What's Wrong With Anzac?

by Marilyn Lake

  34 Quoted in B Buckley, ‘A new hope for the RSL? More than booze and anti-Communism?’, Bulletin, 23 April 1966.

  35 Oz, 14 October 1964.

  36 Oz, 14 October 1964.

  37 KS Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998, p 379.

  38 Inglis, ‘Reluctant retreat from all-solemn observance’, discussing the inter-war years.

  39 W Crouch, ‘Do we still need Anzac Day?’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 April 1974.

  40 Age, 26 April 1969.

  41 A Curthoys, ‘“Shut up you bourgeois bitch”: Sexual identity and political action in the anti-Vietnam War movement’ in J Damousi and M Lake (eds) Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995.

  42 A Howe, ‘Anzac mythology and the feminist challenge’ in Damousi and Lake (eds) Gender and War, pp 304–05.

  43 J McLeod, ‘The fall and rise of Anzac Day: 1965 and 1990 compared’, War and Society, vol 20, no 1, May 2002, p 150.

  44 A Perkins, ‘The new Anzacs’, Sun, 27 April 1981.

  45 A Seymour, The One Day of the Year (1985 revised version) in Three Australian Plays, Penguin, Ringwood, 1994, p 90.

  46 Seymour, The One Day of the Year (1985 revised version), p 90.

  47 Seymour, ‘An old warhorse returns to the fray’, p 7.

  Chapter 4 Why do we get so emotional about Anzac?

  1 AAP, ‘Paul Keating is absolutely wrong about Gallipoli Anzac legend, Kevin Rudd says’, News.com.au, 31 October 2008. My thanks to Mark McKenna for this and subsequent newspaper references.

  2 Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 23–24 April 2005.

  3 Editorial, Age, 25 April 2009.

  4 See M McKenna and S Ward, ‘“It was really moving, mate”: The Gallipoli pilgrimage and sentimental nationalism in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, vol 38, no 129, 2007, pp 141–51.

  5 The transcript of John Howard’s speech, Armistice Day 2004, can be found online at http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au.

  6 RG Collingwood, The Idea of History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1946, p 304.

  7 See for example the work of Carol and Peter Stearns in the United States: Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in the United States, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986; C Kaplan, Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism, Verso, London, 1986; and P Stearns and J Lewis, An Emotional History of the United States, New York University Press, New York, 1998.

  8 See BH Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, June 2002, p 837.

  9 See Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999; Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001; Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005. On the political deployment of the language of loss see also M Lake, ‘Citizenship as non-discrimination: Acceptance or assimilationism? Political logic and emotional investment in campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia, 1940–1970’, Gender and History Special Issue: Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities, vol 13, no 3, November 2001.

  10 B Scates, Returning to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006.

  11 KS Inglis, ‘They shall not grow old’, Age, 30 April 2005.

  12 AF Davies, Skills, Outlooks and Passions: A Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Study of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, p 344.

  13 J Pearlman, ‘Rudd promises to publicly honour Iraq troops’, Age, 1 August 2009.

  14 John Howard Anzac Day address, Canberra, 25 April 2003.

  Chapter 5 Anzac Day: How did it become Australia’s national day?

  1 Board quoted in G Souter, Lion and Kangaroo: Australia 1901-1919, The Rise of a Nation, Collins, Sydney, 1976, p 229; also see J Beaumont, The Anzac Legend: Australia’s War 1914–1918, pp 166–71 (Beaumont quotes Alistair Thompson on the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance); also see report of Anzac Day in Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1938, p 1.

  2 For Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s comments, see Editorial, Age, 25 April 2009.

  3 KS Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Publishing, Carlton, 2008 (first published 1998), p 572 and KS Inglis, ‘They shall not grow old’, Age, 30 April 2005.

  4 V Wilkes in Weekend Australian, 25 April 1981.

  5 Editorial, Australian, 23 April 1980, also see Editorial, Australian, 27 April 1981.

  6 Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1988; also see M McKenna, ‘Metaphors of light and darkness: The politics of “Black Armband History”’, Melbourne Journal of Politics, vol 25, 1998, pp 71–2.

  7 Editorial, Australian, 23 April 1980, Editorial, Australian, 27 April 1981.

  8 For examples of the queen’s message on Anzac Day see Canberra Times, 25 April 1940 and Canberra Times, 26 April 1965, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1959, p 1 and 25 April 1963, p 1; also see Queen Elizabeth II’s Australia Day message, 1970.

  9 T Stephens, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1988; Bruce Ruxton’s comments can be found in Weekend Australian, 26 April 1982, on Turks leading the march, see Canberra Times, 26 April 1974; on the history of the treatment of Vietnam veterans see M McKenna, ‘Howard’s warriors’ in R Gaita (ed) Why the War was Wrong, Text, Melbourne, 2003, pp 167–200.

  10 Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1940; on ‘bloodlust’, see Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1990; Bob Hawke’s speech reported in both the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1990; also see Hawke’s website http://www.library.unisa.edu.au/bhpml/speeches_photos.asp, which contains the full transcript of his speech; E Ashmead-Bartlett, ‘Australians at the Dardanelles: Thrilling deeds of heroism’, Argus, 8 May 1915 quoted in D Gare and D Ritter (eds) Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, Thomson, Melbourne, 2008, p 289.

  11 The full text of Hawke’s Australia Day speech in 1988 can be found on his website, http://www.library.unisa.edu.au/bhpml/speeches_photos.asp.

  12 Hawke in Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1990, pp 1, 4.

  13 On Paul Keating see Weekend Australian, 24–25 April 1993, p 1 and editorial; also see the liftout in the Australian, 26 April 2000.

  14 On John Howard and the flag, see Australian, 25 April 1996, p 1 and editorial, also on the same day, see Donald Horne’s op ed, in which he argued that that young Australians were looking for some articulation of binding values in Anzac Day and in Australia Day.

  15 Australian, 25 and 26 April 2000, the paper’s editorial on 25 April noted the ‘pride’ of the pilgrims; Howard at the Dawn Service Gallipoli 25 April 2000, reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 2000; also see Howard’s interview with Mike Munro, A Current Affair, 26 April 2000, both this interview, and the full transcript of Howard’s speech at Gallipoli, were drawn from Howard’s website when he was prime minister (not currently available).

  16 For details on Howard’s encouragement of Anzac Day, particularly the international context of war, see M McKenna, ‘The Anzac myth’ in T Jones (ed) The Best Australian Political Writing, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2008, pp 333–35; also see M McKenna and S Ward, ‘“It was very moving Mate” Anzac Day and sentimental nationalism’, Australian Historical Studies, no 129, April 2007, pp 141–51.

  17 See Howard’s Anzac Day addresses, 25 April 2001, especially 25 April 2003 and 25 April 2005; also Howard at the State funeral for Alec Campbell (the last Anzac Gallipoli veteran), 24 May 2002, and Howard nominating Anzac Cove to head a new National Heritage List, Editorial, Age, 27 April 2005; also Howard’s Australia Day speech as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2006, p 11, in which he proclaimed: ‘we should have faith in what we have achieved and what we have become … the time has come for a root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history in our
schools’; for examples of press support for the new Anzac Day see Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 23–24 April 2005, p 30 and Editorial, Australian, 19 October 2005 and Editorial, Australian, 25 April 2000 noting the ‘pride’ of the pilgrims and P Kelly, ‘Empire’s battle was our fight too’, Australian, 26 April 2000, in which Kelly wrote: ‘The Gallipoli resurgence enshrines Anzac as the central and unifying story of Australia’s national spirit.’ The Labor Opposition, led by Kim Beazley, was not far behind, see Beazley in Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 17 June 2002, p 3414, Anzac Day, Beazley told the House, was now the ‘core element of our national psychology’; finally see Howard’s Australia Day address in 2007, reported in all major broadsheets the following day.

