Anzac's Dirty Dozen (4 page)

Frontier conflict wasn't war as those later veterans knew it, or even war as other colonists waged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against the native populations of North America and southern Africa. No long columns of regulars ever wound through the Australian bush, no white men mustered as a militia, no great forts were built, and no treaties settled the squalid, confused conflict. A minor drag on colonisation, frontier fighting was too puny to encourage anything like a war industry beyond the importation and sale of more than the predictable number
of shotguns and pistols. Victory brought no shouts of triumph. The dead earned few memorials beyond some stone plaques inside Sydney's St James's Church. Yet a final death toll proposed by historian Henry Reynolds – of 20 000 black Australians and more than 2000 white – is increasingly accepted.
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That's about as many as were lost in 1917, Australia's worst year at war. It also represents an average of 200 dead every year from 1788 to 1901, and if that seems insignificant, it still exceeds Australian losses in any year in Vietnam. Puny and petty as it was, frontier fighting was much more a ‘Battle for Australia' than the fighting in 1942 that lobbyists and politicians have recently elevated out of all proportion.
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The redcoats who occasionally arbitrated in frontier struggles were never mobilised for a serious campaign against the Aborigines, although Nathaniel Lowe of the 40th regiment had the dubious distinction of committing Australia's first war crime by having a black prisoner shot in 1826. British soldiers were never called upon to repel an attack by a rival empire on the Australian colonies, but they shot down rebel convicts outside Sydney in 1804 and miners at Eureka fifty years later. When the last British regiment left Australia in 1870, the civilian response was famously muted. But this brief catalogue of apparent irrelevance and alienation disguises the fact that the redcoats were not merely the first soldiers in Australia, but the first to belong to Australians.

In 1832 a Sydney newspaper pronounced the redcoats to be ‘as much naturalized as the bulk of the community'.
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It was an exaggeration, but not by much. British soldiers formed a significant proportion of early colonial enclaves, and as late as 1828 one in twenty white Australians was a redcoat, his wife, or his child. The border between soldier and civilian was even more porous than this reminder of the presence of military families suggests. Only a trickle of civilians enlisted in the garrison, but hundreds of
thousands of civilians were former soldiers, some granted farms or town allotments in a strangely neglected first chapter in the history of soldier settlement in Australia. Relations between civil and military society were close, indeed intimate, at the time, with bonds of friendship and enmity, of love and sex. Sydney, Hobart and (although some residents snootily pretended otherwise) Melbourne were British army garrison towns in much the same manner as Colchester and York. Civilian residents lapped up the free spectacle of parades and salutes, flocked to military balls and concerts, played against the soldiers in football and cricket, consulted their engineers, surveyors and doctors, took on lucrative contracts to provide barracks with food and fodder, opened hotels to ply the rank and file with drink, and above all befriended soldiers and married them. The lack of fanfare accompanying the last regiment's departure reflected not so much public indifference as an uneasy acceptance of the inevitable. Previously, when British troops had sailed from Australian ports to war on some other frontier of the empire, they had been routinely hailed as ‘our gallant soldiers'.
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Most of the men, women and children cheering the redcoats would have dismissed out of hand any suggestion from us that they should have saved their martial loyalties for some home-grown army of the future.

These soldiers bequeathed as much tradition to the Australians of their day as any slouch-hatted troops would later do. They represented an army that had bled on a hundred famous battlefields. Its ‘glorious and brilliant achievements', one South Australian said, were ‘an heirloom to successive generations' and a challenge to them to emulate ‘the noble deeds of their ancestors'.
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Copies of famous battle paintings hung in middle-class parlours, preachers and governors lectured audiences on red-coated bravery. Towns and streets were named for hallowed battlegrounds on the other side of the globe, and for generals whose names
were household words. ‘A crowd of places in New South Wales bear the names “Waterloo” and “Wellington”', a French visitor observed in 1824,
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and today there are twice as many Wellingtons as Jackas in a Melbourne street directory. The first Victoria Crosses worn in Australia graced the chests of redcoat veterans: three were presented to soldiers or former soldiers in Sydney and Melbourne. One of these men, Frederick Whirlpool, long preceded Neville Howse from the Boer War as Australia's first recipient of the medal.

Similar kinship and respect applied to the Royal Navy, ruler of the waves and with a base in Sydney until the eve of World War I. The first colonial governors were naval officers, the First Fleet was a naval expedition, and the first visit of a navy squadron (in 1824) was an occasion for wonder and verse. While military officers surveyed the land, naval officers surveyed the coast. Sydney became as much a naval town as visiting regiments made it a garrison town – to the annoyance of some politicians but the delight of many merchants, publicans and prostitutes. From 1891, Sydney hosted a so-called auxiliary squadron partly paid for by Australians. Its ships, bearing names like
Wallaroo
and
Boomerang
, blurred any distinction between imperial and local.

Not that everyone loved the British army and navy, or even gave a damn about them. But most of the predecessors of today's journalists, radio hosts, politicians and authors who shape our national military story were devoted to them and the wider imperial military story they embodied and inculcated. The centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1905 was marked in Australian cities by victory arches, newspaper supplements and special sporting matches. Four years earlier the red coats of visiting British soldiers formed the centrepiece of the great Federation parade through Sydney. ‘Australians were glad the imperial soldiers had come here', the nation's first prime minister said, ‘for they were
proud of them, and they hoped the imperial soldiers were proud of the Australians'. The city's mayor found it ‘very difficult for any man to find words to sufficiently express the intense pleasure which the visit of the imperial troops had given the people of Sydney', especially because the ‘glorious traditions of their regiments were well known to Australians'.
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That's hardly true of the army that Australia has fielded since World War II, with its marginal presence in most capital cities. Few civilians habitually encounter soldiers and sailors today, let alone drink with them, marry them or brawl with them as their predecessors did with redcoats and bluejackets. The British army and Royal Navy were more truly at home in Australia, far more a part of everyday Australian life, than our servicemen and women today.

