Noel Turnbull, Defending Country Secretary, comments on Beyond the Broken Years, by Defending Country President, Peter Stanley. The article appears also on Noel's blog and on Pearls and Irritations. For more on the Stanley book.
Every year or so Australia gets a bulky new book about an Australian war, military action, hero or some other military matter, written by what is known as ‘storians.
They are seen as ideal presents for Dads and Uncles and you generally see them turning up in second hand bookshops and school fetes a year or so after they have been gifted. Most of them show little evidence of intense – or any – reading.
In recent years the number and frequency has dropped off and been replaced, to a certain extent, by more reflective and illuminating work. A new book, Beyond the Broken Years, by Peter Stanley puts all this in perspective with an analysis of Australian military history as reflected in 1000 books.
Publisher’s puffs may be puffs but from time to time they hit the spot precisely. In the Stanley case, the recommendations of the historian David Horner – 'Brilliant, erudite and insightful' - and Joan Beaumont – 'A virtuoso commentary – written with Stanley’s characteristic flair, insight and delight in controversy' - are spot on.
The book’s title relates to the publication, half a century ago, of Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, which was most probably the first doctoral thesis on Australian military history, at a time when such history was unfashionable.
Stanley suggests that probably the first Australian military historian was John West, whose The History of Tasmania (1852) described the Indigenous inhabitants as being ‘a people in arms’ – a fact significant to what we commemorate or don’t.
Stanley points out that much of World War I history was written by those who had experienced the war but, in an early indication of some iconoclastic thinking, Stanley challenges the conventional wisdom that Charles Bean’s official history and Monash’s book, The Australian Victories in France in 1918, were the pioneers in the field, by restoring the priority of Staniforth Smith’s Australian Campaigns in the Great War.
Stanley points out that in the 1950s military history was a minority interest, although various military history societies were formed – some of them soon to be dissolved. But a turning point came in the 1970s – ironically when Anzac Day was declining in significance – when the RSL and others embarked on trips to Gallipoli and the Gammage book pointed out the immense significance of the Australian War Memorial’s collection of letters, memoirs and documentation of the soldiers who served.
Perhaps the definitive argument about what the role and significance of military history is in Australia is contained in Stanley’s bibliography. Stanley writes:
Comparative figures based on the bibliography created for this book are persuasive. In the 1970s, after the appearance of The Broken Years, an average seven-and-half titles appeared in Australian military history annually. In the 1980s that more than doubled to nearly twenty; in the 1990s to twenty-six. In the next century they increased to thirty in the 2000s and to over forty in the 2010s. It's too early to say definitively how the trend will go in the 2020s, but so far its back to where it was in the 2010s, at around thirty titles per year.
The book is amazingly comprehensive. It starts with a short history of Australian military history focussing on the impact of the Gammage book and the emergence of myths about the Digger and the impact of the ‘storians. It looks at our colonial wars and significantly it recognises the Australian Wars which the Australian War Memorial is notoriously reluctant to recognise, although there are slight indications that the intransigent opponents of First Nations Wars might be outflanked by newer Board members and a new Chair, Kim Beazley, who has had a long commitment to Indigenous recognition.
How significant that is can be illustrated by the relative length and impact of the Frontier Wars, compared with other wars. Australia’s very first war, the Frontier Wars, is not only our longest war but also one of the most deadly. It lasted more than a century from 1788 to 1934 and some evidence indicates the Wars continued until at least the 1940s – longer than Europe’s One Hundred Years War in the 14th and 15th centuries; and longer than Europe’s deadly Thirty Years War in the 17th Century.
About 60 000 Australian soldiers were killed in World War I and 40 000 in World War II. No-one will ever know just how many Black and White people were killed in our wars. The most conservative estimate of the deaths of Indigenous people, settlers and soldiers is 23 000. Other estimates of White and Black deaths are as high as 122 000.
Think of a subject and Stanley has covered it. Ethnicity and Anzacs, the cost of war and its aftermaths, battlefields, memories and memorials, dictionaries, the European air war, New Guinea, official histories, Korea, peacekeeping, First Nations veterans, POWs, the Navy, the cost of war, and that all-important consideration of every serving soldier – the state of your boots.
The chapter on Sacred Places and memorials is an excellent summary of our national obsession with memorials, from the Shrine to the many memorials in almost every town and suburb in Australia, and nods to Ken Inglis’ book of that title. The Inglis book was once totally comprehensive but since its 1998 publication many more memorials have been erected and some of us veterans are wondering if there will even be one to those who dug our all-important sanitary pits.
Inglis’ book also provides the answer to a great commemoration question. What is the world’s biggest war memorial? The answer – Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, constructed after World War I by veterans.
Picture credits: Detail of cover of Peter Stanley's book. Detail from promotional poster for The Australian Wars, 2022, dir. Rachel Perkins (used with permission SBS). It seems clear that changing attitudes at the War Memorial were influenced by the Memorial Council’s viewing of this documentary in 2022. Although there has been backsliding since.
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