This post is part of a series marking Anzac month. For other posts, look under 'News' at the top of our website home page.
Douglas Newton* reviews Nation, Memory, Myth: Gallipoli and the Australian Imaginary, by Steve Vizard, Melbourne University Press, 2024
This is a superb, original, and provocative study. It explores the invention, persistence, promotion and purposes served by ‘Mythic Gallipoli’. In Vizard’s own words, the book makes the case that ‘nations, national identity and those who forge them are often driven ... by powerful, subjective, often irrational, desires, feelings, and emotions’. In this sense, the book sounds a warning.
The book rests on solid theoretical foundations. Vizard has taken inspiration from a range of anthropologists, mythologists, ethnographers, cultural theorists and sociologists, most prominently Victor Turner and Joseph Campbell. Applying many of their general insights, and adding his own penetrating analysis, Vizard seeks to explain the creation and the role of our own Gallipoli mythology, from 1915 to the present. The result is a fascinating blend of theory, history, sociology and politics.
From the opening pages, the sparkle of Vizard’s prose is a special feature. He captures our attention, entertains, informs, and tugs at our hearts. His prose is intelligent, readable, and memorably aphoristic – although some unusual words will have readers diving for their dictionaries.
From the outset, it is clear that Vizard is not examining Gallipoli in isolation. He begins by introducing the general concept of a ‘foundation myth’ commonly encountered in nation-making across the globe. He argues for the ‘unique social power of foundation myths’. He peppers the reader with questions. ‘Why is a myth of nation sacralised and venerated?’ ‘How does a myth of nation so forcefully bind strangers who will never know each other?’ ‘What is this national myth?’ His own position is clear: ‘It is this book’s central claim that national myths play a fundamental, potent but little understood role in the symbolic and cultural functioning of the modern nation’.
The first chapter, ‘Australia and mythic Gallipoli’, surveys the Australian element – the essential historic context, from Federation to Gallipoli. But Vizard is careful to explain that the book ‘is not a historiographical inquiry’ into the Gallipoli campaign or the First World War. Rather, it explores Gallipoli ‘as a story’. Gallipoli is after all ‘just one foundation myth: Australia’s myth of Gallipoli’ – commemorated, contested, and enduring.
Vizard next places our ‘foundation myth’ in the broadest historical context, ‘The Age of Nations’. He outlines the emergence of nationalism, through the impact of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions in Europe. These disruptions inspired a longing for ‘national identity’, ‘national continuity’, and ‘national solidarity’. It is ‘the imaginary of nation’ that has always been offered to those engaged in ‘the ceaseless searching for emotional belonging and sacred meaning’.
The book then narrows its focus upon ‘Gallipoli as myth’. We are not so special, Vizard explains. For us, as for others, ‘the foundation myth of a nation is solemnized as a binding repository of sacred cultural memory affirming the unique origin, place, purpose and meaning of the nation’. Importantly, he argues, the function of the myth eclipses the need for ‘factual truths, rational explanation, or an accurate historical, chronological record’. Rather, the purpose is to create ‘a compelling sacred and emotional touchstone of beginning, continuity, and belonging to inspire and bind the community’. This chapter documents how Australian opinion-makers across the decades – from newspaper features to films and TV series – have promoted our myth according to a predictable scheme: as ‘an anchor event’, showing ‘the imprint of trauma’; as ‘a carrier of the national ethos’; and ‘a heroic narrative’, one that sacralises the nation and its ethos. ‘Performative’ rituals then boost these ideas. These escape any expectation of being ‘truth-dependent’. ‘Myths naturalise beliefs as truths.’ The foundation myth itself is long-lived because it is ‘mutable’ and ‘assuaging’. ‘The past is the best place to search for origins’, Vizard writes, ‘and the best place to hide the past’. In a nutshell, the facts begin to matter less and less.
