This post is part of a series marking Anzac month. For other posts, look under 'News' at the top of our website home page.
David Stephens reviews Federica Caso's Settler Military Politics: Militarisation and the Aesthetics of War Commemoration*
This is an important book but a difficult one, important because it places familiar Australian tropes into a broad frame and shows how deceitful they are as the basis of a modern nation, but difficult because of its plethora of concepts and its dense prose. This review covers the main points of the book.
Introduction: ‘Settler colonial manoeuvres’; Chapter 1: ‘Settler militarisation’
The Introduction summarises the book. Then, in Chapter 1, Caso argues that 'Settler militarisation' involves seeing ‘modern warfare and the military as a means to consolidate the settler state and legitimise settler authority’ (page 26).
The ‘Anzac Legend’ grew from World War I and it ‘grounds Australian national identity in war’. It also, however, ‘conceals the war that made modern Australia’, the Frontier Wars. ‘Without the blood spilled in these wars, there would not be Australia as we know it today … Settler possession is intrinsically linked with Indigenous dispossession (27, 34).’
The Australian War Memorial is the aesthetic expression of Australian settler militarisation. It is ‘an institution of settler colonialism that works through … the power of emotions evoked by visual representations and performances’. It ‘keeps alive the trauma of the First World War as the foundation of the settler nation’ and ‘Australia’s first war, thus effectively glossing over colonial warfare’ (16-18).
Further, the Anzac Legend is not only a myth of origin, but also ‘Australia’s militarist ideology’. As such, it ‘sustains the racist and settler foundations of Australia’ and gives Australians ‘a sense of national identity derived from war and the military, consequently positioning these topics beyond scrutiny and critical investigation’ (55-56).
Chapter 2: ‘The Settler politics of war commemoration’
Caso analyses the ‘commemorative aesthetics’ of the Australian War Memorial and ‘its mission to assist Australians in remembering, interpreting and understanding the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society’ (59). War commemoration expresses ‘the human need to grieve and create meaning out of traumatic and destructive experiences’ (60). This becomes a powerful instrument of nation-building and shapes national identity.
States take over and mould individual war memories, ‘to manage impoverished and traumatised societies and to justify the loss of lives and livelihoods in war for the birth, re-birth or protection of the nation’ (61).The aesthetics of war commemoration indicate the ways people should feel about war, and they give us memorials where commemoration can take place.
Australia’s commemoration aesthetics helped it after the Great War to construct a distinctive Australian nationalist way of commemorating. That ‘nationalism is strictly intertwined with settler colonialism. The development of Australia’s national identity goes hand in hand with the displacement of Indigenous people from their land and forgetting the history that led to it (66).’
Charles Bean crafted ‘a mythological narrative of Australia’s nationalism’, built around an image of Australians as ‘natural soldiers’ (71-72). He ‘advanced the idea that the sacrifice of Australian soldiers in Gallipoli and Europe conferred settlers the right to belong on Indigenous land’ (73).
After discussing the War Art Scheme and the architecture of the Australian War Memorial, Caso turns to the history and atmosphere of Anzac Day. ‘In my experience of the Dawn Service, I found that the religious aesthetics invited feelings of uncritical compassion for the soldier-martyr (90).’
Chapter 2 ends with ‘Militarised compassion and settler nation-building’. Militarised compassion sees the soldier as victim and evokes reverence for the soldier's sacrifice ‘and a desire to repay a debt of honour to the soldier’ (90). It elevates ‘the suffering of soldiers as the foundation of the nation’; this suffering also ‘legitimises their [White] belonging and ownership of the country’ (91).
Military suffering is above other suffering,
most notably the suffering of Indigenous people endured during the Frontier Wars and because of the structures of settler colonialism. It creates a hierarchy of suffering between uniformed subjects – read White soldiers – and the non-uniformed subject – read Aboriginal anti-colonial warriors … [I]t omits and erases colonial warfare as the moment that made modern Australia. (91)
Recent recognition of Indigenous service in uniform has not changed the insistence ‘that only suffering endured in foreign lands and at foreign hands is foundational for the nation’ (92).
Chapter 3: ‘Crafting the Anzac soldier as national hero’
Caso says ‘militarised masculinity’ became a proof of nationhood after the Great War. ‘The Anzac soldier emerged as an ideal symbol of national maturity. He embodied the manly character of the nation, and at the same time his uniform and mission upheld loyalty to the Empire (98).’
The author traces the development of masculinity in the nineteenth century settler Frontier, the emergence of the ‘Digger’ trope, and the apotheosis of the Anzac soldier at the centre of commemoration. There is detailed analysis of war-related art like George Lambert’s The Landing, the World War II and Korea work of Ivor Hele, the movie Gallipoli, and the Afghanistan paintings of Ben Quilty.
The chapter concludes with the incorporation of multiculturalism into the Legend:
Immigrants finding inclusion within the Anzac Legend are afforded a platform for connecting with a nation that historically upheld a White identity, irrespective of their own ethnicity. Their right to belong to the Australian nation is gauged by the degree to which they can identify with the Anzac Legend and connect with Australian military values (126).
Chapter 4: ‘The militarisation of women’
The militarisation of women has been ‘an important part of the Australian settler colonial project’ (127). In the Great War, men were ‘citizen-soldiers’ while women were ‘citizen-mothers’, which was ‘the continuation of the central role that women played in establishing the British White settlement in Australia’ (128). Women ‘took on the civic duty to be citizen-mothers and the responsibility to produce children, reproduce the nation, and support their husbands and sons to step into war’(129).
Caso looks at the growth of women’s unpaid work during the Great War and the expansion of paid work for women, including those in uniform, during the next war. This created opportunities for women and revolutionised Australian femininity. The trend continued until today, but it left ‘colonised racialised [Indigenous] women’ at the bottom of power structures.
The author describes the work of female war artists and how the War Memorial’s attitude to this work reinforced the role of citizen-mother. She discusses the intersection of gender and the aesthetics of war commemoration, the anti-war movement of the 1960s and, finally, the depiction of Indigenous women soldiers, including Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker). In the martial nationalist state, ‘the commemoration of Noonuccal’s military service presents the military as the institution that enabled Indigenous people to achieve civil rights, but discounts the logic of assimilation that enveloped the military service of Indigenous people’ (159).
Chapter 5: ‘Indigenous militarised recognition’
This chapter shows ‘how the settler nation leveraged Indigenous military participation to advance the settler colonial project’ (161). Including First Nations people in the uniformed Australian military
is not a breakthrough in history, but rather the continuation of the settler colonial project through other means… [It is] a form of militarised recognition intended to govern Indigenous identities and steer settler nation-building… [and it] serves to adapt settler colonialism and further settler authority and legitimacy (161).
Caso builds on the work of Canadian First Nations scholar Glen Coulthard to construct a telling critique of Indigenous service in uniform. In Coulthard’s words, this service ‘co-opts Indigenous people into becoming instruments of their own dispossession’.
Caso goes on:
In a nation such as Australia, where military service and its history hold significant reverence, the celebration of Indigenous soldiers and their contributions to national defence serve as a symbol of settler legitimacy. They attest to the incorporation of Indigenous individuals in vital settler institutions and, most notably, their readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice for the defence of the settler state (162).
Through their uniformed service, Indigenous people ‘recognise the state as a legitimate source of authority and governance’ (162). Recognition is based on ‘unequal power relations’, serving to consolidate settler power while showing apparent Indigenous integration into the society and its defence.
The chapter covers Indigenous enlistment in both World Wars, the role of Indigenous women in the Auxiliary Services during World War II, Indigenous service after 1951, when ‘Australia adopted assimilation as its official Indigenous policy, and Indigenous military service became a primary vehicle to promote it’ (170), and changes in the 1970s and after, which saw a more explicit recognition of Indigenous service, expressed partly through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the Australian War Memorial. After 2007, the Department of Defence put more effort into recruitment of First Nations people.
