tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies-15482/articlesGriffith Review - Enduring Legacies – The Conversation2015-04-24T20:26:45Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/385962015-04-24T20:26:45Z2015-04-24T20:26:45ZThe past is not sacred: the ‘history wars’ over Anzac<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76186/original/image-20150326-8725-uwrbvm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Drape 'Anzac' over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct – even though it shouldn't be.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alexander Turnbull Library</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, has published a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
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<p>The term <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1270703045/robert-manne/comment">“history wars”</a> is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today.</p>
<p>That debate, though hardly resolved, is now taking something of a back seat to a public controversy focused on Australia’s wars of the 20th century and particularly on the war of 1914–18, called the Great War until the Second World War redefined it as the First.</p>
<p>If “history war” is a public controversy about past events that raise disturbing contemporary questions about national legitimacy and identity, then this Great War controversy also qualifies as such. The polemic unfolded in a familiar fashion. “History warriors” from the political right have publicly insisted that historians and left-wing commentators were distorting the past and violating cherished understandings about the First World War. </p>
<p>In various forums, they stated and restated their now-familiar case: Australia’s vital interests were at stake in the Great War and it took part to protect these interests. The warriors insist there is a left-wing “orthodoxy” arguing that Australia’s national interests were not served by participating in the war and that Australians were duped by the British into fighting. </p>
<p>The recent past and the present loom large in the warriors’ anxiety. They insist that Australia is not in the habit of sending troops overseas to fight “other people’s wars”, as critics suggest, and that participation in overseas wars throughout the 20th century (and since) has been overwhelmingly in Australia’s interests. They have loudly condemned, and continue to condemn, historians and journalists who see this differently.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76185/original/image-20150326-8716-tnb9w5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Gerard Henderson argued that the Great War was right for Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Dan Himbrechts</span></span>
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<p>Broadsides along these lines have been heard for a generation. I’m not certain where it started, but an <a href="http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=433411153670742;res=IELLCC">early shot</a> fired in Quadrant in July 1982 by columnist Gerard Henderson merits closer inspection. Henderson was unhappy with the then-emerging field of social history and its emphasis on “waste” and suffering, because – in his view – it undermined the rightness of the cause. </p>
<p>Henderson targeted the distinguished social historian Bill Gammage, whose celebrated “emotional history” of the war, <a href="http://www.army.gov.au/Our-future/Publications/Australian-Army-Journal/Past-editions/%7E/media/Files/Our%20future/LWSC%20Publications/AAJ/2010Summer/15-TheBrokenYearsAustralia.pdf">The Broken Years</a>, was based on soldiers’ diaries. Gammage was guilty, Henderson claimed, of distinguishing “between the Anzacs as individuals and the cause for which they fought” – of feting the soldiers but condemning the war. Gammage was a consultant on the Peter Weir film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082432/">Gallipoli</a> wherein the same distinctions were evident, and equally odious, to Henderson.</p>
<p>Henderson stated his belief that the war was right for Britain and Australia. He took issue with the notion of the war as tragedy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Great War was “futile” and a “waste” in one sense only – in that the Western Allies in the 1920s and 1930s surrendered much of what had been won in 1914–1918 due to their all-embracing guilt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So the tragedy “in one sense only” is to be found in foreign policy errors made after the war. Had these errors not been made, nothing about the Great War would be tragic, “futile” or a “waste”. This, presumably, is the hard-nut indifference to suffering (even on a massive scale) that is required by the men of high politics.</p>
<p>But I find this interesting for another reason.</p>
<p>At the time, Gammage was researching and writing social history, or “history from below”. He was determined to show how this war was experienced by ordinary people and to document their terrible ordeals on the field of battle and, yes, the horrendous waste of human beings, talent and potential.</p>
<p>Australian history probably followed literature here, for it was a novelist who put the human legacy of war on the national agenda. George Johnston’s bestselling novel <a href="http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/may/1398866400/nadia-wheatley/50th-anniversary-my-brother-jack">My Brother Jack</a> was published to great acclaim in 1964. The novel explored the disastrous impact of war for a single family on the home front. It opened up a national conversation about the true legacy of war. Gammage picked up the baton and ran.</p>
<p>In this capacity, Gammage was a part of – or more accurately ahead of – a cultural shift in the history business, with a newfound concern for the traumatic impact of war experience right across the wars of the 20th century, and thereafter.</p>
<p>Historian Christina Twomey wrote about this shift in the December 2013 edition of History Australia. Twomey <a href="http://journals.publishing.monash.edu/ojs/index.php/ha/article/view/988/1520">argued</a> that social history’s focus on suffering in war is but one part of a fascination with the traumatic in contemporary society. She called this change “the rise to cultural prominence of the traumatised individual” and argued that this rise is not peculiar to Australia, or even to the military sphere, but is evident throughout the Western world.</p>
<p>In this vein, though years earlier, Gammage explicitly rejected the label “military history” for The Broken Years. He wrote “to show the horrors of war”. The book has never been out of print and trauma is now a field of study in Australian history, with titles such as Joy Damousi’s <a href="http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2001/knox.html">Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia</a>, Stephen Garton’s <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Cost_of_War.html?id=E5TfAAAAMAAJ">The Cost of War: Australians Return</a> and Peter Stanley’s <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/lost-boys-of-anzac/">Lost Boys of Anzac</a>, among others. But this new focus is perhaps best summed up by Marina Larsson’s <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Shattered_Anzacs.html?id=JyMqAQAAIAAJ">Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War</a>.</p>
<p>In her article, Twomey concludes that the “trauma” perspective – this understanding of what war does to people – has been the principal reason for the resurgence of enthusiasm for the Anzac tradition. No doubt there’s some truth in this idea of a congruence between the personal and the political, empathy working to bind people together in solemn tribute to our nation’s military endeavour over a century and more. But it’s a shaky foundation. </p>
<p>A military heritage understood as trauma and suffering will always threaten to undermine narratives constructed around strategic necessity. Tragedy can too easily extend to critical evaluation of the political necessity for war, both then and now. To emphasise the human side of the war might even break the airlock that shields high politics and belligerent journalism from such considerations.</p>
<p>Perhaps this tension is behind one of the oddities of the current “history war”: never has the Anzac tradition been more popular and yet never have its defenders been more chauvinistic, bellicose and intolerant of other viewpoints. One only has to read the Murdoch press editorials, features or op-eds on Anzac Day (or thereabouts), or the polemics in Quadrant, to know this. </p>
<p>Every year the hard heads kick in – “we got it right”, they say – and serve up the summary analysis, column after column, never failing to fire a shot or two at the doubters, the usually unnamed “orthodox” school that peddles the fiction of “other people’s wars” or “futility”.</p>
<h2>New inclusiveness but a greater intolerance</h2>
<p>ANU historian Frank Bongiorno has argued that it is precisely the renewed cultural authority of Anzac – the popular enthusiasm for remembrance – that has had unanticipated and, for some of us, unwanted consequences, notably a declining toleration of any critique of Australian military endeavour. </p>
<p>In an <a href="http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=72209">edited collection</a>, Bongiorno charts how Anzac commemoration has changed in recent times. Ethnic groups and Aboriginal people claimed a part or a familial connection in one or another of Australia’s wars across the 20th century – somewhat like Australians finding a link to a convict ancestry and with it a newfound pride in their national identity. </p>
<p>There is now a small wing of Australian publishing that is busy with books about German Anzacs and Irish Anzacs, Black Diggers, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, Chinese Anzacs, Russian Anzacs and so on.</p>
<p>The new inclusiveness is one of a number of causal factors underpinning the resurgence of enthusiasm for the Anzac tradition. There is, also, the metaphysical pull of the occasion – the obstinate or perhaps eternal need for the sacred in a secular society. There is the rise of genealogy, linking families to forebears who fought and suffered and died for us. There is the progressive broadening of criteria for participation in the marches. </p>
<p>And there is the all-important role of governments (Labor and Liberal) in the lavish promotion of a war-centred nationalism going back at least to the Hawke government. </p>
<p>It has been noted, for instance, that Anzac Day works better as a national day because it avoids the contentious matters that Australia Day brings to the fore – Aboriginal dispossession and colonisation.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76198/original/image-20150327-4777-2jtndf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The play Black Diggers is one example of the new inclusiveness in the Anzac tradition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Dean Lewins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, Anzac’s popularity is on a high and, buoyed by this popularity, the ideological guardians of the tradition seek to press home their advantage. As Bongiorno points out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a long history of contention over the significance and meaning of the Anzac legend. But once a tradition is defined in more inclusive terms, those who refuse to participate can readily be represented as beyond the pale. To question, to criticise – to doubt – can become un-Australian.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The vitriol has been warming for some time. An editorial on April 26, 2013, in The Australian is instructive. It had suggestions for the bureaucrats responsible for organising commemorative events in the centenary years to come:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The best advice we can offer is that they ignore the tortured arguments of the intellectuals and listen to the people, the true custodians of this occasion. They must recognise that the current intellectual zeitgeist is at odds with the spirit of Anzac. It recognises neither the significance of a war that had to be fought nor the importance of patriotism. Honour, duty and mateship are foreign to their thinking. They may be experts on many things, but on the subject of Anzac, they have little useful to say.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Two days later, Andrew Bolt <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/anzac-day-attacks-have-a-dangerous-audience/story-e6frfhqf-1226631088757">chimed in</a> on cue in the Herald Sun. Intent on vilifying academic critics of the Anzac legend, he suggested they were lining up with Islamic extremists. He named two respected scholars – Marilyn Lake and Clare Wright – and suggested that their expertise had abandoned them on matters Anzac. Doubt and debate in Bolt’s worldview is not only unpatriotic, it is the mark of fanaticism and treachery.</p>
<p>Now the Great War centenary has arrived and the history warriors have chosen their weapons. Paul Kelly set the tone in August 2014, when he <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/a-conscious-decision-to-march-into-the-war-to-end-all-wars/story-e6frg74x-1227010661982">railed</a> in The Australian that Australians had been mugged by an anti-war mythology. The film Gallipoli got another blast, as did:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the legacy of poets and “anti-war cultural practitioners” who, since the 1960s, have peddled the lie, the “delusion”, that the Great War was a terrible blunder … that saw millions sacrificed in vain.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Quadrant, the busiest critic of late has been Mervyn Bendle, an untiring polemicist. His concerns run entirely contrary to the historical project – he wants the Anzac past to be fixed and sacred. He thinks the issue here is “respect for Australian society”, and describes critical interventions in military history as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… an elitist project explicitly dedicated to destroying the popular view of these traditions. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The agents of this conspiracy are at <a href="http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/04/anzac-in-ashes/">one time</a> “little more than a pampered coterie” and <a href="https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/04/military-historians-war-anzac-legend/">elsewhere</a> a more considerable force (one assumes), since they are:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… led by a cadre of academics, media apparatchiks and some disaffected ex-army officers. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bendle seems entirely uncomfortable with the vigorous, contested nature of the discipline. He caricatures these rival interpretations as “an iconoclastic holy war against the Anzac tradition”, and in one instance as “a jihad”. Quadrant has published Bendle’s denunciations regularly since 2009.</p>
<p>Bongiorno’s take on such intemperate reaction is well put:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Anzac’s inclusiveness has been achieved at the price of a dangerous chauvinism that increasingly equates national history with military history, and national belonging with a willingness to accept the Anzac legend as Australian patriotism’s very essence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But if the new inclusiveness of Anzac commemoration provides backing for this kind of intolerance, it is also true that the centenary (now with us) has heightened anxieties about the legitimacy of the so-called Great War, as has the widespread questioning of recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The context for intolerance has, in this sense, been overdetermined.</p>
<h2>The debate is not closed elsewhere</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76200/original/image-20150327-4780-1334d9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Former UK education secretary Michael Gove attacked those peddling ‘myths’ about the war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Richard Goldschmidt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the past two decades, as the centenary has crept up, the scholarly contest around the origins and the meaning of the Great War has intensified. The anniversary has lifted the game to a new intensity – nowhere more evident than in Britain, where historians and politicians have eagerly put their case. Some of the most intemperate interventions seem designed to caricature critical reflection and shut down debate. </p>
<p>Michael Gove, then British education secretary, set the tone in January 2014 when he <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532923/Michael-Gove-blasts-Blackadder-myths-First-World-War-spread-television-sit-coms-left-wing-academics.html">tore into</a> “left-wing academics” for peddling unpatriotic “myths”. He cited satire such as Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder as grist to the left-wing mill that encouraged these myths and denigrated the “patriotism, honour and courage” of those who served and died.</p>
<p>The bizarre edge to Gove’s intervention suggests a fear that the contest may not be going his way. As Oxford professor Margaret MacMillan <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/04/labour-gove-first-world-war-comments">put it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He is mistaking myths for rival interpretations of history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gove had tried to enlist MacMillan to his cause, referring favourably to her important (if oddly titled) book, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/book/105817/the-war-that-ended-peace-by-margaret-macmillan">The War That Ended Peace</a>. But MacMillan said he got it wrong: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Good advice.</p>
<p>The history business is more richly resourced, sophisticated and nuanced, more exhaustive and rigorous and more openly scrutinised by a fascinated general public than ever before. A vigorous contest about the origins and meaning of the war continues unabated. </p>
<p>Broadly, two schools of thought have been contesting the ground at least since A.J.P. Taylor’s <a href="http://endeavourpress.com/war-by-timetable-how-the-first-world-war-began-by-a-j-p-taylor/">War By Timetable</a>. One insists Germany was hell-bent on world domination and had to be stopped. The other (including Taylor) sees the great powers as collectively responsible in varying ways and to varying degrees. </p>
<p>And inextricably tied into these two schools are views set on a spectrum between “high and noble purpose” and ghastly “futility”.</p>
<p>The complexity of this debate should not be understated. My grasp of it suggests the “collective responsibility” school of thought is far more soundly based in history than the nationalistic “evil Germany” version. Perhaps the best example of this headway is Christopher Clark’s celebrated volume <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/books/review/the-sleepwalkers-and-july-1914.html?_r=0">The Sleepwalkers</a>. </p>
<p>Clark is an Australian, and now a professor of modern history at Cambridge. His delightfully readable account of the polarisation process that led to war teases out this collective responsibility against a background of ethnic and nationalistic ferment in Europe at the time. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The outbreak of war is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Clark sees smoking pistols in many hands. He sees a Europe in which all the great powers were pursuing their own interests, willfully indifferent to the interests of others and, to that end, ready to risk a major conflict, having no idea of the horrors they were about to unleash.</p>
<p>The point is this: the debate in Britain is not closed. It is perhaps more wide-open than ever and well able to resist the forces that would shut it down and render history into a hammer in the sectarian tool box.</p>
<h2>An elite ‘hell-bent’ on war</h2>
<p>In Australia, the scholarly scene is similarly robust and, one trusts, similarly resistant to bullying and coercion. Here, too, the coming of the centenary has heightened critical scrutiny and a reactive anxiety that insists the past is sacred.</p>
<p>While social historians continue to track the personal cost of our wars among soldiers and their families, and the cultural industry produces countless books, movies, TV series and tours of battlefields, a more political line of inquiry has in recent times tracked the “militarisation of Australian history” since the 1980s. </p>
