What's Wrong With Anzac? Read online

  Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi are prize-winning historians of twentieth century Australia. Lead authors Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds recently co-authored Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality which won the Queensland Premier’s Prize for History and the Ernest Scott Prize, and were joint winners of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Non-Fiction.

  MARILYN LAKE is professor of history at La Trobe University. She is the author and co-author of a number of books including The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–38; Creating a Nation (co-author); the biography, FAITH: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist and Getting Equal: The History of Feminism in Australia.

  HENRY REYNOLDS is professor of history at the University of Tasmania and is author of many books including The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia; Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land; Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth About Our History and Nowhere People.

  MARK MCKENNA is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of This Country: A Reconciled Republic?; Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place; The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia, 1788–1996 and co-editor of Australian Republicanism: A Reader. His biography of Manning Clark will be published this year.

  JOY DAMOUSI is professor of history at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia; The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia; Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia and co-author of Footy Passions.

  CARINA DONALDSON is a postgraduate student in history at La Trobe University. She is writing a PhD thesis on the memorialisation of the Vietnam War.

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH ANZAC?

  THE MILITARISATION OF AUSTRALIAN HISTORY

  Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds

  with Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi

  A New South book

  Published by

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  www.unswpress.com.au

  © Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi 2010

  First published 2010

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Title: What’s wrong with Anzac?/Marilyn Lake ... [et. al.]

  Edition: 1st ed.

  ISBN: 978-1-74224-002-2

  Notes: Includes Bibliography.

  Subjects: Australia. Army. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

  World War, 1914–1918 – Historiography.

  Collective memory.

  History – Psychological aspects.

  Australia – Historiography.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Lake, Marilyn.

  Dewey Number: 940.394072

  Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction: What have you done for your country?

  Marilyn Lake

  1 Are nations really made in war?

  Henry Reynolds

  2 Colonial Cassandras: Why weren’t the warnings heeded?

  Henry Reynolds

  3 Whatever happened to the anti-war movement?

  Carina Donaldson and Marilyn Lake

  4 Why do we get so emotional about Anzac?

  Joy Damousi

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

  Mark McKenna

  6 How do schoolchildren learn about the spirit of Anzac?

  Marilyn Lake

  Epilogue: Moving on?

  Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake

  Notes

  PREFACE

  For several years now Australia has seen the relentless militarisation of our history: the commemoration of war and understandings of our national history have been confused and conflated. The Anzac spirit is now said to animate all our greatest achievements, even as the Anzac landing recedes into the distant past.

  Anzac Day has been promoted as our national day, but there has been a resurgence, too, in Remembrance Day, VP Day and Vietnam Veterans’ Day. Since 1990, when Bob Hawke became the first Australian prime minister to preside over the Dawn Service at Anzac Cove, we have witnessed an extraordinary increase in the number of books, newspaper articles, documentaries and electronic media programmes devoted to the history of Australians at war. Political leaders of all persuasions, government departments led by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, national institutions such as the Australian War Memorial, mass media, opinion makers, publishers and schools in every state and territory now either actively fund or promote the commemoration of Australians at war, whether at Gallipoli, Fromelles or Kokoda, in Korea and Vietnam, not just on special days, but throughout the year.

  Yet the sudden rush to embrace 25 April as the Australian story has resulted in a crowning irony: in transforming Anzac Day into a sacred myth, we have forgotten our rich and diverse history of nation-making and distorted the history of Gallipoli and its Imperial context and consequences.

  As Australian historians, we have written this book because we are deeply concerned about many aspects of the Anzac resurgence. We are concerned about the extraordinary government intervention in promoting Anzac Day, most of which has occurred without people knowing its true extent. We are also concerned about the misrepresentation and forgetting of our broader history.

  History runs counter to myth-making. We write to encourage a more critical and truthful public debate about the uses of the Anzac myth. We write because we want to do justice to Australia’s long anti-war tradition which was born in revulsion at the terrible cost of war. Most importantly we write because we think it is time to reclaim our national civil and political traditions of democratic equality and social justice in whose name we now ask our soldiers to fight.

  NOTE Although the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps may be abbreviated as ANZAC we follow common usage in writing ‘Anzac’ in lower case, as in CEW Bean’s ‘The Anzac Book’ and the designation of 25 April as Anzac Day.

  INTRODUCTION

  What have you done for your country?

  Marilyn Lake

  ‘My question is: what have you done for your country? … please no lecturing. You haven’t earned the right.’

  Email to author, 23 April 2009

  ‘Questioning the cultural primacy of the Anzac myth is neither traitorous nor disrespectful of the dead.’

