It is said that, when President Richard Nixon, assailed by Watergate, drunk and psychotic, wandered the corridors of the White House in the dead of night, talking to portraits of his predecessors, members of his administration put measures in place to keep the President’s hands away from ‘the football’, the briefcase that always accompanied him, containing the codes to launch a nuclear attack. Is this true and could something similar happen today? (more…)
David Stephens
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Hidden in plain sight: Aboriginal massacre map should be no surprise
Lyndall Ryan’s work on mapping the massacres of Aboriginal Australians builds on earlier work which has been ignored or glossed over by settler Australians. Perhaps this time, finally, we can make the link between Indigenous dispossession and the position of Aboriginal people today. (more…)
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DAVID STEPHENS. Afghanistan infinitum or walking away? The possible cost of shared values
Where do Australia’s values come from and what are they? Ten years ago, Australia’s then Minister for Defence, Brendan Nelson, was convinced that our Australian values were forged on the battlefield:No group of Australians has given more, nor worked harder to shape and define our identity than those who have worn – and now wear – the uniform of the Australian Navy, Army and Air Force. They forged values that are ours and make us who we are, reminding us that there are some truths by which we live that are worth defending. (more…)
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DAVID STEPHENS. How we commemorate our wars in other people’s countries.
‘We need to talk about how we commemorate our wars in other people’s countries – and our own’, Honest History, 18 August 2016
“How would we feel if 1,000 Japanese turned up in Darwin wanting to celebrate the bombing of 1942.”
Apart from the Frontier Wars against Indigenous Australians, all of Australia’s wars, from New Zealand in 1845 to Afghanistan and Iraq now, have been fought overseas. Battlefields are overseas, graves are overseas, what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the mystic chords of memory’ stretch across oceans, we travel thousands of kilometres to distant lands to seek ‘closure’ over the last resting place of a distant relative who died perhaps a century ago. (more…)
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DAVID STEPHENS. Is this the most sycophantic speech by an Australian prime minister? Julia Gillard’s address to the United States Congress, March 2011
‘All the way with LBJ’ has become the cliche that associates Conservative dependence on the US alliance. But Julia Gillard’s address to the US Congress is hard to beat! John Menadue. (more…)
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DAVID STEPHENS. A review of Douglas Newton’s five articles that take us behind the scenes in the Great War.
Douglas Newton confronts the really important questions about war
David Stephens reviews five articles by Douglas Newton that take us ‘behind the scenes’ in the Great War (more…)
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DAVID STEPHENS. Honest History’s Alternative Guide to the Australian War Memorial
Questioning the received view: Honest History’s Alternative Guide to the Australian War Memorial
Which word should we use to describe what happened on 25 April 1915: ‘landing’ or ‘invasion’? Why do we refer to dead soldiers as ‘the fallen’? Does the ‘freedom’ we are said to have fought for in our many wars include the freedom to have awkward views about how we should commemorate these wars? (more…)
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David Stephens. How did Canberra get its memorial to Kemal Atatürk?
The Atatürk Memorial in Anzac Parade, Canberra, was unveiled on Anzac Day 1985. Over the signature ‘Kemal Atatürk’, the memorial bears an inscription which commences like this:
Those heroes that shed their blood
And lost their lives …
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly Country.
Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
Here in this country of ours …Research by Honest History and its associates shows there is no strong evidence that Atatürk, an Ottoman commander at Gallipoli and the founder of modern Turkey, ever said or wrote these words. This article looks at how Canberra got a memorial including them. It draws upon the files of the then National Capital Development Commission (NCDC).
In September 1984, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) advised NCDC of a proposal for a commemorative plaque referring to the Australians at Gallipoli. At the same time, discussions were underway about how Australia could reciprocate the Turkish gesture of officially renaming part of the Gallipoli area ‘Anzac Cove’. Calling a stretch of Limestone Avenue outside the Australian War Memorial ‘Gallipoli Avenue’, or perhaps even ‘Atatürk Avenue’, had been suggested but seemed unlikely to satisfy the Turks – or the Memorial, which objected to ‘Atatürk Avenue’.
After the federal election on 1 December and the Christmas break, things began to move. At the end of January, Prime Minister Hawke’s office (PMO) advised the Turkish Ambassador that Australia was attracted to a proposal that Turkey would provide a brass plaque bearing a depiction of Atatürk’s head and the text in English of his famous saying.
Soon after, PM&C advised that the prime minister wanted the plaque in place by Anzac Day, NCDC was told that the prime minister’s ‘personal interest’ dictated haste, and the prime minister himself wrote to the responsible minister, Gordon Scholes, asking him to take ‘personal responsibility’ for the project. The Australian War Memorial vetoed putting a plaque next to the Lone Pine in the grounds of the Memorial. (This was because Atatürk was not Australian.) Somehow – NCDC files are unclear on the details – the decision was made to place a plaque – and a memorial – in Anzac Parade.
The PMO’s January advice hinted at the strong involvement from the Turkish government: it wanted to supply both the likeness of Atatürk for the memorial and the accompanying text. A few days later the Australian Embassy in Ankara advised PM&C that it had seen the Turks’ proposed words and thought they were satisfactory.
The files do not disclose whether anyone knew the translation they were getting from the Turks had been worked up seven years earlier in an exchange between the Turkish Historical Society and Alan J. Campbell of the Gallipoli Fountains of Honour Committee in Brisbane. They reveal, however, the gradual dropping of the word ‘attributed’, as in ‘words attributed to Atatürk’. When Minister Scholes unveiled the memorial he simply referred to ‘Atatürk’s own moving tribute’. Reciprocity apparently eschewed caveats like this.
Strike action during March delayed the work and the files include suggestions that the Anzac Day deadline would not be met. Senior NCDC officials speculated that an Anzac Day ceremony might be avoided anyway to avoid upsetting Armenians commemorating the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on 24 April.
Relying on Ankara added further uncertainty. The Turkish Ambassador was, said PM&C, ‘adamant that his Government provide the plaque(s) for this Memorial’. Atatürk’s bas relief head had still not arrived from Ankara but PM&C were disinclined to press the Ambassador. In early April the head was still absent.
As it turned out, the memorial was unveiled on schedule on Anzac Day. Questions remain about why the Turks pushed so hard for the project. A partial answer may lie in the Turkish Constitution of 1982, which set up the Atatürk High Institution of Culture, Language and History, incorporating the Turkish Historical Society, ‘to disseminate information on the thought, principles and reforms of Atatürk, Turkish culture, Turkish history and the Turkish language’.
At a time when Turkish relations with ‘Western’ countries were patchy, there may well have been attractions in using the ‘Atatürk words’ in cultural diplomacy with an American and British ally in the Southern Hemisphere. With Prime Minister Hawke’s strong support a new memorial appeared in Anzac Parade.
David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (www.honesthistory.net.au). The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History. A longer version of this article, with links, will appear on the Honest History site.
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David Stephens. Bill Shorten’s Royal Commission proposal.
Labor and the banks go way, way back
Bill Shorten’s proposal to have a Royal Commission into the banking system is not just good politics. It also taps into a long Labor tradition: banking Royal Commissions – and banking policy generally – occupy a special corner in Labor’s history.
We need to see terms of reference for the proposed Royal Commission. The emphasis so far, though, has been on illegal and unethical banking behaviour in the absence of adequate regulation, together leading to damage to consumers of financial advice, loans and life insurance. (The Australian Bankers’ Association believes a Royal Commission was unnecessary though it conceded that ‘in the past …. banks have not always lived up to their own standards, let alone those of their customers’.)
The Royal Commission’s brief should range widely to look at the banks’ market power as this is intimately linked to the quality of their service to their clientele. Wobbly banks in Western economies have sometimes been seen as ‘too big to fail’. In other words, their collapse would bring down the economy. Banks can also be ‘too powerful to tangle with’, especially if their power is concentrated and they operate as cartels. The fewer banks there are the easier it is for them to work together and resist government regulatory power. Having few banks, working as a cartel, also limits consumer choice. Consumers escaping one shark in a suit may be gobbled up by another.
Evan Jones, writing in Fairfax, gave a history of partial reviews of Australian banking. He saw the most recent review, Murray 2014, as emphasising capital adequacy requirements (a hedge against failure) but avoiding other symptoms of a ‘seriously broken’ system.
The de facto cartel competes aggressively in misleading advertising, but declines to compete where it matters – competence and integrity in customer relations. In particular, the typical loan facilities for small business and farmers are not fit for purpose. Who cares? The strategy: take security on customer and guarantor assets and default at will … The finance sector is now a societal monolith, and with parasitical tendencies.
The Murray Report had tried to corral the issues when it concluded thatthe focus of financial system policy should be primarily on the degree of efficiency, resilience and fairness the system achieves in facilitating economic activity, rather than on its size or direct contribution (such as through wages and profits) to the economy.