<p>The evidence of this obsession is found in patterns of government funding, in the media, publishing and education, in documentaries and electronic media programs devoted to the history of Australians at war – to the detriment of our many other pasts. The imbalance here has dire consequences for the breadth and depth of understanding of the past, as Henry Reynolds has <a href="http://insidestory.org.au/militarisation-marches-on">pointed out</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The implications fly off in all directions – nations are made in war not in peace, on battlefields not in parliaments; soldiers not statesmen are the nation’s founders; men of blood are more worthy of note than negotiators and conciliators; the bayonet is mightier than the pen; a few fatal days on the shore of the Ottoman Empire outweighed the decades of civil and political pioneering by hundreds of colonial Australians.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The centenary has galvanised this concern with numerous authors, several key titles and website <a href="http://honesthistory.net.au/">Honest History</a> raising the critical standard. In <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/whats-wrong-with-anzac/">What’s Wrong with Anzac?</a>, edited by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, the contributing scholars sought to explain how this obsession with military history has been manufactured and to highlight how it eclipses a rich and diverse history of nation-making, civil and political traditions of democratic equality and social justice.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76202/original/image-20150327-4768-15fy9i5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ What’s Wrong With Anzac?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NewSouth</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It must be said that the book has sparked fierce criticism from within the history community. Distinguished scholars <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/04/19/its-war-anzac-day-dissenters-create-bitter-split-between-historians/">Inga Clendinnen</a> and Ken Inglis contested the “top down” explanation of the resurgence of Anzac and others pointing to misapprehensions about “propaganda” being fed into schools and about both teachers and students as passive recipients. But there is much in the book that merits attention. It set out to provoke discussion and debate. In that, it has been entirely successful.</p>
<p>Other scholars have indirectly shaped the critique of the obsession with Anzac by contributing to a broadly conceived cultural history that places Asia (and thus our racial anxieties) at – or near – the centre of our national story. <a href="http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/ncas/australias-asia-from-yellow-peril-to-asian-century-edited-by-david-walker-and-agnieszka-sobocinska/">Australia’s Asia</a>, edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, is a key text in this regard. Within this framework it has become possible to rethink Australia’s entry into the Great War, notwithstanding the voices that insist there’s nothing more to know.</p>
<p>A number of authors have taken up this challenge, notably John Mordike and recently <a href="https://griffithreview.com/articles/race-fear-dangerous-denial/">Greg Lockhart</a>, who charted the secret commitments that shaped Australia’s entry into the war and the racial fears that motivated Australian politicians to make these commitments. <a href="http://airpower.airforce.gov.au/Publications/Details/222/We-should-do-this-thing-quietly---Japan-and-the-great-deception-in-Australian-defence-policy-1911-1914.aspx">Mordike</a>, Lockhart and Walker, and predecessors such as historian Neville Meaney, have reshaped the way we think about the racial frameworks that governed political thought and the fears that underpinned Australian defence policy leading up to the First World War – notably the obsession with Japan. </p>
<p>The great irony here is that Japan was a reliable British ally throughout those years of war – yet it was fear of Japan that drove White Australia’s commitment to an expeditionary war long before war broke out.</p>
<p>Another constructive contribution is Douglas Newton’s <a href="http://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/title/hell-bent/">Hell-Bent</a>. The title suggests the author’s revisionist perspective. Newton’s aim is to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… interleave the story of Australia’s leap into the Great War and the story of the choice of war in Britain. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Newton’s interpretation sets Hell-Bent firmly in the collective responsibility camp, with Australian government intent – if not impact – as culpable as Britain and the rest. Newton’s book surveys the obsession with racial fitness, the post-Federation longing for blooding in battle, the searching for confirmation of racial virility and the almost universal belief that the one true test of national vigour was war.</p>
<p>Newton quotes Australian prime minister Joseph Cook’s diary of Monday, August 3, 1914 – the same day that he promised the Royal Australian Navy and 20,000 troops to Britain: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The good to come, [the] moral tonic. Luxury, frivolity and class selfishness will be less. A memory for our children, bitter and bracing for many. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cook’s earnestness was at least preferable to Churchill’s effervescing glee at the prospect of war in July 1914, and his enjoyment of war thereafter. He could still call it “delicious” in January 1915.</p>
<p>War as socially uplifting and purifying was a common theme among Australia’s political elites in 1914. War was an antidote to “effeminate thinking”, ‘sentimentalism" and the way that too long a peace “can rot all manly thought and action out of our race”, as Melbourne academic Archibald Strong put it. War was a curative. War was a way to rescue the British race from the brink of destruction. </p>
<p>Such were the attitudes that underpinned a political elite “hell-bent” on war. The celebrants today would have us forget this. They would have us forget both the racial framework and the obsessive paranoia that inspired the push to war in Australia.</p>
<p>They would have us forget the lessons, too. In <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/blog/2013/04/15/gallipoli-ridge-too-far/">Gallipoli: a ridge too far</a>, edited by Ashley Ekins, historian Robert O’Neill describes how “blindness and miscomprehension” about Turkey’s ability to defend itself was repeated in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How strange it is that Winston Churchill, a voracious student of military history, thought that a force of some 60,000 men, backed by the Royal Navy, would rapidly induce a Turkish collapse leading to the seizure and occupation of Constantinople. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>O’Neill goes on to note how the decision-making process was dominated by Churchill, and to record Charles Bean’s observation in The Story of Anzac – how through the:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bean was the great official historian of the Australians in the First World War. He will be quoted liberally in the course of the centenary, but his blunt summary of the Gallipoli venture as a reckless fantasy may not get the attention it deserves.</p>
<p>No chance of that with James Brown’s <a href="http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/anzacs-long-shadow">Anzac’s Long Shadow</a>, an unusual intervention that has stirred debate and critical reflection, and fury in the Quadrant ranks. Brown, a former officer who commanded troops in Iraq and served with Special Forces in Afghanistan, was the military fellow at the Lowy Institute when the book was published. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This year an Anzac festival begins a commemorative program so extravagant it would make a sultan swoon. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brown argues that Australia is spending too much time, money and emotion on the Anzac legend at the expense of current serving men and women. He rejects the sophistry that suggests any criticism of the Anzac myth is anti-military. He also provides a sharp critique of the clubs and corporations that exploit the Anzac theme for commercial gain. </p>
<p>Brown does not dwell on the particulars of Australian involvement in the Great War but he does stress the importance of informed memory, of knowing Gallipoli for what it was: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A century ago we got it wrong. We sent thousands of young Australians on a military operation that was barely more than a disaster. It’s right that a hundred years later we should feel strongly about that.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>In history, nothing is sacred</h2>
<p>Politicians and a retinue of warrior commentators want us to be proud of our martial history, lest the nation fall apart. Historians worth their salt want us to know that history critically, lest the nation be deceived, or simply dumbed-down. </p>
<p>This is a great divide. History is a cautious, ever-questioning discipline, well aware that all historical truth is contextual and contingent and thus open to revision or to new ways of seeing the past. Politics is a profession played out with dogmatic certainties that are wielded like baseball bats. Where historians must be ever critical, ever ready to go deeper, politics – and national history as set down by politicians – must be unimpeachable. </p>
<p>Drape “Anzac” over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct. History will not stand for that. In history nothing is sacred. History is open inquiry; politics is slogans.</p>
<p>Australia’s finest historian, Inga Clendinnen, <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/agamemnon-s-kiss">explained</a> the great divide between politics and history in the following way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The discipline of history demands rigorous self-criticism, a patient, even attentiveness, and a practiced tolerance for uncertainty. It also requires that pleasure be taken in the epistemological problems which attend the attempt to recover the density of a past actuality from its residual traces. These are not warrior virtues.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Political agendas require a national story that is simple, fixed and inviolable. Thus the Anzac centenary is committed to locking in a glorious military past but, like the 1988 Bicentennial, it is raising more questions than the celebrants want. Centennials can backfire. That is the heart of the problem for the history warriors on the conservative side of politics. </p>
<p>That, more than any other factor, explains their bellicose insistence on the rightness of what happened.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38596/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Cochrane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Never has the Anzac tradition been more popular and yet never have its defenders been more chauvinistic, bellicose and intolerant of other viewpoints.Peter Cochrane, Honorary Associate, Department of History, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/385932015-04-23T00:31:20Z2015-04-23T00:31:20ZMarked men: anxiety, alienation and the aftermath of war<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76052/original/image-20150326-12284-xanr9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What is obscured in our understanding of returned servicemen's problems is the private pain of families who bear the brunt of these psychological strains.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Dan Himbrechts</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, is publishing a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Germaine Greer’s father never hugged her. Born just before the Second World War, Greer’s childhood was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-daddy.html">overshadowed</a> by a father who had served in military intelligence and survived the protracted horrors of the German siege of Malta. He returned suffering the effects of anxiety disorders and near-starvation. Greer found him cold, reserved and distant, unwilling or unable to respond to her desire for familial intimacy. </p>
<p>Greer’s story of a father altered as a returned serviceman – alienated and aloof, seemingly out of place in the feminised space of home and family – is one echoed in the stories of Australians from many walks of life. War service may have been mythologised and enshrined in the national narrative, but the private experience of return is all too often suffused with personal ache and anguish, marking out a profound generational and intergenerational legacy of psychological loss.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, when I first began to research the experiences of returned Australian servicemen from the major wars of the 20th century, evidence of the costs of war – material and emotional – surfaced in abundance. Official archives contained numerous reports of the pressures on widows and children struggling to survive when breadwinners had fallen in combat, or the burdens on wives and mothers caring for severely injured and ill veterans. </p>
<p>However, these dusty files more commonly held disquieting accounts about the strain of living with those demobilised soldiers who were seemingly fit and healthy, but had returned moody and withdrawn – by turns sullen and violent, prone to fits of rage, unable to hold down jobs and salving their private torments in drink or drugs.</p>
<p>Australia’s pre-eminent Great War historian, Charles Bean, asserted that the returning Anzacs “merged quickly and quietly into the general population”. The records of repatriation authorities, returned services charities, support groups and comfort funds tell a different story.</p>
<p>Australia has continually faced a returned soldier crisis. This is something that marked men returning from all the wars of modern memory – from the Great War to Afghanistan and Iraq. There have now been <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2014/s3989386.htm">three times</a> as many suicides of Australian veterans of Afghanistan as combat deaths. </p>
<p>In the 1930s, the RSL graphically encapsulated the problem in its successful campaign for a special pension for the “burnt-out soldier”. After the Vietnam War, a more specialised language took hold. Post-traumatic stress disorder is now enshrined in the ways we think and talk about returning men.</p>
<p>What this term obscures is the private pain of families who bear the brunt of these psychological strains.</p>
<h2>Stretching across generations</h2>
<p>This was the archival account. Yet equally striking was how my research prompted stories and reminiscences of returned soldiers from friends and strangers alike. These were invariably stories of loss or distant, disturbed and damaged men, enshrined in family narratives and transmitted across the generations as a talisman of connection to the horrors of war. Is it possible to capture and do justice to these enduring legacies?</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76060/original/image-20150326-12314-aa4tju.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The tendrils of war can stretch across generations, well beyond the life of the combatants.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A pallid echo of private anguish is evident in the statistics of public support for veterans and their families. More than one-quarter of a million Australians – veterans, widows and children – are currently in receipt of war pensions. This is a figure roughly equivalent to the numbers supported in the 1920s and 1930s when repatriation constituted one-fifth of all Commonwealth government expenditures, although the Australian population has quadrupled since then. </p>
<p>More revealing is that during the interwar years, pensions for psychological disability rose while for all other categories they fell – owing to death or recovery. The scars of war sometimes took years to emerge, something that puzzled Australians in the 1930s but seems unsurprising to those raised in an era where discourses of psychological trauma abound.</p>
<p>The financial burden of war pensions on governments can be surprisingly enduring. A century after Australia mobilised for the Great War, there are still 100 Australians receiving Commonwealth war pensions as a result of the conflict. They are war widows, the wives of any veteran already receiving a pension or a veteran whose death was war-related, even if death occurred decades afterwards: the last Australian Great War veteran passed away in 2009. </p>
<p>The tendrils of war can stretch across generations, well beyond the life of the combatants. If the American experience is any guide, Australia might see many years before the last Great War pension file is closed. The last widow supported by an American War of Independence pension died in 1913, and the last receiving an American Civil War pension in 2004.</p>
<h2>Towards an understanding of war’s personal impacts</h2>
<p>The material and social impact of war might be tangible and, in some oblique way, quantifiable. Less easy to grasp are the emotional, psychological and familial residues of war service – on the people left behind by men who died in service, and on surviving veterans and those who shared their lives. </p>
<p>We can find the traces of these deeper personal currents in family memoirs and reminiscences. Many of them are classics in the genre, such as Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You; Donald Horne’s The Education of Young Donald; Ric Throssell’s My Father’s Son; and Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76055/original/image-20150326-12270-d5iarb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">My Brother Jack is a fictional account of war’s impacts on servicemen and those around them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Collins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The ramifications of war on servicemen and their families and friends also abound in fictional accounts, most famously George Johnston’s My Brother Jack. Other notable contributions include the final volume of Martin Boyd’s Langton series, David Malouf’s The Great World, Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour, William Nagle’s The Odd Angry Shot and Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year.</p>
<p>Less well known perhaps are Vietnam novels, such as Rhys Pollard’s The Cream Machine and David Alexander’s When the Buffalo Fight.</p>
<p>In many of these works, a profound alienation between men at war and those at home plays out, echoing the oral accounts and archival files of many veterans. The horror of war, the death of mates and the insidious growth of the belief that men at the frontline were abandoned to their fate by those at home – unsympathetic politicians, profiteers, shirkers, Vietnam war protesters and the “girls who wouldn’t wait” – were common themes in the private reminiscences, and frequently in the public utterances, of returned men.</p>
<p>However, for some, return was not a welcome release from horror. Rather, it was the loss of comradely friendships forged at the frontline – a leaving behind of the intense bonds of the trench, the jungle and the desert to be thrust back into a mundane, hostile and unmanly environment of family and work.</p>
<p>Historians have traditionally shied away from personal and private emotions, except in historical biography. However, the rise of social and cultural history in the late 20th century increasingly focused attention on a broader range of collective and personal experiences, although not always in the most elegant of conceptual frameworks, as indicated by the short-lived fashion for “emotionology”. </p>
<p>Australian historians interested in the history of private emotions found fertile ground in war and return. The pioneering work of <a href="http://shaps.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/professor-joy-damousi">Joy Damousi</a> and the subsequent work of many others such as <a href="http://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2009/podcasts/shattered-anzacs-with-marina-larrson/transcript">Marina Larsson</a>, <a href="https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/jalland-p">Pat Jalland</a> and <a href="https://www.deakin.edu.au/alfred-deakin-research-institute/people.php?contact_id=658&style=7">Bart Ziino</a> has focused on death, grief, mourning, memorialisation and the burdens of caring for ill and injured returned servicemen. This has greatly enriched understanding of the personal consequences of war and their impact on the shape of Australian life and politics long afterwards.</p>
<p>It is perhaps not surprising that Australian historians have turned to the consequences of war with such enthusiasm. It seemed a natural fit for the social and cultural turn in the discipline. </p>
<p>More importantly, Anzac looms so large in the national consciousness that studies of grief and mourning offer an oblique entry for social and cultural historians into the national debate, without having to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ Anzac.</p>
<h2>Links to the Anzac legend</h2>
<p>The irony of these new personal and familial approaches to the history of the Anzac legend is that the deeper historians go into the private dimensions of war, the less distinctive the Australian experience seems to be. </p>
<p>The history of damaged and ill veterans is hardly unique to Australia. The significance of post-traumatic stress in the lives of returned servicemen and their families, and the impact on rehabilitation and repatriation systems, is common ground for historians of North America, Britain, Europe and other parts the world.</p>
<p>From there, it is a short step to questioning the distinctiveness of the Anzac legend itself. The more we place the Australian experience of war in a transnational context, the more obvious our shared experiences and responses become. The historiography on the experience of modern warfare – from Germans in the Great War to Americans in Vietnam – stresses the importance of group bonds among soldiers. </p>
<p>In other words, what Australians have called mateship was exactly how soldiers on all sides of the major wars of the 20th century survived. And if they didn’t develop such bonds, they did not survive for long. Servicemen from all modern wars commonly felt that generals were sacrificing them for worthless purposes, people at home were ignoring their plight and profiting from their absence, and wives and girlfriends were betraying them.</p>
<p>What is distinctive about the Australian experience of modern warfare is not the experience itself, but our refashioning of it into a national secular religion. For most countries, occasions such as Remembrance Day are solemn occasions for commemoration of the dead. In Australia, Anzac Day mixes solemnity with celebration of national becoming.</p>