The real first world war for Australia was the long struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France from the early 1790s to 1815. Few Antipodeans joined in the actual fighting – John Macarthur's eldest son and William Charles Wentworth's younger brother were the notable ones – but the result determined Australia's future nonetheless. In securing Britain's naval supremacy, Trafalgar promised the whole of Australia to British settlers. The red-coated contribution to the run of allied victories on land from 1812 ensured the promise was kept. The British empire would face no serious threat for another century, by which time its Australian territories had reproduced Britain's political and legal system and were permanently and prosperously integrated into the global economy. The ‘battles that shaped Australia', to adopt the title of a 1990s celebration of later, betterremembered struggles, should include Trafalgar and Waterloo.
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Some colonial Australians barracked from the sidelines during the long war against France, and many more kept on barracking during Britain's wars throughout the nineteenth century. They marked victories with subscription dances and defeats with
solemn church services. They established and donated to patriotic funds as early as 1816, if not before. Great battles like Balaclava, and boutique ones like Rorke's Drift, sent shudders of excitement or despair through Australia almost as deep as the fall of France and victory at El Alamein would do during World War II.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, fear of a new war between the British and French empires prompted Englishspeaking men around the globe to do more than simply barrack for their armies. When the wave of martial excitement rolled across Australian towns and suburbs in 1860, it prompted a rush to enlist that predated by half a century the more celebrated queues before Gallipoli. Within a year many localities had established a volunteer corps – a part-time military unit closer to a fire brigade than a unit of regulars – and a rifle club that trained for war as much as it shot for sport. These volunteers and riflemen were soon joined in the capital cities by tiny naval brigades that imitated Royal Navy landing parties. Hitherto serene mornings and evenings were disturbed by the sounds of military commands being shouted in parks and at racecourses. Strange new uniforms, not always well-tailored, enlivened parlours, ballrooms and church pews. New military ideas were borrowed from citizen soldiers in England and vigorously asserted. Discipline should not infringe a man's dignity; military punishment must not extend to flogging, let alone execution; the Crown could not force men to fight overseas. These ideas, not conceived to limit British control over Australian soldiers but inherited from England long before Australians ever went into battle, reflected the fact that communities, not colonial governments or the British army, had taken the initiative in forming and filling the volunteer corps.

The existence of a local volunteer corps instilled the same kind of communal pride as the creation of a local council and football team. Pride grew further after 1885, when some units began to
ride horses – for mobility rather than the charge – and to replace colourful military clothing with khaki and slouch hats. Forgetting that the new tactics and uniforms were copied from other British imperial frontiers, some Australians hailed these ‘buff-coloured boys' for introducing to war ‘two of the natural habits of the Australians – riding and shooting'.
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The search for the supposedly distinctive qualities in Australia's fighting men began a generation before Gallipoli.

Not that the search was widespread at the time. Indeed its preliminary results were challenged. In a way strangely unthinkable in our multicultural age, some volunteer units paraded defiantly ethnic identities. There were Irish and Scottish corps in the capital cities, a German one in Geelong, an exclusively English one in Sydney. (There would have been a Chinese corps had the idea not so spooked the New South Wales government.) Ethnic units wanted nothing to do with khaki, slouch hats and a common colonial identity. Nor were the new uniforms popular with mainstream urban volunteers, even after a visiting British general praised them for constituting a ‘distinctive national dress'.
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As one colonel explained, it was scarlet, not khaki, that symbolised ‘actual soldiering'.
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The 700 New South Wales men who went to war with the British army in Sudan in 1885 were forced to give up their red coats – at the insistence of British generals. They served in the brief and, for them, bloodless campaign as dutiful apprentices to some of war's most highly skilled tradesmen. Such was the vision for the first Australian contingents to the Boer War fourteen years later. Few expected a handful of South African farmers to do more than delay a triumphal British march on their capital cities. This was one reason why most Australians seemed less than gripped by the outbreak of war in 1899. But historians in the 1970s who studied this languid reaction, and who concluded that imperial manipulation
must have edged an essentially reluctant Australia into the war, were strangely blind to the subsequent mass public engagement with the conflict.
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After the Boers fought back hard – in one ‘Black Week' late in 1899 defeating three British columns – Australia plunged into its first active participation in an imperial war. New patriotic funds were established and public attention, as Tasmania's governor reported, ‘centred practically on one subject, the war in South Africa'.
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This was nothing new by nineteenth century standards. The novelty lay in the sudden enlistment of more than 30 000 men into new contingents, volunteer corps and rifle clubs.
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Some said that number was far too small, thus prompting the first real arguments about raising a compulsory militia and anticipating the 1916 and 1917 conscription debates. The violent attacks on some German migrants that blighted Australia's record during World War I were likewise anticipated after Black Week, largely by hooligans angered by Berlin's sympathy for the Boers.

Many of the new contingents were sent at first to one of the Boer War's sideshows. Still, they made history there. Marched with deliberate slowness through Rhodesia, they helped deter both a Boer invasion of that new colony and an African revolt, fixing the country's future for seven decades as an apartheid state outside South Africa.
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It was also in Rhodesia that another historical first occurred: the creation of the first Australian brigade in war, 1300 strong, under an obscure and overwhelmed English colonel who was anxious to lead his ‘splendid Australians' at the enemy then let them ‘go home happy'.
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