In reality, these attributes and effects run in all directions; Murray’s distinction is unsustainable. The ‘efficiency’ of the cartel delivers profits for the financial sector but may also hamper ‘economic activity’ by reducing competition and ‘fairness’ by denying service to viable customers or giving it to unviable ones.
The clearest ‘contribution … to the economy’ is within the sector itself. Jones points out that the finance sector’s share of total business income – banks dominate the sector but it also includes building societies and credit unions – grew from three per cent in 1980-81 to 17.1 per cent last year. APRA figures show the ‘big four’ banks, ANZ, the Commonwealth, the National Australia Bank and Westpac, achieved profits in the year ended December 2014 of $30 billion out of total banking profits of $34 billion.
According to the International Monetary Fund in 2012, Australia’s banking system is the most concentrated in the world. Our big four banks have a bigger share of banking business (around 80 per cent of total banking assets, with residential mortgages the largest component) than the biggest four banks in any other economy. This sounds like ‘too big to fail’ but it also raises the questions: how did this come about and what has Bill Shorten’s party done about it previously?
The power of the banks has been a continuous theme for Labor. When the Fisher Government founded the Commonwealth Bank in 1911 as ‘the people’s bank’ it disappointed the radical Labor member, Frank Anstey, who complained the new bank ‘possesses no more power than any ordinary trading bank’.
Thus [Anstey said] the Labor Government ignored the felonious bank history of all countries – “one of the frauds by which Capitalism bleeds the people”… It gave a Commonwealth Bank, but it left it stripped of those prerogatives specified in the [Labor] platform; prerogatives that would have made it the supreme banking power in the Nation, that would have made all other banks (while they existed) subject to its will.[1]
The Great Depression of 1929-33 led to demands for banking reform, following what was seen as the banks’ contribution to the crisis – essentially, excessive lending during the 1920s followed by restrictive policies after the crash of 1929 – which harmed many ordinary Australians. While the product emphasis may have changed – more unwise loans in the 1920s, more dodgy financial advice today – the common and ageless threads over the long run of banking history are, first, shoddy service to customers and, secondly, profits.
In 1937, the then former Labor member of federal parliament, Ben Chifley, used his minority report from the Royal Commission on the Monetary and Banking Systems to propose fundamental change. His fresh memories of the then recent depression added to his recollections of the impact of the 1890s depression, when thirteen banks closed in two months in 1893.
Banking differs from any other form of business [Chifley said] because any action – good or bad – by a banking system affects almost every phase of national life … In my opinion the best service to the community can be given only by a banking system from which the profit motive is absent, and, thus, in practice only by a system entirely under national control.[2]
The Royal Commission’s majority proposed far less sweeping reforms than Chifley preferred but even these were not followed up, due to opposition from the banks and then the onset of war. After World War II, the Curtin and Chifley Governments turned their attention to banking reform, largely in response to memories of earlier depressions and fears that a new one would occur.
During the war, banking had been controlled under defence regulations. Labor’s 1945 banking legislation attempted to permanently regulate the trading banks through licensing, lodging of a part of bank deposits with the Commonwealth Bank and control by the Commonwealth of advances policy and interest rates. The legislation also expanded the Commonwealth’s role into that of a central bank, though it was to be subject to the government in any policy dispute. These reforms were along the lines of the wartime system and the majority recommendations of the 1930s Royal Commission.
When the High Court knocked out the 1945 legislation[3], Chifley responded on 16 August 1947.
Cabinet today authorized the Attorney-General (Dr. Evatt) and myself to prepare legislation for submission to the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party for the Nationalisation of banking, other than State banks, with proper protection for shareholders, depositors, borrowers and staff of private banks.[4]
What followed over the next two years has been described as the most torrid political battle in Australia since the conscription referenda of 1916-17. Chifley put the case for nationalisation:
We have only to cast our minds back to other days, when tens of thousands of people were deprived of the necessities of life. Even as a small child, I can remember the depression of the nineties, and the farmers near where I lived who were desolated and grief stricken at the closing of the banks …
We move on then to the 1930s, and there is not one man, be he an economist or not, who will now defend the economic policy which was applied in 1930. We have seen people crowded at factory gates in their thousands trying to get one job; we have seen people at police stations to collect the dole of 5s. 9d. or 8s. 6d. a week.
We do not say that the depression could have been avoided by monetary action. What we do know is that the misery and suffering of hundreds and thousands of men, women and children in this country could have been mitigated to a large degree had proper monetary action been taken …
We do not want the conditions of the depression to recur … [W]e want to ensure that the government of the country shall be in a position to apply through its agent, the Commonwealth Bank, the financial and monetary policy that will prevent, as far as monetary policy can prevent, the sort of thing that happened in the days of the depression.[5]
Trade unions strongly supported nationalisation. On the other side, a vigorous coalition of bank officers and their supporters allied with the Liberal and Country parties and much of the metropolitan press to attack Labor. The argument against bank nationalisation turned into a wide-ranging attack on what Opposition Leader Menzies called Labor’s desire ‘to put the lives and affairs of ordinary citizens into bondage’. Dramatised advertising starring ‘Bob Freeland’ and ‘John Henry Austral’ put the anti-Labor case as the government was accused of socialism, communism, nazism and fascism – and sometimes all of these at once.[6]
Ultimately, the High Court and the Privy Council disallowed the 1947 banking legislation.[7] The attempt to nationalise the banks, along with discontent over petrol rationing, governmental restrictions persisting too long after the war, and other dissatisfaction, led to Labor’s defeat in 1949. A host of reasons then kept Labor out of office for 23 years.
Looking just at banking policy, however, it seems clear that the concentration of banking power today in private hands is not all that different from what would have occurred had bank nationalisation succeeded. Just after the nationalisation announcement, the Sydney Morning Herald claimed that the plan meant that the Commonwealth Bank would control £800 million in deposits and shareholders’ funds in the biggest nine banks and be the largest banking monopoly in the world.
As noted above, the big four Australian banks today control more of our banking business than the top four banks in any other country. We avoided monopoly but copped oligopoly; we denied Chifley’s ideal of banking in the public interest but now endure the profit motive in spades.
Customers can judge the impacts of this history in areas like financial planning, insurance and interest rates. Banks still, in Chifley’s words of 1937, affect ‘almost every phase of national life’. Chifley’s remarks about the balance between banking profits and service to the community also remain extremely apposite.
Chifley-style nationalisation is presumably off the agenda but if anyone wanted to make a case for a tax on bank profits or for breaking up the large banks, evidence like that presented here would bolster their arguments. Perhaps recommendations in that direction might come out of a Royal Commission – if one ever happens – which might bring a chuckle of satisfaction from the ghost of a former Labor Treasurer from Bathurst.
David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (www.honesthistory.net.au). The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.
[1] Frank Anstey, The Money Power, Fraser & Jenkinson, Melbourne, 1921, p. 73.
[2] Australia. Parliament, Report of the Royal Commission appointed to Inquire into the Monetary and Banking Systems: Parliamentary Papers, Session 1937, No. 74, Vol. V, General and Finance, ‘Dissent, reservation and addenda by Mr. Chifley’.
[3] Melbourne Corporation v Commonwealth (1947) 74 CLR 31; [1947] HCA 26.
[4] LF Crisp, Ben Chifley: A Political Biography, Longmans, London, 1961, pp 327-28.
[5] Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives, Official Hansard, 11 November 1947, pp. 1927-28.
[6] For the 1949 campaign, Freeland and Austral, see Robert Crawford, ‘Supporting banks, Liberals and the “Australian Way”: the Freelands and the 1949 election’, History Australia, 2, 3, 2005, downloadable from Monash University e-press; David Stephens, ‘Political theory, history and the Australian Labor Governments, 1941-49’ (MA thesis, Monash University, 1974), available on microfiche at the National Library of Australia; David Stephens, ‘The effect of the Great Depression on the Federal Labor Governments, 1941-49’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, XXII, 2, August 1976, pp. 258-70.
[7] Bank of New South Wales v The Commonwealth (1948) 76 CLR 1; Commonwealth v Bank of New South Wales (1949) 79 CLR 497, [1950] AC 235.
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David Stephens. Invading our smugness: thoughts on a diversity toolkit
Wednesday, 30 March, must have been a slow news day at the Daily Telegraph. It is difficult to find any other reasonable explanation for the fuss the Telegraph made about the ‘diversity toolkit’ it discovered on the website of the University of New South Wales. What followed, however, spoke volumes about how careless some in the mainstream media have become about evidence and, more importantly, how easy it is for ‘hot button’ issues to provoke massively disproportionate reactions.
First, on evidence. Despite the Telegraph’s fulminations that students were being directed to say Australia was ‘invaded’ rather than ‘settled’, and to accept various concepts that the Telegraph blamed on ‘nutty professors’, the toolkit was a fairly mild document. A statement from UNSW insisted the toolkit contained nothing mandatory, merely lists of ‘more appropriate’ and ‘less appropriate’ terminology relevant to settler-Indigenous history in Australia.
