What's Wrong With Anzac? Read online

  In less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position, either bayoneted or fleeing …

  But then the Australians, whose blood was up, instead of entrenching, rushed northwards and eastwards, searching for fresh enemies to bayonet …

  These raw colonial troops in these desperate hours proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and Neuve Chapelle.

  Early in the morning of April 26 the Turks repeatedly tried to drive the colonials from their position. The colonials made local counter-attacks, and drove off the enemy at the point of the bayonet, which the Turks would never face.6

  The Turks were assumed to be cowards, but even so Ashmead-Bartlett was particularly impressed at the Anzacs’ dazzling skill with the bayonet especially when their ‘blood was up’.

  Today the cause of the war has been largely forgotten and its Imperial dimension is ignored. Rather, a new story of our expeditionary forces fighting for freedom and democracy has taken hold and it has been extended to cover all twentieth century wars: ‘our freedoms [were] defended by Australian service men and women in Gallipoli, WW2, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan’ wrote Paul. To which Troy replied: ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom! We sound like brain-washed Americans’. But Brett was drawn to the story of freedom and the soldier’s role in securing it: ‘It is the soldier, not the reporter who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the protest organiser who has given us freedom of speech’.

  When did the story of Anzacs fighting for our freedom begin? Certainly Americans have long told this story about their own history. ‘No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom’ wrote the US historian Eric Foner in The Story of American Freedom in 1998.7 Indeed Barak Obama invoked this history in his Inauguration Address. But since when has the idea of fighting for freedom been central to the stories Australians tell about themselves? It was democratic equality and the fair go, the demand for justice and the assertion of rights that were once central to Australians’ ‘sense of themselves’. At the heart of Australian nationalism, was a belief in equality of opportunity, but ‘equality of opportunity’ is not a value invoked by the ‘spirit of Anzac’. Even as its custodians do their very best to make it inclusive, welcoming Aborigines and women into the ranks of Anzacs, such efforts ironically testify to the depth of the traditional Australian commitment to equality.

  Many participants in the online debate who felt uncomfortable with the myth-making attached to Anzac invoked the ‘facts of history’: ‘We have never been independent and have always followed our colonial masters – whether UK or currently USA. All of our wars including WW2 were in fact due to our compliance with Pax Britania [sic] or Pax America. We have never gone to war for freedom or democracy as the marketing slogans perpetuate’. Michael told readers of the Age that he had only recently discovered that other countries had more troops in the Allied forces at Gallipoli than Australia: ‘Turks, appx 80 000, Great Britain appx 30 000, French appx 12 000 … Australia appx 8500, NZ appx 3500’. Indeed the landing was an international affair, not a narrowly national one and is best understood as part of the larger history of an Imperial world in which empires came into deadly conflict.

  Other contributors to the debate urged readers to remember that far from fighting for Australian freedom, Australians invaded Turkey in 1915, a country that in no way threatened Australia. Now in 2009 it was still their sovereign territory despite the regular invasion each April and Australian outrage at local road improvements. ‘If anyone can show me how invading Turkey in 1915 was in any way a defence of our freedoms, I would love to hear about it. In what way were the Turks threatening our Australian way of life?’ Or as JLT suggested: ‘Let us not forget that the Anzacs were not defending Australia or our way of life, but were attacking and invading the Ottoman empire. If that is nation-building and defines Australia then we are defined by killing Turks defending their country.’ This was a disconcerting thought. As Daniel noted: ‘it’s extremely difficult to understand where the facts end and the myths/legends begin concerning Anzac’.

  In my public lecture I wanted to show that the mythologising of Anzac as our national creation story and the popular re-writing of history that had occurred as a result had effectively marginalised other formative experiences, especially cultural, social and political achievements in the making of the nation. I suggested that the militarisation of Australian history in schools – which had dramatically accelerated with the entry of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs into the business of pedagogy and curriculum design – had worked to sideline different stories of nation-building, oriented not to military prowess, but to visions of social justice and democratic equality. Surely Australians who had fought for sexual and racial equality had contributed more significantly to securing our democratic freedoms?

