A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  These matters were not mentioned in the first news despatches which arrived almost two weeks later. Instead, the Melbourne Argus announced that Australia had ‘in one moment stepped into the worldwide arena in the full stature of great manhood’. Australia now had ‘a place among nations . . . on the anvil of Gallipoli was hammered out the fabric of what is destined to be our most enduring national tradition’.2 Thus the Australian ‘legend’ was cast; by emphasising the willingness, dash and bravery of the Anzacs, imperial chroniclers were able to obscure the scandalous truth of Gallipoli, whose victims were exploited as shock troops, in an engagement of no military or strategic worth and the folly of which was repeated many times over on the Western Front in France.

  In 1987 I spent Anzac Day in the village of Villers-Bretonneux in France. It was here that Australian troops broke through the German advance in April and May 1918. On the brow of the hill, overlooking the town and its surrounding fields wild with mustard flower, stands the Australian war memorial, white and clean, its lawns manicured and headstones paraded in perfect symmetry. There are only 772 headstones; the rest, 11,000 in all, have no known grave. In the ‘Great War’ men tended to be blown to small pieces.

  Seen from afar, a phantom image runs across these fields, regardless of seventy years’ ploughing; it is the jagged line of the trenches in which the men were slaughtered. Here I found a ‘bully beef’ can, a strand of barbed wire, pieces of shrapnel; in each scoop of earth cupped in my hands there were fragments of bone, the remains of those whose names are inscribed on the memorial wall. It was late afternoon and lightning arched over the fields as it began to rain heavily; the white fragments washed into a culvert. I ran for cover in the village.

  ‘Are you Australian?’ said a man outside the church, where an Anzac ceremony would be held that evening.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am a teacher. We owe a debt to the diggers; it wasn’t their war and it wasn’t their cause. My father used to ask: why did they come?’

  He produced a brown paper package, carefully wrapped with string, which was a sepia photograph of two diggers in their poncho capes (digger being the Australian word for soldier), the rain coursing down their ‘slouch hats’ with the brims turned down all round, as the Australian General John Monash insisted of his ‘elite’ Third Division. Both men were beaming, one with his single tooth and large freckled forehead, the other with his bony arms on his hips, the way Australians stand. ‘My grandfather took this picture the day they came,’ said the teacher. ‘He was so pleased to see them, but he never knew why they came.’

  When the war was over, Australian money rebuilt Villers-Bretonneux and children from the State of Victoria donated the money which raised a new school; among them were those whose fathers had fallen here. On the wall of every classroom are the words, N’oublions Jamais l’Australie – We Never Forget Australia. On the day I was at the school children sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and displayed drawings of kangaroos and the Sydney Opera House, as well as a Toohey’s beer poster and ancient water colours entitled ‘Herbert River ring-tailed possum’ and ‘Pont sur le Yarra à Melbourne’.

  That evening French veterans (mostly of the Second World War) filled the church with their vast unit banners. A contingent of serving diggers presented the usual spruce faces of the career military, so unlike those in the sepia photograph. One of them whispered tired jokes about the quality of French soldiering. A small French girl spoke movingly about her country’s gratitude; the daughter of an Australian diplomat chirped a warm response. Hymns and anthems were then sung and the ‘Last Post’ was played by candlelight outside, its lament drifting over the fields of white fragments.

  The dead at Villers-Bretonneux

  rise gently on a slope towards

  the sky. The land is trim – skylines

  of ploughed earth and steeples; unfallen

  rain still hanging in the air;

  confusion smoothed away

  and everything put back – the village

  too (red brick/white sills) in nineteen

  twenty, unchanged since. Headstones

  speak a dry consensus. Just one

  breaks free: ‘Lives Lost, Hearts Broken –

  And For What?’3

  During the First World War, Australia, with a population of fewer than five million people, lost 59,342 young men and sustained 152,171 wounded. As a percentage, more Australians died than Americans in both that war and in all the years of the Vietnam War. Australian battle casualties represented more than 64 per cent of troops in the field; only the French figure was higher. No army was as decimated as that which came from farthest away. And all were volunteers. The Australian Prime Minister overseeing this carnage was the famous imperial warlord, Billy Hughes, also known as ‘the little digger’. Although Hughes himself never fought in any war, he loved the British Empire and made his reputation by calling it to arms. ‘War’, said Hughes with relish, ‘ . . . war prevents Australians from becoming flabby. War has purged us from moral and physical decay!’