The university rejects any notion that a resource for teachers on Indigenous terminology dictates the use of language or that it is designed to be politically correct … The guide does not mandate what language can be used.
Even Wiradjuri journalist Stan Grant (Guardian Australia) fell for the idea that UNSW was trying to suppress free speech. Those who delved a little deeper also found the UNSW guidelines had been obtained under licence from Flinders University, Adelaide, that there were similar guidelines in place at the Australian National University, Monash University, the Queensland University of Technology, the University of Melbourne and probably other institutions, and that the UNSW Indigenous guidelines were based on material that has been used in New South Wales schools since – wait for it – 1996.
Secondly, on the reaction. Paul Daley (Guardian Australia) argued that ‘invasion’ was the correct word to use. He attracted more than 2600 comments in two days, both strongly supportive and strongly resentful, and an unusual number ‘deleted by Moderator’. Shock jocks Hadley, Jones and Sandilands frothed although morning television was fairly laid-back. (The Telegraph’s original outrage had found willing support from Keith Windschuttle and the Institute of Public Affairs.) In non-MSM media, Alex McKinnon in Junkee kept a level head. Up in Queensland, Premier Palaszczuk supported QUT’s similar guidelines. Among the exercised, there was some confusion about whether Cook or Phillip was the invasion leader.
As usually happens, the best analysis arrived a couple of days after the initial explosion.
[W]hy is this hysterical response so entirely predictable? [asked Waleed Aly in Fairfax] Why is it that the moment the language of invasion appears, we seem so instinctively threatened by it? This isn’t the response of sober historical disagreement. It’s more visceral than that. Elemental even. It’s like any remotely honest appraisal of our history – even one contained in an obscure university guide – has the power to trigger some kind of existential meltdown. What strange insecurity is this?
Archaeology professor Bryce Barker in The Conversation also provoked trenchant comments pro and con. He made an important connection.
It is telling that [Kyle] Sandilands suggested people “get over it – it’s 200 years ago” when we so revere the notion of Lest We Forget when remembering our role in a foreign war (WWI) 100 years ago … [W]ho we, as Australians, choose to remember and what events we commemorate are inherently entwined with how we view ourselves and how we want the world to see us as a nation … Is not a Walpiri man’s death defending his way of life [at Coniston, NT, in 1928, when 31 men, women and children were killed by police] just as worthy of remembrance as a World War I digger’s ten years earlier?
Why are we as a nation so reluctant to face up to this part of our past? Inconvenient truths that risk tainting the white “pioneer/settler” narrative are, it seems, not to be commemorated but forgotten.
You could write a history of Australia around two invasions: Australia from 1788; Gallipoli 1915. You would need to explain, though, why one invasion has attained cult status while the other, for many of us, is euphemised out of mind. Smugness reigns.
‘Invasion’ or not? Semantics can lead us up a dry gulch. Not all invasions look like D-Day, the War of the Worlds or the Gallipoli ‘landing’ but none of them end when the last soldier splashes ashore. An invasion, at its simplest, is entering and remaining in a place where you are not welcome.
If the initial reaction of the Eora to Phillip was more one of puzzlement than hostility this did not remain so for long. The invasion went on to take various forms, from loss of land to poisoning to massacre. Indigenous resistance commenced within months of the First Fleet and persisted, led by warriors like Pemulwuy, Windradyne, Jandamarra and unnamed others.
According to recent research by Evans and Ørsted-Jensen the invasion of Australia led to more than 65,000 Indigenous deaths (men, women and children) in Queensland alone and perhaps 100,000 across Australia. That’s many more Australian deaths than in World War I and about as many deaths as in all our overseas wars.
‘Get over it’, or not?
You cannot “get over” a colonial past that is still being implemented today [responded Indigenous writer Luke Pearson in Guardian Australia]. You cannot come to terms with a national history that the nation refuses to acknowledge ever happened. We cannot “reconcile” what happened yesterday when we are too busy bracing ourselves for what will inevitably come tomorrow.
That initial ‘wound in the soul’ has been reopened many times and still festers beneath Indigenous family violence, incarceration and mental and physical illness. The strand of our history that traces from 26 January 1788 has left a mark that many of us cannot fail to see and feel but that many more of us refuse to recognise.
David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (honesthistory.net.au). Sources for the article can be found here or by using the search function on the Honest History website. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.
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David Stephens. Malcolm Turnbull’s post-Anzac pitch to the Australian Defence Force
Tony Abbott admired soldiers. He liked to be around them, to talk about the fortunes of war (“shit happens,” as he memorably muttered to troops in Afghanistan). He quoted Samuel Johnson about how men despise themselves if they have never been a soldier. His Anzac Day Dawn Service speech last year at Gallipoli portrayed the men of Anzac as sacred role models for us today. He tried to con New Zealand’s John Key into a “Sons of Anzac” commemoration force to take on Islamic State.
Malcolm Turnbull is different. On 14 February (11 days before he released the Defence White Paper) he spoke to soldiers at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville. He mentioned the “professionalism” and “commitment” of members of the Australian Defence Force and recalled his recent visit to Afghanistan. He thanked those present for their service. Then he said this:
I want to say how much I admire the way the Australian Army in 2016 is adapting to the rapid changes in technology. What you are doing here is showing the kind of agility and innovation that the most successful companies in the private sector do as well. It is recognising that you are operating in a rapidly changing environment … [W]e constantly have to adapt what we are doing to be agile and always, always at our best. To reject complacency. So really, you are a model of a 21st-century army.
Later on the same day, at a doorstop with journalists, the prime minister warmed to his theme:
What an inspiration it is to see how the 21st century army is adapting to new challenges, new challenges on the battlefield, and using the newest technologies to ensure that our young men and women, when they go out to defend our nation, defend our values, protect our interests, are doing so in a way that gives them greatest effectiveness, the greatest ability to succeed and also gives them the maximum protection.
[Our soldiers are] adapting to every new stage of technology, every piece of new information and experience coming in from Afghanistan or Iraq is being analysed and then incorporated into the training here … So, this is a critically important part of ensuring Australia’s Army is at the very cutting edge of military technology, both in terms of signals and of course, in terms of military technique and training.
So innovation and agility is not just for start-ups and science graduates but for men and women in uniform as well. The prime minister did not ignore the Anzac tradition but his mention of it came right at the end of his Lavarack praise of the innovative military, almost as an afterthought:
Agile, nimble, technologically advanced and of course, you embody all of the same values of the ANZACs, 100 years ago, the ANZACs of 100 years ago, their values, their traditions, their commitment, their patriotism, you embody today. So, we are so proud of you.
Prime Minister Turnbull has in the past been an enthusiastic spruiker for the book written by his son-in-law, retired Army Captain James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (2014). (So he should be; it is a very good book.) In the book, Brown is sceptical of the traditional image of “larrikin Anzacs” as the epitome of Australian soldiers. He also quotes former Chief of the Defence Force, General David Hurley, who in 2010 called for the Australian Defence Force to become innovative in strategy, intellectually excellent and deeply knowledgeable.
Innovation, understanding, connection and intellectual excellence – these are skills and attributes not captured in the Anzac legend and digger myth. Hurley is describing [says Brown] a new type of military professional – one who can fight tactically but also do battle in the realm of ideas. But Australians have their own ideas about what professional soldiers should look like, and their own legends about how they should act.
Brown also quotes military psychologist, Damien Hadfield, who has identified “the Anzac spirit monkey” as something that Australian soldiers today have to deal with. Not only does “the monkey” leave today’s service men and women with a legacy of Anzac superheroes that is difficult to live up to but it also ingrains unrealistic concepts in civilians (including, one might add, some prime ministers). They still see warfare in World War I terms (charging at the guns, reckless heroism, stressful lives in trenches). Archie in the movie Gallipoli has a lot to answer for.
Modern warfare is more complex than this, Hadfield (and Brown) conclude, requiring more technical expertise and stressful in different ways to what it was like a century ago. Consequently, it is “much harder for people at home to identify with a war driven by machines, systems and strategy.”
That latter type of war is what Prime Minister Turnbull seemed to have in mind when he spoke in Townsville. As things ramp up again in the South China Sea, that may be a good thing. The final image in Brown’s book may well have been in the prime minister’s mind when he spoke. Brown imagines the scene in the belly of an amphibious vessel (interestingly enough, one based in Townsville) approaching a hostile shore. Only the invasion scenario looks much like what Australians faced a century ago in Turkey; the men and women in this boat (or in one of the submarines the White Paper says we are going to acquire) are high-tech and highly trained but are their heads in the same place as their ancestors in the Dardanelles? “Has our obsession with the Anzac legend,” Brown asks, “helped prepare us for what happens next?”
Brown, the prime minister (and us) should hope that it never comes to that. If it does (and Australia is foolish enough to follow the United States into a confrontation in the South China Sea, come what may) a nimble, technologically advanced defence force will be much more desirable than one with Anzac stars in its eyes.
David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (honesthistory.net.au). The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.
