Now can Anzac Day return to a day of solemn reflection?
There are just seven months to go before the profligate commemorative folly that has been Anzac 100 comes to an end. And now that the best part of $600m has been blown on a non-stop, fouryear Anzac sound and light show, perhaps 25 April will come to reprise its intended place in Australian consciousness as a day of solemn commemorative reflection.
That may be too much to hope for of course.
As a child in Melbourne in the 1960s and early 70s there was a reserved dignity about Anzac Day. There would be mention of the war dead and wounded at primary school assembly along with the laying of a modest wreath, and then, on 11 November, Remembrance Day, a traditional minute’s silence.
Both would prompt minor discussion among the kids – of grandfathers and great uncles who’d died or returned, most never quite right again, and perhaps of the unknown, foreign places where they’d fought.
You’d see the old blokes (though many were probably only 15 years older than I am now), worse for wear on the trams and outside the pubs at the end of the day. And that’d be it for another year.
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No one back then – not the teachers, not the old blokes themselves, not the footy coaches, not even the politicians – reckoned Gallipoli was the birth of the nation. Back then Anzac was portrayed nothing like the foundry of the nation that it’s been inflated into today.
Australia of my childhood was economically strong but lackadaisical and content with its luck, a somewhat temperamental little Britain, confident in the future and little concerned with republicanism. As it followed the foreign policy lead of that other empire, America, into yet one more war in Vietnam, it still held to Britain for its history and definition.
And that history clung, limpetlike, to a couple of British seamen, Captain Cook and Admiral Arthur Phillip, and to a tale of “discovery” and “settlement” that defined us, as generations of pioneers and nation builders, somewhat distinct from – but always inextricably tied to – the old mother.
The Aboriginal rights movement of the 60s and 70s reminded white Australia, uncomfortably, about sovereignty unceded and past woes. But little was conceded to Indigenous Australians and pitifully little – as evidenced by the Turnbull’s government’s rejection of the request out of Uluru last year – has changed.
As the first concerted pitch for a republic died at the hands of John Howard, Peter Reith, Tony Abbott (and, yes, Malcolm Turnbull) along with the last of those who’d participated in the failed invasion of an obscure finger of the Ottomans in 1915, Anzac had already well and truly been disproportionately puffed-up by the politicians and their storytellers.
This began in the 1980s with prime minister Bob Hawke (who took the last of the Gallipoli veterans back to the Dardanelles in 1990 at the cost of $10m) and continued apace under Howard, and successors Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Abbott and now Turnbull. That’s how we got here, to this place where Anzac has become a contorted national story of derring-do, about soldier white hats who either bravely endured or became the “glorious” dead, whose “spirit” and “sacrifice” somehow created who we are, all the while bequeathing us with supposedly unique characteristics of courage, ingenuity and mateship (it’s worth remembering the Turks, Germans and Japanese had them in spades, too).
For 102 years Anzac Day has held a rightful place of national moment. But there’s little denying that in recent years, since the deaths of the last veterans, its core sentiments have increasingly been monopolised by a crude, unwelcome jingoism. It’s a you-flew-here-we-grewhere-style of nationalism that long ago inveigled Australia Day, marking the first fleet’s arrival in 1788, itself already profoundly exclusive of the continent’s timeless, abiding Indigenous heart.
For years now I’ve been writing about how the Anzac myth of national definition denies not only the story of the 60,000-plus years of Indigenous culture and habitation that preceded the Gallipoli landings, but also the story of the wars that raged across this continent after European invasion.
It also overlooks important elements of its very own story: the failure of many veterans to cope with return to civilian life; the legacies on terrified women and children of drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and venereal disease; the failure of medicine and clinical psychology to deal with post-traumatic stress and, not least, the atrocities committed by Australian troops on operation.
So eager was I for clarification about this Anzac myth and of what it might tell me about Australia that I’ve visited many times the important first world war battlefields, from Gallipoli to Beersheba and Gaza to the Jordan valley and Damascus, from Fromelles and Pozieres to Bullecourt and Hamel, where the Australians died in the heat and the dust or drowned slowly in the mud while screaming for their mothers. And I’ve also traipsed around this country visiting the places where, by some accounts, just as many tens of thousands of Indigenous people died fighting the British redcoats and their proxies. And after walking past all of those blonde headstones in all of those foreign war cemeteries, replete with their militarily-clipped lawns and fragrant rosemary bushes, all of these places that dignify so many terrible deaths, I feel like I’ve learnt far more about what my country is by looking inward, by walking this landscape and determining what happened within it.
So, last week, in the name of remembrance, in the remote corner of a sheep station in central New South Wales, I visited the grave of the Indigenous warrior Windradyne, who led resistance against the British in the Bathurst war of the 1820s. We walked across a dusty, desiccated paddock, dotted with ancient scar trees and sprinkled with stone artefacts, to reach him.
This was an Australian battlefield. On this continent.
This is my Australia. It’s an Australia with an Indigenous past that I embrace. It’s an un-reconciled place of many wars and conflicts. It’s a country that should proudly speak of its many cultures and peoples, of the achievements of its many brave women as well as men, but is too often bullied by fatuous claims into thinking that to do so is to indulge identity politics.
It’s a country whose reconciliation, whose true identity, will be determined by our capacity to look inward, by self-reflection, in order to parse the critical things that happened right here. But it remains, sadly, a country afraid to embrace the breadth of its history, the noble and the horrific, a country that clings to 1788 and Anzac at the expense of too much else.
I hope that as the over-hyped, over-expensive Anzac 100 comes to a close, we can settle into a gentler, more reflective, far more inclusive commemoration of who and what we are.
Amid today’s chorus of lest we forget, I’ll be remembering all that’s just as, or more, important than Anzac.
And I’ll be thinking, “Lest we remember.”