Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  Dale Blair, in Chapter 6, addresses the equally mistaken notion of Australian ethical or moral exceptionalism in war. ‘Australian soldiers are nothing if not sportsmen, and no case ever came under my notice of brutality or inhumanity to prisoners’, wrote General Sir John Monash after World War I. There is no doubt a great many Australian servicemen in this and other conflicts have indeed attempted to uphold such chivalrous and sporting notions, and to act fairly and within the bounds of existing conventions or rules of war when called to the service of their country. That this idea applied universally, however, and the suggestion that somehow Australian troops are unique and have unwaveringly applied their ‘digger-ethic’ of fair play on every battlefield, is simply untrue. Regardless of how uncomfortable an acceptance of Australian atrocities in war might be, or how awkwardly it might sit within the contemporary public’s unquestioning veneration of the deeds of past servicemen, it is a part of this nation’s military past.

  Australia’s record in World War II up to 1943 was a proud one. Australian sailors and airmen had fought all over the world, and while its soldiers had endured bitter retreats in Greece and Crete, they had won glory at Tobruk and spearheaded Allied troops at El Alamein. In Papua, Australians fought in some of the worst conditions of the war to wrestle Kokoda, Buna, Gona and Sanananda from the Japanese. During the later phases of the Pacific War, however, the army was left behind, excluded from the Allied recapture of the Philippines and restricted to ‘mopping-up’ in New Guinea, Bougainville and Borneo. This was a period of disagreement and disappointment – and it has remained so ever since. Time and again veterans, journalists and writers have repeated the notion, almost as a mantra, that Australia’s final campaigns in the Pacific were an ‘unnecessary war’ where lives were wasted needlessly for nothing other than political reasons and in campaigns that did nothing to bring about Japan’s surrender any sooner. As Karl James demonstrates in Chapter 7, however, this orthodoxy, which has been such a consistent complaint over time, does not make it true. The idea of an ‘unnecessary waste’ is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.

  It is certainly unusual, notes Alastair Cooper in Chapter 8, that an island continent like Australia – where the overwhelming majority live on the coastal margins, whose modern incarnation was founded by a navy, and which is as deeply dependent on maritime trade and industry – should have so little naval history. He examines the dearth of naval history in this country, investigates some of the key reasons why such a situation has come about, and offers some subject matter within the limited existing genre of Australian naval history that calls for much greater attention. Australia is missing out on its naval history, Cooper suggests, and it is time for a change.

  In Chapter 9, Bob Hall and Andrew Ross set out to correct a set of pervasive and influential myths concerning the experience of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. Contrary to dominant popular public conceptions of that war, influenced to their core by Hollywood imagery and imported American representations, Australia’s war in Phuoc Tuy Province was never about large-scale ‘landmark’ battles such as Long Tan. These were aberrations and of little relevance when compared to the more common and significant ‘contacts’ which characterised the face of battle for the men of the Australian Task Force in Vietnam. In addition, prevailing ideas of how conclusively such battles were ‘won’ by Australian troops need to be rethought in their fuller political context. Nor do enduring ideas of their adversary’s ‘owning’ the jungle or ‘owning’ the night have any real resonance or relevance for the Australians in Vietnam; quite the converse. Australia’s Vietnam combat experience was not the same as that of the South Vietnamese or the Americans. Nor in many ways was it the war of the silver screen or dominant public memory. It is time to see it and accept it on its own terms.

  In Chapter 10, by closely examining Australian involvement in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, Albert Palazzo challenges the recent but misguided claim that Australian servicemen ‘punch above their weight’. This institutionalised myth is built on a thin veneer of self-perception and a reputation won by the few rather than by the many. Moreover, it is a dangerous delusion that obscures more than it reveals, and prevents honest internal or external assessment of the Australian Defence Force’s true capabilities and weaknesses. It is a tempting cure-all to politicians and policy-makers who seek the comfort and convenience of a force that can be deployed in support of allied operations overseas without having to pay for it. This is not a critique of the training, professionalism and commitment of individual servicemen and women, but rather a critical analysis, at an institutional level, of a myth without any basis in reality.

  There runs throughout the history of Australian political, diplomatic, military and public discourse, a long and continuing tradition of frequent and heartfelt professions of faith in the Australian–US alliance. Such faith, such unquestioning and uncritical certainty in the absolute and indispensible nature of the relationship lumbers along, no matter what contrary evidence the historical record might contain. In Chapter 11, Mike McKinley provocatively asks and answers two key questions: why is the Australian–US alliance so privileged and unchallenged in academic and general discussions about Australian security and strategy? And what should we make of the grand claims made in support of the alliance? The first admits no easy answer, because ultimately the defenders of the alliance possess a temperament of conviction in things that can only be believed with their eyes and ears closed. Faith, not rationality, is the currency here. The second part is easier. The overblown claims are at best the repetition of myth; at worst they are fiction. Both misconceptions reign nevertheless, standing reminders that a myth can be killed again and again, but never really die.