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David Stephens. ‘There will be blood’: ministerial remarks on the responsibility of children.
There will be blood from the sword up to the belly of a horse, and the thigh of a human, and the hock of a camel. And there will be great fear and trembling upon the earth. And those who see that wrath will be terrified, and trembling will seize them. (6 Ezra, Old Testament Pseudoepigraphica)
Blood has always fascinated authority figures and their acolytes, from high priests then to ministers now. In ancient Israel, the old men who ran things got so hung up on blood and blood-letting that they invented the cult of Moloch and similar ritualistic practices. Moloch followers supported the passing of children through fire or sacrificing them to idols.
Since these early days, war and the idea of blood sacrifice have become intricately entwined. One leading study ‘argues that violent blood sacrifice makes enduring groups cohere, even though such a claim challenges our most deeply held notions of civilized behavior’.
Historian Carolyn Holbrook, in her book, Anzac: the Unauthorised Biography, traced the connections between the growth of the Anzac legend and yearnings about the spilling of blood. Before the Great War, even a ‘radical’ poet like Henry Lawson noted the disappointing lack of blood in Federation.
A nation’s born where the shell falls fast [Lawson wrote in The Star of Australasia in 1895], or its lease of life renewed.
We in part atone for the ghoulish strife, and the crimes of peace we boast,
And the better part of a people’s life in the storm comes uppermost.
The 1981 film Gallipoli famously riffed on blood sacrifice with its final scene of a ‘crucified’ Archie, brought down at The Nek.
Another historian, Frank Bongiorno went further, asking an important question.
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. Is this not to glorify war?
When Fromelles, 19 July 1916, was ‘rediscovered’ as an Australian battle of the Great War, the blood shed there was the main point of significance, even becoming the sub-title of a book for young people, Carole Wilkinson’s Fromelles: Australia’s Bloodiest Day at War. The book was shortlisted for a Children’s Book Council Award in 2012 and promoted by Junior Bookseller and Publisher as ‘exactly the kind of book that will inspire a love of history for years to come’. It has a suitably ruddy cover with blood-red Flanders poppies.
When Defence Minister Andrews spoke on Anzac Day this year at Villers-Bretonneux he quoted the Bishop of Amiens in 1920 about how Australians had restored the Bishop’s diocese by the spilling of blood. The Minister added:
The sacrifice that the bishop speaks of – sacrifice made in blood by those brave Anzacs – must be understood and carried on in the hearts and minds of our young people. It must never be forgotten.
But it is Minister Andrews’ colleague, Senator Michael Ronaldson, Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, who has been most vocal on the twin themes of blood sacrifice and the responsibility of children.
Last year the Minister talked about how children ‘must understand that’ in many cases their ‘freedom has been paid for in blood’. This year he has warmed to the theme.
We [he told the Queensland RSL on 20 June] must also do whatever we can to ensure that the future generations of young Australians understand as well what that service and sacrifice is for them in a personal sense.
The freedoms that we enjoy today have come at a huge price. It is incumbent on you and I to ensure that our kids understand, the next generation of young Australians understand, what their responsibilities are as well as what their rights are …
[The next four years] is an opportunity that you and I, quite frankly, must ensure that we maximise with another generation of young Australians who understand. I think we can be rest assured that they will reward us accordingly.
Ten days later, the Minister opened a memorial park in Cheltenham in Victoria:
[W]e’ve got to make sure that our children understand that the 102,700 names in the cloisters of the Australian War Memorial had given their own blood to enable us to live our lives in relative freedom today …
[T]his has come at an enormous price and they will be carrying the torch of remembrance well after many of us who are here today are gone … It’s a community obligation to ensure that our children understand …
[W]e must teach our kids that these freedoms are incredibly important and they must stand and defend them as well as others have before us.
The Minister’s speeches as recorded are a touch incoherent but we can trace his argument well enough:
Children must understand the concept of blood sacrifice.
They must carry the torch of remembrance of this sacrifice.
They must be prepared to defend our freedoms, as was done by those who are being remembered.
Thus will be ensured the necessary blood sacrifice by future generations.
This will be an appropriate reward for the current generation’s advocacy of blood sacrifice.
It is notable though that this generation – the Minister’s generation – has mostly not had to make such a sacrifice itself. And blood in these remarks is always in the abstract; nothing about the details – evisceration, decapitation, or slowly bleeding to death, screaming, alone, trying to hold your intestines in.
This rhetoric effectively conditions the next generation for military endeavours involving blood sacrifice. That’s our legacy to our children and grandchildren: the expectation that honouring the war dead of the past – carrying the torch – requires the preparedness to become the war dead of the future. There will be blood.
David Stephens is secretary and editor of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au), a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.
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David Stephens. Why is Australia spending so much more on the Great War centenary than any other country?
Current Affairs
The question at the head of this article has intrigued Honest History since we began our coalition and our website. This was in the floundering days of the Labor Government. When Abbott replaced Rudd II, the federal commitment to the Anzac centenary already stood at $140 million, it has been going up ever since and it is way ahead of any other country in the world and, possibly, of every other country combined. (More of that shortly.)
Finding the evidence
We had plans to obtain information for all countries involved in World War I, their expenditure on the centenary, and their death toll, military and civilian, during the war. Death figures are easily found in Wikipedia, which in turn uses a mass of official and other authoritative data. Other sources offer marginally different numbers.
More than 30 countries and colonies took part in World War I as combatants. To date, working off media reports and some information from embassies in Canberra, we have found useful information on commemorative spending by just nine of them. Some embassies we spoke to were clearly puzzled by our question, as if Great War commemoration expenditure was not a high priority issue for them. We will follow up with some of them. While we hoped to put some flesh on some earlier estimates that Australia is spending more – perhaps two times more – than all other countries combined, the more we probed the more difficult it became to find firm evidence.
Here is a summary of what we have so far, with a focus on total military and civilian deaths, commemoration expenditure and commemoration expenditure per death. All figures are converted to Australian dollars as at early June 2015. The three countries where information is still incomplete are listed first in alphabetical order, followed by six other countries in ascending order of commemoration expenditure per death. (A version of this article including references will be posted on the Honest History website. An explanatory note is at the foot of this article.)
Belgium. Total military and civilian deaths: 144,300. A 2014 media report claimed the province of Flanders was spending 55 million euro and other provinces even more.
Portugal. Total military and civilian deaths: 89,200. A 2014 media report noted there is a centenary commission which is organising cultural and research events, although the centenary has not aroused great public interest.
United States. Total military and civilian deaths: 117,500. There is a centennial commission and a plan for a World War I memorial. The legislation for the centennial commission prohibits federal funding, so commemoration efforts will rely heavily on private donations. There is limited evidence of donations to date, indicating that they may not start to flow until 2016-17.
Germany (German Empire). Total military and civilian deaths: 2,800,720. A 2014 media report estimated German expenditure at around $A6 million although the German Embassy was unable to provide figures. While there were numerous commemorative projects under way at federal, state and local level, we were told, governments mostly choose to support such activities indirectly by funding various non-government groups. An overall figure was thus difficult to obtain. We have settled on the $A6 million figure for comparative purposes. Commemoration expenditure per death: $A2.
France. Total military and civilian deaths: 1,737,800. A media report in 2014 puts French spending at 60 million euro which is $A90 million today. Commemoration expenditure per death: $A52.
United Kingdom and colonies. Total military and civilian deaths: 1,012,100. The UK government in 2013 proposed to spend 55 million pounds and the High Commission cannot identify any additional funding since then. That amount is $A110 million today. Commemoration expenditure per death: $A109.
Canada (including Newfoundland). Total military and civilian deaths: 66,600. Canada is very reticent about details of commemoration expenditure, following political fallout from its spending $C30 million on commemoration of the bicentenary of the War of 1812. The formula of ‘no new money’ has been used. Yet the commemorations of the 1917 battles at Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele will not be cheap. Given that we are counting the $A100 million being spent on the Australian Monash interpretive centre and that most of that is not ‘new money’ we have not let the Canadian form of words thwart us. For the sake of comparison we are assuming that Canadian commemoration of World War I will not cost less than commemoration of the War of 1812, even if the evidence is more difficult to find this time around. So, $C30 million it is, which is $A31 million. Commemoration expenditure per death: $A465.
New Zealand. Total military and civilian deaths: 18,100 (including no civilians). There is a complication in the New Zealand case. Total commemoration expenditure of around $A140 million can be identified, with more to come (including a government contribution to an exhibition being created by Sir Peter ‘Lord of the Rings’ Jackson) but $A109 million of this (according to the New Zealand Government) is for the Pukeahu National War Memorial Park in Wellington. This project is described as ‘legacy’ (the first work on the Park was just after World War I) and much of the cost is for construction of the Arras Tunnel under the Park. (We have not been able to obtain separate costs for the tunnel and park elements of the project.) This tunnel is named after a New Zealand tunnel project on the Western Front and its walls are decorated with Flanders poppies artwork. For those reasons the tunnel could be classified as a commemorative project, although it also has major traffic benefits. We have done the figures two ways, nevertheless. Commemoration expenditure (including Pukeahu Park and Arras Tunnel) per death: $A7735; commemoration expenditure (excluding Pukeahu Park and Arras Tunnel) per death: $1713.
