Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  To state the case most baldly, and to borrow from the title of Geoffrey Perret’s work, the United States is ‘a country made by war’.27 Notwithstanding the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the US Civil War on its own soil, the United States had by 1942 already shown its war-proneness by its role in the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, and World War I. By 1980, the United States had managed to participate in eight international wars at a cost of nearly 700 000 dead. On average, each of these wars lasted longer (33 months versus 22 months) and cost more lives (83 000 versus 68 000) than those of Imperial Britain.28 It also must be remembered that, once committed to a war, states tend to forget the past and need to learn anew the costs to be borne. Wars tend to be long and expensive in human terms, and wars fought by major powers are particularly long and particularly expensive. And minor powers aligned with major powers share the risks and eventually the significant costs of such conflicts. US military interventions, whereby a US force was deployed on foreign soil, are therefore relevant to the central argument of this chapter. Since 1900, 71 such initiatives have taken place, 15 in the period from 1945 to 1991. And this count leaves to one side the 215 occasions in the period from 1946 to 1975 when the United States used its armed forces as a political instrument without actually committing any violence.29

  War-proneness and a habit for coercion and intervention do not of themselves disqualify the United States as an appropriate ally if the country were acting out of necessity, or perhaps, even legally. But the evidence is not favourable here either. As Melvin Small has argued, of the six major wars which the United States has fought (including both World Wars and Korea), ‘necessity’ as a justification was found wanting in virtually every case.30 Nor were those conflicts in the post-1945 period either (domestically) constitutional or, more recently at least, in accordance with international law. As regards the former, two leading US constitutional lawyers, Michael J. Glennon and Louis Henkin (acknowledged by Theodore Draper as ‘the doyen of constitutional scholars’), have in separate accounts concluded that wars since 1945 have not been constitutionally sanctioned but presidentially arranged without congressional authorisation.31 The Reagan administration had difficulty even in maintaining international legal norms in the exercise of US foreign policy. In Stuart Malawer’s study of 32 major US foreign policy decisions taken by that administration, he identified only five as broadly complying with the standards of international law. The remaining 27 represented deviations from these norms which varied from moderate to significant, but in any case suggested a careless and certainly patterned disregard for them.32

  Nearly a quarter of a century later, the record is unchanged: the invasions of and subsequent wars in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq were all either illegal in their initiation, in how they were fought, or in the manner in which prisoners and non-combatants were treated – or all three. Indeed, the record includes ‘the violation of international agreements, the use of prohibited weapons, crimes of aggression, military attacks on civilian populations, support for war crimes by proxy [and] support for death squads and torture’.33 Of greater significance is the fact that, even where the perpetrators are known to the US government and the crimes in question are prima facie covered by US law, the decision has been taken not to press charges and prosecute, even when there is an admission of responsibility for the crime. Instead, successive administrations have declared that the president may order the extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens living overseas.34

  For the student of US politics and society, one of its most striking features is its openness. This is not to say that there is no deceit, secrecy, or hidden government – on the contrary, these most assuredly abound – but the openness of the United States at least allows political analysts to examine them in approximate terms. Indeed, US writers are exhibitionists in terms of the pathologies embedded in their national ideology. There is a consensus that the ideology of the United States emphasises patriarchy, individualism and the country’s Anglo-Saxon heritage to the point of racism. Inseparable from this are both the consequences of the historical origins of the European settlement of America and its abundance of natural resources, and of the dominant political economy – the need for territory and markets, and a belief in what is known as ‘American exceptionalism’. Together they have induced a sense not just of nationalism, but of national mission, a tendency to universalise the American experience and either export it, impose it, or both. This tendency makes the United States impatient with those states slow to grasp the ‘truth’ and even hostile to other forms of social and political revolution and development.

  Since the contradiction between being ‘exceptional’ and asserting the universal relevance of the US ideas and ideologies is never (nor can it be) resolved, the United States continually collides with a world of adversaries and enemies, almost all of them of its own making. Believing it is ‘exceptional’, it believes it is also invincible. Believing it is ‘exceptional’ and the instrument of a universal mission, it tends neither to compromise nor to trust diplomacy. It tends, therefore, to decide in solitude, and to act unilaterally.35 The Global War on Terror – with its declaration of a war against an abstract noun and an unknown enemy, effectively a declaration of perpetual war – only confirms this tendency. All of this has real and significant consequences for the United States’ allies like Australia, for this is an intrinsic part of the nature of the power we chose to attach ourselves to.

  It remains then to ask two questions: why is the Australia– US alliance so privileged and unchallenged in Australian security and strategic discourse? Now as much as ever, as Australia agrees to host US troops in Darwin from 2012. And what do we make of the claims made on the alliance’s behalf? The first admits no easy answer because, ultimately, defenders of the alliance possess a temperament of conviction in things that can only be believed with their eyes and ears closed. Faith, in other words, is the currency here, not rationality. The second is definitely easier: the claims are at best the repetition of myth, at worst they are fiction. They have become, in the poetic turn of Dylan Thomas, ‘the hissing of the spent lie’. Both reign nevertheless, standing reminders of a myth that is killed again and again, and again and again comes back to life.