  We are now regularly told, however, by politicians, the media and the educationists at Department of Veterans’ Affairs that our national values derive from the military values displayed in battle, usually listed as courage, mateship and sacrifice, but not aggression, conformity, obedience to orders and a capacity to kill people. ‘It is about the celebration of some wonderful values’, Prime Minister Howard said in his Anzac Address in Canberra in 2003, ‘of courage, of valour, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost’.

  Such eulogies forget that soldiers don’t just die for their country, they also kill for it, sometimes in murderous rampages and covert massacres as recent research on the Light Horse Brigade in Palestine has highlighted. Our soldiers have been involved in many wars – from Vietnam to Iraq – that have inflicted terrible deaths and injuries on hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in villages, towns and countrysides. Whereas this ‘collateral damage’ was obvious in television coverage of the Vietnam War on the nightly news, we rarely see reports of civilian deaths and the destruction of villages in Afghanistan.

  Overseas battlefields have now become key national sites for Australians, where, school students are told, Australian history really happened. ‘You feel as an Australian’, said Prime Minister Howard nominating Anzac Cove to head the National Heritage List, ‘it’s as much a part of Australia as the land on which your home is built’.8 Many bloggers at the Age suggested that one only needed to go to Gallipoli to understand our history, to ‘see what it means first hand’. ‘I have been to Gallipoli myself’, wrote Kim, ‘and seen what our troops had to contend with’. He had seen ‘the actual trenches’. Others had a rather more cynical take on the pilgrimage to battlefields: ‘Bogans running around getting drunk at Gallipoli, our national identity’.

  One visitor felt he had to explain to European tourists what Australians were celebrating. ‘After answering several Europeans’ questions on the subject of what it was all about, Basques, Dutch and Germans were stunned that a country would go to a place they invaded, visiting in such vast numbers in often flagrant nationalistic displays, whilst the invaded country profited by ripping them off on tours and selling them drinks. A quiet commemoration is one thing, but tens of thousands, many with little or no connection to the events, arriving en masse is another.’

  During the last ten years, military history has become central to popular understandings of Australian history and in the process the rightful honouring of the war dead and the writing of national history have been conflated. Australian history has been thoroughly militarised. But because war commemoration centres on timeless military virtues – ‘the Anzac spirit’ – this new account of the national past is ironically profoundly ahistorical: all wars become one. History becomes a series of battles – at Gallipoli, the Somme, Fromelles, Kokoda, Tobruk, Long Tan, Oruzgan Province – in which the protagonists all demonstrate the same heroic virtues. Historical specificity, difference and changing contexts are lost sight of. For all the insistence of prime ministers Howard and Rudd on ‘the facts of history’ i
t is the ‘facts’ that get completely submerged in the mythology.

  Rather all battlefields become sites in one continuous war with Australian soldiers cast as always ‘fighting for our freedom’, their service always serving to ‘unite the nation’. ‘What does it matter if we focus on a military disaster’, wrote Pete, ‘as long as it unites the nation’. ‘To me Anzac day is so much more than Gallipoli’, wrote Troy. ‘It’s France, Changi, the Kokoda trail, the army nurses who lost their lives during the fall of Singapore and those who suffered at the hands of the Japanese.’ Indeed in a recent book by Peter Rees nurses at war have been paid the ultimate honour as The Other Anzacs.

  That World War I and Vietnam were in fact unpopular wars that deeply divided the nation does not sit easily with the myth of nation-building. ‘The focus on the Gallipoli campaign to the detriment of other significant historical events can be a problem’, wrote Peter, ‘I would argue that the rejection of the referenda for conscription in 1916 and 1917 was also fairly significant, but it was divisive rather than unifying so it rarely gets a look in’. Many Australians know, of course, from family experience that participation in the wars could be a devastating and deeply demoralising experience. ‘My great grandfather served in Fromelles’, wrote Troy. ‘Luckily he lived to be 101 and I experienced his stories and views first hand. He refused to attend an Anzac day ceremony and … let me assure you, he would be turning in his grave if he could see what ANZAC day had now become. At the time, like many ANZACS he was an unworldly and naïve young man, voluntarily enlisting in the meat grinder and his actions were mostly driven by primordial instincts, not some collective and god like ‘Australian’ courage.’

