Anzac's Dirty Dozen (5 page)

The idea of dutiful apprentices patiently waiting while the regular army showed the way was one more casualty of early Boer successes. Replacing it was an expectation that, if Boer farmers riding nimble ponies could outwit or at least outrun professional soldiers, then amateurs from Australia, Canada, New Zealand
and England itself should be able to do the same, and so tip the balance the empire's way. Thus Australians came to fight in South Africa as buff-coloured boys were supposed to do, riding out far from supply lines and dispersing small bands of Boers, although all too rarely crushing them. A year or two earlier, most of the Australians had been riding trams or bicycles to work, not horses. Still, they seemed handy enough on campaign, and some were truly at home in the outdoors. A few were wild, but their wildness was encouraged as, well, natural among frontiersmen. Years before official historian Charles Bean spied their descendants on Gallipoli, the poet Banjo Paterson rejoiced at seeing such ‘longlegged fellows, brown and hard-faced' in a South African town, with ‘the alert wide-awake look that distinguishes the Australian soldier from the more stolid English “Tommy”'.
³⁶
Rudyard Kipling similarly summed them up as ‘Dark, tall men, most excellent horsemen, hot and angry, waging war
as
war, and drinking tea as a sandhill drinks water'.
³⁷
The Australian soldier entered the consciousness of the rest of the world as a bushman in khaki, and the slouch-hatted larrikin began to replace the dutiful, red-coated military apprentice as the stereotypical Australian in uniform.

The new image was a flash and flattering one, but the Boer War brought bad news as well. The squalid fighting on Australia's frontiers could be dismissed as nothing to do with real war; the squalid fighting in South Africa could not. Australians had to accept that war could be unrelieved by glory, that it could be simply brutal. This explains both the apologies given for ‘Breaker' Morant, found guilty of murdering unarmed Boers, and also the wider acceptance that his execution was well deserved. Then there was the whiff of alienation, even antagonism between the British army and its wartime colonial recruits. For the first time, thousands of Australians were fighting beside the soldiers they had so long venerated, and found them to be ordinary men after all. British
colonels and generals usually complied with the Australians' expectations that men who had come to help the army should be praised to the skies and, in all but a few cases, protected from military discipline and punishment – but there was friction when the brasshats acted like brasshats. A popular campaign effected the released from gaol of an accomplice of Morant who was popularly but mistakenly judged not to have been responsible for his part in the murders. A similar campaign and the same result, with greater justification, followed the incarceration of three Victorian soldiers who had challenged an overbearing general.

The Boer War also brought a heavy casualty list. The usual number given for Australia's dead, around 600, seems modest enough until supplemented by the likely toll among the thousands of men who fought in units raised in South Africa. If, as seems likely, a thousand Australians died in the Boer War, it was a noticeable loss in a male population only a third of the size of the Vietnam War generation. And like Vietnam, there was no great victory to point to, no moment when Australians seemed to have tipped the balance, no higher cause that seemed to make it all worthwhile. It became more satisfying to see the conflict not as a dull, disappointing drama in itself but as a forgivably patchy rehearsal for something greater to come. Australia had federated halfway during the war and could look forward, as nations and perhaps even proto-nations were supposed to do, to a bloody test of their worth. Australians were ready to embrace the next war as a new beginning.

Preparations for that war began soon after Federation, well before it was clear where the fighting would be and who the enemy was, and the result was a social and financial upheaval. Contrary to the folk tales of C.J. Dennis and Charles Bean,
³⁸
the soldiers and sailors who came to fight in World War I were not so much products of rough city neighbourhoods and the self-reliance
bred in the bush, but of much costly and uncomfortable military reform.

