Patrick Carlyon: Why those who challenge Anzac Day can get nicked

Anzac Day has never been about chest beating and triumphalism. It remains a thank you to all Australians who have served and it cannot be dismissed.

Australia is a nation of hand-wringers.

We are compelled to question who we are.

And we are ordered to ponder who we once were, as if finding the answer will poison the nationalistic sprouts that left-leaning thinkers liken to weeds of racism and white supremacy.

Australia Day is the easy target, a punching bag for colonial settlement and Aboriginal dispossession.

It’s kind of predictable that Anzac Day is also being derided as unfashionable.

In recent years, it has been dismissed as a “celebration”, which might surprise the thousands who turn up in the inky light before dawn, shivering and whispering, to acknowledge those Australians lost in service.

A Flinders University academic, Romain Fathi, has fired the bullets this year. Anzac Day should be more inclusive, he says. Anzac Day must be reinvented to retain its relevance.

Fathi is more measured than some academics. He makes some fair points about diminishing turnouts and commemoration fatigue. There should be scope, as he suggests, for greater emphasis on overlooked aspects of Australians at war.

But he also submits to the claim that Anzac Day is overrun by militaristic overlays.

It is derided as a “touchstone in the culture wars”, as if commemorations of family loss can be neatly reduced to political emblems.

It’s kind of predictable that Anzac Day is being derided as unfashionable.. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

The question of the supposed appropriateness of Anzac Day is a path of sanctimony cleared by commentators on matters as diverse as nation-building and horseracing.

If any official occasion does not include all, offend no one, and satisfy the conflicting political barrows of the time, it must be something to be suspicious of, if not ashamed.

The smug assumption goes that if the masses bow to something, reflexively, they have been manipulated by political agendas. That popular monuments, in short, are built to be pissed on.

Under the prescribed battlelines, for example, it is untenable to both celebrate Australia Day yet also recognise the dreadful treatment of Indigenous people after 1788.

Australians nod to Anzac Day on the whole.

For most of us, who have not been to war, its poignancy lies in the imagining.

It’s a thank-you to those Australian men and women who have trusted their lives to the person standing alongside them.

An Anzac service links Gallipoli to Afghanistan, casting the harrowing whole in quirks of mateship and humour. More importantly, Anzac Day services bind those who have served, so that they can share what the rest of us cannot understand.

Anzac Day has never been about chest beating and triumphalism. This is its abiding strength. The date itself marks a botched landing and assault. It signifies adversity, not victory.

The first Anzacs may have been mythologised as tanned warriors who served as exemplars of national character. But the tales of those men, as recorded in their diaries and letters, express humanity and horrors that still resonate today.

Australians nod to Anzac Day on the whole. Picture: AAP

Anzac Day has swelled and dimmed over the past century. In the 1920s and 30s, it was about broken men and broken families.

Anti-war sentiment dimmed the occasion through the 70s and 80s. Prime Minister Bob Hawke reignited the memory in 1990, when he went to the dawn service at Gallipoli, setting off genealogical pursuits of an uncle or grandfather who died far away, or who came home and never talked about it.

Prime Minister John Howard, whose father served on the Western Front, embraced the day, incurring the wrath of knockers who questioned the symbolism of “our most sacred day” as a nationalistic church.

When Scott Morrison applies this same rhetoric, it prompts suggestions of campaigns in jingoism.

The 2015 centenary of Gallipoli was a natural crescendo of interest. So intense was the build-up that the bubble of interest seemed to pop before the April 25 date.

Yes, that Anzac Day, like all, was bogged by winding speeches from politicians. Their words tended to distract from the natural desire to stare at the shoreline or gaze at the flame. Politicians, it should be noted, also give winding speeches about reconciliation and our colonial beginnings.

The Andrews government’s inertia towards this year’s commemorations, in COVID conditions, has contrasted with its tacit approval for more fashionable causes, such as gatherings for Black Lives Matter and so-called Invasion Day. Anzac Day seemed too hard, for a time, what with limits and restrictions.

Yet politicians and governments, along with academics, should be mindful when they tell us what we ought to think.

That’s the virtue of a free-speaking land. When a precious few Australians challenge what we hold dear, the rest of us can tell them to get nicked.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist