Paul Daley wrote in Guardian Australia on 16 October under the headline 'Australia treats its armed forces veterans with a perversely shabby contempt'. He referred to the Royal Commission on veterans' deaths and suicides (imminent report), Veterans' Health Week (this week) and Remembrance Day (coming up). His key points are summarised below:
'If you are going to define the birth of a nation by imperial adventures abroad then you must honour and respect those who return damaged. Having characterised so much of its history and identity by military adventurism, Australia certainly treats its armed forces veterans with a perversely shabby contempt.'
The Royal Commission report contained a 'litany of egregious abuses of broken veterans pushed to – or beyond – the brink of suicide by a culture that relies on young, intelligent, energetic, committed people but too often shuns them when they become impaired by their service'.
Veterans' Health Week has a welcome acknowledgment of the importance of 'social connectedness' in the lives of veterans and their families, but Defence has a history of marginalising its damaged ex-personnel.
The people - the 'political class' and 'the top brass' - who have let veterans down are big on national commemoration.
'The militarisation of Australian history has deep roots and many anomalies. Not least, the Anzac-birth myth ignores the seminal wars on the Australian frontier between British invaders, settlers, militias and First Nations custodians that killed, by reputable estimate, as many, if not more, Indigenous people than Australians who died in the first world war.'
'Defence – its history and its culture – too often seems to be a world of battlefield heroes and largely forgotten, discharged casualties.'
There were 120 comments on Daley's article, mostly supportive and many referring to family experience.
Picture credit: cover of book published (in London) in 1915. Written by Ernest Charles Buley (1869-1933), former thief (larceny as a public servant at the Mint to finance his gambling) who moved from Melbourne to England and turned to writing war books. 'Hailed as "the first Anzac book", Glorious Deeds was reprinted three times before the end of the year [1915] and issued in an enlarged edition within weeks of the Gallipoli evacuation. The Bulletin praised it as a 'record of a valiant adventure undertaken by a new sort of soldier' (John Lack's ADB entry).
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