Talk of such reform began in 1905, but the hard and expensive work kicked off only in 1911, when teenage boys were forced into compulsory cadet drill. A year later the old force of volunteers, already reformed and partly transformed into a voluntary militia, gave way to a real, compulsory militia organised and funded by government, and trained and administered by professional soldiers. Half of all young men who turned eighteen in 1912 were obliged to serve. Slowly, year by year, a part-time army of seven infantry divisions and seven cavalry brigades emerged. One of its aims was to give Australia something like the military clout of Belgium or Romania – enough to warn off Japan, planning an empire in east Asia, and to prepare men to fight in a likely war in Europe against Imperial Germany, the British empire's most serious rival since Napoleonic France. There was also a domestic motive, particularly popular with some parents and clergymen, of inculcating toughness and patriotism among a new generation widely suspected of addiction to sport and cigarettes, to cinema and soft living. Perhaps best of all, the militia would be strictly territorial in its organisation, with just one unit for each town or suburb, leaving no room for the ethnic regiments that many Australians now feared as divisive. Whatever its motives, it all seemed a bold initiative – ‘a proclamation of historic importance', as Boston's
Christian Science Monitor
put it
³⁹
– and another example of how a newly federated Australia was becoming a laboratory of political and social reform.

But the experiment was nearly compromised. Historian John Barrett showed long ago that resistance to militia service was smaller than critics of the system claimed at the time;
⁴⁰
the real problem was subtle but widespread resistance while in uniform. Many young men were reluctant to learn the unglamorous basics
of soldiering or to obey unpopular superiors – or any superior. One officer described his cadet company as ‘an involuntary association of stone-throwing criminals'.
⁴¹
What he would have thought of the whole battalion that broke out of its camp at Liverpool in 1913, and had to be returned at bayonet point, can only be imagined. Outside of the ranks, employers objected when workers were lost to militia duty, and parents protested when their sons were sent to camp, or made to drill on cold nights. Ian Hamilton, the British general who would later command the Australians on Gallipoli, inspected the new militia early in 1914 and guessed it was capable of resisting an enemy only half its size.
⁴²
Still, by winter that year an army of 62 000 learners, loafers, leaders and larrikins was under some sort of training and discipline. Not until the 1950s would Australia have again a peacetime military force as large or as uncomplicatedly focussed on the basics of war.

By 1914 Australian also had a navy of sorts. Although the redcoats had left in 1870, the Royal Navy continued to crew an Australia Station. But the ships were small and few, sufficient for suppressing human trafficking in nearby Pacific Islands (their usual duty) but not much else. In any case, strategic orthodoxy was calling for concentration in European waters to face the growing German fleet. Some Australians saw the sense of this. During the so-called Dreadnought Crisis of 1909, as newspapers screamed that Berlin was outbuilding Britain in the construction of the latest capital ships, five rich men and countless poorer folk across New South Wales offered more than £90 000 – nearly the size of Queensland's entire defence budget a decade earlier – to reinforce the fleet in the North Sea. But more Australians feared Japan, or more precisely that the imperial government in London couldn't or even wouldn't help them fend off a Japanese attack. They wanted their own navy tied to local waters, and to hell with the cost. The final decision was a compromise – an affordable
navy within a navy that would secure Australian shores in peace, and in war (provided Japan kept out of it) would reinforce the Royal Navy's main battle fleet. When the first Royal Australian Navy ships, built in England and partly crewed by British sailors, reached Sydney in 1913 they sparked the same proud comments as news of the Gallipoli landing would later. Australia, the Labor Party heavyweight William Morris Hughes pronounced, had ‘assumed the toga of nationhood'.
⁴³
With 16 ships, one of them a battle cruiser, our navy was a more formidable force in 1914 than it would be in 1939, and a relatively more powerful fleet than Australia has put to sea since the 1980s.

On the eve of World War I, then, Australia had the beginnings of a navy and a militia it was starting to think of as an army. When war came, the new ships and sailors proved themselves immediately, making possible the conquest of German New Guinea, running aground a German light cruiser, escorting the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) to war, and then reinforcing the Royal Navy's main battle fleet. The militia fell into neglect during the war, and wasted away as the tide of combat refused to break on Australian shores. But the vast effort of raising, organising and disciplining it, and the experience gained by its officers, administrators and suppliers, ensured that the AIF could be smoothly and quickly formed in 1914, and that more men than a few thousand Boer War veterans knew what to do once the shooting started.

If Australians were poised by 1914 to recast themselves as a distinct people by some act of military endurance, they continued to draw strength and to derive a sense of themselves from their long pre-Gallipoli military heritage. The best-selling book by an Australian at the time wasn't a volume by Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson, but probably the Reverend W.H. Fitchett's
Deeds That Won the Empire
, a stirring account of heroism by Englishmen in red coats and blue jackets. The book, first
published in Melbourne in 1896, was conceived for a purpose his successors like Peter FitzSimons share today – to bind Australian society with gripping popular stories of ancestral martial bravery.
⁴⁴
A little more scholarly but no less purposeful was a 1908 lecture on the Royal Navy's contribution to Australian history by James Watson, a former volunteer captain and a leading light in the newly formed Royal Australian Historical Society.
⁴⁵
Joseph Forde, another literary bowerbird plundering the past, narrated a lively history of British regiments in Sydney to amuse readers of the scandal-sheet
Truth
from the late summer to the late spring of 1909.
⁴⁶
Not that Australia's military heritage was only clad in red and blue. Boer War memoirs and histories such as
Australians in War
,
Australians at the Front
and
Tommy Cornstalk
had sketched the achievements and attitudes of a new breed of British soldier from the fringes of empire, someone scarcely different from the one soon to be dubbed a ‘digger'. Fitchett spied in a somewhat hapless defence of an obscure spot in the western Transvaal the same qualities about to revealed on Gallipoli,
⁴⁷
with the result that the fighting at Elands River Post was already set to become a prequel to the national military story.

Still, in 1914 the old British army was still Australia's ancestral military force, its default image of the real soldier. Two months after the war began, the Sydney magazine
Lone Hand
covered its October issue with a picture of an Australian soldier striding off to war and saluting his predecessor – a soldier in the red coat worn at Waterloo. When news came of the Gallipoli landing, Fitchett pleased everyone by announcing that Australians were like Wellington's army almost exactly a hundred years before – young fresh-faced militiamen, ignorant of the sound of gunfire – except that ‘Wellington's lads would not have had the initiative and daring to climb that cliff. That was the “Australian touch”.'
⁴⁸
The reverend's benediction helped Australians to shift
their affections seamlessly from red coats to slouch hats, and from a military past to a military future that no longer needed a past before 25 April 1915.

But there
was
a past, more substantial than even our historians usually allow. Not as substantial as the Australian immersion in the two World Wars, of course, but more so than our military experiences since. It is customary, when calculating such experience, to tally up the number of people wearing uniform. But if we also count Aborigines likely to have engaged in
ganygarr
, and also the members of rifle clubs, then martially active men in Australia might have numbered more than 50 000 early in the nineteenth century,
⁴⁹
perhaps 70 000 at the height of the Boer War,
⁵⁰
and certainly more than 90 000 in mid-1914.
⁵¹
Such numbers were exceeded only during the World Wars and from the 1950s to the 1970s, but really only in the 1940s if we adjust for an increasing population. Deaths in combat were notoriously heavy during the World Wars, but more than 20 000 dead from frontier fighting and Boer War service is not to be sneezed at – and far exceeds all our battle deaths since 1945. On the grounds of human cost alone, the Australian War Memorial's colonial and Boer War rooms ought to be larger and more prominently placed than its Korea and Vietnam galleries.

While cost is one reason for pondering Australia's military history before Gallipoli, an equally good one is the alternative and perhaps unsettling vision opened up by looking at our military experience from a different vantage point from that of Anzac Cove. Looking from Gallipoli, we see Australians dying beside their New Zealand cousins. We hail them all as Anzacs and leave the connection at that. But as Grace Hendy Pooley understood – and as later historians like me, even in this chapter, have pretended not to notice – our national military story from the First Fleet to the First World War and probably beyond, has
artificial if not ahistorical boundaries unless it spans both sides of the Tasman to take in New Zealand, that seventh former British colony at the Antipodes.