Anzac Day Then & Now

PROFESSOR TOM FRAME is Director of the Australian Centre of the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS) at UNSW Canberra. He served as a naval officer for 15 years and completed postgraduate studies in history, theology and sociology before being ordained to the Anglican ministry. He has been Bishop to the Australian Defence Force, patron of the Armed Forces Federation of Australia, a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, and judged the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. He is author or editor of more than twenty-eight books, including Living by the Sword? The Ethics of Armed Intervention, The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy and Moral Injury:

Unseen Wounds in an Age of Barbarism.

edited by

TOM FRAME

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Tom Frame 2016

First published 2016

This book is copyright. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in Tom Frame, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Title: Anzac Day then & now / edited by Tom Frame.

ISBN:  9781742234816 (paperback)

9781742242323 (ebook)

9781742247694 (ePDF)

Series: ACSACS series ; 2.

Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Subjects: Anzac Day—History.

Memorialization—Australia.

Nationalism and collective memory—Australia.

Australia—Historiography.

Other Creators/Contributors:

Frame, T. R. (Thomas R.), 1962– editor. Dewey Number: 355.160994

Design Di Quick

Cover image Di Quick

IllustrationsPage 76 (NewSouth Publishing), page 83 (Australian War Memorial, 4/I/42/3 Part 2, Appendix I), page 84 TOP (Phillip FR Schuler, Australia in Arms: A Narrative of the Australasian Imperial Force and the Achievement at Anzac, T Fisher Unwin, London, 1916), page 84 BOTTOM (Australian War Memorial, P01242.002), page 86 (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1918), page 88 (National Archives of Australia, A432, 1929/3484 part I), pages 175, 178, 186 (‘Anzacs and Anzac Day 1915–1919: programs and invitations ephemera material collected by the National Library of Australia’, ).

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The editor welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

ANZAC DAY: CONTROVERSY AND CRITICISM Tom Frame

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

1 Reflecting on a retrospective Ken Inglis

2 Anzac: Celebration or commemoration? Gareth Knapman

3 The nation’s secular requiem John A Moses

PART TWO: FEATURES

4 Naming the day: ANZAC or Anzac? Robert Nichols and Peter Stanley

5 Anzac Day’s religious custodians Michael Gladwin

6 Anzac Day and national identity John Connor

PART THREE: FRACTURES

7 Owning Anzac Day: The One Day of the Year Heather Neilson

8 ‘They’ve got a right to their feelings’: The One Day of the Year reconsidered Christina Spittel

9 The fall and rise of Anzac Day? 1965–1990 Jeffrey Grey

PART FOUR: FERVOUR

10 Best we forget? Poetry and civic performance Jeff Doyle

11 Anzac hymns: Ancient and modern? Tom Frame

12 ‘Commemorators-in-chief’ Carolyn Holbrook

POSTSCRIPT

13 Remembering the fallen or reflecting on fallen-ness? Tom Frame

APPENDIX 1: POEMS

APPENDIX 2: HYMNS

NOTES

ACSACS SERIES

This book is part of a series produced by the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS) – a UNSW Canberra Research Centre at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA). ACSACS seeks to become the pre-eminent Australian venue for assessing the past, present and likely future impact of armed conflict on institutions and individuals in order to enhance public policy and raise community awareness through multidisciplinary scholarship of the kind this book embodies.

Established in 2012, ACSACS utilises the strength of academic research conducted at UNSW Canberra and draws on the university’s close and continuing relationship with Defence which began in 1967. In bringing together acknowledged experts in diverse fields of study, the Centre hopes to produce creative solutions to a variety of problems, whether questions of history or challenges in policy.

ACSACS also serves as a significant focal point for academic activity prompted by the centenary of the Great War (2014–18), the 75th anniversary of the Second World War (2014–2020), the 50th anniversary of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam Conflict (2015–22) and the 25th anniversary of the first Gulf War (1990–91). ACSACS is well placed to interpret these stories of valour for the thousands of local commemorations being planned across the nation. With its hugely significant database of 1st AIF personnel (www.aif.adfa.edu.au) and computer-assisted analysis of Australian Taskforce–Vietnam operations (www.vietnam.unsw.adfa.edu.au), the Centre’s resources are an indispensable tool for those researching Australia’s war effort.