  At the height of the war the British demanded more Australians, and so did Hughes. With the confidence of one whose oratory had been acclaimed in Britain, he announced a national referendum on conscription. If the ‘yes’ failed, he warned, Australians at home ‘will be like sheep before [the German] Butcher’. The same year, 1916, also saw the Easter Uprising in Ireland; and Irish Australians were in no mood to die for King and Country. Nor were those in the Australian labour movement, who remained unmoved by Hughes’s desperate invocation of the ‘threat’ of the ‘Yellow Peril’ – ‘This lonely outpost of the white man’s civilisation will be deprived of its scanty garrison and left open to cheap Asiatics, reduced to the social and economic level of Paraguay or some other barbarian country.’4

  Above all, and in marked contrast to the campaigns of women’s organisations in Britain, it was women who mounted the successful 1916 campaign against conscription, which started the modern phase of Australians’ struggle for independence. Led by the Women’s Peace Army, their propaganda was brilliant. A famous poster, declared illegal in several States, was headed ‘The Blood Vote’ and showed an anxious woman placing her vote in the ballot-box above the verse:

  Why is your face so white, Mother?

  Why do you choke for breath?

  Oh, I have dreamt in the night, my son,

  That I doomed a man to death.

  On polling day all but one of Australia’s political leaders urged a ‘yes’ vote. They lost. A majority followed the women, and in a second referendum called by Hughes the following year the nation again voted ‘no’. The writer and historian Donald Home has described the result ‘not as a protest against the war, but as an affirmation that the war was to be fought in the Australian manner’ – with volunteers.5

  That was true of the way the ‘no vote’ campaign was run; but its success had deeper roots. Such a poll would have been unthinkable during the Second World War, when Australia was in real danger of invasion. My mother, Elsie, a fine oral historian, was a student during the First World War. In 1983 she recalled the ‘great unease’ ordinary people felt about the war, Protestants and Irish Catholics alike. ‘We were conditioned to being part of the Empire, we couldn’t see straight in front of us,’ she said, ‘but we knew in our hearts we were being used and conned and that what we should be fighting for was not in Europe, but right here at home. The anti-conscription vote was pretty close, but when you think of all the gush Hughes was giving us, the result was really an act of national rebellion. And it was led by women – who, I might add, didn’t give up knitting socks for the poor beggars in the trenches.’

  For many Australians, there was no historical record of this. When I was at school in the 1950s ‘history’ ended at 1914. I was assured that there had not been enough time to develop ‘a proper perspective’. As for ‘contemporary history’, it did not exist. In the ancient books we read, imported from England or reprinted from the English originals, there were
merely asides or footnotes about the Anzacs.

  The Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League, a lobby which became almost as powerful as the Catholic Church, had called for ‘the prohibition of war books which defame the soldiers of the Empire’ and demanded that ‘all war books should be censored by the official war historian’. The New South Wales Government complied, banning among others the classic novel All Quiet on the Western Front.6 The First World War was to be remembered as a war without horror, as we could see in George Coates’s famous painting, ‘Arrival of the First Australian Wounded from Gallipoli at Wandsworth Hospital, London’, in which the wounded were treated with dignity, and George Lambert’s ‘The Landing at Anzac’, in which all was manly, romantic and admirable.

  My mother and father grew up in the same mining town, Kurri Kurri, in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The main street of Kurri Kurri was almost as wide as a paddock, with hitching posts on either side. The shops were shaded by great awnings of corrugated iron and the cavernous pub had balconies of fine wrought iron. The mines were worked according to nationality: a pit for the Scots, one for the Welsh, another for the Australian born. There was a brass band and a pipe band, a WEA (Workers’ Educational Association), a Miners’ Institute, a School of Arts, a well-used library and an annual eisteddfod.