  As we show in chapter three, World War I and Vietnam generated strong anti-war movements, which called into question the purpose and legitimacy of those wars. The large peace movements that resulted are now largely lost to memory. Anti-war protesters in the 1960s and 1970s are now depicted as ‘anti-Anzac’. ‘Australian troops returning from Vietnam were spat on courtesy of Jim Cairns and the media’ wrote Woody in the online debate. But another blogger took issue with this story. Was this simply a new myth in the making that if repeated often enough would become a truth? ‘Care to offer any evidence that returning Australian soldiers were actually spat upon by Jim Cairns – or anybody else for that matter?’ asked Redsaunas. ‘Yet another myth to add to the mountain of soldier worship myths this country groans under.’

  To be accused of being ‘anti-Anzac’ in Australia today is to be charged with the most grievous offence. ‘I find your article deeply insulting and offensive’, wrote one blogger. ‘You can’t rewrite history, sorry. You are a revisionist.’ But who is re-writing Australian history? There are now more books published on Australians at war than ever before, hundreds during the last two decades alone. The shelves of bookshops groan under their weight and military history is usually given its own section of the shop. The myth of Anzac now dominates our understanding of Australian history and national identity, but it wasn’t always so. This shift in values is in need of explanation.

  It is not the case as many now assume that earlier historians saw the landing at Gallipoli as ‘a seminal moment in modern Australian history’ as one blogger suggested. Indeed it would come as a shock to many to realise that past histories of Australia, even officially sponsored ones, could omit all reference to Anzac and Gallipoli. Gordon Greenwood’s widely read text, Australia: A Social and Political History, officially sponsored by the Arts Sub-Committee of the 1951 Jubilee Celebrations Committee of the Commonwealth of Australia, first published in 1955 and reprinted many times in the 1960s and 1970s, has, astonishingly, no index entry to ANZAC, Anzac Day, Gallipoli, CEW Bean or the Returned Services League (RSL).

  In 1964 a survey of Australian historiography in the Pattern of Australian Culture omitted any reference to CEW Bean and the story of Anzac.9 As historian Ken Inglis told a gathering of his colleagues in Canberra that year, Australian historians, caught up in the political romance of the defeat of the conscription referenda, took no interest in the war itself. He thought that it was time they did and would soon recruit a bright young PhD student, Bill Gammage, who followed the example of CEW Bean, in rendering the experience of ordinary soldiers central to the history of World War I.10

  Throughout most of the twentieth century, the commemoration of the war dead on Anzac Day and the writing of Australian history had proceeded as quite separate and unrelated activities. Certainly Bean’s idea that ‘the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born at Gallipoli’ had become the ‘liturgy of Anzac Day’, as historian Geoff Serle remarked, but not the stuff of national history.11 Historians tended to pursue social and political themes and they found the emergence of a sense of Australian nationhood – an Australian ethos – elsewhere in the romance of the bush or nationalist literature, in the vision of the Heidelberg School or on sports grounds, in trade unions and the Labor Party, in the achievement of Federation and the Liberal experiment of nation-building after 1901.