Australia. Total military and civilian deaths: 62,100 (including no civilians). At the time of writing, Australian expenditure, spent and proposed, stands at $A551.8 million, by Honest History’s reckoning, comprising $331.3 million Commonwealth, $140.5 million State and Territory and $80 million corporate. The Commonwealth figure may be a little low – a Senate Estimates Committee was told recently that the spend for the current year was $88 million and four years at that rate would amount to $352 million – and more corporate money is expected. A final figure of $A650-700 million is not implausible. Let’s settle for $A552 million for now. Commemoration expenditure per death: $A8889.
There are many caveats necessary in comparative work like this, particularly to do with different budgetary conventions between countries. Countries identify commemorative spending in different ways, for example, ‘commemoration’, ‘defence’ or ‘heritage’. Some will try, for political reasons, to hide expenditure (Canada is an example). Others, for political reasons also, will try to inflate their expenditure, perhaps by rebadging as ‘commemoration’ spending which could have been called something else (there have been hints of this in relation to Australian spending).
These caveats accepted, Australia’s expenditure appears much greater compared with any other country, both in absolute terms and per death. Depending on how we count the New Zealand spend, the Australian spend per death is between five and 19 times the average spend per death of the next five countries (New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany).
Explaining why
Why are the Australian figures so high? Seven possible reasons can be advanced. First, commemoration in Australia, officially, is not only for the centenary of Anzac, but also for ‘a century of service’ by Australian defence forces. So, there will be commemorations of the Vietnam War in 2016 (50 years since the Battle of Long Tan), of the 75th anniversary of the Fall of Singapore in 2017 and of a number of other events that occurred during the last 100 years. We have not attempted to cost the non-Great War commemorative events but our impression is that they will be much less expensive than the Great War-related projects which include, for example, major refurbishments of the World War I galleries at the Australian War Memorial and of monuments in the state capitals. Still, the non-Great War spending drives the total figure up.
Secondly, Australian commemoration expenditure is being pushed along by a dedicated (in both senses of the term) federal Anzac centenary minister, by a master publicist in Director Nelson of the Australian War Memorial, by state officials and ministers, by corporate boards responding to lobbying from fellow business people (and presumably hoping for some return on their investment in terms of access to government and other benefits) and by military ‘brass’ expecting morale and recruitment returns from high profile commemoration.
There may also be a feeling among senior military officers that conspicuous commemoration has psychological value for retired and current service people. (This view has certainly been put to Honest History although one retired mid-level officer, James Brown, has been trenchantly critical of the emphasis on Anzac at the expense of attention to today’s defence force and often to the embarrassment of today’s service people who dislike being compared with Anzac super-heroes.) The efforts of the RSL, other ex-service groups, commercial firms selling merchandise, and non-profits promoting commemorative events, further boost the pressure for commemorative expenditure.
None of this is to deny the sincerity of many of the people involved. Lest Honest History be accused, however, of fostering theories about top-down militarisation, we should note that official and corporate ‘urgers’ are to a large extent responding to community demand. This is a third driver pushing expenditure upwards. In 2013, when we asked a senior commemoration official what was driving the impending commemorative splurge, the answer was, ‘It’s what the bogans want’. There is certainly mutual reinforcement between officials and others wanting to score goals (and build reputations) and a public that seems to have developed a deep-seated need for sentimental commemoration.
We say seems here with a glance at the remarks of, for example, the American musician and commentator, Michael Stipe (‘More and more, what we “feel” about collective history seems like something manufactured, and kind of pumped into us, rather than a real emotion’), and the ABC presenter, James Valentine (‘I’m being told repeatedly what I should feel. Exactly how solemn I should be, which parts of the story I should mark and what lesson I should draw from them, how our nation was forged on these distant sands, what it meant for us all back home and on and again and over and again.’) Useful work could be done – and may have been done already and Honest History would love to hear of it – on contagion effects and fashion as drivers of commemoration fever. There are fashions in mass emotion, as there are in anything else.
Fear of being accused of disloyalty may reinforce these drivers. Frank Bongiorno has written of this in Griffith Review:
To question, to criticise – to doubt – can become un-Australian … Anzac’s inclusiveness [trying to include everyone within the Anzac tradition] 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.
Australia’s federal system provides a fourth possible reason for Australia’s high expenditure. Let no state government dare think that the existence of, say, Australian government school essay competitions with Gallipoli travel prizes should preclude the state offering similar goodies. State administrations, like federal, have their supplicants and they respond to pressure in the same way. Interest groups are adept at playing federal and state governments off against each other to receive more benefits in areas, like commemoration, where there is overlapping responsibility.
Then, there is the effect of the distance between Australia and most of its war cemeteries and battlefields (except those of the Frontier Wars), which encouraged our ancestors a century ago to compensate by building thousands of local memorials at home. (Ken Inglis and Bart Ziino have chronicled aspects of this.) The inability, even today, of many relatives to view the graves of family members – no matter how long these relatives have been dead – may fuel a desire for more intense, compensatory commemoration at home. The desire for ‘closure’ is open-ended.
The sixth reason is related to the previous one. Our having no civilian deaths in the Great War (and hardly any in our overseas wars as a whole) simplifies the commemoration project, making it easier to go all out in sentimental remembrance of heroic combat deaths without having to negotiate the delicacies of deaths by atrocity or bombardment or disease or starvation. ‘Collateral damage’ is always a fraught concept; it may be one reason why European countries commemorate less than we do. They saw war up close and have a more realistic appreciation of its effects.
Finally, unlike the citizens of any other country (except Turkey but not New Zealand, at least not to the same extent) Australians, or some of us, reckon we were ‘born as a nation’ at Gallipoli. Birthdays have long been an excuse for spending splurges. National birthing stories carry their own momentum, which is expressed today in expenditure from allegedly distressed Budgets and carefully-measured donations from corporate coffers.
(Note regarding the figures in this article. The Wikipedia figures are by 1914 borders, so Canada includes Newfoundland, which was a separate dominion until 1948, and the German Empire includes parts of what is now Poland. ‘Military’ includes all causes, including combat and missing in action. ‘Civilian’ includes civilian deaths from military action, crimes against humanity, malnutrition and disease, excluding the influenza pandemic 1919-20. Where Wikipedia gives a range, we have used the higher number. We have rounded to the nearest hundred.)
David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au) a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History. There is more on these subjects at honesthistory.net.au; use the Search function.
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David Stephens. Atatürk’s famous words of 1934 questioned
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives …
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours …
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears.
Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace after having lost their lives on this land.These famous words may not be what they seem to be – a statement composed by the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
The words appear on many monuments in Australia and Turkey, such as the Ari Burnu monument at Anzac Cove and the Atatürk Memorial in Canberra. They are recited every year at Anzac Day ceremonies around the world.
Now, painstaking research by leading Turkish scholar, Cengiz Özakıncı, has established that the ‘Johnnies and Mehmets’ words were inserted by a former Anzac from Queensland, Alan J. Campbell, during an exchange of correspondence with the head of the Turkish Historical Society in 1978.
The research is reported by Walkley Award-winning journalist, Paul Daley, in the Guardian Australia, with additional material on the Honest History website: http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/tracking-ataturk-honest-history-research-note/ .
‘The words that are everywhere said to be Ataturk’s from 1934’, says Honest History secretary, Dr David Stephens, ‘actually seem to be a combination of something that Atatürk may have said and an amendment inserted by Campbell, for reasons we don’t yet know, but because he was looking for words to go on the Gallipoli Fountains in Brisbane’. (The Fountains were opened in 1978 and demolished many years later.)
There is considerable doubt also about whether Atatürk ever said the rest of the words.
‘It’s generally been accepted that Atatürk composed the words and gave them to one of his ministers, Şükrü Kaya, for a speech in 1934. But there is no evidence that Kaya gave such a speech in 1934. Özakıncı has uncovered a speech that Kaya gave in 1931 (with input from Atatürk) but that was a very different speech, which clearly distinguished between Turkish soldiers and invading Allied soldiers. Nothing about no difference between Johnnies and Mehmets.’
The material on the Honest History website also looks at how the famous ‘Atatürk words’ became well-known.
‘The words allegedly were said in 1934. Kaya recalled them in 1953 in an interview, which was only rediscovered in 1978, and there were personal and political factors surrounding that interview which need to be taken into account.’
While there is evidence that words similar to the well-known ones were in use in Turkish publications in 1960 and 1969, recent research has not been able to find evidence of them being used before Kaya’s interview in 1953. Atatürk died in 1938.
