Anzac's Dirty Dozen (35 page)

So, finally, we come to the most persistent myth of all: that war is central to Australia's history, the biggest thing in it. This idea stems from the familiar idea that the landing on Gallipoli represented ‘the birth of a nation'.
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This proposition implies that history is a mystical rather than a human process, and no one ever actually explains what ‘the birth of a nation' actually means. It is certainly a persistent idea. In July 2011, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston accepted the appointment to chair the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board. In his first public pronouncement, Houston said that ‘it was on the shore of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe where our nation was defined, where our nation was born'. Air Chief Marshal Houston is not alone. Standing at Anzac Cove on Anzac Day 2010, young Melbourne builder Chris Barr declared ‘This is where the history of our country begins'. At least Air Marshal Houston went on to say ‘I relish the challenge in getting it right'.
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Is he getting it right to make such a claim?
This idea that war is central to Australia's history and identity is, I confess, one I spent years fostering and justifying. When I worked at the Australian War Memorial (1980–2007), I would occasionally draft a speech or talk for someone more senior, and later for myself. In explaining the significance of military history to Australia – which it was part of my job to encourage – I often found myself adding a line to the effect that ‘war has been one of the most significant influences on Australia's history and on the lives of its people'. Superficially, this statement seems justifiable, even self-evident. Consider the numbers involved in the world wars overseas, the colossal casualties, the magnitude of suffering or – and this was the clincher – the way that, in the wake of the Second World War, non-British migration changed Australia's demographic composition forever. No longer required to advocate the claims of military history for my daily bread, I am now, however, less sanguine about such rhetoric: indeed, some may see me as an apostate – one who recants a former item of faith. Has war really been so significant to Australia's experience of history as a nation? Should Australians today think that war as an historical force deserves a pre-eminent position? If not, what other aspects of the historical experience should we regard as equally or even more significant?

This chapter examines these questions in three ways. First, it looks at recent arguments critical of the centrality of Anzac Day in unduly skewing Australian history towards war. Second, it considers other aspects of Australian historical experience that could be used to complement the attention accorded to war in justifiable and proportional ways. Third, it considers the continuing case of the world war memorials proposed for the shore of Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin, as a way of evaluating whether or not war justifies its supposed centrality in Australia's history.

We do, however, need to keep this re-evaluation and these
questions in perspective, and strenuously avoid any suggestion that we might be decrying or denigrating those who experienced war and its effects, especially on individuals and families. No one would doubt the importance of wartime experience either for individuals or families, or as a significant factor in shaping crucial aspects of the national experience. In discussing the place of war in the national historical experience, we would do well to recall the 102 000 Australians who did not return from war, or the even more numerous Australians who returned wounded in mind or body. But the significance of war's effects on Australia can be magnified unduly, and this is increasingly the case. Anzac Day especially has been harnessed to serve the purposes of the state – since 11 September 2001 a state in a condition of ‘war'. We might therefore begin by enquiring whether Anzac Day explains the primacy of war as the principal contemporary vehicle of Australia's national history.

In 2010 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds published their provocative collection of essays
What's Wrong with Anzac?
With collaborators Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi, they argued that ‘Australian history has been thoroughly militarised'. They argued that Anzac has become, as Mark McKenna put it, Australia's ‘most powerful myth of nationhood'.
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Military history has colonised the school curriculum, and dominated any other single aspect of Australia's history in popular publishing (with the possible exception of ‘true crime'). Lake documented the extraordinary and unparalleled expansion in budgets devoted to promoting the study of war in Australian schools, an effort principally funded by the Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA). ‘Why', she asked, ‘is one federal government department funded to produce history materials when other federal government departments are not?'
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It is a telling question. The idea of Anzac enjoys a privileged place in education, and indeed in Australian life. Why is this?
In the rhetoric of Anzac Day today, 25 April 1915 marks the point when Australia ‘became a nation' or ‘gained nationhood'; at which, as Charles Bean put it, ‘the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born'. As Mark McKenna asked in his chapter of
What's Wrong with Anzac?
, what did this do to the long history of the struggles for representative government in the Australian colonies; the creation of an Australian identity; the attainment of Federation in 1901; and the decade of nation-building that followed?