<p>The ink spilt trying to explain this has been extensive and at times illuminating. But is there more to the Anzac legend than just the flowering of emergent nationalism? I’ve never been well disposed to psychohistory, generally finding it vague and speculative. Yet the more I look at the history of Anzac and how it has waxed and waned in national consciousness, the more I think collective psychology might have something to tell us.</p>
<p>The Anzac legend emerged in the aftermath of Gallipoli, but only came to national prominence in 1916 and beyond – just as the conscription referenda convulsed the nation. In the end, Australia was one of the few combatant nations that did not institute conscription, a fact sometimes used by veterans and their representatives to suggest that Australia had failed its men and owed them a special debt. </p>
<p>By the 1970s, the power of the Anzac legend seemed to be on the wane, only to reawaken in the 1980s when discourses about the betrayal of Vietnam veterans – a lack of sympathy for their war service – encouraged many to support the “Welcome Home March” movement. Since then, Anzac commemoration has undergone a remarkable revival, particularly among younger generations.</p>
<p>In this light, could it be said that Anzac has been fuelled in part by collective guilt? Have discourses of betrayal fostered compensatory discourses of national embrace? Are these anxieties amplified by the fact that unlike many nations Australia’s modern wars have been fought overseas, with civilians a long way from theatres of combat (except perhaps in Darwin)? </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76053/original/image-20150326-12293-1q0wzb1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine Greer had a distant relationship with her father, a returned serviceman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Gerry Noon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Answers are elusive. There is clear conjunction, but causation is harder to prove. Australian opposition to war, from the divisive votes of 1916 and 1917 onwards, has often failed to disentangle legitimate criticism of the war effort from criticism of those Australians who accepted the call to arms.</p>
<p>In this failure, ordinary soldiers have felt themselves at the brunt of public opprobrium, even when the critics were clearly a minority of Australians. Can we find ways to criticise wars, while at the same time hold the valour and sacrifice of the soldiers themselves in high esteem (except when military atrocities have been proven)? </p>
<p>If cultures fail to perpetuate warrior myths, do they make their veterans’ alienation worse? Does the inevitable gap between discourses of debt and the reality of its repayment create the conditions for disenchantment?</p>
<p>However, Greer’s story of familial disharmony refuses the easy discussion of Anzac alienation, instead exploring more discomforting theories about paternal disaffection. Greer’s brilliance lies in moving beyond the obvious narrative lynchpin to deeper undercurrents of masculinity, class and status. Similarly, recent research on suicidal veterans questions whether high rates are peculiar to war service or reflect an emerging masculinity crisis in young men.</p>
<p>In this light, are our collective discourses on Anzac – even on the alienation of Anzacs from all our modern wars – ways of deflecting more troubling interrogations of the evidence, something that both reveals and disguises? </p>
<p>What is inescapable is that the legacies of Anzac story-making, whether praising Australian virtues or highlighting loss and sacrifice, are in many respects efforts to render meaningful the unfathomable pain and anguish experienced by generations of Australians as a consequence of war.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Garton has received ARC funding for various research projects over the years. He is an ambassador on the NSW Centenary of Anzac Council.</span></em></p>Australia has continually faced a returned soldier crisis. This is something that marked men returning from all the wars of modern memory – from the Great War to Afghanistan and Iraq.Stephen Garton, Professor of History, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/385942015-04-22T03:09:03Z2015-04-22T03:09:03ZGerman experience in Australia during WW1 damaged road to multiculturalism<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76550/original/image-20150331-1256-9qea8a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A ‘view from tower’ reveals the long rows of huts at Holsworthy internment camp, where Germans were interned during the First World War.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, is publishing a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>On September 26, 1999, Governor-General Sir William Deane delivered the <a href="http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/2854">opening address</a> at the inaugural Australian Conference on Lutheran Education at a Gold Coast resort. In his speech, he offered an apology to members of the German–Australian community present at the meeting:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The tragic, and often shameful, discrimination against Australians of German origin fostered during the world wars had many consequences. No doubt, some of you carry the emotional scars of injustice during those times as part of your backgrounds or family histories. Let me as Governor-General say to all who do how profoundly sorry I am that such things happened in our country.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The little-known apology invites reflection on a number of issues, particularly in the context of the centenary commemorations and the privileged role the Anzac myth as Australia’s foundation narrative has been accorded in recent years. The story of the German–Australian community offers an alternative view of Australia’s history as a nation. </p>
<p>While Deane referred to “scars of injustice” and family histories, and thus to individual grief and loss, it might be appropriate also to recall the experience of a collective loss the nation incurred when a significant community within its ranks was destroyed during the Great War.</p>
<h2>Early migrant movements</h2>
<p>During the 19th century and well into the 20th, German-speaking immigrants constituted the largest non-Anglo–Celtic group in Australia. Organised large-scale immigration had begun with the arrival in 1838 of groups of Lutheran farming communities from the eastern provinces of Prussia. They settled in South Australia. The foundation of their first villages, Hahndorf and Klemzig, served as a point of attraction that was to bring many more immigrants to the Barossa Valley.</p>
<p>A smaller wave in the wake of the failed German revolution of 1848 brought a different group of immigrants: urban professionals and intellectuals, outspoken democrats and liberals who were dissatisfied with the lack of political reforms in Germany and preferred to live in a country that promised constitutional democracy and progress towards their ideal of a unified nation state.</p>
<p>A third wave of German immigrants was contained within the huge number of fortune-hunters who came to Victoria during the gold rush years of the 1850s. When the goldfields were exhausted, many of the diggers and tradesmen of German origin took up farming in Victoria and New South Wales.</p>
<p>After 1860, government-sponsored immigration and free passages coupled with the prospect of cheap land brought large numbers of agricultural settlers to Queensland. Around 1880, the number of German immigrants in Queensland had surpassed that of South Australia. </p>
<p>There was a sizeable urban community of merchants, tradesmen and labourers living in and around Brisbane. However, most of the German immigrants settled on the land, along the coast and on the Darling Downs, where they played a significant role in the pioneering work of opening up the country for agriculture.</p>
<p>In New South Wales, no such areas of contiguous settlement existed. But a substantial number of German immigrants, mostly skilled tradesmen, chose to live in or near Sydney.</p>
<p>By around 1860, a very visible German–Australian community was well established. It was prosperous, sophisticated and generally highly regarded by their British–Australian compatriots who preferred to think of the immigrants from the Continent, with some patriarchal condescension no doubt, as our Germans. In the towns, German clubs, complete with their marching bands, athletics associations and Liedertafel choirs, constituted centres of social activity that attracted wide audiences not limited to members of their own ethnicity. </p>
<p>There were prominent business establishments that carried German names. Australians of German origin were active in the medical and legal profession, in education, the arts as well as in commerce and industry, science and politics. </p>
<p>In the metropolitan cities, and in Adelaide in particular, one could spend the day easily without having to speak a word of English: shopping, attending doctors’ or dentists’ surgeries, relaxing over a cup of coffee and a piece of cake while reading the Australische Zeitung in a German Konditorei (coffee shop), or wining and dining in one of the city’s two German hotels, the King of Hanover or the Hamburg Hotel, both in Rundle Street.</p>
<p>In 1861, towards the end of the Victorian gold rush, people of German origin comprised 4.32% of the total Australian population. They were by far the largest non-British immigrant group. The Chinese, as the second-largest, came to 3.28% by comparison; the Italians as the third-largest made up only 0.21%, and the total migrant population of 48 other ethnic communities amounted to only 3.25%.</p>
<p>By 1895, the overall number of German–Australians, including the descendants of immigrants of the second and third generations, had been estimated at approximately 100,000. This figure remained stable until 1914. As the total Australian population was approaching five million at the outbreak of war, the percentage of Germans in Australia comprised roughly 2%: hardly a significant number statistically.</p>
<h2>The role of the Lutheran religion</h2>
<p>Their history, as Augustin Lodewyckx noted in 1932, is the “history of their Anglicisation” – although “Australianisation” is perhaps a better term. To compete socially, in business and on the labour market, it was necessary to speak the language and to become familiar with the vernacular, the customs and norms of the new country. </p>
<p>In rural districts, where the church was the central focus of the community, assimilation was a slower process. But the Lutheran pastors were in no position to resist the process of assimilation, nor – it must be emphasised – was it in their interest to do so.</p>
<p>Loyalty to the state and respect for the secular authorities, based on the concept of the Zwei-Reich-Lehre (that is, the doctrine of the two kingdoms, spiritual and temporal), had been central tenets of Lutheran theology ever since the Reformator’s dilemma in having to side with the feudal princes against the rebelling peasants during the Peasants’ War of the early 16th century. </p>
<p>This was a point that was emphasised over and over again: as Lutheran Christians, their allegiance was to the government of the state in which they lived, its institutions and constitutional authority.</p>
<p>The Lutheran pastors were very conscious of their identity as representatives of an Australian, not a German, church. They were subjects of the British Crown and citizens of their respective Australians colonies, and of the Commonwealth after 1901. It made no difference to them whether individual parishioners had become naturalised or not. Relations with Germany were of a purely private nature, concerning the maintenance of language, family ties and cultural traditions. </p>
<p>At the same time, the Lutheran clerical establishment fastidiously insisted on its autonomy in religious and cultural–educational matters, including the teaching of German in its schools. The German language reminded the German–Australian Lutherans of their country of origin, but it was above all the language of Martin Luther, his Bible and catechism, and of his wording of the Lord’s Prayer.</p>
<p>The decline of the Lutheran schools gives a clear indication of the process of Australianisation. Around 1900, there were 46 Lutheran schools in South Australia, 45 in Queensland, ten in Victoria and one in Sydney. They were all primary schools, small to very small (average size of 35 pupils) with only one or two teachers. English had become the main medium of instruction in most of the schools. Only classes in religious studies were conducted in German. </p>
<p>In the following years, most schools were forced to reduce their operations from five days to one – to become purely denominational Saturday schools, devoted to maintaining the German language for the purpose of reading liturgical texts.</p>
<p>By 1913, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Australia had begun publishing in English. Its monthly periodical, now titled The Australian Lutheran, had a decidedly national tenor, as the foreword of the first edition explained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The term “Australian” … is a “national” cognomen, signifying that the paper is published in Australia, by Australians and, first and foremost, for Australians, be they Australians by birth or adoption.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All Lutheran schools were closed during the war, as were all German clubs and German-language newspapers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=700&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=700&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76555/original/image-20150331-1263-ik0rl6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=700&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Holsworthy internees perform a breathtaking number in the camp’s gym.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The migrant ‘48ers’</h2>
<p>The arrival of immigrants, who left Germany for political reasons after the disappointing failure of the March Revolution of 1848 – known as “48ers” – marked a new beginning in the history of the German–Australian community. Their numbers were comparatively small, but they exerted considerable influence due to their role as journalists and publishers of German-language publications. </p>
<p>The most prominent 48er was Hermann Püttmann, previously arts editor of the Kölner Zeitung, a friend of poets Heine and Weerth and associate of Marx and Engels. Püttmann arrived in Melbourne in 1855 after residing for a few years in London. As author and publisher of journals and calendars he soon played a leading role in the German-speaking community in Victoria.</p>
<p>In Adelaide, Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Mücke, head of a group of like-minded immigrants from Berlin, was no less prominent as the spiritus rector of the South Australian German community. He had studied classical philology and sciences in Bonn and Berlin. His special interest was the propagation of a new curriculum where scientific and technological topics were to be given a prominent role. </p>
<p>In 1847, a year before he arrived in South Australia, Mücke was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Jena for his achievements as a pedagogue. In 1878, the University of Adelaide followed by awarding him an honorary master’s degree, the highest academic honour that was available in Australia at the time. </p>
<p>Mücke’s Australische Zeitung, a newspaper that grew out of his earlier Tanunda Deutsche Zeitung, eventually became the flagship of the German-language press in Australia.</p>
<p>During the 1850s, Mücke and his journalistic collaborators played a major role in a public debate on the issue of “German rights” that was being discussed in the context of introducing “responsible government” – that is, a local colonial legislature. The German immigrants protested vehemently against plans to exclude them from standing for election to the proposed parliament. </p>
<p>They were supported by a number of British-born Australians, including the governor. But there were many who voiced opposition, arguing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Germans should be grateful that they were even allowed to come to South Australia and stop demanding equal rights with Englishmen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is no doubt that the writer’s sentiment represented a substantial popular feeling, one that would re-emerge time and again in the decades to come.</p>
<p>In the 1850s, however, the German–Australians carried the day. They were granted the right to stand for parliament, and in the first elections of 1857 one of the 48ers, Friedrich Krichauff, became the first legislator in South Australia of German descent. </p>
<p>The winning of both active and passive voting rights was an important step in the integration of the German–Australian community in the public life of the colony. The German-speaking minority now had a voice in the highest constitutional body and their spokesmen were accepted as co-legislators with full equal rights. </p>
<p>German–Australians were assured of being able to participate in the political affairs of their new home country and to enjoy the privileges and liberties the democratic institutions offered, including the privilege of working towards new political goals and of disagreeing with the politics of the government of the day.</p>
<p>Between December 1883 and February 1884, the Australische Zeitung ran a series of articles that amounted to a campaign for Australian independence. A comparison was repeatedly made between US and British–Australian citizenship. The comparative analysis clearly suggested a deficiency in the status accorded to “naturalised British subjects of Australia”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The acquisition of citizenship in the US affords full equality and protection. This is not so in British colonies where the German immigrant gives up his German citizenship for a thing of little significance. Through naturalisation in a colony, he only becomes a citizen of that colony but not of all colonies, and especially not a citizen of Great Britain, although he has sworn an oath of allegiance to the Queen of England. If a naturalised German leaves his own colony, he is completely homeless, a pariah, a member of no nation, whereas the British colonist remains a Briton.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The final article in the series, on February 28, 1884, concluded with an eloquent call for Australian sovereignty in which the alternatives, Australia as a free country or as an inferior colony under the tutelage of Great Britain, were clearly spelled out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Only with independence can a truly national life develop in which immigrants from everywhere fuse into one free nation. This is impossible as long as there is a mother-country to which Australia is politically subordinated, to which the British colonists look and whose ways they seek to force upon the other non-British colonists.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Developing an Australian identity</h2>
<p>Mücke’s vision certainly has a very contemporary resonance in terms of suggesting a fusion of different ethnic groups into a multicultural society. But how could a “truly national life develop” in Australia? And how could German immigrants, representing a small minority within a British colony, put forward a claim towards defining Australian nationhood? </p>
<p>To the overwhelming majority of Anglo–Australian immigrants at the time, “home” meant the British Isles, their “nation” was the British Empire.</p>
<p>Mücke and his friends saw Australia as a nation in statu nascendi. They recognised it shared a common fate with the Germany they knew. To become a nation, Australia had what Germany lacked, namely a constitutional form of government that ensured individual freedom and civic rights to guarantee the democratic participation of its citizens in the development of their country.</p>
<p>What Germany had, on the other hand, was what Australia lacked or did not yet possess, namely a consciousness of its mission to become a nation. This was precisely what the 48ers thought they were able to contribute. Their experiences in the struggle towards a unified, democratic nation state in Germany, unsuccessful though it had been in 1848, could be made productive in an effort to create a national consciousness in Australia.</p>
<p>The 48ers were Australian nationalists and early republicans who developed a concept of triple identity: a cultural identity linked to the German language and to the immigrants’ intellectual heritage; a political identity that implied loyalty to the King or Queen of England as the constitutional head of Australia; and a national identity as Australians committed to a nation in statu nascendi.</p>
<p>The 48ers firmly believed that Australia would eventually follow the American model and develop into an independent republic. Their concept of an Australian nationalism had a number of things in common with the “Australianism” that was beginning to be propagated by Anglo–Celtic Australians around 1890. It shared a belief in a singular Australian identity, based on an appreciation of the land and of the unique experience of the pioneers who first developed it, on the special geographical, floral and faunal features of the continent, as well as a shared history. </p>