‘They are lovely words’, Dr Stephens said, ‘but we really don’t know that Atatürk ever said or wrote them. It detracts from the dignity of commemoration, whether it is in speeches or memorials, if we keep quoting these words and putting his name under them without proper evidence. Doing it again and again, as we have done in Australia and Turkey, just sets in stone what may well be a myth.’
Defence Minister, Kevin Andrews, used the ‘Atatürk words’ in a speech at a conference last month in Canberra. The prime minister quoted them when he launched the Anzac Centenary Public Fund in December 2013. They appear on the Australian-Turkish Friendship sculpture unveiled just last week by Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, on the Ataturk Memorial unveiled in February in Sydney, and on memorials in Adelaide and Brisbane. (Links are on the Honest History website.)
The words have also been used commercially, most recently on tins of Anzac biscuits sold by Aldi. Overseas, British Prime Minister, David Cameron, has also quoted them recently.
David Stephens, Secretary, Honest History. This article was first published in ‘Honest History’ on 20 April.
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David Stephens. The magic Anzackery pudding
Norman Lindsay was busy during World War I. When he wasn’t doing propaganda posters of slavering Huns or sketching buxom young women he was writing a children’s book called The Magic Pudding: being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff. The magic pudding was remarkable for its ability to keep regrowing itself, regardless of how many slices were taken off it.
There are some people who think Anzackery is like the magic pudding. There are two elements which are essential to the Anzackery concept and which reinforce each other: sentimental and jingoistic commemoration of an Anzac myth; making money from this commemoration. Anzackers hope they can go on doing Anzackery indefinitely (or at least till something better comes along) and the pudding will just keep growing back.
There are, for example, the promoters of 2015 centenary cruises to Gallipoli via all sorts of exotic places. A ticket on one of these expeditions costs anywhere between $9000 and $90 000 for about 35 days, with the price varying depending on whether you simply want to see out the porthole or, at the other end of the scale, have a room big enough to practice your chip shots in. All comers, though, get to listen to the on-board historians and entertainers.
The highlight of one of these cruises is standing off Anzac Cove, like Sir Ian Hamilton, before dawn on 25 April, possibly with champagne in hand, with an expert helping you to imagine what it was like heading to shore in those boats a century ago. Unlike those men then (and Sir Ian) you get to leave Gallipoli on the afternoon of Day 1. At some point, one imagines, the strains of the Last Post will drift over the water.
There are always, as someone said, people with more money than sense. Gallipoli cruises, though, that arrive in Anzac Cove on a date other than 25 April ‘the centenary of the Second Battle of Krithia perhaps, or Lone Pine, or the evacuation’ might not have the same cachet. Will the enthusiasm for military tourism last till the centenaries of Fromelles (1916) or Villers-Bretonneux (1918) or will African safaris or the North-west Passage become the rage instead?
At home, one feels for the promoters of the Spirit of the Anzacs Arena Tour (‘a musical experience commemorating 100 years of Anzac pride’ tickets $89 with $3 going to charity) who are not getting their show on the road until 21 August. They’ll be signing up bums on seats early in case the punters are bored witless by the Lee Kernaghan song which headlines the program and which will have had saturation airplay by then. (Mr Kernaghan will be able to buy lots of new Stetsons.) In an era of rapid fad turnover how much cloying patriotism can a market stand?
Those who specialise in more durable commercial Anzackery might do better from the pudding. Somebody sent us a page from a bookshop catalogue which carried blurbs for 20 children’s books about Anzac. Then there are Anzac pot holders, oven mitts, stubby holders, t-shirts, ear-rings and other knick-knacks. Perhaps being less ambitious and taking smaller slices off the pudding is the better option. Even then, how many Anzac-themed items can one acquire before the brand becomes passé?
Should we care about commercial Anzackery? A radio presenter asked the author that very question just the other day: in a market society isn’t it OK to make money from everything? Are there no sacred cows any more, only cash ones? One answer is: see above, about fools and their money. Another answer is: what would the men of Anzac thought? One could also answer with a question: do buyers of Anzackery assume that some of their money is going to charities like Soldier On and Legacy? One enterprise has been misleading about how much of a cut charities get and another which can genuinely claim to be not-for-profit freely admits that its merchandise provides attractive commercial opportunities for suppliers.
Then there is the political side. Politicians help mix the pudding. They set people up for commercial Anzackers by promoting and fronting seductive commemorative occasions. When two former prime ministers, Bob Hawke and the late Malcolm Fraser, and other luminaries produced a report to help the Rudd government get things rolling for the Anzac centenary they came up with a ‘partial’ list of some 250 events in our military history that were worthy of commemoration over the years 2014 to 2019. The list was that long mainly because the bureaucrats, uniformed and not, supporting the commission could not agree on whether the object of commemoration was World War I or ‘a century of service’ (by military people to their country) so they decided to do both. The list of 250 events thus dates from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.
Was there not a concern that Australians might be commemorated out before the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, the author and others asked some senior commemorators more than 18 months ago? Might the pudding stop regenerating? (Some of these commemorative events won’t even offer a souvenir t-shirt.) ‘Yes, of course’, was the reply, but ‘it’s what the bogans want’, the ‘bogans’ being not the government but the voters, represented by focus groups, to whom the government was listening. And, we can add, to whom the commercial Anzackers have been selling.
More recently, Joan Beaumont, joint winner of the prime minister’s history prize for Broken Nation, a book about the Great War, suggested that commemoration fatigue might be setting in. She noted, among other things, the ratings failure of Channel’s Gallipoli. Brendan Nelson, director of the Australian War Memorial, was quick to demur. Promoting an insatiable appetite for Anzackery pudding is good for public budgets as well as commercial revenue, and possibly good for careers, as well. A regenerating pudding is what both the commercial and political Anzackers are counting on, the former because there are potentially big bucks in it, the latter because wrapping oneself in the flag, with moving music playing and a Victoria Cross winner or two nearby, never did a politician any harm.
David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au) a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History. There is more on these subjects at honesthistory.net.au; use the Search function.
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David Stephens. Anzackery in the time of Anzac
Anniversaries sharpen sensations and heighten moods. Christmas brings on good feelings, New Year provokes resolutions, siblings’ faults are set aside on their birthdays. Centenaries accentuate this quite normal process. The centenary of Anzac has brought on a welter of commemoration, slopping over into celebration, with a good lashing of commercialisation as well. Honest History revived the term ‘Anzackery’ to apply to what was happening.
The word ‘Anzackery’ seems to have been coined by the historian Geoffrey Serle in 1967 to describe Anzac Day addresses from his primary school days in the 1930s, when ‘fire-breathing’ officers from the Great War described how Australia had been ‘born’ at Gallipoli. Professor Stuart Macintyre used the word to the present author in March 2013 and attributed it to Serle. Some years earlier James Curran had wrongly taken ‘Anzackery’ to be Serle’s synonym for Australian nationalism in general.
As minted by Serle, in fact, the word had a flavour of irritable, pompous jingoism and that is how Honest History has used it. There are doubtless examples in speeches by RSL representatives. More recently, the current Director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Nelson, has developed a standard speech which is medium strength sentimental Anzackery; it brings audiences – and sometimes Dr Nelson – to tears. He also refers to a set of ‘Anzac values’ (mateship, courage, resilience, and so on) which are really universal values.
Recently, a group of military historians and retired soldiers took up the challenge to define ‘Anzackery’ in an etymologically defensible way. Work is proceeding but the outline of the definition is clear. First, Anzackery distorts Australia’s military history to make the Australian contribution more important than it was in reality. Gallipoli, for example, becomes ‘Australia versus the Turks’ and the efforts of British, French, Indians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders and Germans fade into the background. Similarly, in 1918 in France, General Monash becomes the military genius who turns the fate of the war.
As well as the inflation of Australian contributions to wars, Anzackery encompasses the Australian lack of interest in the impacts of war on non-Australians. This comes up every year in February, for example, when Australians commemorate the deaths of a few hundred civilians in the bombings of Darwin and other towns in February 1942 but mostly ignore the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Australian deaths in wars in the twentieth century amount to around 0.04 per cent of all deaths in wars and conflicts around the world in that century but there are surely not war deaths anywhere else in the world (with the possible exception of Civil War deaths in the United States) that are commemorated so relentlessly and repetitively.
The inflated version of Australia’s military role in the Dardanelles and elsewhere is used to promote patriotism and encourage support for current wars. Emotive rhetoric prevails; emotion, sentiment and nationalism are at the heart of Anzackery but it is rarely peddled without purpose. Prime Minister Hawke’s memoirs show that he consciously linked Australian efforts at Gallipoli and the first Gulf War. Howard made similar connections, as did Gillard. A lyrical version of Anzac (sometimes rendered as ‘the Anzac tradition of arms’ when soldiers are in the audience) has become a staple of prime ministerial speeches. Here is Prime Minister Rudd in 2010:
For Australia, our identity has been etched deeply by what we call ANZAC. For nearly a century … ANZAC has occupied a sacred place not far from the nation’s soul. It shapes deeply our nation’s memory. It shapes deeply how we see the world. A hundred years later, it shapes too what we do in the world. Neither religious nor secular, whatever our beliefs are, ANZAC is profoundly spiritual – inspiring pilgrimages still to that far-off place where our modern-day pilgrims drink deep from the well of national memory … I believe each generation of Australians has a duty to pass this torch to the next.