The titles published within the ACSACS series will engage both specialist and general audiences with the expectation that individual titles will become standard reference works or text books for undergraduate and graduate teaching at UNSW. The subjects reflect the Centre’s principal areas of interest: the Australian experience of military operations and armed conflict with a particular focus on history, ethics and economics.

The Centre’s website is: www.acsacs.unsw.adfa.edu.au and its staff can be contacted at: acsacs@adfa.edu.au

Previous Titles

2015 Moral Injury: Unseen Wounds in a Age of Barbarism

CONTRIBUTORS

DR JOHN CONNOR is a Senior Lecturer in history in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, and previously worked at Kings College, London and the Australian War Memorial. He has written on the British Empire and the First World War, frontier and colonial warfare, and Australian military history. He is a volume co-author for the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations.

JEFF DOYLE has been a Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra since 2012, and Associate Researcher for the Australian Prints Collection at the Australian National Gallery since 2013. He is a former Senior Lecturer in English and Media studies at UNSW Canberra, (1983–2011), and the curator of numerous art exhibitions for the Academy Library (1987–2012). He has published widely on Australian literature and art, and on Anzac memorialisation and iconography in literature, sculpture, architecture, film and art, particularly on Australian participation in the Vietnam Conflict.

PROFESSOR TOM FRAME is Director of the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS) at UNSW Canberra. He is a former naval officer (1979–93) and has published extensively on Australian naval history and military ethics. He has been a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial (2004–07) and judged the Inaugural PM’s Prize for Australian history (2006). As Anglican Bishop to the Defence Force (2001–07) he conducted many commemorative services including the 2005 Dawn Service at the Australian War Memorial.

DR MICHAEL GLADWIN is Lecturer in History at St Mark’s National Theological Centre, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. A graduate of the Australian National University and the University of Cambridge, his research interests include the religious and cultural history of Australia and the British Empire, with a particular interest in the relationship between religion and war in Australian history. Michael is the author of Captains of the Soul: A History of Australian Army Chaplains (2013) and Anglican Clergy in Australia, 1788–1850: Building a British World (2015).

PROFESSOR JEFFREY GREY is Professor of History at UNSW Canberra. The author or editor of many books on Australian, Commonwealth and international military history, he is editor of the journal War & Society and managing editor of the Australian Army Journal. His most recent book is The War with the Ottoman Empire, volume 2 in the series The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, of which he is also series editor.

DR CAROLYN HOLBROOK is Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her book Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography was published by NewSouth in 2014. Her research interests lie in memory of the Great War, the history of the Anzac legend and Australian political and civic history.

PROFESSOR KEN INGLIS AO, was born in 1929. He gained a Masters degree in History from Melbourne University and a doctorate from the University of Oxford. He has been Professor of History at the Australian National University and at the University of Papua New Guinea, where he was also Vice Chancellor. He is an Honorary Professor in Monash University’s National Centre for Australian Studies. He is the author of many books and articles of history and journalism, including The Australian Colonists, The Stuart Case, This is the ABC, Whose ABC?, Anzac Remembered and Sacred Places. He is retired, lives in Melbourne and is working on a book about the internees transported from England to Australia in the Dunera during 1940.

DR GARETH KNAPMAN completed his PhD at RMIT University in International Studies. He has previously worked as Research Fellow at Monash University’s National Centre for Australian Studies University focusing on the history of Anzac Day. His research addresses the prequel Anzac Days of 1915. He is currently working at UNSW Canberra.

PROFESSOR JOHN A MOSES is currently a professorial associate of St Mark’s National Theological Centre, Canberra and is an active Anglican priest. Previously he served in the Department of History at the University of Queensland (1966–1988). Having received his postgraduate training at Munich and Erlangen universities he has researched and published extensively on German labour history, colonialism, war-guilt and church resistance to both the Nazi and Communist regimes. More recently he published (with George Davis) Anzac Day Origins: Canon DJ Garland and Trans Tasman Commemoration (2013).