<p>But the inclusive commitment to an Australia made up of “immigrants from everywhere” offered a sharp contrast to the vision of the Australian Natives’ Association or the writers of the Bulletin who also advocated a separate Australian identity. The Bulletin’s masthead motto, “Australia for the White Man”, was clearly incompatible with Mücke’s vision that was based on the universal principle of the Rights of Man and the ideals of the European Enlightenment.</p>
<p>On July 16, 1883, a festive banquet was held at the Adelaide German Club to mark the election of Carl Mücke as an honorary member. The occasion was his 68th birthday. It was a special, symbolic event: on this day, Mücke had spent exactly half his life in Germany and the other half in Australia. Before an audience of more than 400 German–Australians, Mücke gave a vote of thanks that spelled out his vision of an Australian nation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of us have found in our dear Australia a new home Heimath which we sincerely love and where we can be happy, happier – for the most part – than we perhaps could have ever been in our old home country. Let us therefore return our active thanks to this our new home country. And what could our thanks be? </p>
<p>Let us not forget that it was our fate, when it led us with broken hearts out of the old country to this place here, which destined us to help forming a new nation coming into existence in Australia, a nation made up of citizens of all nations but notably from England.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=363&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76553/original/image-20150331-1259-1koegtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dr Max Herz rehearses Minna von Barnhelm at Trial Bay.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>During the Great War</h2>
<p>On August 10, 1914, all “Germans” living in Australia were called upon to report to the nearest police station. It was the beginning of the end of the once prosperous and proud German–Australian community. Registration involved filling out a yellow form which asked a number of personal particulars – name, address, date and place of birth, trade or occupation, marital status, property, length of residence in Australia, nationality, naturalisation details.</p>
<p>It was then up to the local police officers to impose any restrictions they may have thought fit. Usually these took the form of a Provisional Order – the aliens in question had to notify the police of any change of address or to report at daily or weekly intervals. </p>
<p>The officers were subsequently required to fill out a second form (“secret and confidential”), entitled Report on Person reputed to be an Enemy Subject, in which they had to state whether they believed their clients’ statements “to be frank and truthful”, and whether the aliens were “reputed to be anti-British” or consorted “with persons believed to be of enemy origin”. Finally, they had to give an opinion as to whether or not the aliens:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… should be sent forward for examination by the military authorities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On October 29, 1914, the Commonwealth parliament assented to the <a href="http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/wpa1914101914217/">War Precautions Act</a>, conferring upon the government and the military authorities a wide range of powers. As Frank Crowley observed, the act:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… gave the Commonwealth Government complete control over the press and the economy, and enabled it to establish a centralised and militarist administration.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Manual of War Precautions listed no less than 81 separate offences. It contained a bewildering collection of rules, orders and prohibitions – such as measures that forbade enemy aliens the possession of motor cars, telephones, cameras or homing pigeons. Internment was only one, albeit the most severe, infringement of their personal rights and liberty imposed upon German–Australians during the war.</p>
<p>By the end of 1914, the commandants of the military districts had been given the authority to intern “enemy subjects with whose conduct they were not satisfied”. Then-defence minister George Foster Pearce reserved for himself the right to order the internment of naturalised subjects when he thought they were “disaffected or disloyal”.</p>
<p>In 1915, paragraphs 55 and 56a enlarged the power of the minister:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… to cover the internment of disloyal natural born subjects Australian by birth of enemy descent, and of persons of hostile origin or association.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once a military intelligence officer had decided an individual “enemy alien” or a person of “hostile association” constituted a “possible danger”, that person was arrested and placed in a camp behind barbed wire. It was “internment without trial”. The government routinely refused to submit the complaints of internees to the ordinary procedures of legal arbitration.</p>
<p>In October 1916, the registration regulations were <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/histories/first_world_war/AWMOHWW1/AIF/Vol11/">extended</a> to apply to “all aliens, whether enemy or otherwise”. In the end, the machinery of registration, censorship, surveillance, internment and deportation set up by the department to control the resident “enemy” population in Australia was also being used to investigate and prosecute pacifists, unionists, radical socialists, Irish nationalists, anti-conscriptionists of all ideological persuasion – practically anybody who dared to speak out against the government’s commitment to the war. </p>
<p>A precedent was established, involving the use of the state apparatus for the purpose of suppressing political opposition that constitutes one of the ominous features of the political culture first developed in Australia during the war.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76551/original/image-20150331-1253-8iemlh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A German ‘enemy alien’ is taken to the Torrens Island internment camp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the economic front, too, measures against perceived German business interests were enforced on the basis of comprehensive legislation. The <a href="http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/ecaa1915111915314/">Enemy Contracts Annulment Act</a> and various <a href="http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C1914A00009">Trading with the Enemy Acts</a>, passed between 1914 and 1918, imposed restrictions that ranged from the prohibition to buy or sell land to owning or managing a business. Suspected aliens were ordered to disclose holdings in shares, securities or bank accounts. Businesses were wound down and assets transferred to a trustee.</p>
<p>The war provided a welcome opportunity to realise one of Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ long-held aims, namely “the eradication of German influences from the trade of all parts of the Empire”. This was to be achieved by diverting “trade from enemy to Empire”, as Hughes put it. </p>
<p>The Trading with the Enemy legislation was designed not only to prevent Australian products from reaching Germany during the duration of the war, and vice versa. It was meant to destroy permanently what the Commonwealth government considered to be German firms operating in Australia, regardless of whether they were branches of foreign companies or whether they were businesses founded in Australia and run by Australian residents. </p>
<p>Hughes was not afraid to point out that the war was being fought for economic supremacy. This was an argument to support Australia’s unreserved commitment to the war rather than to oppose it.</p>
<p>Since it was physically impossible for the Australian authorities to detain all adult German–Australians, the government decided early on to pursue a policy of selective internment, even though “patriotic Britishers” continued to call for the internment of all enemy aliens (“Intern the lot!”) throughout the war.</p>
<p>While the internment process was to a large extent improvised and capricious, there were nevertheless distinct policy objectives. The Commonwealth government had announced early in the war that destitute enemy alien males could volunteer for internment if lacking any prospect of being able to pay for their livelihood. Their families, after being means-tested, were granted a small allowance.</p>
<p>Progressively, the government then developed a policy of interning destitute or unemployed enemy aliens even if they did not volunteer. The Aliens Instructions, a military handbook detailing the rules of how to deal with “aliens”, explicitly gave district commandants the power to arrest aliens who they considered to be without a regular income. If the intelligence officers found that such individuals had no ties in the Commonwealth and were likely to become a burden on the government, it was routinely recommended that they should be deported after the war concluded.</p>
<p>The internment system thus developed into a tool of social control. It was used to segregate and, after the war, to exclude undesirable residents not only because of their ethnic origin but also because of their poor socioeconomic status. Internees who had been imprisoned because they were considered mentally weak were similarly singled out. Yet other people were interned and later deported because they had criminal records.</p>
<p>In South Australia and Queensland, the Department of Defence also pursued a policy of actively seeking out and interning those residents who were regarded as the political and spiritual leaders of the German–Australian community. The aim of the government was to destroy their community as an autonomous, socio-cultural entity within Australian society.</p>
<p>This objective was pursued through many different avenues: the closing of German clubs and Lutheran schools, the cancelling of German place names and the internment of community leaders in order to deprive German–Australians of their spokesmen in the mainstream public sphere of Australian society.</p>
<p>Thus, the Honorary German Consuls (as opposed to official members of the German diplomatic mission), usually prominent German–Australian businessmen residing in the capital cities of the different states, were all interned. The government firmly believed they were working in alliance with the Lutheran clergy on behalf of the Imperial German government. </p>
<p>In South Australia, Consul Hermann Mücke, son of Carl, was briefly interned during April 1916 and subsequently detained in his home in Adelaide under military guard. At the same time, his youngest son, Francis Frederick, was serving with the Australian Imperial Forces in France after being wounded at Gallipoli.</p>
<p>The Lutheran clergy were also believed to be leaders of the German–Australian community under orders from Berlin. In Queensland, nine pastors were interned. Six of them were naturalised, two of them had been born in Australia. One of the latter two was Pastor Friedrich Gustav Fischer of Goombungee, born in South Australia in 1876. Both his parents had also been born in South Australia.</p>
<p>Fischer’s internment was approved by Hughes’ cabinet following a recommendation by Pearce, who had based his opinion on an intelligence report prepared by his department. It read, in part:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The situation in the German districts gives great anxiety to British residents, and the best way of relieving their anxiety, as well as of keeping German residents in check, is to intern occasionally a few leading German residents. From this point of view it is considered that the internment of Fischer would be justified.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The government steadfastly maintained in public that its policy was to intern only persons who were considered “angerous”. However, the recommendation by Pearce that was accepted by cabinet clearly spells out the actual motivation of the government – to intern the leaders of the German–Australian community, dangerous or not, in order to keep the rest of the community “in check” and, at the same time, to accommodate the wishes of the local “British” community.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/76552/original/image-20150331-1266-1g7gwp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Interned ‘butchers’ pose proudly with their authentic German sausages at Holsworthy internment camp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Dubotzki/Dubotzki Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>After the war</h2>
<p>In total, 6890 persons were interned in Australia during the war, including 67 women and 84 children. Despite the official designation “prisoners of war” given to them by the Commonwealth authorities, the internees were mostly civilian Australian residents. They included approximately 700 “naturalised British subjects” and some 70 “native-born British subjects” who were Australian by birth, sometimes second- or even third-generation Australians of German ancestry.</p>
<p>At the end of the war, a total of 6150 persons were “repatriated” – that is, summarily shipped to Germany: a mass deportation unparalleled in Australian history. Of these, 5414 had been interned, the others were family members or non-interned “ex-enemy aliens” who either accepted the government’s offer to be repatriated or were ordered to leave the country. </p>
<p>Six hundred and ninety-nine people were compulsorily deported. The internees who had been brought to Australia from British dominions overseas were not allowed to return to their previous places of residence. They were all summarily deported.</p>
<p>Most of the internees consented to leave Australia voluntarily. They were convinced that there was no future for them in a country that had robbed them of their rights and freedom. A few protested and appealed to stay, only to be rejected by the Aliens Tribunal that had been set up by the Department of Defence. </p>
<p>The tribunal, consisting of a single magistrate, rubber-stamped the applications according to the guidelines issued by the government. As a rule, businessmen and importers were to be deported, while farmers – who were said to “have shown themselves of less potential danger than the German businessman” – were allowed to stay, unless there were unspecified “special reasons”.</p>
<p>Workingmen were to be deported “if there seems to be any doubt of their obtaining regular employment” after the war. Here, as elsewhere, the official language with its curious linguistic construction – that is, some individuals had shown themselves to be less potentially dangerous – reveals the real political motivation hiding behind the bureaucratic rhetoric.</p>
<p>When the war ended in November 1918, the government was confronted with the task of organising the transport of thousands of deportees. While negotiations were underway with the British government to requisition ships, 104 internees died of the worldwide pneumonic influenza that struck Australia in 1919. </p>
<p>The last prisoners were released on May 5, 1920, a year after the Treaty of Versailles had come into effect. They included 14 “mentally feeble” internees (of the 50 who had been brought to the Holdsworthy camp from insane asylums around Australia) who were transferred back to their original institutions. The other 36 had either died or had already been put on ships to be “repatriated”.</p>
<p>By the end of the war, the once proud and highly visible German–Australian community had disintegrated. German immigrants, if they had not been deported, had gone into assimilationist hiding. It was the end of a process towards a multicultural society that would eventually lead to an independent Australian nation – or so had been the hope of the spokesmen of the German–Australian community who had publicly proposed the notion of a republican Australian citizenship as early as the 1870s.</p>
<p>How can one explain the Australian homefront experience during the Great War: the extraordinary conversion by which an apparently peaceful, largely homogenous, “optimistic” society with strong traditions of British-style liberal democracy based on constitutional rule of law, turned into a violent, aggressive, conflict-ridden society, torn apart by invisible lines of sectarian division, ethnic conflict and socio-economic and political upheaval? </p>
<p>How did domestic co-operation and laissez faire change into spiteful intolerance and blatant injustice?</p>
<p>The war at home against an imaginary enemy, waged by a government that called on the Australian people to assist in every way possible, fuelled a jingoistic atmosphere of demarcation and exclusion. Its aim was to emphasise the “Britishness” of Australian society and to reinforce its links to the Empire.</p>
<p>As a civil, pluralistic, liberal and democratic society, Australia did not pass the test of the crisis brought about by the Great War in Europe. The country suffered a setback in its political culture from which it did not recover until long after the next world war which, with regard to the treatment of “enemy aliens”, was largely a repetition of the experiences of 1914–18. </p>
<p>It was another 60 years before Carl Mücke’s 19th-century dream of an Australia with citizens who felt able to embrace multiple identities began to be revived following the postwar immigration program, which doubled the population and gave birth to a new multiculturalism. In a forerunner of other apologies, it took almost a century before the “shameful discrimination” and its consequences were to be acknowledged.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38594/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gerhard Fischer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The story of the German–Australian community offers an alternative view of Australia’s history as a nation.Gerhard Fischer, Adjunct Professor of German and European Studies, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/385922015-04-21T00:42:43Z2015-04-21T00:42:43ZA legend with class: labour and Anzac<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75799/original/image-20150324-17688-lfsug2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Labor has long had leaders, such as former prime minister Paul Keating, capable of speaking the language of Anzac.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, is publishing a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>For the Australian labour movement, Anzac has been more like a first cousin than a close sibling. There is no missing the family connection: the first Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was an overwhelmingly working-class army, with an ethos instantly recognisable as such. </p>
<p>The AIF’s members valued social egalitarianism while accepting the substance of inequality – just like most of the Australian working class in civilian life, who well understood the difference between a boss and a worker. It nurtured a powerful sense of entitlement – reflecting the idea of a living wage, which had begun to make its mark by the time war broke out, as Justice Higgins’ <a href="http://worksite.actu.org.au/the-harvester-judgement-and-australias-minimum-wage/">Harvester Judgement</a> in 1907 found wider acceptance. </p>
<p>And, just as in civilian life, AIF members were sometimes prepared to withdraw their labour when they believed their rights were being disregarded, or their dignity insulted.</p>
<p>Like the working class of Australia’s cities and towns, the AIF contained its fair share of crooks, crims and ne’er-do-wells. But alongside them were the steady and the respectable – men who saw the demands that war made on them as a test of their <a href="http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=760444117947883;res=IELBUS">moral character</a>.</p>
<p>As late as 1916, there was little reason to expect that the history of the relationship between the labour movement and Anzac would be other than a comfortable coupling. Labour was certainly active in early Anzac commemoration. The first Anzac Day occurred not on April 25, 1916, as one might reasonably assume, but on October 13, 1915, in Adelaide. It was a rebadging of Labour Day, and was designed to raise funds for wounded soldiers. The Adelaide Advertiser <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5483778">explained</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The workers readily yielded up the identity of their day, and while celebrating the attainment of brightened conditions of labour took their places in a bigger scheme of things.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The South Australian labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, was no less enthusiastic in celebrating:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… a grand united community carnival of practical patriotism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But such unity would not long endure. Even in 1915, Anzac Day was marred by the street violence of drunken soldiers. And not everyone in the labour movement appreciated the merging of the traditional festival of labour with the nascent culture of war commemoration. Some trade unionists refused to participate because they objected to the hijacking of their day.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a few imperial patriots, already giving thought to how the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing should be marked, were concerned about the light-hearted spirit of Adelaide’s October Anzac Day, as well as of a number of other fundraising events of the period such as <a href="http://www.ach.familyhistorysa.info/ww1violetday.html">Violet Day</a> and Australia Day.</p>
<p>They wanted a solemn and sacred occasion that would honour the dead, sanctify the cause for which they had given their lives and encourage in others a willingness to serve the Empire. Anzac Day should not be an occasion for fundraising or hedonistic pursuits but, as Brisbane’s Anglican Canon David Garland put it, should become “Australia’s All Souls Day”. </p>
