The next Anzac century

Albany dawn service 2010

WITH Anzac Day entrenched as the authentic national day and the centenary of the Gallipoli landing looming on April 25, 2015, just four years away, the meaning and commemoration of Anzac will assume a new saliency.

How Australia honours the centenary will test its maturity, especially since Gallipoli, the nation's sacred site, is located in Turkey, far distant from Australia and beyond its sovereignty.

The certainty is that demanding decisions will be required from the Australian, New Zealand and Turkish governments because with tens of thousands hoping to attend in 2015 not everybody can be accommodated.

The centenary will mark the next stage in the astonishing revival of Anzac Day over the past generation. It has been an unpredicted phenomenon of Australian cultural life. The great chronicler of Anzac memorials, historian Ken Inglis, admits his own surprise. In his luminous 1998 book Sacred Places, Inglis said: "By 1960 or so, like almost everybody else who thought about the matter, I thought that the ceremonies of Anzac would wither away and its monuments become even more archaic."

At the precise time it was expected to slumber, the Anzac story underwent a muscular resurgence. The lesson within this paradox is Anzac's recuperative power. As Australia became less British, more multicultural, less militaristic, more open to feminine influence, the Anzac ethos gained new tractions. How could this happen? What does it portend for the 2015 centenary?

Anzac was transformed from a symbol of political division in the Vietnam War-dominated 1960s into a cultural phenomenon that by the 90s became a focus for unity. Author Les Carlyon offered the insight in 2001 that Gallipoli was no longer linked to the causes of the Great War. In a new century "it stands alone", at a distance from early 20th-century ideology. That put a clearer spotlight on the sacrifice and courage of the men and, crucially, invested Gallipoli with a more inclusive ethos.

The post-1960s reinterpretations of Anzac were pivotal, with Bill Gammage drawing on diaries to produce The Broken Years (1974), Peter Weir and David Williamson producing the film Gallipoli (1981) and Patsy Adam-Smith writing the book Anzacs (1978). Their focus was the quality of the ordinary man. In that sense they still operated within the originating tradition of C.E.W. Bean, official war historian and moving force behind the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The re-energising of Anzac has become the central organising principle of Australia's past and how the nation interprets its future. It is fair to see the struggle over Anzac's memory as the triumph of the people over the intellectual class.

Historian Manning Clark, in the 1981 fifth volume of his History of Australia, cursed Anzac with damning irony. For Clark, Anzac constituted the loss of the more noble, finer Australia that might have been. "Australia's day of glory had made her a prisoner of her past," Clark lamented in the book's final paragraph. While the stories of heroism would be recounted for generations, the deeper lesson was that the ideals of Australia "had been cast to the winds".

This has long been the refrain of pacifists, socialists and feminists.

For Clark, Anzac had cast a pessimistic shadow across Australia's path. Ironically, he penned these words on the cusp of its revival. That revival has been driven by a combination of elements -- a more mature Australian nationalism, family ties to the Anzac experience and a de-politicisation of the legend that invests it with a unifying power.

In the 1990s Inglis tested the theory of Anzac as a civil religion and found it met the criteria: "We still see a landscape occupied by monuments which are fairly well cherished, which make solemn collective statements about war, death and nationality and at which people -- lately more and more people -- choose to gather on at least one day of the year for the conduct of activities properly called religious." The texts were a synthesis of Christian tradition and secular religion: "Their name liveth forever. Lest we forget. We will remember them."

The symbolic point of Anzac's revival came in 1993 when the remains of an unknown AIF Digger, fallen on the Somme at Villers-Bretonneux, whose name was listed on a local war memorial somewhere across the land, was repatriated to the heart of the Australian War Memorial with an iconic speech delivered by Paul Keating, written by Don Watson. Soil from Pozieres was dropped into the tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier and a sprig of wattle was placed on the coffin.

Taking the NSW south coast town of Thirroul as a measure, Inglis recorded the dawn service crowd was 90 people in 1993, 130 in 1994, 200 in 1995. In Canberra the dawn service at the War Memorial had grown from about 2000 in 1977 to 6000 in 1989, whereupon it was moved the next year to the grassy esplanade where numbers in the 1990s were judged at more than 10,000. By contrast, numbers for May Day and St Patrick's Day had fallen away.

At Anzac Day the Melbourne Cricket Ground becomes an open-air shrine where 90,000 people stand for Last Post in a ceremony that fuses military commemoration on a stage owned by sporting gladiators. Indeed, only the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras seems to match the Anzac resurgence and there is little doubt which has more endurance.

