Pillars of nationhood steeped in the Anzac legend

Anzac Day is one of the supreme achievements of modern Australia. The original event in all its glory and terror rightly remains the centre of our attention: the heroism of the Anzac soldiers, the scale of the casualties in the Gallipoli campaign — 27,000 Australians killed and wounded — the role of the journalists, the galvanising effect on society, the heroism of the nurses and much, much more.

Australia’s sacrifice in World War 1 was disproportionate. We lost as many men killed, in absolute numbers, as the vastly bigger US. Other nations have encompassed greater military disasters, losing more soldiers, and more civilians. The war didn’t take place on our shores. Our own land didn’t run with blood, it ran instead with sorrow.

But still Gallipoli is unique in our history. The nearest thing I’ve seen to the way Anzac Day holds the Australian imagination is the Civil War in the US. Even that is not on the national scale of our involvement with Anzac Day.

This is the greatest, single popular achievement of our culture. It cannot be attributed to official patronage. At the height of the anti-soldier feeling at the end of our combat commitment in Vietnam in 1971, folk singer Eric Bogle produced his ironic lamentation, And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda. In the song’s view all the sacrifice was worthless, and the young people ask: “What are they marching for?”

It was common then to predict the decline of Anzac Day. Instead, it has grown and grown. Anzac Day is the biggest, most important, uniquely Australian cultural creation. I am not one to diminish religion. But if Australia has a national religion, it is reverence for our soldiers in wars past, and commemoration of Anzac Day. If there is a single sacred site created in Australia since European settlement, it is the National War Memorial, the only thing about Canberra that has entered the nation’s heart.

Anzac Day is not a consequence of official encouragement. Our governments are notoriously incapable of making anything popular. Some government promotions that succeed for a while fade away. The Coral Sea battle commemorations — from a World War 11 encounter that helped save Australia — are less prominent than they were when I was a teenager.

Australia Day, the Queens Birthday, Labour Day: these and many other days enjoy differing but substantial official encouragement. Not one is remotely as important to Australians as Anzac Day.

No one battle is more deserving of commemoration than another. Australian forces did more militarily significant things than Gallipoli and had more success in other theatres. Certainly other battles contributed more directly to the physical security of our continent.

All that is beside the point. Gallipoli deserves commemoration in its own right, but it also stands as the representative for all our battles, and all the selfless sacrifice of our nation. The drama and the poetry of Gallipoli, notwithstanding its terror, indeed because of its terror, moves us and has captured our national imagination.

But you could not design a day less likely to win appeal in modern Australia. We fought a long way from our own land. We were involved in a poorly planned and led military endeavour designed by the British, with little initial strategic input from us. We lost. The whole business unequivocally honours soldiers when the modern zeitgesit holds the profession of arms in the deepest suspicion.

John Howard sometimes argues that it is the Celtic strain in Australian identity that gives us our scepticism. The triumph of Anzac Day embodies magnificent scepticism, indeed downright repudiation, of the modern zeitgesit at most points.

As a high school student I was enthralled by the formal study we made of the causes of World War 11. I looked forward to studying the conflict itself and was disappointed and shocked to find that, even then, the school syllabus looked down on the study of any military history as such. It wanted to focus on sociological and political trends, not on the movement of armies and navies and the rest.

At the time I thought this a great weakness of the education system. But this formal disdain of military history, I now see, was a prerequisite for the splendid love Australians have for their military history. It is untainted by the classroom.

It is a genuinely popular movement of self-education by the Australian nation which has demanded books, and articles and movies and miniseries and documentaries without number about the Anzacs, and about our military history more generally.

No book publisher, no television station, not even our film makers, craving as they do the purest zeitgeist approval through culture committee grants, can ignore Anzac Day and the broader Australian love of military history.

Anzac Day continues to give our nation a multitude of benefits. Here are four.

It helps maintain the honour of the profession of arms. With the exception of the US, and to a much lesser extent Britain and France, Western nations are losing the will and capability to undertake armed conflict if necessary.

Australia’s security situation is in the long term more uncertain than that of most western nations. Anzac Day helps us honour soldiers past and present, and to keep alive the national appreciation which is necessary to sustain capable armed forces.

Second, Anzac Day helps Australians in the fundamental goal of all decent people, the search for meaning. The decline of religious observance has left many lives without an ethical centre, or at least confused about ethical purpose.

The story of the Anzacs, which is based above all on the willingness of young men and women to live and die for something beyond themselves, is an inspiration which transcends religious affiliation.

Three, the Anzac celebration of mateship is the celebration of social solidarity. All nations need this and must find it in their own legends.

And finally, Anzac Day gives us an inheritance that all Australians can participate in. Nothing is more foolish than to ask: what relevance does Anzac Day have to Asian immigrants, or Muslim Australians, or any Australians of non-Anglo-Celtic descent.

Australia, like America, is a new world nation, where the gene pool of your ancestors means nothing. All Americans are inspired by the ethical example of Abraham Lincoln.

The same is true for Australians and Anzac Day.

For all this and much more, we should give thanks.

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