<p>The Queensland Labor premier, TJ Ryan, gave enthusiastic support to the efforts of Garland and his colleagues on Brisbane’s Anzac Day Commemoration Committee to establish Anzac Day as a solemn occasion. He predicted that, to Australians, Gallipoli:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… would always be holy ground … It was the scene of undying deeds of young Australia’s sons and the last resting place of her noble dead. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But by the end of 1916, Ryan was the sole anti-conscriptionist in the country still leading an Australian government. He was rivalled only by his co-religionist, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, in the imperial patriots’ rogues’ gallery.</p>
<h2>Labor’s early moves</h2>
<p>Labor’s stance on defence up to this time was impressive. Its pre-war refusal to contribute a dreadnought – the great battleship of the day – to the Royal Navy arose from nationalism, not pacifism. Labor wanted Australia to have its own navy. It also wanted a citizen army for home defence.</p>
<p>By 1911, it had agreed with London – although quietly – that in the event of a European war, it would raise an expeditionary force for service overseas, even if men could not be compelled under Australia’s Defence Act to fight in it.</p>
<p>As a party that strongly championed White Australia, Labor was also seen as least likely to be complacent about a threat from Asia. It would be able to balance national assertion with imperial obligation – and the 1914 election, which coincided with the European crisis of July–August, was inevitably a referendum on which party could best be trusted to lead Australia in the dangerous times ahead. </p>
<p>Under its leader Andrew Fisher, and with Billy Hughes already recognised as its most dynamic and defence-minded figure, Labor won the election easily.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1294&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1294&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75791/original/image-20150324-17688-11uzfjd.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1294&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Billy Hughes (with walking stick) initiated a Labor Party split over conscription.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In October 1916, Hughes initiated the <a href="http://billyhughes.moadoph.gov.au/conscription">conscription crisis</a>, which split the Labor Party and destroyed the government. From then on, Labor would rarely appear comfortable with either defence policy or the Anzac legend. </p>
<p>During the Depression, the Scullin Labor government abolished compulsory military service and drastically cut defence expenditure – for reasons of economy, but the decision was consistent with the party’s ethos.</p>
<p>A majority of the Labor Party had opposed conscription for overseas service during the Great War, but its hostility now extended to compulsion more generally. This spilled over into a suspicion of defence spending and a general discomfort with military affairs.</p>
<p>The shock of the Japanese southward thrust a decade later disturbed this state of affairs. Suddenly, in the face of an unprecedented threat to the Australian continent itself, Labor was well placed to exploit its reputation as the party of white nationalism and brawny manhood, and to revive its reputation as a party capable of giving due weight to defence.</p>
<p>Even before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Labor showed that it had a leader capable of speaking the language of Anzac when the previously anti-conscriptionist John Curtin spoke at the opening of the Australian War Memorial on November 11, 1941. Curtin said the building:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… gives continuity to the Anzac tradition … It is a tribute which a grateful country pays to those who have served it so steadfastly.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Taking a conservative turn</h2>
<p>The labour movement’s apparent alienation from Anzac in the years between 1916 and 1941 has been a salient theme for 20th-century historians. Russel Ward puzzled over it, somewhat indirectly, in his most famous book, <a href="http://insidestory.org.au/the-legend-turns-fifty">The Australian Legend</a>. </p>
<p>In it, Ward identified the pastoral worker in colonial Australia as the main bearer of the values that many liked to think of as Australian – egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, talented at improvisation, loyal to mates. Towards the end of the book, drawing on the writings of Charles Bean, he recognised in the figure of the Anzac a continuation of the values of the noble bushman.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75792/original/image-20150324-17675-9fxpyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Russel Ward’s seminal work, The Australian Legend.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">OUP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was only in a later work, A Nation for a Continent, that Ward fully acknowledged the Anzac image had been appropriated by the conservatives. Other historians of the nationalist left, such as <a href="http://john.curtin.edu.au/events/speeches/serlebio.html">Geoffrey Serle</a> and <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/historian-author-and-activist/2007/02/13/1171128970103.html">Noel McLachlan</a>, also grappled in the 1960s and 1970s with how and why a radical legend had taken such a conservative turn after 1916.</p>
<p>The answer to the question of why the bush legend had, via Anzac, taken a conservative turn seemed to hold a key – possibly even the key – to understanding what, from their radical-nationalist perspective, had gone wrong in Australia between the world wars. Ward’s noble bushman seemed to be radical – to the extent that he had a political leaning – his bush mateship providing fertile soil for the pioneers of the new unionism in the 1880s, his nationalism laying the groundwork for the literature of the Bulletin writers in the 1890s.</p>
<p>In short, the collectivism of Ward’s bush proletariat was understood as a progenitor of the wider culture of nationalism, democracy and egalitarianism, of what Albert Metin called Australia’s “socialism without doctrines”. But the Anzac and the digger seemed a pesky conservative Empire loyalist who had somehow pushed Australia off its natural course. </p>
<p>In this reading, the returned men’s collectivism had found an inferior expression in the bonds between members of an exclusive cast defined by their common experience as soldiers of the king – not as men owing a primary allegiance to a working class more disposed to national than to imperial patriotism.</p>
<p>The radical-nationalist reading of the politics of Anzac had merit. In some contexts, returned men were a force for imperial conservatism. But the association of political conservatism with the Great War digger or Anzac should not be taken for granted. There was no particular reason to imagine that a working-class army immersed in the horrors of the Western Front would lean right rather than left when it returned to Australia.</p>
<h2>Returned servicemen and the unions</h2>
<p>In fact, many leaned left. Returned men were involved in public violence from 1915 and especially in 1919, when so many of them returned to a divided country that was torn by industrial strife and in the grip of a deadly outbreak of Spanish influenza. </p>
<p>At Fremantle in May 1919, conflict on the waterfront led to a bloody clash between strike-breakers, accompanied by the conservative premier Hal Colebatch, and unionists and their supporters – in some instances returned soldiers. Several people were injured and a unionist was killed. Historian Robert Bollard has <a href="http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/20/bollard">recently uncovered</a> a rich history of industrial action and radical agitation by returned soldiers in the tense period immediately following the First World War.</p>
<p>The Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) – later the Returned and Services League (RSL) – has sometimes been given the credit or blame for directing the politics of Australia’s returned soldiers away from class struggle of this kind and into more conservative channels. </p>
<p>In 1919, returned soldiers, probably organised by RSSILA officers, were prominent among rioters in Brisbane who responded to a leftist <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/03/28/remembering-brisbanes-anti-russian-red-flag-riots">“red flag” rally</a> by attacking members of the local Russian community. And in Victoria in the same year, members of the Essendon RSSILA travelled to the Western District to tar and feather former Labor politician JK McDougall after an anti-war poem he had originally written in opposition to the Boer War was republished, implying that he was referring to the AIF.</p>
<p>Recent research on the RSSILA’s early history suggests that its political impact should not be reduced to a survey of these kinds of incidents. The league’s first president, William Bolton, was an unquestionably partisan figure who had been elected to the federal parliament as a Nationalist senator in 1917. </p>
<p>Bolton aroused fury among his colleagues in the RSSILA after issuing a statement in May 1919, in the midst of widespread industrial action, that “in order to protect our league from the obvious intrigue of disloyal extremists under cover of industrial strife”, it was necessary:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… for all members to strongly abstain from active participation in any industrial dispute.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There was widespread dismay within the organisation over this statement, issued without consultation and, equally seriously, without any apparent understanding of “the awkward position of returned soldiers in time of industrial trouble”. Accused of being unable to devote sufficient time to the organisation he had been involved in founding, it was not long before Bolton was replaced by a very different figure.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1854&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75795/original/image-20150324-17699-12vsul1.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1854&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gilbert Dyett led the RSSILA for 27 years.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gilbert Dyett had been badly wounded at Gallipoli and returned to Australia as an advocate of voluntary recruitment, but an opponent of conscription. He was a Catholic, secretary to the Victorian Trotting and Racing Association, and a close associate of the controversial entrepreneur, John Wren. </p>
<p>Dyett was also an astute negotiator. Historian Martin Crotty suggests that his success in gaining concessions for returned soldiers from then-prime minister Billy Hughes in 1919 probably helped to keep the RSSILA in one piece.</p>
<p>Eschewing the kind of “law and order” campaign in which his predecessor had tried to entangle the organisation, Dyett emphasised the RSSILA’s role as lobbyist. He valued his access to government, for which he thought his own critics among returned soldiers gave him too little credit.</p>
<p>None of this should be taken as indicating that the RSSILA was therefore politically irrelevant beyond its particular concern with returned soldiers’ interests. Plenty of scope remained within state branches and local sub-branches for conservative politicking. But the divisions within the RSSILA about the issue of political neutrality should guard against hasty conclusions concerning its role in shaping the broader political allegiances of returned soldiers.</p>
<p>During the 1920s, the organisation struggled to gain members. In 1919, it probably had between 100,000 and 120,000 members, a figure that declined rapidly and markedly thereafter, dipping to 25,000 members in 1923, before beginning a slow climb that saw numbers reach around 80,000 by the late 1930s.</p>
<h2>From the Depression to the Hawke era</h2>
<p>There is a complicated story involving the Anzac legend and the left between the 1920s and the 1960s which historians have barely begun to untangle. During the Depression, there appears to have been a reinvigorated effort on the part of the mainstream labour movement to engage with the Great War’s legacy, to articulate a progressive Labor nationalism in which Anzac had a part to play. </p>
<p>It seemed natural enough to identify the suffering of the working class during the Depression with the earlier battles abroad, especially as many of those suffering in the 1930s were returned men. The fight for a more just economic system in the face of a crumbling capitalist system was an extension of the sacrifices made by the Anzacs for the sake of a better world. </p>
<p>But further to the left, activists, speakers and publications associated with the Communist Party (and even, on occasion, with more moderate elements in the labour movement) criticised the “imperial boasting and military boosting” of April 25.</p>
<p>Such criticisms – the preserve of a small minority from the 1920s to the 1950s – became part of mainstream public discourse during the 1960s, especially among the young. The Vietnam War is usually associated with the eclipse of Anzac in the 1960s. Its resurgence in the 1980s is seen as dependent, to some extent, on the bitterness and division engendered by that war giving way to a growing sympathy for the young Australian men whose lives were blighted by their participation in it. </p>
<p>Certainly, the 1980s and early 1990s have recently been recognised as a crucial period in the resurgence of Anzac. It was an era that might be seen as beginning in 1981 with the Peter Weir film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082432/">Gallipoli</a> and ending with Paul Keating’s 1993 <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/keating.asp">eulogy</a> for the “unknown soldier” at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9LBpsMqNEV0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is ironic that this reinvention and revival occurred during a period of Labor Party dominance. But both Bob Hawke and Keating – Labor’s two prime ministers of the period – would each, in different ways, seek to align the Anzac legend with his sense of national identity. </p>
<p>Hawke came to office in 1983 evoking Curtin’s wartime legend. He was fond of comparing the economic challenges Australia faced to the problems Curtin encountered in 1942. He engaged with Gallipoli and the First World War more gradually, drawn by circumstance and a highly developed political instinct. </p>
<p>In 1984, Hawke responded to a proposal from the Gallipoli Legion of Anzacs by announcing that his government would ask its Turkish counterpart to rename the beach on which the Australians landed on April 25, 1915, as Anzac Cove – a change which occurred in 1985.</p>
<p>But it was the 1990 pilgrimage to Gallipoli that truly gave Hawke an opportunity to put his mark on the legend. In his memoirs, Hawke places his account of the pilgrimage out of chronological sequence, at the end of a chapter on the Gulf War of 1990–91, as if one were comprehensible in light of the other:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As I looked back nearly a year later, Gallipoli and the Gulf merged in a swell of pride for my country and its people. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hawke was more successful than any other Labor leader, except Curtin, in identifying the Labor Party with “pride for my country”. But the juxtaposition of the two events – the Gallipoli commemoration and the Gulf War – anticipates the ways Anzac would later be used to legitimise the Howard government’s highly contested commitment to the Iraq War.</p>
<p>Fifty-two men, aged between 93 and 104, accompanied Hawke and opposition leader John Hewson on the 1990 trip. Intriguingly, Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, who wrote Hawke’s addresses for the commemoration, thought Hawke’s bicentennial speeches of a couple of years before “had failed to resonate”. Freudenberg saw Gallipoli as an opportunity for Hawke to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… break the conservative monopoly on the interpretation of Australian military history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This background, recently <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/great-war-and-australia-provisional-title/">explored</a> by Carolyn Holbrook, might lend some support to historian Mark McKenna’s theory that a reinvented Anzac Day emerged in the 1990s out of the failure of the 1988 Bicentenary as an exercise in enacting national unity as a result of Aboriginal dissent. Anzac Day, McKenna argues, emerged “as a less complicated and less divisive alternative” to Australia Day.</p>
<p>Hawke’s two key addresses at Gallipoli on April 25, 1990 – at the Dawn Service and later in the morning at <a href="http://ura.unisa.edu.au/view/action/singleViewer.do?dvs=1427089962620%7E449&locale=en_US&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/singleViewer.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=10&adjacency=N&application=DIGITOOL-3&frameId=1&usePid1=true&usePid2=true">Lone Pine</a> – were well-received. The speech at the Dawn Service borrowed – to put it politely – from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. An agnostic prime minister declared the beach:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>.. sacred because of the bravery and the bloodshed of the Anzacs. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Later in the morning, Hawke declared that Anzac’s “meaning can endure only as long as each new generation of Australians finds the will to reinterpret it”. But what he saw in the story of Anzac was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… recognition of the special meaning of Australian mateship.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>More recent times</h2>
<p>As prime minister, Keating elevated war commemoration to at least equal heights as Hawke. But, as is well known, he sought to shift the focus from Gallipoli to Kokoda – from a war fought far from home in defence of an empire to one fought on the doorstep in defence of a nation. </p>
<p>However, Keating’s eulogy to the unknown soldier required reflection on the First World War’s meaning. With historian Don Watson as his speechwriter, Keating delivered a widely admired speech in which he declared the man being reinterred was “all of them” and “one of us”.</p>
<p>The message was egalitarian, democratic, nationalist and, in the context of Keating’s broader concerns and rhetorical armoury of the early 1990s, subtly republican. But, above all, the speech elevated ordinary men and women to war heroes – delivering:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the lesson … that they were not ordinary.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tGh0HdG9ViA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Keating’s ‘unknown solider’ eulogy.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These two streams of rhetoric have arguably been critical in shaping the language of modern Anzac commemoration. There was Hawke’s story of sacrifice and mateship, and Keating’s of the heroic and history-making status of the common man and woman. In each case, the personal was seen to transcend the cause for which the war was fought.</p>
<p>John Howard has been given great credit for his skill in crafting a persuasive political language. Yet, with respect to the Anzac legend, he did not depart significantly from the scripts set down by the two Labor prime ministers who preceded him. </p>
<p>This shared rhetoric of war commemoration should alert us to one of Anzac’s most significant and neglected aspects: that it has functioned since 1916 as a site of social consensus and shared values more than of contestation or disagreement.</p>
<p>However, Anzac is never just about mateship and democracy. It is also always about war and nationhood. </p>
<p>As the political and diplomatic contexts of the First World War became increasingly lost to public memory, the new post-1990 Anzac “consensus” has been forged around amorphous civic values so widely shared that anyone inclined to question them runs close to disqualifying themselves from Australian public culture – or, if you belong to a suspect ethnic or religious group, from the national community entirely. </p>
<p>The defence of Anzac Day commemoration – as common in the 1920s as today – turns on some fairly familiar arguments. It does not glorify war; it does not cultivate hatred; it is about honouring and remembering, not celebrating. Yet a sense of sacred nationhood created through the blood sacrifice of young men remains at its core today, as in 1916.</p>