  18 Howard speaking at Australia House, 10 November 2003 (‘Australians at War’), also see Howard visiting Iraq in 2005, where he addressed Australian troops at Camp Smitty, Al Muthanna Province, 25 July 2005: ‘we have never had a war-like military tradition we Australians, we only deploy military force in a right and a just cause’; Vox pops from ABC AM, 25 April 2005 and Age, 25 April 2005; for the beer-soaked celebrations of the so called pilgrims to Anzac Cove, see A Gilbertson, ‘In the fields of the fallen’, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, 23 April 2005, pp 28–30.

  19 Howard equated history with ‘national inheritance’, in his Quadrant address, 3 October 2006; for Howard’s history of pride and honour see his Anzac Day address, 25 April 2001.

  20 Today, 25 April 2006; ABC TV, The First Tuesday Book Club, 24 April 2007; G Henderson in Sydney Morning Herald, 19 April 2005; my thanks to Mads Clausen and Stuart Ward for these references.

  21 Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1965, p 2; for examples of fears that Anzac Day would die with the diggers, see Australian, 25 April 1969 and 26 April 1973, also Editorial, Courier Mail, 26 April 1973, p 1; for clashes see West Australian, 26 April 1969 and 24 April 1972, also Courier Mail, 26 April 1968; for the throwing of red paint, see P Cochrane, Australians at War, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001, p 219; for examples of welcome-home parades for Vietnam veterans see Courier Mail, 13 November 1970, p 3 and Age, 26 April 1972.

  22 Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1967; West Australian, 24 April 1965; on new nationalism, see Editorial, Australian, 25 April 1973; on the controversy over the playing of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ on Anzac Day see Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1974, Courier Mail, 26 April 1974, Age, 26 April 1974; on the lack of agreement over a new national identity, see Editorial, Australian, 25 April 1969 and Editorial, Australian, 25 April 1967; for examples of press support for Anzac Day as Australia’s only true national day, see Editorial, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1970 and 25 April 1972, also Courier Mail, 25 April 1970; my thanks to Stuart Ward for all newspaper references from the 1960s–80s used in this essay.

  Chapter 6 How do schoolchildren learn about the spirit of Anzac?

  1 Unless otherwise stated all the information about the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) programmes and funding can be found in DVA annual reports and on its website http://www.dva.gov.au.

  2 M Caulfield, Voices of War: Stories from the Australians at War Film Archive, Hodder, Sydney, 2006. See also Gallipoli: The First Day (the full 3D interactive site), available at http://www.abc.net.au/innovation/gallipoli.

  3 Prime Minister John Howard, Quadrant address, 3 October 2006.

  4 A Clark, History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, p 46.

  5 K Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Macleay Press, Sydney, 2002; R Manne (ed) Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black Inc Agenda, Melbourne, 2003.

  6 L Reed, Bigger Than Gallipoli: War, History and Memory in Australia, UWA Press, Nedlands, pp 14–15.

  7 DVA, Annual Report 1996-97.

  8 DVA, Annual Report 1999–2000, pp 84–5; P Bowers, Anzacs, The Pain and the Glory of Gallipoli, Australia Post, Melbourne, 1999.

  9 DVA, Annual Report 1999–2000, p 85.

  10 DVA, Annual Report 2001–02.

  11 DVA, Annual Report 2001–02.

  12 DVA, Annual Report 2002–03.

  13 DVA, Annual Report 2002–03.

  14 DVA, Annual Report 2004-05.

  15 See the websites: http://www.anzacsite.gov.au and http://www.ww2australia.gov.au.

  16 Clark, History’s Children, p 47.

  17 Clark, History’s Children, pp 46–7.

  Epilogue: Moving on?

  1 S Brugger, Australians and Egypt, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980.

  2 Australia, Parliamentary Debates, vol lxxxix, 1919, p 12175. See M Lake and H Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2008, pp 308–09.

  3 Mercury (Hobart), 1 August 2009.

  4 Mercury (Hobart), 1 August 2009.