by Marilyn Lake
Schoolchildren and teachers were supplied with even more resources. The DVA commissioned the Office of the Board of Studies in New South Wales to develop a resource to aid investigation of Australia’s wartime history using DVA’s websites ‘Visit Gallipoli’ and ‘Australia’s War 1939–1945’. The result was ‘Operation CLICK: Anzac to Kokoda’ which was distributed to all schools in March 2005.15
Guidelines encouraged community groups at home to involve schoolchildren and young people in activities that reinforced ‘the notion of the debt we all owe for our freedom and democracy’. ‘Indebtedness and gratitude’, ‘freedom and democracy’: these became key general themes and schoolchildren learnt their lessons well. As Anna Clark found in her interviews with schoolchildren across Australia many now believe they owe everything to the Anzacs – ‘If they weren’t fighting Gallipoli, we wouldn’t be where we are today’.16
To further recompense those who served in war and to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War 2, the Australian government asked the Royal Australian Mint to issue medallions to all surviving Australian veterans, widows and widowers from World War 2, as well as British Commonwealth and Allied veterans with qualifying service and the widows and widowers of those with qualifying service, now resident in Australia. It was estimated that some three hundred and twenty-five thousand medallions were required, but many of the recipients thought the money could surely have been better spent.
What is remarkable about all this activity is not that the DVA believes in the centrality of war to Australian history, but that it is funded so lavishly to make this case to schoolchildren and the larger community and that a federal department, established to take care of the needs of veterans and tend their graves, plays such a large role in the teaching of history in primary and secondary schools. Recently steps have been taken by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations to develop a National Curriculum including history as one of its four focus areas. It will be interesting to see how history as a critical practice, committed not to the inculcation of national pride, but to stimulate historical understanding of Australia’s past and its place in the world, relates to DVA’s promulgation of the Anzac tradition.
Debating war and history
The online debate in the Age last April about the meaning of Anzac and its place in our national history clearly reflected the lessons instilled by the educators from the DVA. The idea that Australian soldiers were always fighting for our ‘freedom and democracy’, that Anzac values were central to our national identity and that the ‘spirit of Anzac’ animated all past achievements – whether we were fighting wars or bushfires – were faithfully echoed in the online discussion. But there was also considerable disquiet about the sentimentalising of war and the nationalist uses now made of military service. There was concern that national memory was being warped into a propaganda tool to ensure support for the next war. ‘Honouring/respecting ALL victims of war is important’, wrote Ron. ‘Revering them and elevating them to the status of hero is not. It may even be downright dangerous.’
The educators at the DVA have found partners in universities as well as museums and schools. Some universities have taken to the enterprise with enthusiasm. At Monash University the National Centre for Australian Studies is a partner in the ‘Spirit of Anzac’ competition prize study tour. Monash also offers a Monash–Gallipoli Prize, its historians have written a history of the Shrine of Remembrance and introduced two new units for undergraduate study, ‘The ANZAC Battlefield Tour’ and ‘Anzac Legends: Australians at War’. In addition a community engagement programme conducts ‘national conversations’, the first of which was focussed on ‘Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape’ and offers an ‘Outback Orations’ programme, whose subject in 2008 was ‘Broken Hill’s Memory of the Great War’.
Many history teachers are now employed either directly by the DVA in designing state-of-the-art curriculum materials or as researchers, consultants, conference organisers and assessors on war related projects. Some have objected to our criticism of the militarisation of history by arguing that the curriculum materials are ever more inclusive with new units focussed on women at war, Aboriginal participation in overseas service (despite the tradition of discrimination against them) and debates about conscription. But their objections miss the point. Why is one federal government department funded to produce history materials when other federal government departments are not? Why not the departments of employment, health, immigration, environment and Aboriginal affairs? Might not they also be funded to educate schoolchildren and Australians more generally about the history of their activities and past achievements?
Many school teachers are concerned at the way in which the militarisation of Australian history has come to dominate the curriculum and are acutely aware of their dependence on the extensive resources now supplied by the DVA. They also report that students become emotionally engaged with the story of young men giving their lives at Gallipoli and on other battlefields, though as suggested in chapter one they rarely seem to discuss the fact of killing and the Anzacs’ apparent skill and enthusiasm with the bayonet. ‘Australian identity comes out of war’ schoolchildren affirm. Learning about Australians at war, said a Canberra schoolgirl ‘makes us appreciate, like, the Anzac spirit and everything that we celebrate about it and our nation because it was our birth as a nation as people say’. ‘Most people say that you shape the country with the way you fight your battles and what comes from that’, remarked an Adelaide schoolboy, who added that ‘maybe it’s just boys and guns’.17
In their identification with the story of Anzac, schoolchildren have been imbued with a new sense of patriotic pride, but in sentimentalising history and in celebrating military virtues we fear that history as a critical practice, and as a way of explaining and understanding the past, is in danger of succumbing to nationalist mythology. We are concerned furthermore that Australians’ pioneering achievements in building a democratic society and a welfare state, in extending equal rights to women and to Indigenous Australians, in fostering multiculturalism and racial equality have been silenced by the resurgence of the dangerous nineteenth century idea that nations are made in war. We think it is time to reclaim our national values and commemorate the role of the Australians involved in campaigns for civil, social and political freedoms and who enshrined them in our national culture.