<p>Is this not to glorify war?</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38592/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank Bongiorno receives funding from the ARC. He is an ALP member.</span></em></p>There is a complicated story involving the Anzac legend and the left between the 1920s and the 1960s which historians have barely begun to untangle.Frank Bongiorno, Associate Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/385892015-04-17T02:27:56Z2015-04-17T02:27:56ZA hundred in a million: our obsession with the Victoria Cross<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74993/original/image-20150316-9184-ij5lhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The recent concentration on Victoria Cross heroes as major 'carriers' of the Anzac legend has skewed Australian military history.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Mark Graham</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, is publishing a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676600/">Martin O'Meara</a>, a Tipperary man who had enlisted in Perth, was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC) for carrying both wounded comrades and ammunition under shellfire at Pozières in August 1916. In 1919, he returned to Perth with three wounds and sergeant’s stripes. The 1963 book <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8424787?selectedversion=NBD3841314">They Dared Mightily</a> coyly notes that soon after the war:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>His health broke down completely. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>What it did not reveal was that O’Meara also returned with “delusional insanity, with hallucinations … extremely homicidal and suicidal”. Committed to the insane ward at Claremont repatriation hospital, where he was usually held “in restraint”, he died in 1935, his sanity destroyed by the war. </p>
<p>By then, another Western Australian VC, <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10675770/">Hugo Throssell</a>, had taken his own life in 1933. “My old war head is going phut,” he confided to friends. </p>
<p>Curiously, neither O’Meara’s nor Throssell’s trauma seems to attract much attention in the slew of books extolling VC heroes that have appeared in increasing numbers in recent years.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74997/original/image-20150316-9190-hzd7qe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1118&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hugo Throssell was awarded a VC for his actions at Gallipoli.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the Crimean War (1854–56), Queen Victoria expressed a desire to recognise exceptional deeds in some tangible form. Previously, bravery had been recognised, if at all, inconsistently – by promotion, monetary reward or mere praise. Instituting a reward “For Valour” – as the medal was inscribed – standardised the record of heroism. It was a classic Victorian device combining high notions of heroism with bureaucratic documentation.</p>
<p>The VC has always attracted attention. When it was first introduced, it soon became a standard benchmark of valour – the attainment of which conferred useful advantages on a man’s career. During the Indian mutiny-cum-rebellion in 1857–58, young British officers all wanted to gain a VC. An astonishing 24 were awarded for actions performed in one day – November 16, 1857. </p>
<p>The awards, though open to all ranks (all European ranks, anyway), mostly went to lieutenants in their 20s in massively disproportionate terms. Gaining a VC became a career-defining distinction. Those who care about them tend to deprecate the idea that VCs are “won”. They murmur “it’s not a raffle, you know”. </p>
<p>Through the second half of the 19th century, the VC became the apogee of the Victorian soldier’s dreams of glory. Awarded after clashes with mutineers, Afridis, Sudanese fuzzy-wuzzies, Asantes, Zulus and Pathans, by the end of the reign of its namesake it had become firmly fixed as the ultimate military decoration.</p>
<p>About 1357 VCs have been awarded – 100 of them to Australians in five wars. Six were awarded in the South African war, 66 in the Great War, 20 in the Second World War, four in Vietnam and four in Afghanistan. To put that in perspective, that is 100 men among the million or so Australians who have seen action in wartime since 1900. Statistically, we are looking at a group that is exceptional in every sense.</p>
<h2>A highly visible commemoration</h2>
<p>The VC is not just a relic of Australia’s colonial standing. It was re-invented as the Victoria Cross for Australia in 1991. During the intervention in Afghanistan, four members of the Australian Army received VCs. </p>
<p>While proponents of the Anzac legend stress its continuities, there seems to be a world of difference between the volunteer citizen soldier VCs of the Somme and the regular soldiers of the Australian Defence Force in Uruzgan province. What connects them is acts of bravery performed at great cost.</p>
<p>With the enormous veneration that the VC attracts, it is important to make clear at the outset that every single one of those awarded the VC has performed a deed worthy of the highest regard. It’s always a “deed”. Archaic language comes easily when talking about the VC.</p>
<p>There is no question that these men all did things that were heroic, in some cases displaying extraordinary “valour” – more archaic language. The point is not that they did not individually deserve recognition, or even that others arguably deserved recognition for comparable deeds and did not receive it. The point is that Australians now seem so fascinated by the VC that such attention has begun to get in the way of a balanced perspective on its place in military history.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74998/original/image-20150316-9198-19fqjde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1255&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Harry Murray was the Great War’s most decorated Australian.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The commemoration of VCs is highly visible. In Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, their headstones are marked not by the badge of their regiment (for British soldiers) or of their national force (for dominion troops) but by a representation of the VC itself. Cemeteries in which VCs lie are always identified, by signs and explanatory panels or in guidebooks and websites. </p>
<p>The hometowns of many VCs commemorate their own VCs, with statues and memorials, such as to <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676877/">John Bernard (Jack) Mackey</a> in the main street of Portland, NSW; <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676831/">Edgar Towner</a> in Blackall, Queensland; <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/fiftyaustralians/35.asp">Harry Murray</a> in Evandale, Tasmania; and no fewer than three VCs in Euroa, Victoria. </p>
<p>And VCs are becoming the focus of local remembrance. The local council in Tumut (NSW) is proposing to change the name of a local park to Ryan Park, after <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676782/">John Ryan</a>, a Tumut man awarded the VC in the attacks on the Hindenburg Line in 1918, who is already commemorated in the park. </p>
<p>Tumut’s example exemplifies exactly how adulation of the VC is skewing the traditional Australian egalitarian emphasis on service and sacrifice.</p>
<h2>The Victoria Cross and the Australian War Memorial</h2>
<p>VCs increasingly populate Australian military history, which has enjoyed an unending boom since the early 1980s. There is a minor cottage industry in writing about VCs, with books ranging from expert and scholarly studies to illustrated compilations recycling summaries of VC deeds and privately published works by enthusiasts. </p>
<p>More books on individual VCs have appeared in the past decade than at any period: ten between 1930 and 2000, but 17 since then. There have been several general books: <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/shop/item/1740662881/">Victoria Cross: Australia’s Finest and the Battles They Fought</a> by Australia’s premier VC expert, Anthony Staunton; <a href="http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=94&book=9781742375847">Bravest: Australia’s Greatest War Heroes and How They Won Their Medals</a> by Robert Macklin; and, for children, <a href="http://aussiereviews.com/2013/04/for-valour-australias-victoria-cross-heroes-by-nicolas-brasch/">Australia’s Victoria Cross Heroes</a> by Nicholas Brasch. </p>
<p>VCs also figure inevitably in campaign studies, though their deeds are rarely of any significance to the broader story. For example, the six VCs awarded at Lone Pine figure prominently in every account of the action, even though they were all awarded to men of battalions sent into the fight later – and whose officers therefore survived to submit the “recommendations” with which the process begins. The VCs do not reflect the nature of the fight, but are unavoidably associated with accounts of it.</p>
<p>Australia venerates the VC arguably more than before the “war on terror” brought us perpetual conflict. Since the 1980s, the Australian War Memorial (AWM) has strongly promoted the VC, which has done much to enhance the medal’s stature. It can be argued this promotion has the effect of inclining the museum’s visitors – both in person and online – to take an unduly positive view not only towards these few heroes, but also to the uncritical view that the AWM promotes towards Australia’s military history.</p>
<p>The AWM’s VC collection went from being negligible 50-odd years ago to occupying the large gallery now at its heart. Significantly, VCs had no strong presence in the AWM as conceived by the Australian official correspondent and later historian Charles Bean, but its collection, and the space devoted to it, grew after his death. It was first displayed in a telephone-box-sized showcase holding a few medals, quaintly called “VC Corner”. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/hall-of-valour/">“Hall of Valour”</a> opened in 1981 and has been enlarged twice, most recently in 2011. It now displays 67 Australian VCs (and three British VCs with Australian associations) and comparable decorations such as the George Cross. While the AWM does not buy VCs on the open market, it accepts medals donated by supporters – notably businessman <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/kerry-stokes-is-the-tycoon-with-a-heart-who-collects-diggers-medals-only-to-give-them-away/story-fni0fiyv-1227094253814">Kerry Stokes</a>, who has purchased at least seven VCs for it. This reflects the more elevated stature accorded the medal in recent years.</p>
<p>The AWM promotes VC recipients as the highest exponents of the “Anzac spirit”. It publishes books about them and articles in its magazine, Wartime, invites VC recipients to participate in ceremonies and public programs, and VCs are prominent in its new café, <a href="http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/prime-minister-tony-abbott-opens-new-cafe-at-australian-war-memorial-20140724-zwc6m.html">opened</a> by Prime Minister Tony Abbott in 2014. </p>
<p>The AWM has adopted <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10022612/">Ben Roberts-Smith</a>, VC, in particular as its mascot – if a powerful man more than two metres tall and correspondingly broad can be so described. He has officiated at exhibition openings and book launches, led the Anzac Day march and spoken at and for the AWM – in person, in print and on film, most recently writing a foreword to the AWM’s book, Anzac Treasures. </p>
<p>Far from fostering a neutral or critical attitude to war and Australia, the AWM arguably promotes rather than merely documents, at the expense of the awareness of the experience of the anonymous majority of soldiers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/74999/original/image-20150316-9184-72z1at.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Australian War Memorial has adopted VC recipient Ben Roberts-Smith as its ‘mascot’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Alan Porritt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Bolstering a faltering commitment to war</h2>
<p>There is a curious naivety to accounts of what are often described as “VC Battles”. A man performs a “deed”; his “valour” is recognised by the award of a VC; the accompanying “citation” describes what he did, usually in creaky, passive prose. But the effect is miraculous. The citations are couched as truthful statements without authors, but also without ambiguity, and accepted seemingly without question. </p>
<p>The mystical process is validated by the award being made not just in the name but often by the hand of the sovereign. Adulation of VC heroes is now at odds with a more open, critical understanding of Australia’s attitude to conflict. </p>
<p>It is now possible to show that Australians deserted or caught venereal diseases; to argue that respected commanders were actually fools or knaves; that the Anzac legend was tarnished as well as burnished. But the greater regard for VCs acts to neutralise critical attention. It will undoubtedly be regarded as poor taste to criticise what is perhaps Australian military history’s last remaining sacred cow.</p>
<p>And yet, as the scrutiny of the awards made in the Great War to Australians suggests, this was not a process untouched by suggestions of pragmatism and political opportunism. The timing of awards, recommendations rejected, the language of the citations, the circumstances of their award, subjectivity and serendipity all suggest that the process was very much a human and indeed a political process. Gaining one decoration attracted others. </p>
<p>“I always got first go at the bucket,” Harry Murray admitted cheerfully to explain later decorations. </p>
<p>As Victoria D’Alton’s <a href="http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks:10841/SOURCE01?view=true">research</a> shows, VCs were not simply awarded because a few soldiers performed brave deeds. Rather, they were very much the product of an imperial system under stress. For example, it is surely significant that half of the VCs awarded to men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) on the Western Front were awarded in 1918, the year when the Australian Corps was under the most severe strain, losses were proportionally greater than even 1916 and volunteers in Australia had almost entirely dried up.</p>
<p>Like the timing of John Monash’s knighthood and Nellie Melba’s damehood, it can be suggested that awards were intended to bolster Australia’s faltering commitment to the war. Arguments within the chain of command over the nature of “deeds” to be rewarded – aggressive actions became preferred over rescuing wounded comrades – show the process to be all too political.</p>
<h2>What did war do to men?</h2>
<p>Whether the attention VCs now attract would impress Great War VCs is problematic. Many played down their awards, as VCs tend to do. <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676726/">Joe Maxwell</a>, the second most highly decorated Australian soldier of the Great War (a boilermaker superbly suited to leadership in war but with little aptitude for peace), reflected modestly that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I was the bravest man that day, then God help the man who was most afraid. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Harry Murray, accepted as the Great War’s most decorated Australian, rarely wore his medals, attended just two Anzac Day services after 1919 and declined to take part in formal occasions, such as the dedication in 1941 of the Australian War Memorial. He refused the chance to return to France in 1956 for fear of “raking up very sad memories”. He found, as did many VCs, that receiving the award changes everything. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75003/original/image-20150316-9190-1nogh2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=988&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mark Donaldson received a VC for his actions in Afghanistan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/David Crosling</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Try not to let it go to your head,” <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676520/">Ted Kenna</a> (a 1945 VC) counselled <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10015140/">Mark Donaldson</a> in 2009. Donaldson’s reflective autobiography, <a href="http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/display_title.asp?ISBN=9781742612287&Author=Donaldson,%20Mark">The Crossroad</a>, suggests that he possesses an unusual, and useful, degree of common sense and modesty.</p>
<p>As it becomes more valorised, the VC arouses extremes of passion, with individuals advocating the claims of those arguably “denied” recognition, who have been known to lobby for years to gain redress. In 2013, an Inquiry into Unresolved Recognition for Past Acts of Naval and Military Gallantry and Valour <a href="https://defence-honours-tribunal.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/AF13050787.pdf">reported</a>, after an extensive two-year inquiry involving dozens of written submissions and public hearings, into the claims of 13 individuals supposedly denied recognition. </p>
<p>These individuals included <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10675912/">John Simpson Kirkpatrick</a> (arguably the Great War’s most famous Australian soldier), <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676787/">Edward Sheean</a> (who died heroically on HMAS Armidale in 1942) and ten other sailors. No Royal Australian Navy member has been awarded the VC. </p>
<p>The very existence of the inquiry – the product of determined pressure over many years – aroused further claims. It examined another 140 cases. In a detailed and well-justified report, the tribunal made the “courageous” recommendation that no “retrospective” VCs should be awarded. Interestingly, while professional historians generally argued against retrospective awards, some popular writers urged that they were justified.</p>
<p>The number of books on VCs now available means that they are overwhelmingly the best documented and most celebrated members of Australia’s military forces. Some of these books reflect their authors’ expertise (notably Anthony Staunton or Andrew Faulkner). </p>
<p>Writing about VCs is entirely legitimate and some are works of quality. However, such books invariably celebrate heroic “deeds”, but are rarely portraits of what war does to men as well as what men do in war. </p>
<p>Still, it is incontrovertible that these men did perform acts of individual bravery meriting recognition. Even if other men performed brave deeds that were not recognised, or resulted in anomalies of recognition, surely there is no harm done?</p>
<p>Actually, there is.</p>
<h2>Skewing Australia’s military history</h2>
<p>Much has been made in recent years of the “militarisation” of Australian history. The argument, first advanced by Marilyn Lake and her co-authors in <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/whats-wrong-with-anzac/">What’s Wrong with Anzac?</a>, has been largely dismissed by those who value military history as a field of study and endeavour. It has also been derided by those who venerate VCs, such as Mervyn Bendle, whose articles in Quadrant denigrate all those who present the Anzac legend as anything other than the premier article of faith and shibboleth of belief in Australia. </p>
<p>While some of the arguments of Lake and others have been well-founded, such as in their identification of the elevation of Anzac into a founding myth and the undue promotion of military history through the deployment of government funding, they have been advanced by scholars who generally do not identify as military historians and who do not actually know the field from within.</p>
<p>Writing as a historian familiar with the history of the Australian Defence Force and its precursors and the operational history of Australian forces in several wars, generally before 1945, I would argue that the recent concentration on Victoria Cross heroes as major “carriers” of the Anzac legend has had the effect of skewing the presentation and perception of Australian military history.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75007/original/image-20150316-9190-5d1gzg.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1149&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The awarding of a VC to Arthur Blackburn helps to soften the story of the battle of the Somme.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Focusing on and invariably celebrating the heroism and success so often a part of the VCs’ stories has the effect of distracting attention from the horror and futility that is also part of the broader story. The Australian VCs awarded on the Western Front – just more than half of the total – celebrate individual valour in ways that counter the mass, industrial-scale, indiscriminate slaughter of that war. Perhaps that partly explains their popularity. </p>
<p>For example, the story of <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676227/">Arthur Blackburn</a>, South Australia’s celebrated VC at Pozières, helps to soften the anonymous, violent, degrading death that was for 6000-odd Australians the essence of the Somme. The recent intensification of interest in the VC suggest that war is about heroic individual endeavour, not assaults by infantry killed en masse or the deployment of high-technology weapons.</p>
<p>Veneration of VCs challenges Australia’s tradition of democratic commemoration. Robert Macklin, in his book Bravest, which deals with a selected few VCs, claims that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The VC has a particular appeal to the egalitarian streak in the Australian character. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But even Macklin concedes that as the VC became ever more prized, its story became “ever more gloriously arrayed with myth and legend”. I would argue that the VC story actually denies the egalitarian streak in Australian military history because it valorises the few rather than empathising with the many.</p>
<p>Writing on the Somme in 1916, Bean reflected on the AIF’s part in the great offensive. He praised its men but emphasised that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They are not heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>While Bean’s official history duly notes each Australian VC, he surely knew that those decorated were not the only heroes. It is significant that the Roll of Honour in the memorial he founded records the names but not the decorations of the dead. </p>