However, despite the revival Anzac still represents an uneasy marriage between popular sentiment, returned service organisations and official patronage from the Prime Minister down.

Three weeks ago the Gillard government received a report commissioned by Kevin Rudd in April last year to identify the scale, scope and shape of a centenary commemoration. That six-person panel, including Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser, recommended an over-arching "century of service" theme. Its proposals involved restoration and refurbishment of local war memorials and honour rolls, a mobile exhibition based on World War I memorabilia, a new Canberra-based university centre for the study of peace, conflict and war and a restaging of the first convey departure from Albany in Western Australia and establishment of an Anzac Interpretative Centre at Albany. The 2014-18 centenary will encompass all wars and conflicts in which Australians have been involved.

The report is prudent but disappointing. It reflects an Anzac story that now carries too many expectations and is weighed down trying to satisfy everybody from traditionalists to the peace movement.

The most conspicuous problem concerns the April 2015 centenary at Gallipoli where agreement will be needed with Turkey to manage what is likely to become the largest peacetime gathering of Australians outside of Australia.

The report leaves this negotiation to the relevant governments. It warns the number of Australians who want to attend is likely to exceed capacity. No access agreement has been finalised between Australia, New Zealand and Turkey. This needs to be resolved quickly. The reality, however, is that Australians will vote with their feet and hearts.

During the 1914-18 centenary they will seek to visit Gallipoli and Western Front battlefields in numbers greater than at any time since these battles occurred. Turkey, as host nation, has fears about numbers, control and security. There has even been talk of "ticketed" entry at Gallipoli. Responding to these issues must become an Australian government diplomatic and administrative priority.

The report's emphasis on local events and memorials is entirely sound. So is the Albany re-enactment that would be televised nationwide. Veterans Affairs Minister Warren Snowdon welcomes the report as the basis for the program. But Coalition shadow minister Michael Ronaldson rightly focuses on the absence of any budget for the commemoration.

The idea of putting the Anzac brand on a new centre, based at the Australian National University, to study peace and conflict is fraught with danger. Its main focus is to study "the nature of social conflicts", causes of violence and definitions of peace.

This reeks of political tokenism reflected in the report's view that the centenary "recognise war as a vehicle for peace". The operation of the highly ideological Sydney University Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies comes to mind. Anything remotely similar carrying the Anzac name would be a travesty. The public will be hostile to any notion Labor's enduring legacy from the Anzac centenary is a peace centre that champions views historically alienated from the Anzac story.

This recommendation should sound an alarm. The centre's mission should be rewritten before consideration as a viable centenary project. If Labor wants to save money, here is the place to start.

The truth is that priorities for war commemoration funding are badly out of kilter. This became apparent a fortnight ago when official war historian David Horner criticised government policy on war histories and its refusal to provide funds. That's right, government doesn't fund the official war history as such.

Horner's comments were made on April 11 when Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd launched his Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations (Volume II). Horner as official historian was able to scrape together a $5 million budget for the multi-volume project with the Defence Department and Australian War Memorial providing support.

"The Australian government has never directly allocated funds to the project," Horner said of the current histories. "Yet successive governments have been willing to devote many millions of dollars to memorials around the world and to fund veterans' pilgrimages."

Interviewed by The Australian last week, Horner said: "We focus on Gallipoli but recent events in Australia's military history are being completely overlooked. When I was appointed in 2004 the operations in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq were excluded.

"Yet East Timor in 1999 was our biggest peace-keeping operation and the people who served there deserve to have their story told. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was controversial and it is important than an impartial historian be permitted to go through the cabinet records and make judgments about the government's decision.

"The public has a right to know. After all, the people through their governments have sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and there needs to be an accountability.

"Charles Bean's first volume appeared in 1921, some three years after the First World War. Frankly, the people of Australia have no idea of what our forces have done in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have been out of Iraq for a couple of years now and we need to write an official history of what we did there."

The centenary report talks repeatedly about the need for education. Yet education must confront the essence of the Anzac story. Nations do not attend war in a fit of absence of mind. The Anzac centenary cannot and should not be free of dispute. It should not become an exercise in mindless commemoration devoid of intellectual and historical focus.

It needs to confront why Australians responded to the Great War in such numbers, why Gallipoli became such a defining moment and how it reveals the nation's character.

In their attack on Anzac Day in a 2010 book, historians Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake allege the militarisation of Australian history with the Anzac legend as chief exhibit. They dispute Australia's spirit was formed in a war that became the main source of brutalisation of the 20th century.