  Further reading

  Commonwealth of Australia, Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030, Defence White Paper 2009, Australian Government, Canberra, 2009.

  R. Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building, Schocken Books, New York, 1990.

  M. McKinley, ‘Discovering the “idiot centre” of ourselves: Footnotes to the academic and intellectual culture of the Australian security policy discourse’, AntePodium: An Antipodean Journal of World Affairs, 4, 1996.

  —— , ‘The co-option of the university and the privileging of annihilation’, International Relations, 18(2), 2004.

  —— , Economic Globalisation as Religious War: Tragic Convergence, Routledge, London, 2008.

  M. McKinley (ed.), The Gulf War: Critical Perspectives, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995.

  B. Toohey & M. Wilkinson, The Book of Leaks: Exposes in Defence of the Public’s Right to Know, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1987.

  J. Vasquez, The Power of Power Politics, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 1983.

  [12]

  MONUMENTAL MISTAKE: IS WAR THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY?

  Peter Stanley

  Although much of the thrust of writing about Australia in the twentieth century would lead you to think otherwise, war is not the only or the worst affliction that Australians suffered in this period. One small and personal case in point is the family of George Henderson Smith, killed on Gallipoli on 26 April 1915 with the 11th Battalion. The Australian War Memorial preserves the letters of condolence that his family received and the obituaries they collected. They make heart-breaking reading, and suggest the depth of the family’s loss. But George’s death seems not to have been the greatest trial that
the Henderson Smiths suffered. George was the son of Perth businessman Robert Henderson Smith, who kept a detailed diary-cum-commonplace book. This diary, only available in the State Library of Western Australia in Perth, reveals that George’s death was only one of the tribulations that his family and especially Robert faced during the war years. Robert’s wife Eleanor had been mentally ill with ‘delusions and nervous twitchings’ from before the war. Their daughter Nell refused to accept her mother’s condition, and indeed, Robert felt, was ‘quite incapable of understanding’. Managing what seemed to be Nell’s growing mental illness added to Robert’s woes. Then early in 1917 another daughter, Barbara, suddenly sickened and died. Suffering himself from severe headaches and insomnia, Robert wrote in January 1918 that ‘my life appears to be one long anxiety’. Later that year he wrote to the Claremont Hospital acknowledging that his wife’s condition – what the doctor called ‘deep-seated delusions’ – had been ‘a matter of great grief ’. The strain made his surviving son Max ‘nervy and irritable’. Nor did the Armistice bring peace. Nell’s mental illness, Robert conceded in 1919, was also hopeless.1 What was worse for the Henderson Smiths: the loss of George or the intractable, incurable mental illnesses of Eleanor and Nell? Whose loss hurt more: George’s or Barbara’s? Of course, there is no way to measure the suffering that Robert and his family bore. All we can say is that war was only a part of it.

  So, finally, we come to the most persistent myth of all: that war is central to Australia’s history, the biggest thing in it. This idea stems from the familiar idea that the landing on Gallipoli represented ‘the birth of a nation’.2 This proposition implies that history is a mystical rather than a human process, and no one ever actually explains what ‘the birth of a nation’ actually means. It is certainly a persistent idea. In July 2011, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston accepted the appointment to chair the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board. In his first public pronouncement, Houston said that ‘it was on the shore of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe where our nation was defined, where our nation was born’. Air Chief Marshal Houston is not alone. Standing at Anzac Cove on Anzac Day 2010, young Melbourne builder Chris Barr declared ‘This is where the history of our country begins’. At least Air Marshal Houston went on to say ‘I relish the challenge in getting it right’.3 Is he getting it right to make such a claim? This idea that war is central to Australia’s history and identity is, I confess, one I spent years fostering and justifying. When I worked at the Australian War Memorial (1980–2007), I would occasionally draft a speech or talk for someone more senior, and later for myself. In explaining the significance of military history to Australia – which it was part of my job to encourage – I often found myself adding a line to the effect that ‘war has been one of the most significant influences on Australia’s history and on the lives of its people’. Superficially, this statement seems justifiable, even self-evident. Consider the numbers involved in the world wars overseas, the colossal casualties, the magnitude of suffering or – and this was the clincher – the way that, in the wake of the Second World War, non-British migration changed Australia’s demographic composition forever. No longer required to advocate the claims of military history for my daily bread, I am now, however, less sanguine about such rhetoric: indeed, some may see me as an apostate – one who recants a former item of faith. Has war really been so significant to Australia’s experience of history as a nation? Should Australians today think that war as an historical force deserves a pre-eminent position? If not, what other aspects of the historical experience should we regard as equally or even more significant?