<p>A century on, Bean’s admiration for the egalitarian, volunteer citizen force he documented, celebrated and mourned seems less accepted than once it was. The emphasis on “Anzac VC heroes” ensures that Australia sees glory in its war history rather than the horrific reality.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38589/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Stanley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Australians now seem so fascinated by the Victoria Cross that such attention has begun to get in the way of a balanced perspective on its place in military history.Peter Stanley, Research Professor in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/388472015-04-16T00:24:52Z2015-04-16T00:24:52ZGough’s war: making a politician, changing a nation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75318/original/image-20150319-1562-11ibxki.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C249%2C425%2C389&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Whitlam government had a reformist vision whose origins lay in the future prime minister's own wartime experience.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, is publishing a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In July 1944, stationed with RAAF Squadron 13 in Gove, Flight Lieutenant Navigator Gough Whitlam wrote “a letter of passion” to his wife, Margaret:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Darling … You must conjecture what State administration would have been like in war and compare it with what Commonwealth has been. Similarly you may conjecture what Commonwealth administration may be like in the five postwar years if this Referendum is carried and compare it with what the States’ administration was like in the two previous peacetime periods of stress after the last war and during the depression … You can hardly fail to see that the Commonwealth is better fitted to deal with such nation-wide problems. And so to bed. Love, G.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whitlam’s “passion” for the animating question of Commonwealth–state relations was a thinly disguised, self-deprecating acknowledgement of the depth of his own “aching to return home” – of the dread loneliness of years of war service, which he had increasingly filled with politics. </p>
<p>Margaret and Gough had been married for barely six weeks when he left Sydney to begin his training with the RAAF. For the next three-and-a-half years as an air force navigator, Gough operated across Northern Australia and the South Pacific – from Coffs Harbour, Cooktown and Gove, to Milne Bay, Biak, Hollandia (Jayapura), Merauke, Leyte, Morotai and Palau. Whitlam had applied to join the RAAF in December 1941 – the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. </p>
<p>Four years later, as the war in the Pacific ended, Whitlam navigated the only Empire aircraft assigned to the RAAF Pacific echelon at General MacArthur’s headquarters at Leyte and Manila.</p>
<p>The contrast between American power and dynamism in the region, its keen engagement with the Australian services, and the tired unchallenged British expectations of deference and support could not have been starker. And it did not go unnoticed.</p>
<h2>Early formative experiences</h2>
<p>Whitlam was no stranger to international politics’ changing dimensions. His unusual childhood was spent in the earliest years of the new national capital, Canberra, where his father, Fred Whitlam, was Crown Solicitor and one of Australia’s most significant public servants. </p>
<p>Even as a child, Gough had been immersed in the dynamics of internationalism, current affairs and political debates. It was always in the structured context of parliamentary democracy, which Fred Whitlam considered:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the best political system for the ordering of a humane organised community life. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75319/original/image-20150319-1597-1obs3w9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fred Whitlam had an undoubted influence on the political path of his son.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NAA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their reading matter was the Round Table, the Observer, the Children’s Encyclopedia and the Times Literary Supplement. Their guests were a broad mix of politicians, lawyers and senior public servants. Gough emerged with an astonishing breadth of knowledge and familiarity with international politics and governance. It was the perfect civic grounding for a future prime minister.</p>
<p>Despite the notable distinction between the gentle tolerance and determined political neutrality of Fred Whitlam and the biting wit and fiery political oratory of his son, Fred was an undoubted yet underplayed influence on Gough – in particular on his internationalism and confident view of Australia’s place in the world. </p>
<p>In the postwar formation of the United Nations, Fred Whitlam played a major role as a member of Labor External Affairs Minister’s HV Evatt’s delegation to the <a href="http://adst.org/2014/07/the-paris-peace-conference-1946/">Paris Peace Conference</a> in 1946. He was Australia’s key legal advisor in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the greatest legacy of Evatt’s presidency of the United Nations General Assembly.</p>
<p>The first indications of Gough Whitlam’s abiding concerns for social equality, electoral equity, postcolonial national independence, enhanced federal powers and Aboriginal rights – the pillars of what would become his <a href="https://theconversation.com/gough-whitlams-life-and-legacy-experts-respond-33228">government’s reform agenda</a> – also emerged at this time. This was seen most clearly in his unstinting support for the Curtin Labor government’s 1944 Commonwealth Referendum on Post-war Reconstruction and Democratic Rights – the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1944">“14 powers” referendum</a>.</p>
<p>Stationed in Gove, Whitlam had first come into contact with Aboriginal Australians and was shocked by the conditions in the missions and the towns. He was dismayed by the discrimination that he witnessed not only in the community but also in the services. It was the beginning of his determined policy of recognition of Aboriginal land rights, acknowledgement of wrong and a commitment to end residual discriminatory policies. In his own modest assessment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That gave me an insight which nobody in the parliament had so well.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Cooktown, Whitlam led what he termed “my first political campaign”. He agitated among his own squadron in support of the 1944 referendum to extend the Commonwealth wartime powers for a further five years, to enable it to undertake the extensive national reconstruction effort needed once the war had ended. Evatt called it “planning for peace”.</p>
<h2>The 1944 referendum</h2>
<p>The referendum powers to be transferred to the Commonwealth included national health, employment and unemployment, “reinstatement and advancement” of service personnel and their dependents, uniform company legislation, trusts and monopolies, profiteering and prices, overseas exchange and investment, air transport, uniform railway gauges and family allowances. </p>
<p>The 14th of the Commonwealth powers sought <a href="http://press.anu.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ch0256.pdf">was for</a> “the people of the aboriginal race”. The inclusion of the race power in the 1944 referendum was both a reflection of a “new wartime idealism about the position of Aboriginal people”, and an acknowledgement of the growing international dimension to national considerations of Indigenous affairs. Paul Hasluck, then a senior member of the Department of External Affairs, tried to impress upon successive Australian governments that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… in the postwar settlements, the treatment of native races is likely to be made the subject of international discussion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This international dimension to postwar national developments is the critical framework for understanding Whitlam’s own political trajectory. The extensive reform agenda he later spearheaded through the ALP platform, and the blueprint for <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/government/the-program">“the Program”</a> once in government, provided the domestic articulation of these same postwar international principles of justice and rights first seen in the 1944 referendum.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75325/original/image-20150319-1577-i1dilz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gough Whitlam campaigned in favour of the referendum while in the RAAF.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Whitlam Institute</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whitlam was already a strong supporter of the Curtin government and of John Curtin’s determination that the expansive reach of Commonwealth powers in wartime should not be seen as just a “passing phase”. Curtin’s refusal to concede the undoubted difficulty of reform or to accept “the paradox that the Labor Party was free to enact its policies in times of war alone”, was particularly compelling.</p>
<p>This drove Whitlam’s proselytising for the referendum and his belief – as his war service had already shown him – that only the national government had the capacity to undertake the massive, nationwide postwar reconstruction effort that would be essential once the war ended.</p>
<p>From Canberra, Fred Whitlam (who had drafted the terms of the referendum) sent Gough the paperwork – in typical disinterested public service style enclosing both the “Yes” and “No” cases – together with Evatt’s 188-page 1942 “booklet” Post-war Reconstruction: A Case for Greater Commonwealth Powers, and United Australia Party (UAP) leader Robert Menzies’ second reading speech in forensic opposition.</p>
<h2>The referendum’s international context</h2>
<p>The referendum’s apparently pedestrian proposals to continue the expanded federal powers of wartime were in reality a powerful mechanism for change. Often forgotten yet fundamental to any understanding of it, the earliest iteration of the necessary Commonwealth postwar powers considered at the Constitutional Convention in 1942 had also included four key “democratic freedoms”.</p>
<p>These freedoms were considered, in the context of world war and the rise of fascism, as <a href="https://www.federationpress.com.au/bookstore/book.asp?isbn=9781862874145">central</a> to the postwar spread of liberal democratic citizenship and to future world peace:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this original specification of core political and democratic rights, postwar reconstruction would enable a radical reconfiguration of pre-war certainties, “to lay the foundations for a new social order” through its recognition of fundamental civil and political rights, and of social justice. </p>
<p>It was a dramatic conception, an expression more of hope than possibility, which drew clearly on the urgent political poetry of the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp">Atlantic Charter</a> – a visionary wartime commitment by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 to a world without war, free of deprivations, tolerant and non-discriminatory. </p>
<p>This would be a world that would, with harmony and security at home, never again see the insidious rise of fascism. At its heart, the Atlantic Charter – a pact of mutual aspiration rather than a binding treaty – pointed to a new world order of self-determination and nation-building, of territorial respect, economic security, human rights, international governance and, above all, of peace:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75321/original/image-20150319-1597-r7amfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Franklin Roosevelt first articulated the global agenda-defining ‘four freedoms’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Roosevelt had first articulated the four freedoms in a January 1941 <a href="http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/pdfs/fftext.pdf">address</a> as “a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation”: freedom of speech, of worship, from want and from fear. The inclusion of the freedoms from want and from fear represented both an early notion of economic security as a human right in this post-conflict democratic paradigm, and an internationalism within which the national elaboration of rights and freedoms should be understood. </p>
<p>Like the Atlantic Charter and the initial terms of the Post-war Reconstruction referendum to follow, Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” brought the specifics of national reform into an international framework for a democratic future. It was a forerunner of the postwar international organisations to come. </p>
<p>Evatt’s elevation of the Atlantic Charter and these “four great freedoms” can be seen in his concluding remarks of his first ministerial speech in the House of Representatives on November 26, 1941:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… international peace can be maintained only through international justice, and … the four great freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want – are meaningless unless they be enjoyed, not in one or two or three countries, but, as President Roosevelt insists, “everywhere in the world”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To Curtin, the four freedoms and the “common principles of national policies outlined in the Atlantic Charter” were at the very heart of a new and better world order. He described them to the 1943 Labor Party national conference as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… comparable in their significance to the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The referendum’s defeat</h2>
<p>In its conception, the 1944 referendum was decades ahead of its time. Remarkably, Curtin initially appeared to have secured the necessary cross-party support for its success. After all, in 1942, the states had agreed to the voluntary transfer of much of these same powers.</p>
<p>What defeated the 1944 referendum in the end was time. The end of the war quickly brought an end to any appetite for what was readily depicted as a continuation of onerous wartime regulation and control. Meanwhile, the capricious politics of federalism saw the support of the states evaporate.</p>
<p>Hasluck recalled that the referendum had provided one of the few rallying points for the rapidly disintegrating UAP and Country Party unity, feeding conservative concerns over:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the possible use of wartime powers and arrangements to inaugurate lasting socialist or unificationist programmes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The campaign became further mired in petty squabbles with the states, both Labor and conservative, over the detail of the 14 powers and the implications of the four rights and freedoms. When the revised referendum bill was finally put to the House of Representatives after two years of escalating division, the “four freedoms” had been its greatest casualty. None appeared in the version introduced on February 10, 1944. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75331/original/image-20150319-1572-66ft5y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1150&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Curtin’s 1944 referendum failed to pass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NAA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Curtin and Evatt insisted that the provisions would be put as one. They argued that they made little sense in isolation. They refused to be drawn into endless arguments about specific clauses, state rights and confected fears of federal control – driven by dire press claims that the referendum would “impose a dictatorship in Australia” and that freedom “would vanish entirely”. </p>
<p>In its final form, the “democratic rights” referred to in the referendum’s formal title – <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/library/intguide/law/docs/1944referendumbills.pdf">Constitution Alteration (Post-war Reconstruction and Democratic Rights) Act</a> – bore little resemblance to the powerful and purposive “four great freedoms” originally proposed. </p>
<p>Instead, the referendum question would now include provisions “to safeguard freedom of speech and expression and freedom of religion” – the latter by extending the provision of <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s116.html">Section 116</a> guaranteeing freedom of religion to include the states – and to increase regulatory oversight of delegated government decisions. </p>
<p>This only served to further confuse an already confused debate over the nature of and powers needed for postwar reconstruction. As <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/milner-ian-frank-16424">Ian Milner</a> described it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Referendum campaign politics twisted beyond recognition the actual basic issues involved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whitlam had campaigned fervently for the 1944 referendum, convincing even long-term RAAF pilot Lex Goudie – a paid-up member of the UAP – to support it. But despite majority support from within the services, the referendum did not succeed. It was carried in just two states and failed even to reach the necessary nationwide majority.</p>
<p>The greater degree of service support showed the willingness of those already familiar with and personally reliant on the adequate reach of Commonwealth power in wartime to accept its extension in peacetime, particularly given the specified power for the “reinstatement and advancement” of service members. </p>
<p>The service vote also evinced an anomaly in the broader voting system. The Commonwealth Electoral War-Time Act enabled all service personnel to vote in the referendum even if they were not on the electoral roll. This led to the unusual outcome of an apparently greater than 100% turnout in the referendum vote in some divisions.</p>
<p>The 1944 referendum’s failure had an immeasurable impact on Whitlam. It was not only personally disappointing, but in his now-committed Labor view it was politically devastating. Nearly 60 years later, Whitlam <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=mU5iAAAACAAJ&source=gbs_ViewAPI&redir_esc=y">reflected</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The campaign had an immediate and lasting effect on my attitudes and career.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whitlam understood the almost insurmountable difficulties faced by reforming Labor governments with the Constitution deemed to minimise the reach of federal powers except during wartime. He saw the failure of the 1944 referendum as a singular lost opportunity for future Labor governments.</p>
<p>The “14 powers” propounded by Curtin and Evatt foreshadowed the expanded federal responsibilities in health, welfare, regional and urban development, trade and industry regulation and Aboriginal rights later introduced by the Whitlam government, as well as the protection of basic rights and freedoms that are its hallmark. </p>
<p>Much of what was set out in that referendum, and in the arguments for the expansion of Commonwealth powers first rehearsed there, can be seen in a direct policy line from the extensive renovation of the Labor Party platform of the 1960s driven by Whitlam and the “modernisers” to the reform agenda of the Whitlam government itself. </p>
<p>This was unfinished Labor business – expanding the reach of Commonwealth powers, ensuring the rights of Aboriginal Australians, recognising international responsibilities and agreements, an independent foreign policy stance and a fundamental notion of equality of opportunity as the gateway to social and economic progress – that he would pursue in the Labor Party, in opposition and in government. </p>
<p>Whitlam’s appointment of Curtin’s Director-General of Post-war Reconstruction, Dr H.C. “Nugget” Coombs, as his personal adviser in the days before the 1972 election was an equally powerful reclamation.</p>
<h2>How it shaped Whitlam’s reform agenda</h2>
<p>Perhaps most significantly, the nature of the referendum and its defeat did not consign Whitlam to the pessimism and constitutional impotence that would soon engulf the Labor Party during the bitter infighting of the postwar decades.</p>
<p>Instead, it gave way to Whitlam’s energetic search for alternative means to accrue federal powers within the confines of the constitution – to enable a reform agenda despite the apparent strictures of Section 92 (that trade, commerce and intercourse among the states shall be “absolutely free”) long seen as an historic constitutional barrier to fundamental Labor reform.</p>