Contrary to post-Vietnam expectations of thirty years ago, Anzac Day has not died. In fact, it has gained in support, in numbers attending Anzac Day ceremonies at home and abroad, in the attention military history is accorded by publishers and the media, and in its place in school curricula. All of this essentially endorses a positive view of Australia's involvement in war, regardless of the historical circumstances of the conflict.

Barbecue chat analysis of the resurgence of Anzac Day generally gives John Howard (prime minister from 1996 to 2007) responsibility for encouraging, sanctioning, fostering or even funding the greater attention that Anzac Day received. As McKenna shows, however, in terms of the rhetoric of Anzac as the ‘real Australian national day', the process began under Bob Hawke (prime minister 1983–1992). Certainly his successor Paul Keating (prime minister 1992–1996), whose government funded the ‘Australia Remembers' year of 1995, must also bear a major share of the responsibility for what has effectively become a bipartisan support for elevating the standing of Anzac Day over the past twenty years. The result is that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, far from eroding, Anzac Day is entrenched as the
de facto
national day, eclipsing an Australia Day hampered by multiple disadvantages. Australia Day occurs during the summer holidays, enjoys lukewarm support outside New South Wales, and
is seemingly fatally tainted by the connotation that it celebrates what is widely seen as the European invasion of the continent. These disabilities leave Anzac Day triumphantly in possession of the field, bolstered by the greater support it enjoys among the public, the media, governments and publishers all eager to establish it as the anniversary of Australia's supposed birth as a nation.

The tone is indeed ‘triumphant'. Anzac Day has changed from being an occasion for public mourning for those sacrificed in an imperial cause to a celebration of those who died ‘to keep Australia free'. The word that most often recurs on Anzac Day is not ‘remembrance', ‘sadness' or ‘grief ', and still less any expression of regret that Australia committed itself as a nation to so many conflicts in such a short national history. Rather, it is ‘pride'. Many Australians are ‘proud' of their nation's military history. They express pride in its volunteer tradition, in the way it ‘punched above its weight' in war, of the skill, courage, ingenuity and general martial proficiency that Australian troops are said to have exhibited – all themselves myths already demolished in this book. Often Australians talk as if Australians alive today took part in the events that they commemorate: they talk about ‘us' and ‘we' even though no one alive today actually lived through or remembers the Great War . Now ‘we' talk about ‘us' on Gallipoli and ‘Our Anzac pride', as the
Herald Sun
put it on 25 April 2010.

The sheer numbers of war dead – what I might formerly have called ‘the magnitude of sacrifice' – might seem to explain why war has attracted such attention. War – and especially the Great War – saw such concentrated slaughter that it has tended to overwhelm or dull critical responses. Charles Bean's heartfelt observation that Pozières ridge is ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth' is always before us, and it takes an effort of will to look beyond it.
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For example, it is true that one in five of those members of the Australian Imperial
Force (AIF) who served overseas died; but that does not equate to a fifth of Australian men or their families. Only about four in ten ‘eligible' men volunteered to serve overseas, so perhaps something like one family in ten actually lost a son, husband or brother. Of course the question is complicated by what constitutes a ‘family', and is bedevilled by double- or even triple-counting: many men would be both brothers and sons; some would be fathers too; tragically, some families lost more than one member. It is at least a long way from Philip Knightley's claim of one family in two. Not that anyone really knows. No one has done the detailed demographic and genealogical research required for a definitive answer. I am just suggesting we be careful. Arithmetic like this might seem either heartless or ghoulish. But it is necessary, because it requires a stern discipline to keep in perspective the lives that war has cost Australia over the course of the twentieth century, or at least in the first half of it.