  This chapter examines these questions in three ways. First, it looks at recent arguments critical of the centrality of Anzac Day in unduly skewing Australian history towards war. Second, it considers other aspects of Australian historical experience that could be used to complement the attention accorded to war in justifiable and proportional ways. Third, it considers the continuing case of the world war memorials proposed for the shore of Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin, as a way of evaluating whether or not war justifies its supposed centrality in Australia’s history.

  We do, however, need to keep this re-evaluation and these questions in perspective, and strenuously avoid any suggestion that we might be decrying or denigrating those who experienced war and its effects, especially on individuals and families. No one would doubt the importance of wartime experience either for individuals or families, or as a significant factor in shaping crucial aspects of the national experience. In discussing the place of war in the national historical experience, we would do well to recall the 102 000 Australians who did not return from war, or the even more numerous Australians who returned wounded in mind or body. But the significance of war’s effects on Australia can be magnified unduly, and this is increasingly the case. Anzac Day especially has been harnessed to serve the purposes of the state – since 11 September 2001 a state in a condition of ‘war’. We might therefore begin by enquiring whether Anzac Day explains the primacy of war as the principal contemporary vehicle of Australia’s national history.

  In 2010 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds published their provocative collection of essays What’s Wrong with Anzac? With collaborators Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi, they argued that ‘Australian history has been thoroughly militarised’. They argued that Anzac has become, as Mark McKenna put it, Australia’s ‘most powerful myth of nationhood’.4 Military history has colonised the school curriculum, and dominated any other single aspect of Australia’s history in popular publishing (with the possible exception of ‘true crime’). Lake documented the extraordinary and unparalleled expansion in budgets devoted to promoting the study of war in Australian schools, an effort principally funded by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA). ‘Why’, she asked, ‘is one federal government department funded to produce history materials when other federal government departments are not?’5 It is a telling question. The idea of Anzac enjoys a privileged place in education, and indeed in Australian life. Why is this? In the rhetoric of Anzac Day today, 25 April 1915 marks the point when Australia ‘became a nation’ or ‘gained nationhood’; at which, as Charles Bean put it, ‘the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’. As Mark McKenna asked in his chapter of What’s Wrong with Anzac?, what did this do to the long history of the struggles for representative government in the Australian colonies; the creation of an Australian identity; the attainment of Federation in 1901; and the decade of nation-building that followed?

  Contrary to post-Vietnam expectations of thirty years ago, Anzac Day has not died. In fact, it has gained in support, in numbers attending Anzac Day ceremonies at home and abroad, in the attention military history is accorded by publishers and the media, and in its place in school curricula. All of this essentially endorses a positive view of Australia’s involvement in war, regardless of the historical circumstances of the conflict.

  Barbecue chat analysis of the resurgence of Anzac Day generally gives John Howard (prime minister from 1996 to 2007) responsibility for encouraging, sanctioning, fostering or even funding the greater attention that Anzac Day received. As McKenna shows, however, in terms of the rhetoric of Anzac as the ‘real Australian national day’, the process began under Bob Hawke (prime minister 1983–1992). Certainly his successor Paul Keating (prime minister 1992–1996), whose government funded the ‘Australia Remembers’ year of 1995, must also bear a major share of the responsibility for what has effectively become a bipartisan support for elevating the standing of Anzac Day over the past twenty years. The result is that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, far from eroding, Anzac Day is entrenched as the de facto national day, eclipsing an Australia Day hampered by multiple disadvantages. Australia Day occurs during the summer holidays, enjoys lukewarm support outside New South Wales, and is seemingly fatally tainted by the connotation that it celebrates what is widely seen as the European invasion of the continent. These disabilities leave Anzac Day triumphantly in possessi
on of the field, bolstered by the greater support it enjoys among the public, the media, governments and publishers all eager to establish it as the anniversary of Australia’s supposed birth as a nation.

  The tone is indeed ‘triumphant’. Anzac Day has changed from being an occasion for public mourning for those sacrificed in an imperial cause to a celebration of those who died ‘to keep Australia free’. The word that most often recurs on Anzac Day is not ‘remembrance’, ‘sadness’ or ‘grief ’, and still less any expression of regret that Australia committed itself as a nation to so many conflicts in such a short national history. Rather, it is ‘pride’. Many Australians are ‘proud’ of their nation’s military history. They express pride in its volunteer tradition, in the way it ‘punched above its weight’ in war, of the skill, courage, ingenuity and general martial proficiency that Australian troops are said to have exhibited – all themselves myths already demolished in this book. Often Australians talk as if Australians alive today took part in the events that they commemorate: they talk about ‘us’ and ‘we’ even though no one alive today actually lived through or remembers the Great War . Now ‘we’ talk about ‘us’ on Gallipoli and ‘Our Anzac pride’, as the Herald Sun put it on 25 April 2010.