  Potoroo, Age blog, 23 April 20091

  To write about what’s wrong with Anzac today is to court the charge of treason. And much else besides. When I presented a public lecture on the subject last April, which was printed in an abridged version as an ‘Opinion’ piece in the Age newspaper, and later broadcast on Radio National, an avalanche of correspondence descended, much of it in the form of personal abuse and accusations of disloyalty. In the Age blog that followed emotions ran high.

  I had been invited by the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria and the University of Melbourne to give a lecture on the ‘Myth of Anzac’ in a series on ‘Mythologies’. I addressed the power of Anzac mythology in Australia today and the way that it had come to serve as White Australia’s creation myth. Federation had inaugurated the Commonwealth of Au
stralia as a new nation state in 1901, but clearly many felt that – at the symbolic level at least – that there was something missing.

  It was at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, so the legend ran, that the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) made good: a nation was born on that day of death. War provided the supreme test of nationhood. As the official war historian, CEW Bean wrote, the Great War served as a test of Australian national character and the men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) had passed that test triumphantly. Despite the Gallipoli campaign ending months later in military defeat, for Australia its triumph lay in

  the mettle of the men themselves. To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness … to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that he had set his hand to a soldier’s task and had lacked the grit to carry it through – that was the prospect which these men could not face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.2

  In proving their manhood – brave, firm, loyal and steadfast – these men (so it was said) had proven our nationhood.

  But now in the twenty-first century, I suggested in the lecture, perhaps it was time to move on from such Imperial myths and proclaim ourselves a free and independent republic, enshrining not militarist values, but the civil and political values of equality and justice, which in an earlier era had been thought to define a distinctive ‘Australian ethos’. At its heart was an ‘egalitarian social doctrine’, as leading historian Bob Gollan had written, ‘a belief in equality of opportunity, and a conviction that in Australia men had a right to a good life’.3 That aspiration was widely attractive to diverse Australians including Chinese colonists who joined in the celebration of Federation in 1901, as John Fitzgerald has noted, even though they were subject to systematic racial discrimination. From the 1870s Chinese Australians had invoked Australia’s commitment to equality and common human rights to argue for their own citizen rights and for a multicultural Australia. Similarly early Aboriginal campaigns had demanded that political leaders extend the Australian principle of equality to grant full citizenship to Australia’s Indigenous people.

  It was time, I suggested in the lecture, for Australians to reclaim the best of our social and political traditions that had long defined the aspiration towards economic, social, sexual and racial equality as definitive of Australian values. This commitment to equality was reinforced when Australian women became the first in the world to win full political rights, possibly the only turning point in world history in which Australians led the way. Should not these distinctive national traditions and values inspire political leaders today, inform their public pronouncements and help shape national policy?

  Anzac Day had in any case long since ceased to be a day of solemn remembrance and become a festive event, celebrated by backpackers wrapped in flags, playing rock music, drinking beer and proclaiming their national identity on the distant shores of Turkey. Surely it was inappropriate, I suggested in the lecture, for a modern democratic nation to adopt an Imperial, masculine, militarist event as the focus of our national self-definition in the twenty-first century.

  What have you done for your country?

  The responses to the lecture, newspaper article and radio broadcast were immediate and passionate. They contained a mixture of hostility and support, personal abuse and thoughtful reflection. Some indignant Age bloggers said that I had no right to write on this topic. What had academics and ‘clever dick historians’ – especially female ones – ever done for their country except show lack of patriotic pride? ‘This fool of a woman should be charged with treason!!’ fulminated one critic. His advice was forthright: ‘Be quiet and be grateful.’ To interrogate the myth of Anzac was un-Australian and disrespectful. ‘How disgusting to call ANZAC a “myth”’, added Rick. ‘Get a reel job [sic].’ To refer to Anzac as a ‘myth’ said another was ‘unconscionable’. ‘And she calls herself Australian?’

  But there were as many contributors to the Age online forum and personal correspondents who expressed relief. ‘It came as a bright light amidst all the Anzac fanfare’, wrote one. ‘Congratulations!’ ‘Australia needs to drop the sentimental garbage that ANZAC day has become’, said another. ‘The soldiers of Gallipoli must be honoured however they are not apostles to be given religious reverence.’ ‘The Anzac fixation was always a bit odd, but during the Howard years it went completely off the rails’, wrote Neil. ‘The annual backpacker festival at Gallipoli is flat-out weird. I’m confident the average attendee’s knowledge of WW1 would comfortably fit on the back of a postage stamp.’ And from another happy blogger: ‘finally someone with the courage to stand up to the constant soldier worshipping we do here. Thank you, thank you, thank you!’