‘The recognition of Indigenous military service is narrated’ says Caso, ‘as a story of reconciliation such that it sustains the narrative that Australia has overcome structural racism, has moved on from colonial history, and has become a postcolonial society’ (180).
Caso looks at the Australian War Memorial’s For Country, For Nation art exhibition (2016, then travelling) as an example of ‘how Indigenous-driven war commemoration endeavours to present a more comprehensive narrative of war in contrast to the selective official nationalist perspective’ (185). For Country, For Nation drew (mostly subtle) connections between First Nations people fighting for Country and serving in the defence forces. ‘This is a form of resistance’, says Caso, ‘against the half-story of settler nationalist commemoration which distinguishes between the modern Indigenous soldier who fought for the settler state and the traditional Indigenous warrior who fought against the birth of the modern settler state’ (185).
Caso then considers the Anzac Day Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commemoration Service and the March for the Frontier Wars, both of which she attended in 2017. They were modest events, in the proximity of the Australian War Memorial and tolerated, up to a point, by the Memorial and the police. Caso’s summary of the March could apply to both events (and, indeed, to For Country, For Nation): ‘they [the Marchers] have ingeniously woven colonial warfare into Anzac Day through a subtle form of camouflage’ (192).
Conclusion: ‘Settler military politics’
‘Colonial warfare’, Caso reiterates, ‘is the unsung pillar of modern Australia, covered by the veneer of modern warfare. Without the blood spilled in colonial conflict, there would be no modern Australia (199).’
It was the Great War – a bloody conflict fought overseas for causes dimly understood in Australia – rather than colonial conflict, that burrowed into the national psyche.
The war was remarkable for Australians because, although they were imperial soldiers, they fought as nationals for the first time. Consequently, it was portrayed as the birth of modern Australia, an idea that persists to this day. The First World War held significance not solely in reinforcing a national identity, but also in addressing the colonial legacy. In essence, it was positioned as a deliberate deviation from the colonial history. The bookmarking of the First World War as the birth of the nation elevated the White nation and the deeds of White men. (200)
In 2023, Australia missed a chance to change direction, but perhaps the door is ajar:
The Uluru Statement demands acknowledgement of the colonial history of violence and its legacy, and to some degree, settler institutions and society have accepted the Indigenous counter-memory of war. This gets Australia one step closer to truth and acknowledgement of the brutal colonial history and the ongoing violence of the settler state. (203-04)
Finally
The book’s bibliography is extensive, with lots of academic journal articles, but rather dated in its Australian sources and lacking some obvious entries (no Peter FitzSimons or Ross McMullin, thin on Peter Stanley and Bruce Scates). It ignores ten years of the Honest History website (motto: Australia is more than Anzac – and always has been), including articles in 2017 by Emily Gallagher (originally in Inside Story) and the present author on For Country, For Nation, which reach similar conclusions to Caso’s.
The emphasis in the bibliography indicates the wide gulf between academic studies and evidence-based advocacy in this field. While that gulf remains, the bearers of that flawed settler-military covenant will have an easy run through the middle, shrouded in the Anzac cloak. They shouldn’t.
There is much more in Caso’s book than this review has covered. The book is an important analysis of Australian settler militarism, though too much of it is summarising of sources, rather than application of concepts to Australian evidence.
To ensure the book’s wide readership outside the academy, it needs a revised edition, pruning the otiose prose and surplus theoretical explication, and marketed vigorously to show Australians how settler militarism has stunted our growth as a modern nation. Over to you, NewSouth or Text.
*Dr David Stephens is editor of the Honest History and Defending Country websites and a member of the Defending Country Memorial Project Inc. Many years ago he did a Political Science PhD at ANU, applying theories of decision-making to the history of the Australian Labor Party 1955-72.
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