The sheer numbers of war dead – what I might formerly have called ‘the magnitude of sacrifice’ – might seem to explain why war has attracted such attention. War – and especially the Great War – saw such concentrated slaughter that it has tended to overwhelm or dull critical responses. Charles Bean’s heartfelt observation that Pozières ridge is ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth’ is always before us, and it takes an effort of will to look beyond it.6 For example, it is true that one in five of those members of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) who served overseas died; but that does not equate to a fifth of Australian men or their families. Only about four in ten ‘eligible’ men volunteered to serve overseas, so perhaps something like one family in ten actually lost a son, husband or brother. Of course the question is complicated by what constitutes a ‘family’, and is bedevilled by double- or even triple-counting: many men would be both brothers and sons; some would be fathers too; tragically, some families lost more than one member. It is at least a long way from Philip Knightley’s claim of one family in two. Not that anyone really knows. No one has done the detailed demographic and genealogical research required for a definitive answer. I am just suggesting we be careful. Arithmetic like this might seem either heartless or ghoulish. But it is necessary, because it requires a stern discipline to keep in perspective the lives that war has cost Australia over the course of the twentieth century, or at least in the first half of it.
One of the themes of this chapter is that Australians have been content to allow wars and war remembrance to become the preserve of uniformed members of the defence services. So note that while the figure of ‘60 000 dead in the Great War’ is one of the most well-known Australian historical statistics, hardly anyone but specialist medical or social historians can tell you that 12 000 people, the great majority civilians, died in the influenza epidemic that followed in that war’s immediate wake. Were these people not also victims of war? According to the Australian War Memorial, if they died in uniform they were, but as civilians they were not. Yet surely the flu victims were at least indirect victims of war, as much as soldiers who died accidentally before embarking for overseas service (who nonetheless qualify for the ‘Roll of Honour’). Here the actual effects of a war are skewed because the idea of a Roll of Honour ascribes some civic virtue to the deaths recorded. This is a nonsense, of course: we surely ought to list Australian deaths due to the Great War as 72 000, just as we routinely include civilian deaths in the death tolls of other wars: the Soviet Union in 1941–1945, say, or Korea in 1950–1953.
We can settle the question of war’s effects for the second half of the century quite simply. It can be safely asserted that the experience of war left Australia largely untouched for the decades after 1950. The nation was technically fighting wars for about half of that half-century: in Korea for three years; Malaya for a decade; Vietnam for a further decade (the latter over-lapping with the ‘Confrontation’ with Indonesia); and the brief Gulf War occupying a few months in 1990–1991. These wars were largely fought by regular services, although conscripts provided about 40 per cent of the army’s strength in Vietnam. Despite dramatic opposition to the Vietnam War in its final years (evoking comparisons with the turmoil of the conscription debates of 1916 and 1917), such anti-war feeling was both short-lived and had few enduring ramifications for society. The brief opposition to Australian involvement in the Gulf War had even less social or political aftermath. In short, in the second half of the twentieth century, war rarely intruded on Australian domestic concerns. (Again, this is not to deny the long-lasting effects on the 50 000-odd Australians who fought in Vietnam, or the small number of regular service personnel or families on whom the burden of the past decade of conflict has fallen.)
If we make a claim, however, for war’s pre-eminence based on how many Australians have lost their lives fighting, perhaps we ought also to consider the argument that at least as many, or even more, have died from other causes worthy of regard. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and other sources of longitudinal historical figures (such as Australians a Historical Library and, to be honest, Wikipedia) suggest that alternative causes of death warrant examination as historically significant. The largest single cause of death in twentieth-century Australia (besides ‘natural causes’) has been motor vehicle accidents. The Australian Bureau of Statistics history of road fatalities refers to the historical ‘war on the roads’: from 1925 to the end of the century, over 160 000 Australians died in motor vehicle accidents.7 Deaths due to road accidents increased as car ownership and reliance on road transport rose until some 3798 people died in 1970 alone. Since then the rate of accidents has fallen, due to innovations such as seat belts, drink-driving laws, safer cars and better driver behaviour. Still, in the decade of the 1990s just short of 20 000 Australians died in motor vehicle accidents; in the first five years of the twenty-first century 8283 died in road accidents and 143 000 were injured – almost as many as were wounded in the four years in the Great War. Considering these figures against Australia’s losses in war we find that, in the course of just three years, as many Australians died on the roads as died, for instance, as prisoners of the Japanese. As many people died on Australia’s roads as died at Tobruk over precisely the same time period. The effect is arguably greater among the living. Each year, three times as many Australians are injured in road accidents (about 30 000) as were wounded fighting Germany in the Second World War (about 9480).8 Arguably, more Australians have been touched by the trauma of car accidents killing loved ones, friends or neighbours than have been affected by deaths in war, yet we do not see calls to erect a National Motor Vehicle Accident Memorial. The idea might seem almost offensive, but why should we not remember motor vehicle accident victims as comparable those who ‘gave’ their lives in war?
One of the most striking tables in the Historical Statistics volume of Australians: A Historical Library is devoted to infant mortality. It shows that, over the years of the two world wars respectively, no fewer than 33 000 and 30 000 infants died in Australia. Certainly that is fewer than died as young men in battle, but in the five years following each war a further 42 000 and 25 000 died respectively, and they went on dying, year after year, regardless of whether the nation was at war.9 Naturally the numbers and the proportion that died declined as hygiene and medical science improved (from annual figures of 10 000 in 1901 to just 2500 in 1979) but the total of deaths – about 600 000 in the course of the century – surely dwarfs the sum of misery inflicted by war. This everyday suffering is of course part of the human condition: but what makes it less worthy of notice? What memorial should it justify?
Similar cases could be made for remembering deaths from, say, tuberculosis, from various cancers, or from the quaintly named statistical category ‘mental and nervous diseases’. Among such causes we might count suicide. Although nowhere as deadly in absolute numbers, suicide continues to take a shocking toll, especially among teenagers, and accounting for about a quarter of the deaths of all men in their early 20s. Just as deaths from suicide are distributed unevenly by age, so are they also disproportionately found geographically. In 1998, there were 1589 suicides in capital cities, 511 in other urban areas and 557 in rural areas. Given how urbanised is contemporary Australia, this 557 represents a much greater impact among young men in the country. The Bureau of Statistics explains these grossly disproportionate deaths by pointing to such factors as greater access to firearms, rapid technological changes and living in a climate of economic uncertainty.10 In such figures are written the history of modern Australian rural life, its pressures and challenges – and its tragedies. It seems peculiar at best and grotesque at worst that a country should valorise on memorials in country towns the sacrifice of its young countrymen at places like the Nek and Beersheba, but ignore the experience of their counterparts a couple of generations away. To what degree are the Nek and suicide among rural young men two sides of a coin?
Suicide might b
e compared to the loss of life through drug use. Bureau of Statistics figures suggest that some 13 304 Australians died of ‘drug-induced deaths’ between 1991 and 2001. Calculating ‘years of potential life lost’ in 2001 alone gave a staggering total of 37 386 for, like soldiers, most of those dying were teenagers or young adults.11 Again, these deaths are widely distributed and regarded as a private tragedy rather than a cause for public commemoration; and yet the loss to both families and the community must surely be as severe.
Then there are other causes of death that might seem worthy of remembrance. Taking the statistics for disasters or accidents resulting in more than ten deaths, we get the following indicative figures from 1788 to the present:
• Shipwrecks – at least 3000 deaths
• Heat waves – at least 2500 deaths
• Cyclones and storms – at least 1800 deaths
• Bushfires – over 800 deaths
• Industrial (mostly mine) accidents – 450 deaths
• Air accidents – at least 340 deaths
• Floods – at least 285 death
• Rail accidents – at least 230 deaths.12
These figures suggest the price that the continent exacts from those who live here: over 5000 people have died from cyclones, storms, bushfire and extreme temperatures. Several thousand people have died in ships bringing them to this country – including, recently, 50 asylum-seekers who are not included in the figure. As the response to the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria demonstrated, Australians care deeply about those affected by such natural disasters. Speaking of the work of fire services, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described fire-fighters as Anzacs: but perhaps it would be more fitting to devote greater attention to those affected by such events in their own terms. Why does Australia as a nation accord greater privilege to a person in a khaki uniform than to someone in a yellow or orange overalls? Why should deaths in shipwrecks not be remembered as heroic and tragic? Why should the victims of mine disasters be forgotten when the victims of what might be called obscure and pointless imperial adventures of wars of diplomacy in south-east Asian jungles are valorised in perpetuity?
Such questions might seem impertinent; the answers may seem obvious. I think they are worth pondering. Realistically, however shocking these figures might be, it is unlikely that those who died from these non-warlike causes will be commemorated, for several reasons. Car accident deaths are horrific but rarely heroic. They are diffuse, spread across the nation. In the last decade about 20 000 Australians died on the roads, representing a death toll equal to that in the Vietnam War every three months. But because they occur in small numbers throughout the decade, and attract only local media attention unless the crashes are large or especially lethal, the effect is diminished. However tragic, deaths on the roads differ from death in war because deaths in war come in the service of the nation, and it is the nation that decides that they will be made a fuss of, whether that means a state funeral on return from Afghanistan, a huge and impressive national memorial or official commemoration. We tend to regard such commemoration as natural or organic or justifiable because Australia has always done it. But as a nation we can decide what we commemorate and how. We could as a nation choose to commemorate these losses as well as (not instead of ) those who have died in war.
The point about deaths due to drug use, suicide or motor vehicle trauma is that they do not occur only when uniformed forces enter combat in battles overseas: they happen every day, in communities and homes and on roads in every part of Australia. They must surely have affected every single family in the country, in one form or another. Again, this is not to decry or diminish the deaths of those who have served and died in war. But it is important to consider them in perspective. We might ask: why would we as a nation especially remember those who die in one situation – in uniform often in battle – while so persistently ignoring other forms of death that also bring suffering and grief to families and loved ones? Are deaths in war different to deaths in peace-time? Of course they are. First, Australians who have died in war have usually (with two significant exceptions) placed themselves in danger of death voluntarily.13 Second, and more significantly, those who have died in war have generally served formally as members of uniformed services. It is significant that the few exceptions – merchant seamen and civilians killed in bombing – are largely denied formal commemoration. At the Australian War Memorial, merchant seamen do not appear on the Roll of Honour but are consigned to panels on a memorial outside the building, while the civilian dead of Darwin, although buried in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Adelaide River, are not actually recorded in the Roll of Honour at all. This reminds us forcibly that commemoration in war in Australia is very firmly reserved for uniformed members of the armed services. In Australia, death in uniform (not in battle, mind, but in uniform) is accorded a privileged status.
So, many argue, should it be. They will remind us that Australia’s war dead ‘gave their lives’. They will remind us that many of those deaths came in horrific ways: cut to pieces by shrapnel on the Somme; succumbing to gas gangrene at Ypres; starving and ill on the Burma–Thailand railway; in lonely jungle clearings anywhere from Ambon to Bougainville. They will remind us that many died heroically: facing death in seemingly futile attacks on Gallipoli or at Fromelles; standing to their guns as ships sank; withstanding attacks by superior numbers at Isurava; and in actions from Pink Hill in South Africa in 1900 to nameless fire-fights in Afghan villages this very year. They will remind us that about a third of these deaths have left no trace, in that thousands were posted ‘missing’. They will remind us that every one of those deaths left grieving families. All this is true. The 102 000 Australians who have died in war have often died in horrible ways, sometimes heroically but too often to no clear purpose, very often without trace and all leaving behind grieving loved ones. Yet it still does not adequately explain why war should be accorded such a privileged place in Australian history.
If Anzac Day is, as its proponents aver, a day devoted to remembrance (and not to the celebration of a bombastic national identity), then surely it could readily accommodate the remembrance of those Australians who have died other than in wartime? It could, but realistically it probably never will. Deaths in war are sanctioned, indeed, sanctified, by the nation. Remembrance is orchestrated by organised bodies such as ex-service organisations. No such large organisations speak for the victims of car accidents, suicide or drug use. The overall effect of this, however, is to skew our understanding of the experience of Australian history.
Surely many deaths – in a bush fire, by suicide, from an overdose – can be regarded as just as horrible as deaths in war? Surely deaths due to suicide or drugs, or to a speeding teenage driver, can be seen as equally futile? Surely every death leaves a family distraught, asking unanswerable questions about why a young man or woman has died? They do: but deaths other than war are not remembered publicly because war occupies a privileged place in the way we as a nation think of our history. In this Marilyn Lake is right. No other aspect of Australian history has anything remotely as powerful as its own agents whose task is to lobby to ensure that that aspect is accorded such prominence. Indeed, so much do we take for granted this privileging of military history that to point it out is at first sight either ludicrous or sacrilegious, like asking why we wear trousers and skirts or, say, why we accord everyone the vote. It is so intimately a part of the texture of our society that to question it is to contest a fundamental assumption. Of all comparable Western democracies, however, only Australia accords war service and sacrifice a ministry of government (in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs) that enjoys such influence. This is not to mention its own national museum in the Australian War Memorial – indeed, the most handsomely funded and largest museum in the country. What other aspect of Australian history is accorded its own national day? Why should that be?
The answer is only partly that war, and specifically the world wars, were events of such p
rofound effect on Australian society that they justified a response in keeping with the magnitude of the effects. After all, other countries, ones even more profoundly affected by one or both of the wars, did not do all or most of these things. But the Australia of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 recognised the magnitude of sacrifice by creating enduring ways of remembering. Among other things they created a vast administrative edifice of ‘repatriation’ to care for those affected by war, erected memorials in every state capital, town and suburb, built national memorials in Canberra, at Villers Bretonneux and Gallipoli, supported the creation of war cemeteries and commissioned series of official histories and the archival collections that sustained them. (And note that except for the construction of state and local memorials, this huge effort was almost all undertaken by agencies of the national government.) All this was understandable (even if it was actually rather more than comparable countries did). It was arguably a fitting response by those actually affected by war.
Nowadays, however, with the increasing commoditisation of the Anzac ‘brand’, war is being promoted as central to the Australian historical experience. This process has been occurring for over a decade, regardless of political party in power and more as a response to bureaucratic enterprise and the centralising imperatives of media and ‘event management’ than by conscious manipulation. In 2003 the then prime minister, John Howard, proclaimed – at the opening of the Australian War Memorial in London – that ‘Anzac Day remains more evocative of the Australian spirit than any other day in our calendar’.14
Anzac's Dirty Dozen Page 27
