Cover story – Busting the Anzac myth
Has a national obsession
hijacked centenary commemorations of the Great War? Chris Sheedy and Steve
Offner report.
At
a recent conference in the United States, UNSW Canberra military historian
Professor Jeffrey Grey found himself at a roundtable discussion in the company
of some of the world’s most respected Great War scholars.
As
they discussed the centenary of World War I and the commemorations that will
begin rolling out on 28 July this year, the panel Chair noted “Australia is
without doubt the most aggressive of the centenary commemorators[B1] ”,
Grey recalls.
He
was immediately struck by the comment.
“I
said to her afterwards that I thought ‘aggressive’ was exactly the right word.
We Australians have taken the opportunity of the centenary and are spending
something in the vicinity of half a billion dollars on the commemoration[B2] ,”
he says.
That price tag was
calculated by former Australian Army officer and UNSW alumnus James Brown in
his book Anzac’s Long Shadow. Brown, who has tours of duty in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and is a Military Fellow at the Lowy Institute for
International Policy, is a vocal critic of the Australian approach to the centenary.[B3]
“At
the War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park, inscribed words decree: ‘Let silent
contemplation be your offering’,” Brown writes in his book. “Instead,
Australians are embarking on a discordant, lengthy and exorbitant four-year
festival for the dead.”
Brown
estimates $325 million is being forked out by the Australian taxpayer for the
string of “festivals”. Add more than $300 million expected in private donations
and what we will have, Brown predicts, is an Anzac centenary that risks
fetishising war.
The national
enthusiasm for the centenary project is all the more perplexing when
Australia’s part in the war is analysed, says Grey, who is one of Australia’s
leading WWI experts. Based at UNSW Canberra’s Australian Centre for the Study
of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS) Grey has undertaken the writing and
editing of Oxford University Press’ new five-volume history of the war to
commemorate the centenary – the first since Australia’s official war historian Charles Bean [B4] penned
his six-volumeOfficial History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 from
the 1920s to ’40s.
Unlike
other countries in the Great War, Australia was never under serious threat of
invasion, Grey says. Even
the number of Australians killed – around 60,000 – represents a tragic but
small figure, compared with the 600,000 British deaths, more than one million
Austro-Hungarian fatalities and almost 1.4 million French lives lost.[B5]
In
commemoration of the centenary, Australia is not only spending more than twice what Britain is[B6] ,
we’re even outspending the French. “And the French, you might think, have more
reason than most to remember the Great War,” Grey says.
Grey set out his
reservations in an opinion piece published in The Australian. “If
Australia’s centenary observance is little more than a four-year long Dawn
Service, replete with all the hackneyed cliches [B7] and
self-serving a-historical mythology trotted out each Anzac Day, it will be a
monumental waste of time and money,” he wrote.
He
adds: “I wonder about the commemorations at Anzac Cove next year. I don’t know
that I necessarily want to scratch too hard to find out what is below the
surface and why all those people will be there.”
The power of myth
According
to Grey and his colleagues in ACSACS – Professor Peter Stanley and Associate
Professor Craig Stockings – you don’t have to dig too deep to uncover the
reasons behind Australia’s obsession.
Anzac Day has arguably replaced
Australia Day as our de facto national day and the events surrounding Gallipoli
have established themselves as our national story.[B8]
In particular, our soldiers’ bravery at Gallipoli is seen to exemplify
idealised virtues that lie at the heart of our self-identity.
“The driving need to celebrate the deeds of past
servicemen and promote conceptions of national identity wrapped in the imagery
of war have come to dominate our national discourse,” Stockings writes in the
introduction to his book Anzac’s Dirty Dozen – 12 Myths
of Australian Military History.[B9]
From this foundation myth [B10] a whole host of historical
misunderstandings has been spawned – and these are not harmless, says
Stockings, whose earlier book Zombie Myths also
sought to dispel some of the more stubborn misconceptions around Anzac. “These
misunderstandings shape our picture of ourselves in obscuring and inaccurate
ways … they situate our attitudes to the past falsely, distort our reading of
the present and our expectations of the future. They are monsters of the mind.”
With
the centenary celebrations it stands to get a lot worse, Stockings predicts.
“These
myths are aided as never before by blogs, Wikipedia, Anzac supplements in the
weekend papers, and bestselling popular histories not always based on archival
research.”
Setting the record straight
One
of our most cherished and enduring myths is the idea Australia’s military history [B11] – and by association our
national identity – began at Gallipoli in 1915, despite Australia’s military
involvement in conflict extending at least to the 1899 Boer War, if not to
colonial times.
Other
myths “that will not die” include the boast that the Australian Imperial Force
was the only all-volunteer army in WWI (it wasn’t), that its volunteer status
made Australian soldiers inherently superior to their conscripted counterparts
(there is no evidence their skills were inherent), and that Australian soldiers
had higher ethics and morality (they demonstrably didn’t).
Another oft-repeated
misconception is that Australia has only ever fought in other people’s wars as
a consequence of misplaced
loyalties or sentiment – a claim particularly levelled at WWI. While this view
has obvious appeal, Stockings says, it fails to stack up. “Australia’s wars
have been her own,” he writes. “For better or worse, successive Australian
governments have chosen to fight. They have done so in the main for cold, calculating, realpolitik reasons.”[B12]
Stanley, one of
Australia’s most active military historians and author of a number of books
including Lost Boys of Anzac, and Digger Smith and Australia’s Great War, says what’s
seductive is the emotional appeal of military history – especially Gallipoli.
“Many Australians believe the landing
at Gallipoli was in the wrong place, that the British put us down in the wrong
place,” he says. “These beliefs have been around for decades. But if you look
at the documents, as historians do, then you will challenge those popular
beliefs.”[B13]
Stanley,
who headed the Australian War Memorial’s Historical Research Section from 1987
to 2007, says it has become clear through generations of scholarship that
Britain’s Royal Navy could not have navigated to a more exact point than it
did, in the dark, using the navigational aids available a century ago.
“The spot they put ashore was actually
a better place because it was less heavily defended,” Stanley says. “Everyone
at the time, including all of the officers, agreed it was a reasonable place to
land. So you can’t attribute the failure of the operation to that.”[B14]
If
blame must be apportioned, he says, it might be better to focus on what
happened once the troops made it to shore on 25 April 1915. The Australian commanders simply
didn’t follow their orders, [B15] he says.
“They
didn’t push on to the objective, to get to the other side of the peninsula.
Instead they told their troops to dig in and that was where the line
stopped. The Turks certainly played their part, but so did the Australian
commanders. That’s not something most Australians would understand or believe
or accept, but it’s true.”
For
many Australians, facts like these are at odds with the legend that was born
that day. Prior to 1915, Australian identity was largely centred on the myth of
the pioneering bushman. Thanks to Gallipoli, that image was replaced by the
bronzed warrior – the ultimate fighter and larrikin prepared to die for his
mates.[B16]
But look more
closely and a different picture emerges. It is a picture of ordinary men coping
as well as they could in terrifying conditions, says Stanley. He wrote Lost Boys of Anzac, using soldiers’ personal letters
and previously unresearched Red Cross records, because he felt a “human gap”
existed in the conventional historiography.
“They are very
candid records and quite destroy the idea that the landing on Gallipoli was in
any way glorious,” he tells Uniken. “I wanted to
show that the Anzacs were ordinary young men – if we can understand that we can
keep Anzac in perspective and understand Australia’s military history
realistically and maturely.”
The ordinariness of
the Diggers is reflected in records that show the Australian Imperial Force had
a higher rate of desertion than any other force on the Western front and that
one in 10 Australian soldiers had some form of venereal disease. The honest accounts
of the soldiers’ lives are included in Stanley’s book Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian
Imperial Force, which was jointly awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize
for Australian History in 2011.
“That book was made
feasible by the release of the AIF’s court martial files,” Stanley says
of Bad Characters. Getting the tone right was critical. “I
needed to be honest – this story had largely not been told – but also
sympathetic to the situation of young men who in many cases suffered death and
wounds in circumstances that none of us experienced. I remembered Madame de
Stael’s aphorism ‘to know all is to forgive all’, and that became the book’s
epigram.”