EPILOGUE
Moving on?
Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake
‘Each year we wrestle with words to describe the Anzac spirit. I don’t think we ever do it the justice it deserves, but we share a sense of it, and we’ve held on to it since it emerged in World War One.’
Governor-General Quentin Bryce, Australian, 2 September 2009
Few members of the governor-general’s audience or readers of later published reports would have found anything unusual in Her Excellency’s recent remarks about Australian history. Her explicit assumption that Australian identity and national character can be conflated with the Anzac spirit would have surprised no one. Such sentiments are commonplace, cherished and comforting, and for that reason rarely questioned or subjected to serious analysis. While, as a nation, we may wrestle with words to describe it, we show far less interest in grappling with the question of why we are obsessed with the Anzac spirit and now accord it priority over almost every other aspect of our history.
The substance of this book should remind us that the close, contemporary focus on Anzac has not been a constant feature of Australian historical thinking. There has been opposition to the militarism inherent in Anzac Day celebrations at various times since the 1920s and it intensified from the late 1950s. Many of the general histories written during the middle decades of the twentieth century paid little attention to it even though many of those historians had served in World War 2. At that time war history was seen as a specialist sub-discipline with little relevance to the mainstream of history. Australian history focussed
on what had happened in Australia, not on what our soldiers had done overseas. The emphasis of Australian history was, as we have shown, on political and social reform and the shaping of a vision of a new society.
What we find remarkable, then, is the sudden re-invigoration of the legend and its impact on the writing of Australian history, a manifestation of what we have called the militarisation of Australian history. We have outlined the way in which government has promoted the celebration both of Anzac Day and the more general history of Australia’s many and ongoing military engagements. Federal government departments and instrumentalities have been involved in unprecedented ways in the creation and dissemination of curriculum materials relating to war in a direct attempt to influence the content of classroom teaching. But we note, too, that the upsurge of interest in war has also swept the wider community. The replanting of memorial avenues of trees, the expansion and refurbishment of old and almost forgotten monuments and the building of new ones have resulted from near partnerships between the federal government, municipalities and local enthusiasts.
We have argued that while decaying monuments have been restored, antiquated rhetoric has also been called back into service and put to new uses. But the Anzac legend cannot be extracted from the ethos of the time of its birth and the attitudes and values that prevailed in 1915. It thus has become the vehicle by which the ideas of the Edwardian militarists are preserved and passed on to a new generation. At the centre of their creed was the conviction that war was the ultimate test for both nations and men. It was the beckoning threshold to individual heroism and national maturity. The central claim that Australia became a nation at Anzac Cove is the product of these ideas. Without that intellectual provenance the myth of Anzac would lose its great resonance as an event of transcendent national significance. The state-inspired encouragement for school children to admire and celebrate the heroism of the soldier would warm the hearts of the old Prussian militarists if they were ever to learn of it. The Anzac legend perpetuates an attitude to war in general and to World War I in particular. The belief that it was a source of unique and positive national virtue sails directly into the winds of contemporary global interpretations, which portray the conflict as the prime source of the brutalisation of the twentieth century that fuelled vast and terrible violence.
It is essential to look again at the overbearing idea that the spirit of the nation was born among the members of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on active service on the other side of the world. A significant problem with this proposition is the very uniqueness of their experience. The soldiers were far removed from normal life and its complex web of kinship, affections and responsibilities. They were in the distinctive situation of being in all male company for years on end and even then their associates were drawn from a very narrow male age cohort. We might well ask how such an unnatural society could give birth to a spirit of general relevance. Added to this is the fact that despite all the evidence of their anti-authoritarianism, the soldiers were governed by military laws which compelled obedience and severely punished mutiny or insubordination. They had to do as they were told and, even if grudgingly so, obey their senior officers. Their experience was far removed from the norms of civil society.
And then there is the inescapable matter of violence. It shadowed the experience of soldiers in a way unthinkable in ordinary life in Australia itself. The fear of cowardice was not unknown at home, but at the front it assumed compelling importance. The conflict at Gallipoli, in particular, was often conducted at close quarters, accompanied by vicious hand to hand fighting with direct, personal experience of killing. Respect, admiration and decoration accrued to those who could do it without flinching or even with dark, triumphant elation. But it is hard to prove that courage in the face of the enemy or close comradeship were distinctive characteristics of the Anzacs. Every army had its own brave, bold men, and the nature and outcome of the fighting were determined more by external factors like terrain, numbers, logistics and weaponry, rather than by national characteristics.