DR HEATHER NEILSON is a Senior Lecturer in the English program at UNSW Canberra. She is a past president of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (1998–2002) and her research is mainly focused on American literature and culture. She is the author of Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power (2014).

DR ROBERT NICHOLS was Senior Editor in the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial, a post he held from 2000 to 2015, except for a two-year stint as a freelance editor in Tasmania in 2009–10. He has edited 70 major exhibitions and about two dozen books for a variety of Australian museums and galleries. When not working, he enjoys reading, playing chess and correcting restaurant menus.

DR CHRISTINA SPITTEL teaches English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW Canberra. She specialises in the intersections between literature, history, memory, and politics and is co-editor of a volume on the publication of Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic (Anthem, 2015). Christina is currently preparing a book on the Great War in Australian novels, based on the PhD thesis she completed at the University of Freiburg. Her work has appeared in several collections and among others, Australian Literary Studies, Book History and The Journal of Contemporary History.

PROFESSOR PETER STANLEY is Research Professor at UNSW Canberra. Formerly the Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial, where he worked from 1980 to 2007, he is the author of 27 books, mostly on Australian militarysocial history but also on British Indian military history, medical and bushfire history and battlefield research. His book Bad Characters was jointly awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011 and as President of the group Honest History he has been a notable critic of ‘Anzackery’. His most recent book, Die in Battle, Do not Despair, was the first published account of the Indian experience of Gallipoli.

DISCLAIMER

Each chapter represents the views of the individual contributor. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the organisations to which they belong. None of the chapters should be taken as representing the views of UNSW.

ANZAC DAY: CONTROVERSY AND CRITICISM

TOM FRAME

When the six Australian colonies formed a Federal Commonwealth on 1 January 1901, they turned their mind to the necessary elements of nationhood, even stipulating where the new federal capital would be – and not be – in the constitution. But neither the nation’s founding document nor the early parliaments felt the need to declare a national day. There was effectively no national day when the Great War began in 1914. This perhaps is one reason why, by the time of the first anniversary of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli, 25 April had the mood of an unofficial national day. While the national Australia Day that emerged in the mid-1930s had its precursors, 25 April was marked by a great many more Australians and with a good deal more emotion.

Anzac Day might still be considered Australia’s unofficial national day, but it is also one of the nation’s most controversial cultural habits. Does it commemorate those who suffered and died in war, celebrate deeds of courage and bravery redeeming the savagery and barbarism associated with armed conflict, and console those whose loved ones did not return from war or who returned changed by an overseas deployment? For many, Anzac Day essentially functions as an alternative religion with its own sense of the numinous, transcendent and divine. This makes criticisms of Anzac Day akin to blasphemy as the following episode reveals.

In the early 1980s, David Kent, a University of New England historian, was researching the origins and contents of the publications produced by Australian soldiers embarked in troopships and deployed to the trenches during the Great War.¹ He located a file at the Australian War Memorial containing material that did not appear in The Anzac Book edited by Charles Bean. Reading the file led Kent to conclude that Bean had been highly selective in the material he accepted in order to produce a rather pristine image of the Australian soldier. Kent noted that:

The rejected material contained references to cowardice, drunkenness, malingering, friction between the men and their officers, personal suffering, the waste of life and the de-humanising effects of warfare. Some of the material included for publication was toned down by Bean to the point where he altered its meaning and he omitted a piece where a soldier reflected on another’s good fortune in securing a wound that ensured his escape from Gallipoli.