  My mother’s father had taken his expanding family there in 1906, by train and bullock dray. They lived in Hopetoun Street, named, like so many streets, after the Earl of Hopetoun, the Viceroy who had presided at Federation. Their house was made of slab weatherboard in the 1860s and dragged on wooden wheels to Kurri Kurri. At that time it was the only solid structure in Hopetoun Street; the rest were ‘bag humpies’, frames of branches covered with hessian, not unlike the traditional Aboriginal shelter. When I found the house still standing in 1987, the occupant, a lady of my mother’s vintage, said, ‘Of course I remember that family! How could you forget them? They ended up with a dozen kids, didn’t they? [nine actually] . . . lots of girls, all beautifully turned out every Sunday in frills and bows, and in the dust or mud! . . . Yes, I remember that Elsie. She had curls and was always reading. You’re not Elsie’s boy, are you? Are you, dinkum? Good God!’

  My father’s father, Richard, was a German seafarer whose ship, the fully rigged Maréchal Suchet, had put into the nearby port of Newcastle in 1896. ‘I was at the rail with the mate looking down upon the crowd of sightseers who had gathered around the ship under a canopy of waving parasols’, he wrote, ‘when I found myself gazing into the eyes of a most attractive woman.’7 This was my grandmother, Alice, who was to wave goodbye many times during the years she bore him five children.

  When he finally ‘came ashore’ and worked in the mines, Richard Pilger became one of Australia’s first naturalised citizens. He believed Australia to be a ‘special place’ and took his new citizenship seriously: so much so that he enlisted in the Australian army when war broke out in 1914 and offered himself for service against the land of his birth. But Germans then were ‘baby-devouring Boche’ and German agents were said to be ‘rife’ among the 33,000 German-Australians, who soon became the ‘enemy within’ and a ‘nest of traitors’. South Australia, the State with the strongest German heritage, prohibited the teaching of German. The town of Hamburg became Haig; German Creek became Empire Vale; Mount Bismarck became Mount Kitchener.

  Incipient violence entered the lives of my grandfather and his family after a smear campaign against them. The English, Scots and Welsh in the pits refused to work with Richard. Desperate to feed his family, he was forced to drift from one miserably paid job to another, until the inevitable accusation – ‘German, out!’ A quarter of a century later, during another war, my brother Graham was stoned at school for his German name. Such events tend to happen in an immigrant society, especially one that fights other people’s wars.

  Captain Jim Throssell took the stand in a large public rally at Northam’s Peace Day Celebrations in Western Australia in 1919. He seemed to many to be the logical choice. A champion athlete and the son of a conservative politician, he had been wounded at Gallipoli and awarded the Victoria Cross.

  He took his position on the stand next to the West Australian Premier, receiving loud applause from those in attendance. But the enthusiasm turned to an uncomfortable embarrassment. For Captain Throssell did not give the usual platitudes about King and Empire, his address was Why The War Made Me A Socialist.

  He explained how the war had lost its glory for him when his brother disappeared at the second battle of Gaza, and he spent all night searching in vain through trenches full of the dead and dismembered. He believed that the war was not only futile, it was an imperialist venture.

  His wife was in the audience, Katharine Susannah Prichard, then a struggling author, later to become one of Australia’s greatest writers. Katharine recorded, ‘You could have heard a pin drop. Jim himself was ghastly, his face all torn with emotion. It was terrible – but magnificent.’8

  John ‘Togs’ Tognolini, ‘Red Anzacs’

  When Kurri Kurri welcomed home its survivors from the ‘Great War’, the miners’ stadium was draped with banners such as ‘Home is Jock the Brave’. The bands paraded and the men marched; but tears of pride hardly disguised the poverty. The diggers had not come home to the jobs the pit owners had promised to keep for them. A general strike in 1917 had closed the mines and now the woolclip remained on the docks. Riots spread as the diggers contemplated their ‘glory’.