The interpretation of the Anzac spirit, offered in the governor-general’s speech, would have surprised CEW Bean, the pre-eminent founder and celebrant of the legend. He did not suggest that it emerged on the Anzac Peninsula. Rather it was something that was born in the bush and carried into battle. It came from the experience of pioneering the country and above all from the resilience and toughness needed to settle the outback. Australian democracy, universal education and an open, meritocratic society shaped the specific quality of the diggers. The source of the spirit, according to Bean, was not to be found in military battle, but in the distinctive character of civilian life in the colonies. The diggers were citizen soldiers. Bean argued that they displayed these characteristics in the Middle East, but they did not create them there. More importantly they were noticed and admired by British commentators. Knowing very little about Australia itself, they thought they had discerned something new and distinctive in the behaviour and bearing of the soldiers. Their observations were treasured. Imperial praise mattered at the time to a degree that is hard for us to fully appreciate.
A further complication for the current apotheosis of the spirit of the Anzacs is that they were men of their time and therefore convinced white supremacists. They were the proud representatives of the White Australia Policy, which promoted racial purity at home and abroad. Indeed much of their self-confidence and élan came from their belief in their inherent superiority. They embodied it in their swagger, proud bearing and well-nourished physiques. Bean himself was a strong believer in the pre-eminence of what he thought of as the Anglo-Saxon race and the exploits of the soldiers confirmed for him that the ancient Teutonic spirit had not suffered by migration to the Antipodes.
The dark side of such racial cockiness was the contemptuous treatment of non-Europeans and in the Middle East, the Egyptians, Turks, Palestinians and Bedouin. The bush values of the Australian diggers included pride in being white men. Some of the Australians behaved like overbearing bullies in their dealings with the people whose countries they were occupying. Others expressed amused kindly condescension. It was perhaps inevitable that the young Australians would assume that the extreme poverty they witnessed for the first time was associated with racial difference. The British authorities found this pattern of behaviour particularly useful when they used the AIF to help put down the nationalist uprising in Egypt in 1919 after the end of hostilities. The accompanying atrocities have been largely forgotten or repressed,1 which is not really surprising for how would we explain arrogant contempt for other people’s nationalist aspirations in terms of the spirit we wish to associate with our national character? And how do we explain this to a world that still remembers the White Australia Policy and remains only half convinced of our much proclaimed recantations?
For many observers at the time, the victory in World War I was intimately associated with the preservation and perpetuation of White Australia. When he returned to Australia from Europe after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Prime Minister WM Hughes was greeted by members of the Fremantle branch of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) who congratulated him for his successful fight to keep Australia white. For Hughes that struggle had been central to his life’s work. When he rose in the parliament to report on his role at Versailles he declared:
White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you please; but at any rate, the soldiers have achieved the victory, and my colleagues and I have brought that principle back to you from the Conference.2
Hughes’ sentiments would have been re-assuring to those diggers who had wondered whether White Australia should have been engaged in defending Black Egypt.
In explaining the historic return to Anzac in the last decade we have seen a relationship between the militarisation of Australian history and the controversy over Aboriginal history known as the ‘History Wars’. The same political leaders who emphasise the importance of our military he
ritage have been demonstrably uncomfortable when asked to deal with the century-long conflict on the frontiers of settlement. Thus we show no embarrassment, indeed even feel pride, in our invasion of Turkey at the behest of the British, but great reluctance to acknowledge the British invasion of Australia. Many resist the idea that an invasion ever took place. And while we restore old monuments and construct new ones to commemorate military conflict overseas, there are still no official memorials to those who died on the frontier. The leadership of the Australian War Memorial stoutly resists any suggestion that they should give recognition to domestic warfare. Like their partners at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs they seem to think they have fulfilled their responsibility by celebrating the contribution of Aboriginal and Islander servicemen abroad. New Zealand has always recognised the significance of Maori resistance in their national story. In the Anzac War Memorial Museum in Auckland there is a monument to the memory of all those who gave their lives during the New Zealand Wars of 1845–72. How long will it be before a similar monument is commissioned in Australia?
And what of the leaders of Aboriginal resistance? Though known to history they are not known to the general community and, as a corollary, not appreciated. Many Australians seem quite incapable of recognising them as patriots who were defending their homelands and their way of life against superior weapons and ever increasing numbers of Europeans. Heroism, it seems, is a quality best displayed overseas. Just like our artists, our warriors had to go abroad to achieve recognition. And while we go to great expense to find and recover the bodies of fallen servicemen wherever they are in the world, no official attempt has ever been made to find, mark and commemorate the sites where Aborigines were shot down by settlers, soldiers and police.