The
reviews of the book demonstrated the validity of this approach. “To my secret
disappointment no one burned the book, and it sold reasonably well,” Stanley
says.[B17]
Despite
the warts-and-all stories, one of the things that emerged from the historical
accounts was that these ordinary people, when they entered battles and
performed their duties in war zones, had a superb reputation.
“New
Zealand soldiers were good. Canadians were good. Many Brit divisions were good
but Australian divisions were very good and remarkably consistent,” Stanley
says. “Were they among the best fighting forces? Everybody at the time seems to
agree they were.”
Backlash
Predictably,
attempts to set the historical record straight have attracted criticism and
angered some.
Former James Cook
University academic Dr Mervyn Bendle, writing in the conservative journal Quadrant, distilled the criticism, accusing the
UNSW historians and the Lowy Institute’s James Brown, of declaring “a war on
the Anzac legend”, an accusation also seized on by The Australian.
According
to Bendle, they have embarked on an “elitist project explicitly dedicated to
destroying the popular view of these traditions”. Ensconced in elite
institutions (located mostly in Canberra, he adds), they exhibit a disdain for
ordinary Australians and their beliefs.
“[Australians]
should be allowed to honour the centenary without constant sniping from an
anti-Anzac elite of obsessive academic leftists and disgruntled ex-officers,”
he concludes.
It’s
a cheap criticism but not entirely unexpected. After all, no one likes to have
closely held beliefs challenged.
Nevertheless,
Grey, Stanley and Stockings believe it is essential to continue to make the
distinction between historical inquiry and mythology. The military is a
reflection of Australian society and an agent of government policy, Grey
stresses.
“For
the vast majority of Australians their understanding of war and of our defence
forces is refracted through their knowledge of the Great War. If that
understanding is partial at best, by the time it is applied to today’s defence
force – one that bears no relation to the army of 1914 – it is going to be so
skewed as to be deeply misleading.”
Stockings agrees. “I have no problem
with the Anzac myth and sentimentality around that. As far as national
foundation stories go, it’s a reasonably positive one. My problem is when that
type of mythology or sentimentality is mistaken as a substitute for history.
“It’s
one thing to believe in the idea of an invincible, seven-foot-tall Anzac
soldier. It’s another thing to understand these guys as normal people in
harrowing circumstances who still achieved amazing things.
“They
were human beings with human frailties. That’s the reality; it’s evidence from
the source. Their legacy
is far greater in truth than it is in myth,” Stockings says.
What,
then, of the upcoming centenary commemorations?
“It’s
not the worst thing to happen,” Stockings concedes. “I have friends who were
wounded in places like Afghanistan. I have no problem with commemorating loss,
but I have no interest in carnival-like, almost joyful celebrations.
“A
very large proportion of the first Australian Imperial Force was not interested
in marches or the like – they just wanted to get on with their lives.”
[B1]This
is a Challenge – Why is it a challenge? I never saw Australia as being
“aggressive about commemoration”
[B2]Connection
– Maybe aggressive is the right word. Maybe that sort of money can be put into
something like a school or hospital.
[B7]Lots
of people talking about how “We almost won” And how we Gallipoli was a
necessary battle (It was not)
[B12]Australians
didn’t only go to the war. We wanted to go. Conscription was bashed down but
people were still signing up, knowing it was a death sentence
[B13]Myth:
We landed at the wrong beach. We went to the wrong beach because the original
was booby trapped and the next beach was only 4-5 kms off the original
[B16]We
stopped looking at the myth of the Australian bush man and looked at the bronze
digger, the good bloke, the larrikin
[B17]Highest
rate of Dissertation and V.D
1.
Has our national obsession hijacked
centenary commemorations of the Great War?
I believe that matters like these shouldn't really be publicly celebrated or remembered. However if they are i think that it requires the upmost respect of the people there and the people you are remembering, whether we are remembering their courage or bravery it doesn't matter. We need to remember the people who died on that beach with respect for what they did and why they did it. Things like making your money off making people pay to sleep and drink at a beach that wasn't even the one that the Australians landed. I do believe that our obsession has hijacked centenary commemorations and it is easily reversible. We just have to see the way we see our past selves and celebrate and remember with respect.