Honest History’s favourite exhibit, though, is ‘The Spirit of Anzac’, composed by the long-time chairman of the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee of Queensland, Colonel Arthur Burke OAM (Ret’d). It has been extant for many years, it was written to inspire children, and it has been quoted regularly in entries by Year 9 and 10 students in the Simpson Prize essay competition.
The Spirit of ANZAC is invincible [according to Burke]. It is the flame that burns forevermore in the heart of every true Australian and New Zealander. Today we stand safe and free, clothed with all the privileges and rights of citizens in these great free countries. And all these things – liberty, security, opportunity, the privileges of citizenship – we owe to those men who fought, endured, suffered, and died for us and for their country. Their deeds and their sacrifices gave us the invincible, the intangible, the Spirit of ANZAC.
Burke’s piece is a good example of how Anzackery targets children. The commercial aspect of Anzackery is almost as egregious, though this element could be seen as the inevitable response from business to demand from politicians, commemorative institutions and the public. As examples of this strain of Anzackery, Carolyn Holbrook, author of Anzac: the Unauthorised Biography, has catalogued the Anzac Run, Camp Gallipoli, various Anzac Centenary Cruises, a ‘Spirit of the Anzacs’ CD, Gallipoli ear-rings, oven mitts and pot holders, the ‘Anzac Day Thank You Baby Blanket’, the ‘Anzac Descendant’ t-shirt and another item, the ‘Anzac Pin-up Girl’ t-shirt, which is no more than soft core pornography. Anzackery is a cash-cow.
Phenomena like Anzackery spread when they are not contested. There is growing anecdotal evidence that many Australians, while respectful of our war dead, are uncomfortable at extreme forms of commemoration-celebration. (Some people feel intimidated by the noise coming from the Anzackers or are afraid of being seen as disrespectful.) Hyperbole ultimately devalues its object. Sentiment prevents us asking important questions about why we fight wars. The Anzac centenary should be marked by vigorous debate. Anzackery is a bubble that needs to be pricked.
David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au) a coalition of historians and others supporting the balanced and honest presentation and use of Australian history during the centenary of World War I. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.
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David Stephens. Is this justifiable delicacy or insidious censorship?
The Battle of Bita Paka occurred in then German New Guinea on 11 September 1914. It saw the deaths of the first six Australians killed in the Great War, as well as the deaths of a German officer and 30 Melanesian soldiers. It was really a series of skirmishes rather than a battle.
On the eve of the centenary of the ‘battle’ the ABC presented evidence that the German and the Melanesians had been massacred by Australian troops. Two historians with relevant expertise were more cautious and readers of the Daily Telegraph were outraged. In the absence of further research it is difficult to know what happened at Bita Paka. Of immediate interest though are the remarks of the Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, Senator Ronaldson:
Mr Ronaldson told The Australian yesterday that the report [on the ABC] was based on unsubstantiated allegations and the timing of its broadcast was “insensitive and totally inappropriate”.
“I was angry that on the day that the descendants of the first six Australian men killed in the First World War had gathered at Rabaul to commemorate their service and sacrifice, the ABC chose to run an unsubstantiated allegation’’, he said. (Emphasis added.)
If the appropriateness of reporting or commentary is to be driven by its timing in relation to commemorative occasions then many, many days over the next four years may be off limits. There is an awful lot of commemoration coming up, presumably involving many descendants, however far removed. One official list includes more than 250 dates of events worth commemorating over the next four years. The potential commemoration dates relate not just to events during World War I but to ‘the century of service’ – military service – since. Consequently, any researcher wanting to say something publicly about, for example, the Battle of Mouquet Farm in France (11 000 Australian casualties), which went on for a month in August-September 1916, faces a potential problem.
Why? The 2011 list has five other dates besides Mouquet for potential commemoration during August-September 2016, including the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan in Vietnam (42 Australian casualties) in 1966. Let’s apply the Minister’s test in this case. Will researchers publishing, around 18 August 2016, material which challenges received views of Mouquet be attacked because their work is seen as insensitive to the memory, not just of the Mouquet men, but also of the 18 Australians killed at Long Tan on 18 August 1966? (Remember that the Long Tan dead, like all service personnel since 1915, are seen as inheritors of the Anzac tradition that was young at Mouquet.)
If, on the other hand, these researchers hold off publishing until there are no Great War dates nearby, will they cop it anyway for insensitivity regarding a proximate non-Great War date which is being commemorated? Further, given that we are now at war again (the Anzac tradition is in the custody of a new generation of service men and women), will questioning the deeds of former Anzacs be seen as critical of their fighting descendants today? Having a continuing Anzac tradition implies that questioning the early days of the tradition threatens the tradition today.
Back to the Minister. His remarks raise more questions. He objected not only to insensitive timing but also to lack of substantiation. But would insensitively timed critical commentary be acceptable if it was properly substantiated? Does evidence trump timing?
Secondly, how wide is the ‘sensitivity blackout’ – a week on either side of the commemorative occasion, a month, the whole four years of the centenary? The possibility of descendants of the dead being upset is still going to be present, regardless of timing. The longer such a blackout applies, though, the more it looks like the censorship that has applied in wartime; replicating wartime censorship would indeed be a novel form of commemoration.
Thirdly, are there some commemorative occasions, say, Anzac Day 2015 or the centenary of the Battle of Fromelles in 2016, where the occasion is so important, so sacred, that any questioning is beyond the pale? Who decides which occasions qualify for this degree of protection? Could these sacred occasions be nominated in regulation, perhaps by extending the original 1921 regulations under the then War Precautions Act? The 1921 regulations refer to the use of the word ‘Anzac’ in trade and street names; that is, they target expression. Might the regulations be extended to control expression more broadly? If we have ‘race hate speech’ laws could we have ‘legend hate speech’ laws also? Might loaded adaptations of the word ‘Anzac’, like ‘Anzackery’ and ‘Anzacker’, be targeted also?
Fourthly, who decides what substantiation is? It is a rubbery concept, as we saw not long ago in relation to allegations (again on the ABC) of asylum seekers being forced to touch hot pipes. Does the allegation have to be substantiated in the eyes of the relevant Minister?
It is fair enough to argue over evidence, as has happened with the alleged Bita Paka massacre, but it is worrying when ministerial comments seem to question the rights of individuals to have different views and to express them how and when they like. The freedom to have and express awkward opinions is presumably part of the freedom referred to in the inscription on ‘the King’s Penny’, the commemorative medallion presented to the families of dead servicemen after World War I: ‘He died for Freedom and Honour’.
All the stories of war need to be told, however uncomfortable they may be. The words of The Age editorialist earlier this year were spot on: ‘This [telling the full story] is not to sully the memory of Australian Diggers, but to add to it by presenting a complete record of war, abroad and at home’. And if the stories need to be told it should be possible to tell them at any time, notwithstanding the sensitivities of distant relatives of dead soldiers.
David Stephens is Secretary of Honest History. An earlier version of this article (including citations) appeared on the Honest History website (honesthistory.net.au).
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David Stephens. The children suffer.
Osbert Sitwell’s The Next War, published in 1918, depicts some plutocrats deciding what would be an appropriate war memorial. The senior plutocrat puts a suggestion which his colleagues eagerly take up.
“What more fitting memorial for the fallen
Than that their children
Should fall for the same cause?”Rushing eagerly into the street,
The kindly old gentlemen cried
To the young:
“Will you sacrifice
Through your lethargy
What your fathers died to gain?
The world must be made safe for the young!”
And the children
Went . . .Are we in Australia just as keen on roping children into war as Sitwell’s plutocrats were? We do not explicitly say to them, ‘you must fall for a cause’ but we sanitise and normalise and proselytise ‘sacrifice’ in war in a way that cannot fail to be attractive to some children, even while we protest that we abhor war and wish to save future generations from it. Teaching children about war can so easily become teaching war to children.
Politicians keep track of the involvement of children in war remembrance. The then prime minister, Julia Gillard, said last year that she always looked for the number of children at Anzac Day services and noted there were ‘more and more’ and that parents admitted they had been ‘dragged’ along by their children.
So it’s actually the children who are driving the next level of engagement and I think that that means that for all of time, we will commemorate Anzac Day and think about who we are as Australians on that day.
This attitude is bipartisan. The current Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, Senator Michael Ronaldson, said to the New South Wales Branch of the RSL earlier this year that
2014 to 2018 means that you and I have another opportunity to teach another generation of young Australians what their obligations are. And if we do not do so ladies and gentlemen, then we have failed them and we have failed ourselves.