  The Anzac spirit

  For some correspondents, the significance of the ‘Anzac spirit’ went far beyond the commemoration of our war dead. Rather it gave meaning to all our history. It was the ‘very lifeblood of the country’, animating all national achievement:

  The ANZAC spirit, ethereal it may be, is the impetus behind our never say die attitude, the reason we excel at sport, the reason the country galvanized behind the victims of the Victorian bushfires, the reason we came to the aid of East Timor … ANZAC day is not just about honouring the war achievements and bravery of the war dead but acknowledging the virtues of our nation past and present so that they may be preserved for future generations.

  These sentiments faithfully echo the message promoted by official organisers of Anzac Day rituals:

  The Spirit of ANZAC is an intangible thing. It is unseen, unpredictable, an unquestionable thirst for justice, freedom and peace … the spirit of ANZAC is a cornerstone which underpins our Australian image, way of life and indeed is an integral part of our heritage.4

  But such rhapsodies received short shrift from more cynical contributors to the debate who pointed to different history lessons. The Anzacs ‘were not the first from our nation to work with allied nations in stupid wars, and they are definitely not the last’ wrote Groggo. ‘The one thing that stands out in all the Anzac hooha is that you are basically celebrating a magnificent tactical ballsup (historical fact) engineered by our mates the poms why don’t we get free of the poms and celebrate that?’ ‘Regarding Anzac’, wrote Troy, ‘We should be remembering people of peace not people of war. Anzac only reminds us of WAR. Australia has always been fighting someone else’s war.’ ‘In past years ANZAC Day has changed from remembering the dead soldiers who sacrificed their lives fighting other countries’ wars to glorifying war’, suggested Frank. ‘This type of glorification is making it easier for the world’s politicians to go to war instead of using diplomacy to solve problems that crop up between countries.’

  Central to the discussion was a dispute over the meaning of our engagement in foreign wars and their relevance to our national history and identity. Australians didn’t die to defend their freedom, observed Marg, but always fought in the interests of other countries: ‘Modern Australia was never in danger of being invaded by anyone … Instead European Australians’ forebears were the invaders of the First Australians’ homeland.’ ‘Identity is layered and plural’, Frankie suggested, ‘and to suggest that we as a nation should define ourselves solely through war takes away from the variety of experiences of Australian history, not least of which is a war on Indigenous people that goes unacknowledged’.

  Meanwhile, Daniel worried about the significance of the battle at Anzac Cove: ‘Because I can’t remember my high school history, could someone please tell me how crucial the battle of ANZAC cove was to the war? If “we” had lost there, would our lives today in Australia really be very different?’ No wonder Prime Minister John Howard had called for ‘a root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history in our schools’.5

  That the Allied forces were defeated at Gallipoli – the landing being followed by the evacuation – meant of course that nationalist myth-making had to focu
s on a different sort of triumph, as official historian CEW Bean recognised, which was the demonstration of ‘manly character’ now known in more gender neutral terms as ‘the spirit of Anzac’. As Murray described it online: ‘Stand by your mates and never ever give up. Why would we ever want to forget that?’ But was mateship really distinctive to Australians? ‘What’s this yammering about “mateship”, as if it’s a unique Aussie characteristic’, asked Max. ‘You think Russians, Americans, Chinese, French, Germans, Italians, Egyptians, Brazilians, Mongolians or anybody else don’t have mates?’

  The Age online forum on the Myth of Anzac attracted more than two hundred contributors to a lively, heated exchange that revealed not only deep divisions over the meaning of Anzac, but also how intertwined Australian history, identity and war commemoration have now become. In public mythologising, Gallipoli has become a sacred place, consecrated land, which the sovereign Turks disturb at their peril. Anzac Day is our national day, so the legend now asserts, because Australians fought there for our ‘freedom and democracy’ – even though the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli to assist our great ally and the world’s greatest autocracy, Russia. The diggers did not invade Turkey to defend democracy.

  Many contributors to the debate were aware that Australians enlisted in World War I to fight for king and empire. In fact a disproportionate number of the first recruits were English migrants. ‘The hard facts of history’ wrote Yakman to his fellow bloggers, ‘tell us that the Dardanelles campaign was instigated by Churchill at the urging of the Czar of Russia to open up a new battle front at a time when Russia was being hammered by the Germans and there was a stalemate on the western front’.

  Australians went to Gallipoli at the behest of the British, to aid the Mother Country. They served the empire well, as the British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett affirmed in his report of the pleasing performance of the ‘colonials’ in April 1915: