In 2003, an essay on Anzac Day was written by a Brisbane high school student, Joanna Sampford, which made more sense that the outpourings of Australia’s entire corpus of mainstream politicians and commentators. The essay was awarded the Simpson Prize by the History Teachers Association of Australia.
Jo is now studying at the University of Queensland, and I had the good fortune to have her as a High Distinction student in my Environmental Politics and Policy course last year.
With Anzac Day upon us for another year, I’ve decided that the essay is worth posting here for people to read at their leisure and reflect on tomorrow morning whilst waiting for the shops to open.
Continue reading ‘Lest we keep on forgetting’
Published in Anzac Day,
Australiana,
Books, Writers & Writing,
Culture,
Ethics,
History,
Indigenous,
Markets,
Media,
Nationalism,
Philosophy and
Politics .
At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.
One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:
A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?
In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.
Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Continue reading ‘Advance Australia Fair?’
It has often been said that as Australians we have a predilection for remembering and even celebrating our failures. The ABC does a lot of remembering at these times. This year there have been a couple of segments covering an event that may eventually take over from ANZAC in our consciousness, an event that occurred 90 years ago on the third ANZAC Day.
I speak, of course, of the Australian counter-attack that took the French town of Villers-Bretonneux. This year for the first time there will be a dawn service on the actual day.
The Australian flags are hung, toy kangaroos are crammed in shop windows and now all the small French town of Villers-Bretonneux is waiting for is Anzac Day.
Up to 6,000 Australians are expected to descend on the rural town on Friday for a dawn service commemorating the 90th anniversary of its liberation by Anzac [actually Australian, I think] troops on April 25, 1918.
The rural town, in the heart of the Somme region north of Paris, holds annual memorial services for the diggers – but this year is the first time it will host a dawn service on Anzac Day itself, instead of the nearest Saturday to April 25.
Continue reading ‘Remembering ANZAC’
Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:
It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.
I can claim to have anticipated the kernel Professor Rubenstein’s argument in this letter which I had published in the Australian on 24 April 2004:
Continue reading ‘This Anzac Day, Bill Rubinstein agrees with me’
They shall not grow old,
As we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning,
We will remember them.
We will remember them.
The ANZAC Dedication: For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon
Open Anzac Day Thread.
I think The Australian is running a campaign. Quick on the heels of Stephen Barton’s Kokoda Track minimalism, now we have another hitherto unknown author, Bob Wurth, attacking John Curtin as an appeaser. It would be worth reading his book to see if the documents he cites can bear the interpretation he places on them, but it’s also pretty clear that what Curtin was trying to do was to prevent Japan from entering the war. Certainly, senior Cabinet secretaries within FDR’s administration, in the lead up to Pearl Harbour, were still exploring the possibility of dialogue with Japanese factions who opposed or who were lukewarm to the prospect of entering the war. It’s pretty rich, as Wurth does, to make Curtin bear the responsibility for Menzies’ acts while the latter was still PM, and it’s worth noting this bit from the article:
Curtin girded the government to prepare for the possibility of war with Japan at a time when Australia’s attention was firmly fixed on helping Britain. On February 14, 1941, the advisory war council heard reports that raised the spectre of Australia being abandoned by the great powers and being forced to fight a holding war with Japan.
The British believed that the capacity of the Japanese “should not be over-stated”. But Curtin demanded that Australia be put on a war footing.
As John Quiggin observes, it’s difficult not to be suspicious that when the name of Alexander Downer crops up again and again in such revisionist articles, that what’s going on is partisan re-writing of history to serve present party advantage rather than a disinterested search for truth.
On what was intermittently a good tempered and interesting thread about nationalism and identity in the context of Anzac day, I posted this comment just at the point that it was swamped by the usual tedious leftie bashing from our good friends the RWDBs:
I also have an odd relationship with nationalism, because of my family heritage and where I’ve lived. My dad was an American diplomat, and I lived all over the shop as a girl. My mum was Portuguese, and when my parents separated, moved to Australia as she had rellos here. I went to high school and uni (u/g) in Brisbane, then took advantage of my American citizenship and went to California to do postgrad stuff, and stayed on for quite a bit, til I came back here a couple of years ago. I’ve also lived in Europe. So I don’t feel myself to be particularly exclusive in who I am. I’m very fond of both Australia and America, and feel like I’m a bit of both. I speak with a Californian accent. I don’t feel particularly patriotic as such, but there are freedoms and values in America I’ll defend strongly, just as there are aspects of Australian-ness I think are wonderful.
I may be reading too much into it, but what interested me about the lack of response was that just as I find it difficult to pigeon hole my nationality (and am accordingly ambiguous about nationalism and patriotism), so too it’s hard to write the stories of those who come from more than one place into these heavily politicised discourses about “how to be (un)Australian”. There’s no doubt that we live in an increasingly cosmopolitan world. One of the paradoxes of globalisation is backlashes against the free movement of labour and the erection of literal and metaphorical border fences. This, of course, is quite contrary to the promise of globality.
Continue reading ‘On being (un)Australian or global(ised)’
John Quiggin sharpens the argument about Stephen Barton’s entry into the History Wars disputing the significance of the Kokoda Track. John argues, rightly in my view, that the logical endpoint of Barton’s position is that the defence of Australia’s national territory should take second place to the needs of our “great and powerful friends”. There’s probably a lot more in this sort of argument than Barton realises. Our defence forces are being restructured to facilitate force projection rather than homeland defence. And we’re increasingly entangled in some sort of armed enforcement of good governance in the Pacific. Is this the 21st century equivalent of an Imperial Defence Policy in which we only have a small say? Would the Bartons of the world acquiesce in Churchill’s re-assignation of Australian troops to the Middle East without consulting the Australian government under the aegis of the exigencies of war? What are the History Warriors really getting at with the reinvention of the Brisbane Line?
On Lateline, I’ve just watched Stephen Barton, Edith Cowan University political scientist and author of a provocative op/ed yesterday in which he claimed that the significance of the Kokoda Track was inflated by a Labor clique of politicians and historians. Barton was pretty unconvincing. To the degree that he has a strategic or military point, it seems to rest on hindsight and an argument that the Second World War was actually won in Europe. That may or may not be true, but it doesn’t mean that there was any less obligation on Curtin to defend Australia and Australian territory. Curtin could not have known how the war would end, and nor could he have known what Barton now knows about Japanese intentions and capabilities. History is contingency, and decisions in war need to be made, not mulled over. Most outrageous was the suggestion from Barton that if the Japanese had occupied part of Northern Queensland, that would not have been a disaster and would not have affected the overall course of the war. It was pretty clear in the debate that Barton, who is not a historian, was out of his depth. His motivations appear to be suggesting that “Australia’s security has traditionally been won far beyond our borders, as a member of grand alliances” implies something about our current defence commitments, and slurring the memory of Curtin in some sort of history wars partisan intervention. It’s very easy to agree with the RSL that this intervention, or at the very least its timing, was offensive.
Elsewhere: More at John Quiggin’s and Andrew Bartlett’s.
Update: Follow up post here.
I find Anzac Day quite confronting. I am never sure how to react to it.
On the one hand, I have a lot of respect for the men and women whose lives have been touched by the wars that Australia has participated in – those in the armed services, their families, their friends, and all the civilians who were caught up in the wars. I have no desire to detract from the sacrifices that have been made or the opportunity that Anzac Day presents to celebrate the lives of those who have been lost, and to remember. On the other hand, I find war unsettling and I find the growing sense of nationalism that seems to be accompanying Anzac Day even more unsettling. I wish that there was another way in which to honour the fallen and to remember the sacrifices and pain experienced by so many in a way that didn’t seem to focus so much on the military and was not so infused with the spirit of nationalism.
It is particularly the nationalism that has come to be so closely associated with Anzac Day that concerns me. When I moved to the USA in high school, I was surprised by the nationalism and patriotism expressed by the Americans that I met. While I respected the positive ways in which taking pride in one’s country could be expressed (by fighting to uphold its democratic traditions, or to fulfil its promise of freedom and equal for all – such as through the civil rights movement), I was also quite disturbed by the way that it seemed to cloud people’s ability to critically judge their country. Many Americans that I met were completely unwilling to be critical of their country; they defended the lack of social security and health care from comparison with other countries, out of a dogged belief that America was by definition the best country in the world and anyone who said otherwise was suspect. Another thing that was frequently defended was US foreign policy – either through willing ignorance and (more disturbingly) a glowing pride in the nuclear capacity of their country. Statements like “well, we could nuke your country out of the water” were not an uncommon conclusion to an argument about the superiority of the US.
Continue reading ‘Anzac Day and Nationalism’
Aside from the links already posted to the thoughtful pieces at Polemica and Suki’s place, and the Anzac Day series of posts here at LP, there’s a wealth of Anzac Day reflection on the blogosphere. Laura, Andrew Bartlett, saint, John Quiggin, Pavlov’s Cat and Tim Blair. There are also a couple of additional posts at Polemica.
Personal reflections, reminiscences, statuary, historical photos, cultural studies, veterans’ protests, political controversies and poetry – it’s all there to enhance the significance of the day via the Australian blogosphere.
Update: And Liam has the all important drinking angle covered.
My great-uncle George Berrie was both a Gallipoli and Middle East veteran, falling sick in the Gallipoli campaign and sent on to England for medical treatment and recuperation. He wrote his book on his experiences “Morale,” as a novel, probably because the memory of losing his best friend, “Snow” was too painful to relate in autobiographical form. He called himself the “Bushman” in the novel, and he was one in every sense, independent, knowledgeable and like so many others prepared to fight and die for “King and Country.”
I met and remembered uncle George in the mid fifties as a child, near Yeppoon Qld, and luckily he did something that enabled me to imprint his face in my mind for all time. With a wicked sense of humour he gave me a small green chili and told me to eat it “They call them chilies because they are cold” he said. Having never seen a chili before, I bit down on it with the inevitable results. Mother was not impressed, but I had uncle George firmly fixed in my mind from then on, and otherwise would probably never have become interested in his life and the two books he wrote.
This short chapter from the book, gives an insight on how the Brits treated our diggers in London, overflowing kindness seems to be a simple way of expressing it.
CHAPTER XI. SEPTEMBER 1915.
The hospital, as such, was undoubtedly a model, but in one respect it resembled a gaol. If you were let out for exercise you were well guarded and carefully returned. When the authorities were satisfied that the Bushman had been there long enough, he walked out a free man for two weeks, subject to certain supervision by military policemen and some unwritten laws. He broke one of the latter before he had been loose an hour, for he went into the swankiest hotel he could see and asked to be shown to the dining room. It had never been considered necessary to put this hotel out of bounds; its tariff and yards of red tabs and gold braid did that automatically. The Bushman in his innocence had butted into a holy of holies of the regular army. He took his time over a huge lunch, and it was nearly three o’clock before he ordered a liqueur and cigar. He felt that after a few more similar feeds he might begin to draw level.
Continue reading ‘Uncle George: An Anzac in London 1915′
My first full-on Anzac Day was April 25, 1966 – I missed Anzac day in 1965 through arriving in the country too late.
By then I’d started at High School, in a new Public Works Department standard high school a short, crowded bus-ride from the migrant hostel – where we lived in one half of a Nissan hut – in the morning and a long walk back in the afternoon. The Anzac day service consisted of an ABC Schools broadcast piped through to the classrooms on the tannoy. That year I heard the story of Simpson and his donkey for the first time.
Continue reading ‘Simpson and Me’
They were all so ordinary. Stockbrokers, painters, stock hands and farmers, as my grandfather Richard Cornish Bate was. Many unlikely to ever cross each other paths if civvies, but all gathered together on a wharf in Brisbane on the 28th of March, 1916 after volunteering to fight in the Great War For Civilization. 4th Infantry Brigade, 15th Infantry Battalion, 15th Reinforcements. Off to fight the Boche in France.
Continue reading ‘Ordinary Men of Extraordinary Times’
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