exhibits, the Anzac Lecture Series and exhibitions at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, the expansion of memorials across the country and the publication of an unprecedented number of books in the field of war history, often made possible by subsidies from the DVA, the Australian Army History Unit of the Department of Defence, the Returned Services League (RSL) and the Australian War Memorial, which also has an affiliated Facebook site, encouraging members to ‘become a fan’ of the Anzacs. Joint ventures are common, for example, Michael Caulfield’s book, Voices of War: Stories from the Australians at War Film Archive, based on the documentary series commissioned by the DVA and the ABC’s Gallipoli: The First Day.2
According to a recent estimate, books published on Australia at war increased from less than sixty in the 1970s to over two hundred and fifty in the 1980s, to more than three hundred and sixty in the 1990s, a number likely to be soon exceeded in this decade. No aspect of war history has been ignored. Personal testimony jostles alongside studies of military strategy, individual stories compete with major battles. Titles during the last five years include: Frank Glen Bowler of Gallipoli: Witness to the Anzac Legend, Richard Reid Gallipoli 1915, Kevin Meade Heroes before Gallipoli: Bita Paka and That One Day in September, Stephen Chambers Anzac: The Landing, Peter Hart Gallipoli: A Stone Unturned, Victor Rudenno Gallipoli: Attack from the Sea, Chris Clark Naval Aviation at Gallipoli, Peter Pedersen The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front, Jane Pearson Anzacs at Gallipoli: Creating a Legend, Alistair Thomson Anzac Stories: Using Personal Testimony in War, Jonathan King The Western Front Diaries: The ANZACS’ Own Story Battle by Battle, Wesley Olson Gallipoli: The Western Australian Story, Bruce Scates Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War,
Les Carlyon’s The Great War, EPF Lynch Somme Mud: The War Experiences of an Australian Infantryman in France 1916–1919, Peter Cochrane Tobruk 1941, Michael Tyquin Madness and the Military: Australia’s Experience of the Great War, Melanie Oppenheimer Oceans of Love: Narrelle – An Australian Nurse in World War I, Bart Ziino A Distant Grief, Peter Stanley Quinn’s Post: Anzac, Gallipoli and Men of Mont St Quentin and Elena Govor Russian Anzacs in Australian History. In this ever-growing industry, war commemoration and writing history have become conflated, joined in a grand narrative about the seminal role of Australian military engagements and the Anzac spirit in shaping the nation.
This chapter focusses on the role of the DVA in militarising our history in schools during the last ten years. In his Quadrant address in 2006, former prime minister, John Howard, talked of the need for Australian children to be ‘taught their national inheritance’.3 That heritage in all its richness and diversity, and not just one aspect of it, should indeed be available to all Australians. Schoolchildren are now conceptualised as the inheritors of the Anzac spirit and its custodians. They have been bombarded in recent years and throughout the year with every aspect of the history of our engagement in overseas wars. Indeed lessons begin even before children begin school. One correspondent wrote to me: ‘My son whilst a four-year-old last year received an extensive age appropriate grounding in ANZAC traditions at his pre-school!’ We might well doubt the former prime minister’s assertion that ‘we have never had a war-like tradition we Australians’. Schoolchildren would be forgiven for thinking that this is our dominant national tradition. And it seems that many do think this. Anna Clark in her survey of schoolchildren’s attitudes to Australian history was surprised at how many students now assume that a ‘militarised national identity’ is ‘intrinsically Australian’. She was also concerned that these lessons were generating nationalist sentiment rather than ‘historical understanding’.4
The vast pedagogical enterprise of the DVA – which under its Commemorative Activities programme has supplied all schools in Australia, primary and secondary, with voluminous and sophisticated curriculum materials, websites, virtual tours of the battlefields, handsome prizes including trips to Gallipoli and other battlefields – has been made possible by massive funding from the federal government, the budget for this activity increasing from $4 215 000 in 2001–02 to $5 878 000 in 2007–08. Whether it is the job of the federal Department of Veterans’ Affairs to prescribe schoolchildren’s understanding of national history is surely debatable. Whether it should link these history lessons to the definition and promotion of national values is more questionable still. Has the equivalent happened in any other democratic country?
History has been appropriated in Australia for militarist purposes and comprehensively re-written in the process. The myth of Anzac has been at the heart of the reshaping of public memory through a national story that defines military values as Australian values and overseas battlefields as key historic sites. The relentless militarisation of Australian history has effectively marginalised other stories, different historic sites and other conceptions of national values. Writing history is not a choice between narrative and a stew of themes, as former prime minister, John Howard, liked to declare, or between fact and interpretation as our current prime minister suggests, but it does involve a choice between narratives. Which narratives about our past gain ascendancy depends on their proponents’ material and discursive resources as well as on their rhetorical power and dramatic appeal. As historians we think it’s important to distinguish between history and mythology.
Significance of war to our national development
From the late 1990s, the federal government through its agencies, the DVA and the Australian War Memorial replaced the RSL – aged and out of touch – as the new promoters of Anzac, deploying their vast resources to promulgate a new national history, a story of national development centred on the sacrifice and service of the Anzacs through the ages. Providing extensive curriculum materials, teaching resources and websites to schools, through its own publications and publication subsidies, the funding of documentary films and travelling museum exhibits as well as the expansion and renovation of community war memorials, the federal government has lent its authority and vast resources to a new pedagogical project we might call the militarisation of Australian history.
The History Wars of the 1990s provided a key context and motivation for the focus on twentieth century wartime history, with former prime minister John Howard especially keen to divert attention from the history of Aboriginal dispossession and frontier massacres by opening up a new front. A celebratory national narrative was needed to defeat the critical force of ‘Black armband history’ and to replace the earlier radical nationalist tradition, disliked by the right and discredited on the left by feminist and anti-racist critiques from the 1970s through the 1980s. There was clearly little to be gained from endlessly disputing the extent of frontier massacres as Keith Windschuttle had done.5 Far easier to change the subject and offer an alternative story of the forging of national identity in overseas wars: the Boer War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Malayan Emergency, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan.
At the centre of the new national narrative promoted by the DVA was the sacrifice and service of Australian soldiers and their role in shaping the nation. Attacking the RSL, as the protagonists in the anti-war play The One Day of the Year had done was one thing. Appearing to attack the Anzacs was quite another. The RSL was a special interest group lobbying for its constituency. As national heroes, the Anzacs could be seen to be above politics. A significant and symbolic change in terminology occurred: that very Australian group ‘returned servicemen’ suddenly became ‘veterans’, as those who served in Vietnam and then the government itself borrowed the American terminology.
The effect of the educational campaigns of the last decade – documented below – has been to disarm the critique of Australian participation in war by casting it as an attack on Anzac and the nation itself. It has also worked to marginalise other accounts of the formation of national values, civic, social and political traditions and different Australians’ experiences.
In 1994 the federal government led by Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, first became involved in actively funding community activities to commemorate Australian engagement in war. On the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War 2 he announced the ‘Australia Remembers’ programme, presided over by veterans’ affairs minister Con Sciacca, whose personal commitment did much to ensure its great success. Introduced as the largest series of commemorations ever held in Australian history, it also promised ‘job opportunities’ for seven hundred unemployed Australians.6 ‘Australia Remembers’ was hailed as a new nation-building programme embracing local communities across Australia.
There was then no general commemorations programme within the DVA beyond the Office of Australian War Graves, which managed a war graves programme, established during World War I to assure bereaved families that relatives killed on active service, whose bodies would not be returned, were properly buried and commemorated. The objective of the war graves programme, whose responsibilities dated back to 1917, was thus defined as:
To commemorate, individually, the sacrifice of those Australian men and women who gave their lives during, or as a result of, their service to Australia and the Commonwealth in war, or who were prisoners of war, and to maintain these commemorations.7
The war graves programme was focussed on appropriate burial practices, with names inscribed at gravesites or on memorials, in lawn cemeteries, crematoria or gardens of remembrance. A research service was also provided for next of kin and others seeking information about burial sites and it supplied photographs of individual graves, war cemeteries and memorials for those unable to travel overseas.
The ‘Australia Remembers’ programme in 1995 inaugurated a new direction in commemoration: it emphasised historical education. Allan Hawke, president of the Repatriation Commission, noted
in his report that:
Activities associated with the commemorative year brought to the attention of younger Australians a reminder of the sacrifice and commitment shown by their forebears in the dark days of more than fifty years ago and a greater understanding of the Commission’s ongoing and vital role in compensating veterans, their widows, widowers and dependants for the effects of service.