Kent decided the contents of the file would serve as the basis for an interesting article on Bean’s role as editor of The Anzac Book. The first public outing for the material was the annual Australian War Memorial conference in 1984, at which he read Bean’s reflection on the challenges facing the war correspondent:

Everyone who has seen a battle knows that soldiers do very often run away; soldiers, even Australian soldiers, have sometimes to be threatened with a revolver to make them go on … Then there is the nonsense about wounded soldiers wanting to get back from the hospital to the front. I have asked the nurses, I have asked the men, I have heard them discussing it – and everyone says – what here everyone knows – that it is not one soldier in fifty that wants to go back … They dread it … There is horror and beastliness and cowardice and treachery, over all of which the writer, anxious to please the public, has to throw his cloak – but the man who does his job is a hero …. Well this is the true side of war – but I wonder if anyone would believe me outside the army.

Kent drew attention to Bean’s assessment of his task and of the material he had to recast to boost morale and please the public. A summary of his conference presentation appeared as a special feature in the Sun-Herald newspaper and unleashed a barrage of abuse even though he had simply reported Bean’s comments. In personal letters, many of them anonymous, Kent was berated for being a ‘knocker’ and chastised for ‘smearing the deeds and memory of wonderful men’. His research was considered ‘unnecessary and hurtful’; he had produced ‘an indecent … macabre and unsubstantiated treatise’ which was ‘an exercise in futility’. Detractors called him ‘a traitor and treason-monger’ whose ideas were ‘vile, filthy, distorted’. One correspondent was adamant: ‘Sack the bastard’. Putting aside the vituperation, Kent had demonstrated that ‘Bean acted quite deliberately to create a partial, one-dimensional image’ of soldiers and their circumstances. Had he told the truth, Bean confessed, ‘the tender Australian public, which only tolerates flattery and that in its cheapest form, would howl me out of existence’.

When Les Carlyon launched a reprint of The Anzac Book at the Australian War Memorial in 2010, he responded to criticisms that Bean had produced ‘an idealised view of the Anzac legend’:

Editors are meant to edit, and editing isn’t objective. It’s about one person’s perceptions of taste and tone and of what constitutes good prose. So we shouldn’t be too literal. We shouldn’t assume that the omission of a piece or a sketch automatically amounts to censorship rather than the exercise of that oxymoron people in my vocation call editorial judgment.²

It is one thing to produce an appealing and evocative book, it is quite another thing to produce a distorted and misleading one. In a deft understatement, Carlyon conceded that Bean had ‘occasionally exercised a sanitising hand’. The material Kent uncovered showed Bean did a good deal more than that. Carlyon also avoided another key issue when he remarked: ‘I think we should see this book for what it was meant to be – a diversion, something to amuse the men as they prepared to spend winter in a hellhole’. Again, it had a much wider audience and a more expansive purpose than that. Bean knew that The Anzac Book would be read in Australia, indeed 100,000 copies were sold in 1916 alone, and that its contents would influence the mood at home. He produced a book to entertain the soldiers but it had a definite polemical intent: the Australian people needed to remain committed to the war and willing to sustain its human and financial cost.

Thirty years after the controversy, Kent wondered whether reactions to this kind of iconoclastic writing ‘would be repeated today or whether it might be even more hysterical?’ Perhaps less hysterical but certainly just as vehement. Adam Brereton remarked in the Guardian that:

Today criticism of Anzac has itself become part of the event. For some, who see the whole day as a kind of violence, iconoclasm is the only way they can participate. Around sacred things there will always be a swirl of opprobrium … but despite the wishes of Anzac’s defenders, there will never again be a return to commemoration free of criticism, just as there is no person who takes part in Anzac services without reflecting on their meaning. That’s what sacred things do: they compel us to consider their nature.³

Brereton wondered whether Anzac Day could ever be different because ‘the loss of public religion has robbed us of language and ritual we once used to give purpose to death. In its absence, the military has sold us its own vocabulary and view of history wholesale, along with the nasty stuff that comes with the uniforms’. Curiously, he concluded by commending Anzac Day as a kind of ‘state religion’ and claimed ‘it does the thing a religion should do: burden its adherents with the view that violence and evil have their origins in alienation and ignorance’.

