This post is the first in a series marking Anzac month. For other posts, look under 'News' at the top of our website home page.
The Honest History Book was published in 2017, edited by David Stephens and Alison Broinowski. Here are some extracts from 'Conclusion', by Broinowski and Stephens, pp. 287-93 of the book, republished with the permission of the authors. The chapters and authors of the book are listed below. Many of the issues touched on have been further explored in the Honest History and Defending Country websites.
We began this book with the simple statement that honest history is interpretation robustly supported by evidence. The book has shown that the evidence supports many interpretations; Australian history is complex. We have presented evidence for a balanced history that puts Anzac in its proportionate place, explores other influences, confronts myths and fills silences. The Honest History coalition’s mantra, ‘Not only Anzac but also’, is particularly relevant to Australia. The widely received view of Australian history has a special, disproportionate place for Anzac; honest Australian history means both downsizing Anzac and upsizing non-Anzac.
We also argued, particularly in chapter 9, against Anzackery, the excessive or misguided promotion of the Anzac legend. There should be no sacred cows in a free society. Anzackers, the peddlers of Anzackery, deserve and should receive trenchant criticism, whether they are jingoistic ministers of the Crown or sentimental directors of war memorials, gung-ho office-holders in the Returned and Services League or commercial shysters making money from the Anzac ‘brand’. Anzackery – the extreme version – aside, Anzac may still be a secular religion for some Australians, but it is not the established church; other Australians have the right to be atheist or agnostic about it. In turn, Anzac atheists and agnostics should respect the adherents of the Anzac religion, but they should not in a democracy be required to worship at its altars.
There is still a place for Anzac, in the quieter, more reflective form described in chapter 9 of this book, and as a talisman for members of our defence forces, provided they have other values as well – professionalism, respect for the civil power and the rejection of misogyny, for example. In a diverse society, there is room for this sort of Anzac, but it needs to get beyond sentimental stories of Australian men in khaki fighting and dying heroically. It also needs to look at why wars occur, how Australia enters them, whether they are worth it, what happens at home while the soldiers are fighting and what happens afterwards.
We also saw in the first part of this book how parochial and how bedevilled by myth is the way Australians relate to our war history. The chapters on the broader Great War and on the treatment of the Armenians should remind us that there was much more to that war than the alleged ‘blooding’ of Australia as a nation. Despite 61 000 deaths and many more people than that permanently affected, the impact of that war – and all our wars – on Australia pales beside the overall global impacts. Yet we act as if it does not – and that is national narcissism. If we are ever to value humanity as a whole, we need to cease ‘setting Australian life and sense of loss above this common muddle of bones and blood’.
The myths discussed in chapters 4 to 7 of the book should remind us again of the importance of evidence in history. The evidence is that Anzac has ebbed and flowed in our national consciousness over a century, that Charles Bean was but one man among many rather than the single founding father of Australian commemoration, that the story of men returning from Vietnam is not straightforward, and that the ‘Atatürk words’ are little more than a confidence trick, although they have become central to the Anzac legend. A national reluctance to further disseminate these words would be a great advance.
There are some other practical ways to change the balance of our history between Anzac and non-Anzac. First, we should ‘level the playing field’ between the institutions that promote Anzac (and flirt with Anzackery) and the other cultural institutions that deal with the broader spread of our history. At the federal level, the Australian War Memorial should be removed from the Veterans’ Affairs portfolio (under the Defence umbrella) and returned to a cultural portfolio, from one of which it was excised more than 30 years ago. The memorial would then have to compete directly for public money with institutions such as the National Gallery, the National Library and the National Museum, rather than continue its privileged funding of more and more buildings to house more and more military relics. (It also needs a more representative governing Council.) For similar reasons, the commemorative education function and staff of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs should be moved into the Education portfolio and given a broader, less khaki-tinged role. Finally, the Commonwealth should abolish the requirement under the Parliament and Civics Education Rebate scheme that schools must visit the Australian War Memorial if they want their students to receive a subsidy for their trip to Canberra. Mandating visits to a war memorial that has such a limited agenda should be anathema in a civil society that cherishes a peaceful future.
Similar reforms are needed at state level. While some states have more balanced programs than others, the typical regime has an essay or project competition for children, with a question about the Anzac legend and prizes including a Gallipoli trip, supported by a website about ‘the state at war’ that emphasises the exploits of soldiers rather than the experience of a whole people, perhaps augmented by an online shop selling a range of Anzac knick-knacks. Like their federal equivalents, state outlets of the commemoration industry simplify and sanitise war while claiming they do not glorify it. ‘Yet’, says historian Frank Bongiorno, ‘a sense of sacred nationhood created through the blood sacrifice of young men remains at [the core of Anzac commemoration] today, as in 1916. Is this not to glorify war?’
There is a need also for cultural change. Questioning Anzac should not be seen as disloyal. The late Inga Clendinnen said it was the job of historians like her to be ‘the permanent spoilsports of imaginative games played with the past’; Clendinnen’s fellow historian Peter Cochrane reckoned history is ‘a cautious, ever-questioning discipline’. ‘History is not a single story’, Larissa Behrendt writes in her chapter in this book. ‘It is competing narratives, brought to life by different groups whose experiences are diverse and often challenge the dominant story a country seeks to tell itself. There are no absolute truths in history. It is a process, a conversation, a constantly altering story.’ Historians are not being true to their profession if they are cowed by complaints that they are disturbing comforting myths or removing security blankets. They – and their like-minded supporters – need to be spoilsports, forever asking probing questions, offering evidence-based answers, nailing myths and distinguishing them from history.
Philosopher Raimond Gaita wrote recently that ‘the capacity to think critically requires also that we develop an ear for tone, for what rings false, for what is sentimental, or has yielded to pathos and so on’. (All of these are skills particularly relevant to targeting Anzackery.) In chapter 4 of this book Carolyn Holbrook prioritises critical thinking skills for children. These skills should also be more common among the journalists who write about our wars. Critical reporting when a country is at war matters more than at any other time, because the stakes and the costs are so high. Critical thinking among politicians about our involvement in wars would also be welcome; bipartisanship about the Anzac legend, as described in Frank Bongiorno’s chapter 8 of this book, and support for serving soldiers should not mean an unquestioning acceptance of military adventures. (See Alison Broinowski’s chapter 19.)
Nevertheless, the best way of putting Anzac in its place and seeing off Anzackery is by promoting the non-khaki side of our national story. A century after Gallipoli, surely it is time to pay more attention to the winding and fascinating tracks – environmental, social, political, cultural, scientific, and so on – down which Australians have travelled to where we are now.
In her chapter, Larissa Behrendt wrote of our need to ‘acknowledge that there is no one dominant national narrative but many concurrent, competing and conflicting stories that reflect the diverse backgrounds and perspectives within Australian society’. This means looking at the many elements of the nation that has grown from the one the men of Anzac thought they were defending all those years ago. It means rejecting silly claims that a single, narrow story is ‘our story’. It means trying to understand the history of our environment, of the multicultural country that immigrants from 200 countries have built, of the devastating effects of economic upheaval but the smugness that prosperity can breed. It means confronting the evidence of the growing gap between unequal 21st-century reality and our comforting national myth of egalitarianism. It means asking why leadership by women has not been recognised and promoted, so that our first is not our only female prime minister, and young women can aspire to and become leaders in all fields. It also means confronting – and ending – our continuing adolescent relationships with the monarchy, regardless of the ‘star power’ of its current representatives, and with great and powerful friends who take us for granted.
Most of all, upsizing our non-khaki side means facing up to what Larissa Behrendt calls ‘the invasion moment’, for ‘until we do that we will never have found a way to truly share this colonised country’. That invasion of 1788 and its consequences deserve far more of our attention today than do the failed invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and our military ventures since. ‘Not only Anzac but also’ is shorthand for a complex history that deserves exploration, understanding, commemoration and even, sometimes, celebration. Australia is more than Anzac – and always has been.
The Honest History Book, NewSouth, Sydney, 2017, chapters, authors and (then) affiliations:
Foreword: Julianne Schultz (Griffith Review)
Chapter 1: Introduction: David Stephens (Honest History); Alison Broinowski (Honest History, Australians for War Powers Reform)
Part I: Putting Anzac in its place
Chapter 2: Other people’s war: The Great War in a world context: Douglas Newton (author, formerly Western Sydney University)
Chapter 3: 24 April 1915: Australia’s Armenian story over a century: Vicken Babkenian (Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies); Judith Crispin (Australian Catholic University)
Chapter 4: Adaptable Anzac: Past, present and future: Carolyn Holbrook (Honest History; Deakin University)
Chapter 5: The Australian War Memorial: Beyond Bean: Michael Piggott (Honest History; independent scholar, former National Library of Australia Fellow)
Chapter 6: ‘We too were Anzacs’: Were Vietnam veterans ever truly excluded from the Anzac tradition? Mark Dapin (author, journalist, Fairfax)
Chapter 7: Myth and history: The persistent ‘Atatürk words’: David Stephens; Burçin Çakır (Glasgow Caledonian University)
Chapter 8: A century of bipartisan commemoration: Is Anzac politically inevitable? Frank Bongiorno (Honest History; Australian National University)
Chapter 9: Anzac and Anzackery: Useful future or sentimental dream? David Stephens
Part II: Australian stories and silences
Chapter 10: Fire, droughts and flooding rains: Environmental influences on Australian history: Rebecca Jones (Australian National University)
Chapter 11: From those who’ve come across the seas: Immigration and multiculturalism: Gwenda Tavan (La Trobe University)
Chapter 12: Bust and boom: What economic lessons has Australia learned? Stuart Macintyre (University of Melbourne)
Chapter 13: ‘Fair go’ nation? Egalitarian myth and reality in Australia: Carmen Lawrence (University of Western Australia)
Chapter 14: Australian heroes: Some military mates are more equal than others: Peter Stanley (Honest History, University of New South Wales Canberra)
Chapter 15: Hidden by the myth: Women’s leadership in war and peace: Joy Damousi (University of Melbourne)
Chapter 16: Settlement or invasion? The coloniser’s quandary: Larissa Behrendt (University of Technology, Sydney)
Chapter 17: Our most important war: The legacy of frontier conflict: Paul Daley (author, journalist, Guardian Australia)
Chapter 18: King, queen and country: Will Anzac thwart republicanism? Mark McKenna (University of Sydney)
Chapter 19: Australia’s tug of war: Militarism versus independence: Alison Broinowski
Chapter 20: Conclusion: Alison Broinowski; David Stephens
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