  National values

  Gordon Greenwood’s Jubilee history, Australia, was a self-conscious ‘Australian’ departure from the English tradition of historical writing. This was represented, for example by Englishman Ernest Scott at the University of Melbourne, who not surprisingly located Australian history within the larger framework of British imperialism. For Scott, British traditions were everything and British history was Australian history. ‘It has stood for very much in the development of Australia’, he wrote, ‘that her people have been proud of their race and sensitive to maintain its best traditions. British history is their history.’ The population itself was ‘thoroughly British’ as were its values.12

  First published in 1916, Scott’s Short History of Australia was revised in the 1920s to take account of the impact of World War I. As official historian of the volume on the home front, Scott was mindful of its divisive impact on Australia, but he praised the Anzacs’ achievement as an example of British ‘valour’. Lest Australians show too much national pride in this military expedition, he reminded readers that ‘English as well as Australian troops took part in the Gallipoli campaign’.13

  In 1930 the historian WK Hancock also emphasised the importance of British traditions, but he discerned, too, the emergence in the new environment and circumstances of settlement a distinctive national ethos and set of values: ‘the sentiment of justice, the claim of right, the conception of equality’.14 Contemporary fiction writers and playwrights such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Louis Esson and Katharine Susannah Prichard (whose returned soldier husband Hugo Throssell committed suicide) also turned their backs on the war, when it came to defining national distinctiveness, writing stories and plays that emphasised the nation-building role of pioneering the outback and the new communities battling the bush. Ironically these outback pioneers have been retrospectively re-cast in a 2009 essay on ‘The Spirit of Anzac’ by retired Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Burke as the earliest exemplars of the Anzac spirit.15

  Katharine Prichard – who like many of her friends was active in the anti-war movement – was deeply influenced by the war experience of her husband and brother, whose letters home told of the terrible waste of lives:

  Describing a futile attack and the men dead and dying as a result of it, he wrote, ‘someone has blundered!’ and later: ‘I begin to agree with many of your ideas … War is a rotten business. A way must be found to stop it ever happening again.’16

  In the middle decades of the twentieth century most Australians had direct experience of the horror and waste of war and were thus less likely to romanticise or sentimentalise it.

  In these years historians looked to Australia’s political and social history for inspiration. Greenwood’s Australia was the main Australian history text used by teachers and lecturers from the 1950s well into the 1970s. The preface explained that the broad aim of the book, written for the ‘layman’ as well as the ‘specialist’ was to write ‘a political and social history o
f Australian society which would show the many-sided nature of its development at any given time’.17 Greenwood wrote about the formative nation-building period between 1901 and 1930, which included chapters on World War I and the 1920s. Although he wrote at length about the AIF’s military engagements, noting the soldiers’ reputation for ‘initiative and aggression’, Greenwood’s account of national development was not animated by ‘the spirit of Anzac’, but by an ‘Australian ethos’ that found its voice in nationalist literature in the late nineteenth century and social experimentation in the early twentieth.

  Frank Crowley’s New History of Australia published in 1974 during the time of the Whitlam government followed Greenwood in failing to register the role of the Anzac spirit in animating national history. The book contains just one (casual) reference to Anzac Day: in his chapter on the post-World War 2 period, 1939–51, Geoffrey Bolton notes that the Charles Chauvel film Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940) became ‘staple fare’ on Anzac Day afternoons.18 In his chapter on World War I, Ian Turner, who had himself served in the army in World War 2 described the heroism of the diggers at Gallipoli largely in terms of their anti-heroic behaviour: they were undisciplined, they ‘whinged continually’ about their conditions and they were racist, one of them asking why ‘Should White Australia defend Black Egypt?’19 CEW Bean was cast here not as a champion of the diggers, but as their censorious critic, whose ‘unpopularity among the soldiers took a long time to live down’.20 Besides Bean was an upper middle class Anglophile.

  The achievement of the Anzacs in Turner’s account was not to establish military values as national values, but rather to demonstrate ‘the established values of the bush’. Here Turner followed Russel Ward who had argued in his classic The Australian Legend that the Australian ethos was born among the outback pastoral workers and later projected onto the soldiers by Bean and other commentators. The New History of Australia also noted the emergence of the RSL on the right wing of politics in the 1920s to become ‘the most powerful pressure group in Australia for years to come’.21 Spokesmen for returned soldiers were conservative and imperialist in their politics and attracted little sympathy from left-leaning historians. The prominence of the RSL in Australian political life for much of the twentieth century caused many writers and historians to distance themselves from the Anzac legend.