Those professing no religion were unmoved by such a narrative. Some, like law student Michael Brull, made it plain that his values were ‘sharply at odds with those who worship a god, a nation or a state’:

I’ve never been patriotic, so Anzac Day has never held much significance for me. Every year it comes by, someone reminds me of it, I briefly remember and then I forget it … the government’s Anzac Day campaign does not seem like a benign campaign to remember the past, so much as pushing particular values through a particular day of remembrance … But Anzac Day is treated as though it is non-political, when really it is just based on particular political assumptions that some prefer to remain unquestioned.⁴

In addition to those professing personal indifference to Anzac Day are the ‘leftist cultural warriors’, denounced by newspaper columnist Miranda Devine. She describes their criticisms of either the Anzac story or Anzac Day itself as ‘insults’ to the national identity.⁵ This alleged campaign is catalogued in Mervyn Bendle’s Anzac and Its Enemies: The History War on Australia’s National Identity.⁶ Notably, Bendle is relieved these concerted attacks have been unsuccessful because Anzac Day functions as a ‘civil religion’ and deserves respect. Nevertheless, he counsels vigilance and names as ‘enemies’ of Anzac no less than four contributors to this book. He writes:

While the vast bulk of the Australian people attempt to honour the promise made a century ago – Lest we forget – we witness a sustained new round of attacks on the Anzac tradition from determined ideologues on the far-Left; pampered, wellresourced and influential academics, disgruntled politicians and junior military officers; and their media camp advocates.

Bendle alleges that what he calls ‘the campaign’ began with the late Manning Clark (who died in 1991), was given fresh impetus by Prime Minister Paul Keating (1991–96) and continued (for the succeeding twenty years) by ‘academic historians in elite institutions including the Australian National University, and (incredibly)’ – his word – ‘the Australian Defence Force Academy, and the Australian War Memorial’ - not that the Memorial ever employed ‘academic historians’.

These allegations are serious because they charge substantial scholars and influential institutions with a conspiracy. It is not my role to defend UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy but I would contend that it is the proper role of the academics to challenge the academy’s students, uniformed and civilian, to think critically and creatively about the place of uniformed service and the importance of armed conflict in the evolution of the Australian nation. Despite the absence of an alleged common cause uniting academics, service officers and the employees of the Australian War Memorial, many people care deeply about Anzac Day and what it signifies. For this reason they are not prepared to allow exaggeration and overstatement to distort the actual wartime achievements of Australians over the past century.

Speaking personally, I was a frequent contributor to Quadrant (the publisher of Bendle’s book) from 1999 to 2009 and I have never been accused (at least to my face) of leftist sentiment. As Anglican Bishop to the Defence Force and a former member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, I attended every commemorative event at the AWM from 2001 to 2007 (Anzac Day and Remembrance Day), officiated at the 2005 Dawn Service, conducted the national commemorations after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2002 and 2003 national memorial services following the Bali bombings, the national prayer services that preceded the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the commemoration of those lost in the crash of Navy Sea King helicopter Shark 02 on the island of Nias following the earthquake that came shortly after the 2003 Boxing Day tsunami. It would be difficult, I would have thought, to categorise me as an ‘enemy of Anzac’. Yet, I must confess to being uncomfortable with many aspects of contemporary commemoration and to feeling less than free to share my anxieties about the Anzac Day ‘experience’ lest I be accused of lacking patriotic spirit.

Being concerned and having misgivings does not make anyone an enemy of Anzac Day and what it might represent. My own experience of Anzac Day coincides with my earliest and deepest memories. In a fading family photo album there is a picture taken on Anzac Day in 1966. My father (who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War) is holding me in his arms as he marches down Crown Street in Wollongong. I attended the march every year until I joined the Royal Australian Navy just after my 16th birthday. It seemed like a ‘day of obligation’; I had to be present. Twenty-five years ago I was on board HMAS Sydney off Anzac Cove for the 75th anniversary of the landing and I met the remaining veterans of the Gallipoli campaign. It was a very moving experience and will stay with me always. I am uneasy with, and have not been persuaded by, some of the criticisms that have been made of what Anzac represents in Australian history and in popular consciousness.