Anzac's Dirty Dozen (3 page)

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.

[1]

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 say
³
– 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 better 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

A nineteenth-century German artist depicted a
ganygarr
in the same way he might have drawn a skirmish between volunteer
jaeger
companies on his local heath.
¹⁷
But casualties were few. The aim was to minimise death while asserting bravery and settling disputes, maybe also to prevent war evolving too far beyond a branch of ritual. Among the Yolngu, at least, a man who sparked too much fighting might be judged a menace to his own people and killed. But for all its choreography and restraint,
ganygarr
was war as it was fought before notions of standing and fighting to the death, of bitter defeat and triumphant victory. It drew in many men and some women too – which seems a lame statement until we reflect that only one in ten white Australians put on uniform during World War II. Aboriginal Australia wasn't military in the modern sense, but it was periodically martial. Only its ignorance of writing has denied us sagas of home-grown Hectors and Hercules.

Waging
ganygarr
against British colonists from 1788 to the 1920s was more spectacular but less effective, and so less common than the smaller raids and ambushes described by John Connor in
Zombie Myths of Australian Military History
and elsewhere.
¹⁸
But, as Connor reminds us, the raids and ambushes also had a warlike character. After eight years of accommodation with the white advance, the Wiradjuri around Bathurst resisted the tide
for a year or more in a conflict that surely edged aside most peaceful pursuits. Over just two days in May 1824 they attacked three stations, and they spent much of September fleeing from an official expedition of 40 soldiers and other unofficial avengers. The Wiradjuri may have lost dozens of dead by the end of the year, along with their way of life. The only sustained military attack on white Australia – the Japanese air raids on Darwin twelve decades later – killed 300 people, but it had nothing like these consequences for its survivors.

If the frontier struggle could be disastrous for the losers, it could be at least harrowing for the victors. The first white settlers of Victoria fought off a long Aboriginal assault during the 1830s. One man seemed to count it hardly worth mentioning ‘having had a servant killed, others attacked, and sometimes our sheep destroyed'. Another complained that he and his workers ‘were kept for years in a perpetual state of alarm', and boasted of firing 60 rounds during a skirmish that gave his opponents ‘a notion of what sort of stuff the white man was made'. Not all white men, though. ‘They murdered one of my servants and burned my huts and stores, and all my wheat', one cried later. The struggle that ended in unchallenged white victory left him ‘an invalid for life', he claimed, and ‘comparatively a poor man'.
¹⁹
Similar cries were heard from veterans of later wars.