  In the Hunter Valley the miners fought on the issue of safety. With some shafts almost vertical and so confined that a man had to shovel coal over his shoulder, the coalfields around Kurri Kurri were among the most dangerous in the world. First-aid stations and training were unknown. The owners were intransigent and brought prosecutions against miners’ lodges under the Master and Servant Act; strikers were sent to prison as felons and scabs went to work in shafts where men had died. ‘Tin-kettling was the battle cry,’ recalled Elsie. ‘Women and children would appear on verandas, in doorways, each with a kettle and a spoon. When the scabs were sighted, they’d beat to a rhythm that made your blood curdle. It was a terrible sound; we’d dread to hear when the shifts changed.’

  By 1929 the New South Wales coalfields were in a state of open rebellion. A new Federal Labor Government, elected on a promise to support the miners, allowed a conservative New South Wales Government to nationalise the mines in order to run them with scab labour. In what they called an ‘historic compromise’, the mine owners demanded a cut in wages and the right to dismiss at will; notices were sent immediately to 10,000 men. In an accompanying press campaign the miners’ resistance was described as ‘treacherous to our British way of life’. Many of the miners had fought for Britain.

  Rothbury mine was the first to open with non-union labour. On December 16 a column of miners, intent on turning back the scabs, set out from Kurri Kurri behind a pipe band. They were met by a paramilitary force known as the ‘Basher Gang’, who drew their revolvers and fired. Scores were wounded and Norman Brown of New Greta Lodge was killed. Jim Comerford, then a sixteen-year-old miner, was there. At the age of seventy-four, he described to me ‘a revolutionary atmosphere’:

  There were three lines of foot police, then behind them the mounted police, then another line of foot police with revolvers drawn. When they started firing, Thomas, my mate, fell down screaming beside me, ‘I’ve been hit.’ I could see a kid of my own age with two bullets under the loose skin under his jaw. A lot of the young blokes went down to collect the wounded, and the police let them. The men then tried to get to the pit railway to pull it up, and you could hear the bullets hitting the water tank. No one knew how many had been hit. There was a woman nearby who tore up all her bed sheets to make bandages. I pushed through a crowd, and a white-faced Rothbury miner said, ‘You can’t go there, son. It’s young Norman. He’s done for.’ I didn’t see him, but by Jesus I heard him. I’ll never want to hear that awful sound again . . . and we were beaten.9

 
Insurrection became a presence in the streets of dust and small prim houses of weatherboard and iron. On January 7, 1930 a meeting of 400 ex-servicemen at Kurri Kurri established a Labour Defence Army, the first of its kind in the English-speaking world. The first parade of the ‘people’s army’ was held in the centre of nearby Cessnock, where more than a thousand miners were drilled by former soldiers and cheered on by the townspeople.

  A week later, at a second parade in Kurri Kurri, the army’s strength had doubled and was gathering support from beyond the coalfields. It was a hot, grey day with squalls threatening. Suddenly the Basher Gang reappeared, driving motorcycles through the spectators, clubbing women and children, dragging others from shops and doorsteps and beating them. People fought back; barricades went up; the police withdrew. On January 17 the Labor Senator J. C. Eldridge warned of ‘impending civil war’. The historian A. G. L. Shaw wrote that in the early 1930s New South Wales ‘was on the brink of serious disorder, to say the least’.

  The election of Jack (‘the Big Fella’) Lang as State Premier of New South Wales in 1925 had given the miners hope. Lang had enacted legislation which helped the miners establish employers’ liability for injury or death. This was followed by the Mines Rescue Act, which brought rescue stations and the training of rescue squads. The Lang Government introduced the world’s first child benefits legislation, as well as widows’ pensions and the forty-four hour week. Lang believed the source of poverty and social distress in Australia lay in the imperial connection. Certainly Australia’s economy, based on wool and wheat, depended on loans from London banks and on the capriciousness of the London money market.10

  Indeed, the Great Depression was first felt in Australia not with the crash of Wall Street but with the failure of two Australian loans in London early in 1929. The exchange rate was devalued by private English banks; the Government of Australia had no say. The upheaval that followed struck Australia harder than Britain or the United States. By 1933 a third of breadwinners were out of work. Communities of unemployed sprang up on the outskirts of the cities. Vistas of squalor became known as ‘happy valleys’: such is the Australian exigence for irony.