When I asked the Minister’s office what sort of obligations he was referring to (social? moral? legal?) the answer was non-committal. More recently, the Minister told Sydney Legacy that he wanted by the end of 2018 to have
the next generation of young Australians doing what you and I are doing at the moment. They will be carrying the torch …
And when they hop on a school bus, or they walk home, or they go shopping, or they go out at night with relative freedom – that they realise in many instances that freedom has been paid for in blood. And they must understand that.
The Minister’s department, Veterans’ Affairs, runs an extensive education program, with booklets, posters and teaching aids flowing to schools or downloadable without charge. Marilyn Lake and others have questioned the appropriateness of this activity and have suggested it is government-sponsored indoctrination. Some teachers, nevertheless, say the DVA material is ignored, thrown away or balanced with other resources. Honest History’s research suggests that another flagship commemorative program, the Simpson Prize, is very much a minority activity and is, in any case, tentatively moving from civics education with a military flavour towards a genuine history activity.
On the other hand, children are referred to the jingoistic tosh of retired Colonel Arthur Burke OAM, who wrote of the torch of freedom being passed from dying hands on the beach at Gallipoli to children today, or they sit through Anzac services with scripts downloaded from the Australian Army website. The Australian War Memorial encourages primary school age children to write messages on little crosses to be planted in the graves of dead soldiers in war cemeteries in France and Belgium. The Memorial has also commenced the Roll of Honour Soundscape project, where thousands of children are being invited to recite names from the World War I Roll of Honour for replaying in the Memorial’s cloisters continuously for the next four years. Questions about whether this is a sensible activity for 12 year-olds are brushed aside with rhetoric about helping children ‘connect’ with the dead.
Meanwhile, school visits to the Memorial continue to be subsidised and perhaps half a million children a year visit. The Memorial continues to offer its mini-theme park ‘Discovery Zone’ (‘touch, listen and smell’ but no corpses in the imitation World War I trench), its Memorial boxes, and various other resources and activities, at minimal charge. Projects in schools feature prominently in the Anzac Centenary Local Grants Program and schools compete for the Commonwealth’s Anzac Day School Awards and many similar Anzac-themed competitions and events in the States and Territories.
When you question teachers or resource providers about the ethics of teaching children about war, the answer is often along the lines of ‘we give the children something that is appropriate to their age’ or ‘they get a nuanced view when they are younger and then more details later’. That this process may never work its way towards honesty is indicated by the continuing tendency of adult, official spruikers of war commemoration to use euphemisms like ‘fallen’ and ‘sacrifice’ in relation to dead soldiers, to avoid terms like ‘eviscerated’, ‘decapitated’, or ‘blown to bits’ to describe the circumstances of those deaths, and to continue to peddle overblown rhetoric about ‘dying for freedom’. What is involved in the rather nebulous concept of ‘connecting’ with the dead is never really spelled out. Connect with what purpose?
We adults are champions at ‘nuance’ in relation to war so it is no wonder that children are fed loads of it. The essential message that war requires soldiers to kill or be killed is lost in nonsense about connecting or ‘understanding’ or smothered by sanitised collections of war memorabilia and dress-ups.
I saw the Anzac Day march in Lismore, New South Wales, this year. There were lots of school children there in uniform, some of them marching in step, like soldiers. I wrote to the local RSL afterwards, suggesting it was wrong for children to imitate military practice. Had the gentleman replied, I’m sure he would have said something about ‘not glorifying war’. He would also have avoided the question of whether relentless, ubiquitous, sentimental commemoration gives children a rosy impression of war. He would have skirted the implications for future generations of their ‘obligations’ to carry the torch of remembrance.
This torch carries many messages – has many ‘nuances’ – including the usually unspoken one that freedom, allegedly ‘paid for in blood’, may have to be redeemed in similar fashion in the future. Meanwhile, there is a club in Lismore, a club where old Diggers go after the Anzac march. It has a neon sign, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’ The vigilant are getting younger every year.
David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au). Honest History is a broad coalition of historians and others, committed to frank debate and expressing a diversity of opinions on specific issues. Views in this article are the author’s own. The Honest History website contains a version with links.
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David Stephens. Parochial commemoration of war.
Australians are not alone in the world in being parochial but we are very good at it, especially in the way we commemorate our men and women who die in war. The Australian War Memorial is missing many opportunities to expand our commemorative horizons and put our war deaths in context.
Under its legislation, the Memorial is ‘a national memorial of Australians who have died on or as a result of active service or as a result of any war or warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service’. The Memorial is also required to research and publicise ‘Australian military history’, defined as ‘the history of (a) wars and warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service, including the events leading up to, and the aftermath of, such wars and warlike operations, and (b) the Defence Force’.
The Act is not, however, the last word on how the Memorial does its work. The Memorial has given itself a ‘purpose’ clause which puts a gloss on the Act by using the debatable word ‘sacrifice’ to describe deaths in war. Then, there is a ‘mission’ clause in which the ambit is not ‘Australian military history’ as defined in the Act but the narrower field of ‘the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society ’. (The history of wars in which Australians have been involved on one ‘side’ is clearly a broader canvass than the Australian experience of those wars.)
This narrowed focus allows the Memorial to target ‘Australian experience’ down to the most trivial level while ignoring events that did not involve Australians. The Memorial’s #OnThisDay ‘tweets’ are a microcosm of this phenomenon. On 19 March this year, the Memorial tweeted that on that day in 1916 one British general, Sir Archibald Murray, replaced another British general, Sir John Maxwell, in charge of the King’s armies (including Australians) in Egypt. Yet, on the same day, 19 March, in 1945, 800 US sailors were killed when the USS Franklin was attacked by the Japanese. The latter event was ignored by the Memorial’s ‘tweeters’.
Not all of the Memorial’s tweets display such clanging incongruity. Nevertheless, the ‘rules of engagement’ at the Memorial mean that any ‘Australian experience’ trumps any ‘non-Australian experience’, even where the latter occurs within a war ‘in which Australians have been on active service’ or where there are many allied deaths, as with the bombing of the Franklin. The Memorial’s exhibitions are a credit to their curators but they have a relentlessly parochial focus. Currently or recently there have been [Australian] ANZAC Voices, Australia Under Attack 1942-1943, Remember Me: The Lost [Australian] Diggers of Vignancourt, [Australian] Rats of Tobruk, 1941, Afghanistan: The Australian Story, and so on.
The Memorial website’s search function provides a crude measure of the Memorial’s areas of interest. ‘Gallipoli’ throws up 885 references to articles, 1064 to books, and 12 713 to collections, including 7639 photographs. ‘Holocaust’, on the other hand, scores 20 articles, 78 books and 23 items in collections. No-one outside Australia would have any doubt as to which of those two events – both part of the history of wars ‘in which Australians have been on active service’ – says more about the experience of war and of the human condition but the Memorial’s ‘Made in Australia’ lens forces these bizarre results.
On a smaller scale than the Holocaust, ‘Breslau’ (40 000 ethnic German civilians dead in the first four months of 1945 while the Russian Red Army besieged the city) provides one article (about ‘the Red Baron’, who was born there), nine books and 39 items in collections. Okinawa (100 000 civilians died there in 1945) tallies five, 18 and 123. Neither event was part of ‘the Australian experience’ so both are virtually ignored.
The wars and conflicts of the twentieth century killed an estimated 231 million people, perhaps 80 per cent of them civilians. By contrast, the wars recognised by the Australian War Memorial took around 100 000 Australian lives during that century, all but a handful of them enlisted servicemen and women. Every single one of those 100 000 deaths was a tragedy but are there in the world any 100 000 deaths so much commemorated as these?
Moreover, are there any deaths in war anywhere which are commemorated with so little regard for the context in which these men and women died? The ‘history of wars’ should involve looking at both sides in each conflict and the full range of effects. Wars have despoiled the lands and the lives of hundreds of millions of people, few of whom – apart from the dead of the Australian Frontier Wars, which the Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise – lived in Australia.
The causes of wars are complex, their progress, aftermath and ramifications traumatic for individuals, families and nations. Yet, in pursuit of ‘the Australian experience of war’, the Australian War Memorial steers away from these aspects while it endlessly mines the stories of our 100 000 uniformed victims, a mere 0.04 per cent of that 231 million.
The Memorial’s Act says, ‘The Memorial shall use every endeavour to make the most advantageous use of the memorial collection in the national interest’. It is surely in the national interest that we understand more of the reasons for wars and the impact of war beyond our own kith and kin. That understanding would do something positive towards advancing the ‘abhorrence of war’ (which all of us ritually claim to feel) and reducing the possibility of future wars.
The Memorial could play an important role in this task and it could do so within the terms of its own Act; it is foregoing that role at present in favour of sentimental and nostalgic commemoration. Picking at ancient scabs has been preferred to making a positive contribution to Australia’s tomorrows.
David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au). Honest History is a broad coalition of historians and others, committed to frank debate and expressing a diversity of opinions on specific issues. Views in this article are the author’s own.