  To conclude, in Chapter 12 Peter Stanley confronts perhaps the most persistent myth of all: that war is central to Australia’s history, the biggest thing in it. This one single aspect of the Australian historical experience is given an increasingly privileged position. It crowds out and overwhelms the many other parts of Australia’s history that are worthy of attention and empathy. In many ways, Australian military history’s gazumping of everything else stems from the familiar idea that the landing on Gallipoli represented ‘the birth of a nation’, and seems to entrench itself further and further in the national psyche on Anzac Day each year. Stanley examines this issue in three ways. First, he looks at recent arguments that criticise the centrality of Anzac Day in unduly skewing Australian history towards war. Second, he considers other aspects of Australian historical experience that could be used to complement the attention accorded to war in justifiable and proportional ways. Last, as a way of evaluating whether or not war justifies its supposed centrality in Australia’s history, he considers the passionate public debates about the war memorials proposed for the shore of Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin.

  This collection is unified by a single intention: the need to acknowledge and confront the persistent and general misconceptions of our military past, and to understand what really happened. Our destruction of myths isn’t for its own sake, as an end in itself, but because good history demands it. Let us re-affirm before turning another page that at the heart of any mantra-like myth is an absence of critical cognition, even of rational inquiry. Myths thrive when there is little curiosity, no drive for insight and no intellectual reflection. Many of Australia’s military myths live on through belief rather than knowledge, on conformity rather than inquiry, and on sentiment rather than facts. These characteristics are the enemies of free rational thought and reason, the very goals towards which most teachers, academics and historians strive. Readers deserve better history, not to mention those who have risked their lives in the armed forces. This is why we have written this book.

  Some readers may not like what follows. The authors themselves understand that no one likes to have their closely held beliefs challenged. We are well aware of the danger of interfering with the forces that animate our myths, particularly aspects of the Anzac legend and
the powerful sentiments of nationalism and identity associated with it. By the end of this book, perhaps a number of your more comfortable beliefs might be challenged, calm preconceptions disturbed, and safe stereotypes swept away. But our goal is worth the risk. In the end, a rattled reality is surely preferable to a zombie-like stare.

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  AUSTRALIAN MILITARY HISTORY DOESN’T BEGIN ON GALLIPOLI

  Craig Wilcox

  ‘There will be two volumes’, Grace Hendy Pooley told colleagues and publishers as she wrote the first full-length military history of Australia, and neither would be brief.1 She would have to cover New Zealand, of course, with its history so closely linked to Australia’s. But even if New Zealand were ignored, how could she possibly squeeze such an abundance of life-changing, nation- shaping events into a single binding?

  And that was without a single page on conscription or soldier settlement as we know them, and without a word on Kokoda, Long Tan or Gallipoli. These were in the unimaginable future in 1912 when Pooley was pitching her work-in-progress. Struggling to find a path down her mountain of notes, she seems not to have submitted a finished manuscript – at least not before a new war stole the attention of readers and booksellers. Had she been a tougher thinker, a nimbler writer and a cannier publicist – and, perhaps, had she been a man – her History of the Military in Australia and New Zealand might have reached the bookshops before World War I, making it harder for Australians today to assume they have no martial story worth speaking of before the landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915.

  Not that many people believe Australian military history began that day on the Gallipoli peninsula. Anyone so misinformed can be immediately set straight by a dozen good books and reputable websites. Jeffrey Grey’s Military History of Australia, a volume rich in the hard-headed pithiness that Pooley so badly needed, gives a generous four out of eleven chapters to the thirteen decades from the First Fleet to World War I. The Australian War Memorial’s website spends four of its thirteen ‘Australians at war’ pages in the same way. You could even say that awareness of those pre-Anzac decades is growing. There is a push to build a national Boer War memorial, and even the pugnacious scepticism of Keith Windschuttle hasn’t halted the re-labelling of clashes between colonial settlers and Indigenous Australians as a species of conquest.2

  But that’s history with a capital H, something for pundits and pupils to ponder, a matter for heads rather than hearts. The national military story is different again, more emotional and more important. It’s a public interpretation – a civic sermon as historian Ken Inglis might say3 – lovingly crafted from cruel and confusing realities about the pit of human suffering to make a morally and socially improving tale, one which harnesses selected facts and downright exaggerations to the vital job of nation-building.