They see the Diggers at Gallipoli as white supremacists with no special claims on mateship or courage. Above all, they say the war narrative diminishes Australia's achievements in social justice, the living wage, sexual and racial equality. Such conflicts over Anzac's meaning cannot be suppressed. Indeed, they should be welcomed with the knowledge the Anzac ethos will emerge stronger.

Australia lost 7594 war dead in the Gallipoli campaign and a total of 58,961 in the Great War of 1914-18. The scale of the Australian effort is staggering and nearly a century later almost defies comprehension. War memorials appeared in every town and city. Last Post would echo down the century. Anzac's meaning is national yet personal.

The essence of Gallipoli for historian Bean lay in the commitment of each man to one another as fellow Australians. He asserted the force that drove the troops was their idea of Australian manhood.

The real power of Anzac lies in its authenticity and this authenticity is the insuperable barrier for its opponents. While Federation in 1901 was an immense political achievement that brought to life a new nation, the quality of Australia's nationalism was untested and its character was stained by a convict heritage.

The Great War was a contest of nationalistic spirit. That was the world of 1915 whether you approve or disapprove. The troops, as their diaries show, knew their landing at Gallipoli was the great test for Australia, just 14 years old.

That knowledge was disguised in Australian bravado described on the eve by then Colonel John Monash: "It is astonishing how light-hearted everybody is, whistling, singing and cracking jokes." But Monash anticipated "great events that will stir the whole world".

World War I was the most immense sacrifice Australians have ever made. No wonder they refused to forget or became dedicated to the fallen. The point is that Australia, of convict origins and patronised by Britain, proved itself to the world and to itself.

There could be no civil religion or sacred sites in the achievement of Federation on January 1, 1901, nor in the arrival of the First Fleet on January 26, 1788, the symbolic event that sustains Australia Day. These were foundational events but they were not holy.

As Inglis said, the first settlers were no chosen people except in the sardonic jest that they were chosen by the best judges in England. By contrast, on the first Anzac anniversary a crowd of 100,000 gathered in Sydney's Domain and in London 2000 Anzac troops marched from the Strand to Westminster Abbey. From the start came recognition something special had happened at Gallipoli.

This renewed conviction now pervades Australia's political life. Each prime minister seeks to find a new or old purpose in Anzac. It has become a requirement of the office as well as a task they relish.

Indeed, a turning point in Anzac's revival was the the 75th anniversary of the landing in April 1990 when prime minister Hawke together with opposition leader John Hewson and a delegation of ageing veterans flew to Turkey to honour the occasion. Ever since, the pilgrimage to Gallipoli has become a ritual driven by young backpackers.

At the dawn service that day Hawke, in words penned by Graham Freudenberg, said of the original Anzacs: "Because these hills rang with their voices and ran with their blood, this place Gallipoli is, in one sense, a part of Australia."

Part of Australia, but of Turkey's sovereignty. So the nation's true sacred site, paradoxically, is located far from Australia's shores. It testifies to Australia's remarkable engagement with the world.

Later that morning at Lone Pine where 2000 Australians died in three days of intense struggle with seven Victoria Crosses awarded, Hawke drew upon Bean, to say the soldiers had a job to do and each determined not to give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness.

Three years later when Keating honoured the Unknown Soldier, he called the war "a mad, brutal awful struggle" but ventured that this soldier probably signed up for no other reason "than that he believed it was his duty -- the duty he owned to his country and his king".

For Keating, the soldier did not die in vain. On the contrary, he, like others, proved that nobility and courage lay with ordinary people.

Keating said the soldier's life and death verified the democratic tradition, love of country, personal bravery and sacrifice of ordinary people who, in fact, had shown they were not ordinary.

A decade later Howard visited Gallipoli on the 90th anniversary, deeply aware that both his father and his grandfather were Great War veterans. Howard embraced Gallipoli with a populism beyond any previous Liberal PM. In his Gallipoli speech Howard said that 60,000 Australians who left for the Great War never came home. Their legacy, he had no doubt, was a lasting sense of national identity.

For Howard, this was the story of his own family, the story of his own life. He knew its truth with the certainty of knowing his own family. Hawke, Keating and Howard, despite their many differences, left a contemporary elevation of the Anzac ethos on which the centenary will build.

It needs to be a muscular event, strong enough to tolerate different views, on guard against too much emotionalism and intellectually honest about the history. World War I engaged Australia's direct national interests. It was not somebody else's war. On the contrary, it was our war because victory or defeat would profoundly affect Australia's future.