One of the themes of this chapter is that Australians have been content to allow wars and war remembrance to become the preserve of uniformed members of the defence services. So note that while the figure of ‘60 000 dead in the Great War' is one of the most well-known Australian historical statistics, hardly anyone but specialist medical or social historians can tell you that 12 000 people, the great majority civilians, died in the influenza epidemic that followed in that war's immediate wake. Were these people not also victims of war? According to the Australian War Memorial, if they died in uniform they were, but as civilians they were not. Yet surely the flu victims were at least indirect victims of war, as much as soldiers who died accidentally before embarking for overseas service (who nonetheless qualify for the ‘Roll of Honour'). Here the actual effects of a war are skewed because the idea of a Roll of Honour ascribes some civic virtue to the deaths recorded. This is a nonsense, of course: we surely ought to list
Australian deaths due to the Great War as 72 000, just as we routinely include civilian deaths in the death tolls of other wars: the Soviet Union in 1941–1945, say, or Korea in 1950–1953.

We can settle the question of war's effects for the second half of the century quite simply. It can be safely asserted that the experience of war left Australia largely untouched for the decades after 1950. The nation was technically fighting wars for about half of that half-century: in Korea for three years; Malaya for a decade; Vietnam for a further decade (the latter over-lapping with the ‘Confrontation' with Indonesia); and the brief Gulf War occupying a few months in 1990–1991. These wars were largely fought by regular services, although conscripts provided about 40 per cent of the army's strength in Vietnam. Despite dramatic opposition to the Vietnam War in its final years (evoking comparisons with the turmoil of the conscription debates of 1916 and 1917), such anti-war feeling was both short-lived and had few enduring ramifications for society. The brief opposition to Australian involvement in the Gulf War had even less social or political aftermath. In short, in the second half of the twentieth century, war rarely intruded on Australian domestic concerns. (Again, this is not to deny the long-lasting effects on the 50 000-odd Australians who fought in Vietnam, or the small number of regular service personnel or families on whom the burden of the past decade of conflict has fallen.)

If we make a claim, however, for war's pre-eminence based on how many Australians have lost their lives fighting, perhaps we ought also to consider the argument that at least as many, or even more, have died from other causes worthy of regard. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and other sources of longitudinal historical figures (such as
Australians a Historical Library
and, to be honest,
Wikipedia
) suggest that alternative causes of death warrant examination as historically significant.
The largest single cause of death in twentieth-century Australia (besides ‘natural causes') has been motor vehicle accidents. The Australian Bureau of Statistics history of road fatalities refers to the historical ‘war on the roads': from 1925 to the end of the century, over 160 000 Australians died in motor vehicle accidents.
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Deaths due to road accidents increased as car ownership and reliance on road transport rose until some 3798 people died in 1970 alone. Since then the rate of accidents has fallen, due to innovations such as seat belts, drink-driving laws, safer cars and better driver behaviour. Still, in the decade of the 1990s just short of 20 000 Australians died in motor vehicle accidents; in the first five years of the twenty-first century 8283 died in road accidents and 143 000 were injured – almost as many as were wounded in the four years in the Great War. Considering these figures against Australia's losses in war we find that, in the course of just three years, as many Australians died on the roads as died, for instance, as prisoners of the Japanese. As many people died on Australia's roads as died at Tobruk over precisely the same time period. The effect is arguably greater among the living. Each year, three times as many Australians are injured in road accidents (about 30 000) as were wounded fighting Germany in the Second World War (about 9480).
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Arguably, more Australians have been touched by the trauma of car accidents killing loved ones, friends or neighbours than have been affected by deaths in war, yet we do not see calls to erect a National Motor Vehicle Accident Memorial. The idea might seem almost offensive, but why should we not remember motor vehicle accident victims as comparable those who ‘gave' their lives in war?