In ‘Gallipoli as narrative’, Vizard then explores ‘the universal pattern common to all Hero myths’. The double lens he uses to examine the Gallipoli Hero is that provided by Victor Turner’s concept of ‘social drama’ and Joseph Campbell’s ‘monomyth’. Vizard shows how the pattern of the journey is adopted in the mythic hero’s story: from separation, to initiation, and then return. He explains the constant classical allusions behind so many of the clichéd Anzac narratives. He lays bare the strange schizoid reality: that the Anzac Hero can be simultaneously ‘both the servant and subverter of Empire’, somehow reconciling ‘the old order of subservience to Empire and the new freedom of the individual nation’.
In a most perceptive chapter, Vizard shows the long-running effort to claim ‘the foundation myth of Gallipoli’ as ‘an expression of Australia’s ethos’ – ‘the idealised epitome of Australian virtue’. The ‘Anzac Spirit’ and ‘Anzac values’ have been constantly asserted. But Vizard concedes that there is a ‘deep recurring tension’ between the Anzac Hero as emblematic of British ‘Imperial kinship’ on the one hand, and the assertion of ‘Australian superiority’ and ‘privileged exceptionalism’ on the other.
The role of religion in promoting the ‘Gallipoli myth’ is exposed in an especially valuable chapter entitled, ‘Sacralising Gallipoli’. Anzac rituals call upon the believers to acknowledge ‘sacred sacrifice, on sacred soil by sacred martyrs’. The myth seeks to place Gallipoli ‘beyond rational questioning’. ‘As with all founding myths of nation’, Vizard explains, it is 'Gallipoli’s sacredness that, in great part, confers authority, longevity, robustness and power’. Gripped by the power of the myth, for Australians ‘the myth becomes true history because it is sacred history’.
Vizard is alive to the dark side of all this – its power to exclude. ‘The sacred knowledge of the Australian nation becomes a further signifier of belonging, and of the collective nation’s boundaries. The sacred is a marker between inside and out, between those who share in the transcendent, epiphanous knowledge and those who do not.’ And he sees the danger. Unquestioning love of the nation ‘can be channelled into non-rational, often irrational commitment to sacrifice for the nation; or transformed into antipathy, even hatred of those outside the group’.
Vizard concludes with a speculative chapter, ‘Reimagining Gallipoli’. Historical revisionism will have little impact, he predicts, because ‘myths and history are fundamentally different’. It is wrong to suggest, he argues, ‘that because a myth does not depend on truth, it cannot offer truth’. Critics who see the Gallipoli myth as excluding women and Australia’s First Nations are absolutely right. But critics underestimate the ‘mutability, plasticity or hybridity’ of the myth. Each new generation, it seems, ‘finds the will to reinterpret it’. In the long run, the myth may fail ‘either because it transforms too readily or not enough’. It can scarcely shrug off its ‘imperial genesis’. But those who ‘seek meaning in the past’ will not rely on the facts. ‘History is bound to the past. Myths of nations draw on the past but are never bound to it.’
Disturbingly, Vizard provides an epilogue, offering a glimpse into the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial, and we stand beside the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. ‘The grave breathes and the myth sings with the prospect of another battle ...’ It is a warning, surely.
Some readers will ruminate: Gallipoli as a foundation myth has scarcely persisted spontaneously. Questions leap to mind. Why and how was new life breathed into it? Whose interests were served by the billion dollars spent over recent years to boost it? Why the expense of the nationwide ‘Centenary of Anzac’ exhibitions of 2014-18, the building of the Sir John Monash Centre in northern France, and the current monumental expansion of the Australian War Memorial? If foundation myths arise from the great heart of a people, what expensive boosting ours has apparently required.
*Douglas Newton is the author of Private Ryan and the Lost Peace: a Defiant Soldier and the Struggle against the Great War (2021), The Darkest Days: the Truth Behind Britain's Rush to War 1914 (2014), Hell-Bent: Australia's Leap into the Great War (2014), other books (more details on all of these) and a chapter 'Other people's war; the Great War in a World Context' in The Honest History Book (2017).