  This national military story almost always begins on Gallipoli, and the anniversary of the landing remains the official moment for its telling and re-telling. It is a saga of great battles, great slaughter, great suffering, and the noble endurance of it all. The war in which the Gallipoli campaign was fought becomes ‘Australia’s greatest tragedy’, to quote another good book on Australian military history.4 It was full of supposed firsts for a people who had left their colonial infancy behind only a dozen or so years earlier – their first mass military mobilisation, their first debates over conscription, their first soldier settlement program, and the first appearance of a unique Australian character. The lean and stoic ‘diggers’ who fought and died at Anzac Cove and in the war’s later battles ‘got you a tradition’, as South Australia’s governor lectured his citizens soon after the war ended,5 and it helped the emerging nation through the collapse of the British empire that had nurtured it. Today the saga serves as a rallying point amid the flux of a multicultural society. As immigration obscures the monotone pink face of an older Australia , the saga seems to become ever more urgent. ‘The re-energising of Anzac’, Paul Kelly observed a year ago, ‘has become the central organising principle of Australia’s past and how the nation interprets its future’.6

  The national military story looks forward from 1915, as the prime minister said recently, to chart how ‘the tide of history has taken Australians to war on three continents over more than a century’.7 However different in their scale and meaning and experience, these subsequent wars become re-enactments of Gallipoli in official memory and public reflection, with the same suffering and quiet nobility, the same Australian character on display, the same strangely comforting sense that our troops are always among war’s victims rather than its perpetrators. Vietnam wasn’t easy to squeeze into this mould, but eventually the tale of Long Tan became a re-run of Anzac Cove, and all was well.

  While the national military story looks forward from 1915, with this heartfelt but selective gaze, it rarely looks backward at all. It ignores most of what could fall into view from our earlier martial history as irrelevant, quaint, sometimes even disturbing. The clashes that punctuated the advance of the colonial frontier still seem too sparse, too shabby, and perhaps too shameful to count as real war for many Australians today. The British redcoats who garrisoned Australia from 1788 to 1870 seem colourful enough, but they represent a foreign presence, variously bumbling and tyrannical as they stand over convicts, shoot down Aborigines, overthrow a governor and slaughter innocent goldminers at Eureka Stockade. The military activity of the colonists themselves – all those volunteer corps with their strange uniforms, and those charming sandstone forts whose guns never fired in anger – seems fledgling and feeble, amounting to nothing but a walkon part on the sideshow that was the Sudan War of 1885. The greater supporting role played by Australians in the Boer War, fought in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, stirs a little pride – but at the expense of real knowledge about this brutal conflict and popular support at the time for that brutality.

  Anyway, the whole vista from the First Fleet to Federation was pre-national and so pretty pointless, wasn’t it? The Australian War Memorial might display military relics predating World War I, but only in two tiny galleries safely tucked away at basement level, and it defensively shies away from remembering any fighting on the frontier.8 If a few antique military episodes survive on the edge of popular memory, they do so only as preambles before the sermon. The lacklustre defence of Elands River Post during the Boer War prefigures Gallipoli just as surely as Long Tan repeats it.9 Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and his comrades are not opportunistic killers of unarmed Boers, but brave diggers punished unfairly by the same dastardly Brits who went on to bungle things at Gallipoli and on the Western Front.10 About to be similarly conscripted into the story, and similarly distorted, is Aboriginal resistance to colonial settlers. Until recently, proud accounts of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Aboriginal ingenuity and bravery were exercises in lifting the spirits of Indigenous Australians today, and were therefore indifferent or even hostile to the national military story.11 A new, subtler but no less romantic and unhistorical effort now claims Aboriginal resistance as a heritage for everyone.12 Surely it will one day become the national military story’s prologue.

  Building a nation probably demands a saga as simple and selective and inspiring as this. If the price is a cramped view of history in the minds of politicians, journalists and the public, and sometimes even museum curators, teachers and historians, then it might be a price worth paying. But a sense of the past that follows a few threads bound to a single moment ignores the vastness and confusion of life in every age. Worse, it tidies it all up and packs it away forever inside a box that’s labelled neatly, indelibly – and falsely. Historians’ understanding of what a colonial past can mean has been revolutionised over the past few decades, with the old focus on a sunlit path to nationhood giving way to something richer and more riotous.13 Crafting a complex and politically useless vision that sometimes anticipates, sometimes contradicts and sometimes subverts our national military story has been a small part of that revolution,14 but it could be a larger one, and it ought to be bett
er known. We need to glimpse it as Grace Hendy Pooley tried to see it, as taking place more in Australia than in the uniformed ranks of our expeditions overseas, more in wider military activity than in brief moments of conflict, and more as a tapestry in itself than a few threads leading straight to a national future.

  The view extends back further than Pooley might have guessed. Organised conflict among the Aboriginal societies that possessed Australia for millennia was normally confined to individual punishment and petty raids, but it seems to have regularly peaked in dangerous clashes – what the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land called ganygarr, ‘the spear fight to end all spear fights’15 – between groups of men who might paint their bodies in shades weirdly prefiguring the British army uniforms their descendants would come to know so well. ‘On the morning on which we were to fight’, a Gippsland Aborigine said of one clash, ‘we were all ready, and were painted in pipeclay because we were very angry at our men being killed’ in previous fights, ‘and also to frighten our enemies’ who had painted themselves in red ochre to show they had already drawn blood. ‘They are not many of you’, one of them mocked. ‘Never mind, we will see’, came the laconic reply. ‘Then we fought’, and soon ochre was fleeing from pipeclay. ‘By and by I shot one man, and others were speared. Several women were caught … this was how I got my first wife.’16