<p>In this, Whitlam would follow – with greater success – Evatt’s defiant attempt through the 1944 referendum to remove any such constitutional barriers to “building a better world”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If there are constitutional limitations on such bold and imaginative action, then the Constitution has become the instrument of reaction. Let us not fear to change it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ultimately, Whitlam would realise this shift in federal–state powers without constitutional change, through his expansive application of the interstices of Section 96 enabling the use of “tied grants” of federal funds to the states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I went from the despair of Section 92 to the confidence of Section 96 – 92 was the barrier, 96 the avenue. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Both the reach of the Whitlam government’s comprehensive reforms – “the Program” – and the means through which to achieve it had their origins in his own wartime experiences, and in particular in the lessons of the Curtin government’s 1944 referendum. Out of failure had come opportunity.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75336/original/image-20150319-1597-dxkg79.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gough Whitlam’s novelty in government was less about policy reform and more about trying to realise Curtin’s vision.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">NAA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although rightly seen as a moderniser in terms of Labor reformism and policies, Whitlam’s approach to policy and method also evidences a continuity to this earlier Labor tradition. As an unashamed protector of the Curtin legacy, Whitlam’s novelty in government was less about policy reform and more about finding a means to achieve, within the existing constraints of the constitution, Curtin’s stalled vision for postwar reconstruction, democratic rights, social justice and peace.</p>
<p>Whitlam’s RAAF missions across the Pacific had reinforced the simple reality of this profound geopolitical shift in Australia’s international and security relations. This was expounded by Curtin in 1941 when he shocked the colonial relics with his candid assessment that, at this time of war:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For Whitlam, the continuing, quasi-colonial deference to the United Kingdom was little more than an embarrassing reminder of an arrested national development, and he enthusiastically took up Curtin’s shifting rhetoric and embraced the security implications of the growing US influence in the region – not least because he had experienced its implications in action.</p>
<h2>Whitlam’s commitment to an international order</h2>
<p>In 1945, two days after Curtin’s death, Whitlam returned home on leave. He joined the Darlinghurst branch of the Australian Labor Party the following month. Twenty-seven years later, as he began the final stage of his long road to government, the opening words of his now-famous <a href="http://whitlamdismissal.com/1972/11/13/whitlam-1972-election-policy-speech.html">“It’s Time”</a> policy speech were also Curtin’s words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Men and women of Australia. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this continuity of political influence and history, Whitlam was more than just a product of these postwar global forces. He was an ardent proponent of them. While in government, he drove Australia’s recommitment to them after decades of desuetude.</p>
<p>Under the Whitlam government, more than 133 international treaties were entered into force. This included:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The ratification of the <a href="http://www.un.org/disarmament/WMD/Nuclear/NPTtext.shtml">Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons</a>; </p></li>
<li><p>Fifteen significant human rights treaties, including the <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/3b66c2aa10.pdf">Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees</a>, the <a href="https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1954/07/19540707%2000-40%20AM/Ch_XVI_1p.pdf">Convention on the Political Rights of Women</a>, <a href="http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_INSTRUMENT_ID:312232">Convention (No. 87) concerning Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise</a> and, most importantly, the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx">Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination</a>; and</p></li>
<li><p>The two covenants giving effect to the 1948 <a href="http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a> – the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx">International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights</a> and the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx">International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights</a>.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Whitlam’s appointment in 1983 as Australia’s Ambassador to UNESCO by the Hawke government gave him a rare opportunity to meet that commitment to international governance from within one of the key international organisations itself. He remarked:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For the rest of the decade I sometimes had to apply as much intensity to international politics and administration as I had often applied to national politics and administration during the three previous decades.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a specialised UN agency, UNESCO was itself a product of the postwar drive for internationalism, peaceful conflict resolution and universal human rights that was also fundamental to Whitlam’s domestic political agenda. </p>
<p>Although Australia had played a major role in the creation of the international organisations, this early engagement had waned during the decades of conservative government that followed. Not a single UNESCO convention had been ratified by the Menzies government – an inertia comprehensively overturned by Whitlam.</p>
<p>There is a fine circularity in Whitlam’s appointment as Australia’s Ambassador to UNESCO (1983–86) and his subsequent election to its Executive Board. It was emblematic of the lasting impact of the postwar influences of modernism and internationalism on Australian politics. This was the overdue transformation of the postwar political settlement, promised yet unmet through the decades of Liberal–Country Party government. </p>
<p>The Whitlam government was the necessary rupture with that strained past. It had a reformist vision whose origins lay in Whitlam’s own wartime experience. In the developing institutions of international law, it saw the mechanism for the peaceful resolution of conflict, for equity and democratic rights.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38847/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jenny Hocking receives funding from ARC Linkage and ARC Discovery grants and currently holds an ARC DORA Fellowship.</span></em></p>While serving in the RAAF, future prime minister Gough Whitlam led his first political campaign, agitating among his own squadron in support of the 1944 referendum.Jenny Hocking, Australian Research Council DORA Fellow in the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/388602015-04-15T00:31:19Z2015-04-15T00:31:19ZHow the Great War shaped the foundations of Australia’s future<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75055/original/image-20150317-11980-lmm13k.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Gallipoli campaign is frequently celebrated as the 'birth' of Australia as a nation, but were we already well on our way?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. Over the next fortnight, The Conversation, in partnership with <a href="https://griffithreview.com/">Griffith Review</a>, is publishing a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/griffith-review-enduring-legacies">series of essays</a> exploring the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">enduring legacies of 20th-century wars</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><em>CORRECTED ON APRIL 22, 2015: See the editor’s note at the end of the article.</em></p>
<p>It seems poignantly appropriate that the web address <a href="http://www.gallipoli.net.au/">gallipoli.net.au</a>, which features the logo, “Gallipoli: The Making of a Nation”, is owned by Michael Erdeljac of the Splitters Creek Historical Group. Splitters Creek is now a suburb on the western edge of Albury, better known for its active Landcare group, and as the home to the endangered squirrel glider. </p>
<p>In the competitive market for Great War memorabilia, Erdeljac deserves to be congratulated. He has owned the URL for 14 years, well before commemoration became a national preoccupation. He is motivated by his own conviction that “we must remember”.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78130/original/image-20150416-31678-1kptcuw.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ben Quilty’s oil painting of Troy Park, after Afghanistan 2012.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Image courtesy of Ben Quilty and Jan Murphy Galley, published in the latest Griffith Review</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The history recalled on the site is serviceable; the list of names of those killed at the Gallipoli landing, Lone Pine and Nek battles heartbreaking; the opportunity to “own a piece of history” well-priced: A$1200 for a framed print of a photo from the front. The photo was donated by the late daughter of Corporal Herbert Bensch, one of the many Australians of German heritage who fought for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in the Great War. </p>
<p>It was in a camera belonging to his mate, who was one of the nearly 9,000 Australian soldiers, 3,000 New Zealanders, 35,000 Brits, 27,000 French and 86,000 Turks who died on the peninsula a century ago. Years after returning, Bensch processed the photo and it became a family heirloom.</p>
<p>It is poignant because it was settlements like Splitters Creek in the Riverina that were home to many of the almost 60,000 Australians who died during that war. As has been graphically captured on the screen, and is now easily accessible in the digital records of those who fought, many of the young men who volunteered to travel across hemispheres were country lads woefully ill-prepared for the slaughter they would face.</p>
<p>Not all, like Bensch, traced their forebears back to England. For many of those who fought it was a chance to be involved in a great adventure, albeit often with tragic consequences.</p>
<h2>Did the Great War really create Australia?</h2>
<p>The notion that this blooding and the other epic battles of the Great War made the nation has become a truism. But it is one that needs to be examined.</p>
<p>Australia was already a (teenage) nation in 1914. It was a nation crafted from the time, eager to assert its independence (in most things) from the motherland, infected by a racism made (almost) scientific by Darwinism, egalitarian, protectionist, and, in important democratic domains, marked by a progressive spirit. </p>
<p>In many ways, Australia was a world leader – forging both a civic and an ethnic idea of nation.</p>
<p>In Europe, by contrast, at the beginning of the war, as David Reynolds <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/long-shadow-great-war-david-reynolds-review">details</a>, there were only three republics – France, Switzerland and Portugal – but five major empires: the Ottoman and British, and those headed by the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Five years later, all but one of these empires had imploded. There were 13 new republics and nine nations that had not even existed before the war.</p>
<p>In Europe, the 16 million lives lost and 20 million injured literally created nations. The carnage emboldened a democratic, nationalist and in some places revolutionary, spirit. It led to major political changes in Great Britain, the beginning of the end of the old aristocracy, and eventually the devolution of Ireland. In Australia, by contrast, it slowed and divided the progressive movement, tingeing the country with grief.</p>
<p>Although the trauma and loss was profound in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, there were no battles on home soil in either the motherland or the dominions. In Britain, the outcomes were less concrete. They were more tied, as Reynolds argues, to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… abstract ideals such as civilised values and even the eradication of war.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Australia, as John Hirst has <a href="http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/looking-australia">written</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Gallipoli freed Australia from the self-doubt about whether it had the mettle to be a proper nation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, in Australia, the experience of war became shorthand for nationhood. In New Zealand, it marked the beginning of a long journey to even fuller independence.</p>
<p>It is an ancient notion that equates battle and blood with independence and freedom; that there is life in death. The very idea that war “was the truest test of nationhood and that Australia’s official status would not be ratified psychologically until her men had been blooded in war” is, as historian Carolyn Holbrook persuasively <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/great-war-and-australia-provisional-title/">argues</a>, evidence of:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… muscular nationalism [that] was given legitimacy by Social Darwinism.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Great War did not make Australia – that had been relatively cerebral activity, notwithstanding the conflict of settlement, which reached its conclusion on January 1, 1901, when the colonies federated into a nation. The nation began as penal colonies, prosecuted battles of settlement, welcomed people from many lands and crafted a constitution. But like many adolescents it was conflicted, as Holbrook argues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the very nation that it sought to distinguish itself from was the nation whose approval it craved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Great War was not even the first foreign war that Australians fought in alongside Britain – that was in South Africa. But as the legend of <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P10676773/">Breaker Morant</a> has captured, there were important differences in attitude between Australia and Britain that came to the fore in foreign battles. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=846&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75056/original/image-20150317-11985-19hrmnx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1063&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An anti-conscription leaflet from the 1916-17 referenda era.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many historians have argued that the lingering feeling of illegitimacy, of having a chip on the shoulder that needed to be avenged, helped fuel the idea that participation in the Great War was a coming of age. This was proof, as Hirst <a href="http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/australian-history-seven-questions">noted</a>, that Australia really had the “mettle to be a nation”.</p>
<p>Eagerness to participate was not universally shared. This is illustrated most powerfully in the failure of <a href="http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/fact-sheets/fs161.aspx">two referenda</a> to introduce conscription. This was another important mark of an independent nation, of a place where people had the right to make their own decisions rather than being the property of the state. So those of Irish heritage expressed anti-British sentiment, those of German descent were regarded suspiciously, and Indigenous Australians joined the fight. It was complicated. </p>
<p>Afterwards, the tragedy of loss and grief was palpable. Australia’s progressive spirit was divided and lost momentum.</p>
<p>And then, in little more than a generation, another war began which layered trauma on catastrophe, left the air full of human smoke, changed global geopolitics and renamed the Great War, World War One. </p>
<p>In an enduring sense, it was the Second World War that really changed the world. It consolidated the American Century, defined in part by conflict with the Soviet Republic and its empire; triggered the end of colonialism and its multi-faceted implications; created space for the assertion of international law; and provided the framework for the remarkable transformations of the past seven decades.</p>
<h2>How Australia changed</h2>
<p>Undoubtedly, the wars of the 20th century shaped – arguably even made – modern Australia. But this was not because of an ancient blood sacrifice in distant lands or even the closer strategic battles that followed. It was a product of the responses, realignments and decisions that followed. </p>
<p>Every country has its most symbolic year from each of the world wars, and can trace the consequences of the bloodletting that accompanied the global realignment of the last century.</p>
<p>In Australia this can be measured in many ways, but three major legacies stand out: increasing independence from Britain, deeper engagement with the rest of the world and more multiculturalism at home. It was in the aftermath of these wars that Australia found its voice in international forums – at Versailles and in the formation of both the League of Nations and United Nations. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75054/original/image-20150317-11970-zh0ghv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Second World War was a formative experience for future PM Gough Whitlam.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AWM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After excluding the Chinese, deporting German residents and treating the first Australians as subhuman a century ago, Australia slowly let down the gangplank and after the Second World War began again to welcome large numbers of people from all around the world. While the legal separation from Britain took much longer to achieve – and is still a work in progress – the reaction to the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-30996110">knighting</a> of Prince Philip on Australia Day, 2015, suggests this is a project nearing completion.</p>
<p>At a more prosaic level, one of the greatest media empires the world has ever known can trace its antecedents to the wartime reporting (and political dealmaking) of <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/people/P272/">Sir Keith Murdoch</a>. And it was the wartime experiences of <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/fiftyaustralians/49.asp">Gough Whitlam</a> that shaped his political agenda that was implemented three decades later, and still upholds the foundations of contemporary Australia.</p>
<h2>Not just an intellectual exercise</h2>
<p>It is striking that 2015 is the centenary of the Gallipoli offensive, the 70th anniversary of end of the Second World War in the Pacific, and the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This is a good time to reflect not only on the actions of those wars, but on their consequences and their enduring legacies. </p>
<p>The battles are important, but the lessons to be learnt in their aftermath need to be interrogated to explain how we got where we are.</p>
<p>This is essentially an intellectual exercise. Australians generally shy away from such activity, preferring celebration, commemoration and consumption. This year is replete with travel agents offering guided journeys to far-away battle sites (because, apart from Darwin, none of these modern wars occurred on mainland Australian soil), books, films, television series, exhibitions and coins.</p>
<p>The ballot for places to attend the Gallipoli commemoration was massively <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/defence/august-option-for-anzac-visitors/story-e6frg8yo-1226863661346">oversubscribed</a>. The Perth Mint’s 99.9% gold Baptism of Fire $5050 coin <a href="http://www.perthmint.com.au/catalogue/the-anzac-spirit-100th-anniversary-coin-series-baptism-of-fire-two-ounce-gold-proof-coin.aspx">sold out</a> quickly, but there are still plenty of the 99.9% silver Making of a Nation coins for just $99 and others from the Anzac series. The first episode of Channel Nine’s Gallipoli miniseries <a href="http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2015/02/1-66m-as-my-kitchen-rules-tops-gallipolis-1-1m.html">attracted</a> more than one million viewers before <a href="http://www.tvtonight.com.au/2015/03/gallipoli-concludes-disappointing-run.html">sinking</a> into ratings netherland. </p>
<p>And the Splitters Creek Historical Group still has copies of Corporal Herbert Bensch’s colleague’s battlefront photo, and the list of many of those who died at Gallipoli 100 years ago.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Corrections: This article previously stated that nearly 39,000 Australian soldiers died on the peninsula a century ago. The correct figure is nearly 9,000, as the <a href="https://griffithreview.com/articles/making-nations/">Griffith Review article</a> originally stated. That error was inadvertently introduced by The Conversation during the editing process. There was also a reference to “important democratic domains (compulsory voting)”. Although Australia had universal franchise (excluding Indigenous people in some states) before the first world war, compulsory voting was only introduced federally in 1924, an error made by the author. Thank you to our readers – especially Ned Johnson and Alfred Venison – for pointing out those errors, and we apologise for not seeing and responding to them sooner.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><em>You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review’s latest edition on the enduring legacies of war <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/enduring-legacies/">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38860/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julianne Schultz is on The Conversation's editorial board. Griffith Review receives funding support from the Australia Council.</span></em></p>Every country has its most symbolic year from each of the world wars, and can trace the consequences of the bloodletting that accompanied the global realignment of the last century.Julianne Schultz, Founding Editor of Griffith REVIEW; Professor, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.