SUSAN CARLAND: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this series
may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons.
[Music]
BRUCE SCATES: This episode, ‘The Anzac Legend’, is part of the series that examines the concept of nation.
It begins in Sydney, takes you across to the garden city
of Adelaide and concludes in the nation’s War Memorial in Canberra.
We’ll interrogate the enduring attraction of Anzac,
its impact on the Australian character and identity;
and we’ll examine a forgotten war still at the very heart of our history.
SUSAN CARLAND: This is the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, Sydney. It’s a monument built to the
Australian losses of the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Many Australians would tell
you that this event signified the birth of the nation, and yet many historians
would tell you that, that’s an astonishing claim.
BRUCE SCATES: Now, technically our country
becomes a nation in 1901. That’s when the Commonwealth of Australia is born,
that’s when six separate colonies become one nation.
But of course we remain a dominion of Great Britain, so when we go
to war in 1914 we do so as loyal Britons.
BRUCE SCATES: Some would argue that far from
Australia coming of age in the Great War, it destroyed many of the things that made
us so distinctive as a nation. The massive cost of sending an army overseas
stifled a program of progressive legislation – education, pensions, the right
to vote and earn a decent wage – advanced experimental legislation that had made
us a social laboratory for the world.
In the Great War Australians lost that youthful idealism.
And far from the Great War uniting a nation, it tore us apart.
In 1916 and again in 1917 Australians fought over
fiercely contested conscription referenda. Australia during World War One
was a bitterly divided society at war with the world and at war with itself.
SUSAN CARLAND: So, why do Australians persist in seeing Anzac Day as the birth of the nation,
and what does the word Anzac actually mean?
BRUCE SCATES: Well it’s an acronym,
it’s telegraphic shorthand for the Australian New Zealand Army Corps.
That’s the first trans-Tasman fighting force to leave the shores of Australia and New Zealand.
And the Anzacs’ first battle was fought at a place we now call Anzac Cove;
it’s on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey and that battle was fought on the 25th of April 1915.
BRUCE SCATES: Really it was less a battle than a bloodbath. The Ottoman Empire
was an ally of Germany and landing at the Dardanelles, the Anzacs
faced stubborn Turkish resistance. Australian and New Zealand troops
advanced no further than a narrow beachhead. They dug in and they died.
Over eight months of the Gallipoli campaign, thousands of young men were
killed on the Peninsula and that, that was a crippling blow to families and
communities across Australasia.
BRUCE SCATES: And you can visualise something of that terrible loss
here in the heart of this great memorial. Each of those stars represents
a man or a woman who went to war; thousands never came home again.
Australia and New Zealand would lose more men in that war per head of
population than any other Allied nation. That was a crippling loss to so many
communities, and arguably with those men died something else.
With them died an unquestioning faith in ‘Empire’.
SUSAN CARLAND: And yet significantly, Anzac has come
to be viewed not as defeat but as victory, as a triumph of character over adversity.
The Anzacs held on despite everything being stacked against them.
SUSAN CARLAND: And if we failed at Gallipoli,
that failure wasn't seen as any fault of our own.
Nationhood is always defined through opposition. and at Gallipoli we’ve come to think of
ourselves as the victims of British interests and British incompetence.
What most people forget is that more British troops would die on Gallipoli than Australians,
and it was an Allied campaign and Australia and New Zealand were only one part of it.
BRUCE SCATES: Anzac’s a contested memory then,
it means different things to different people. But few would deny that the Great War
changed how Australians saw themselves. We had fought in imperial wars before.
Colonial contingents rallied around the Empire in the relief of Khartoum and the
Boer War in South Africa. But at Gallipoli men fought not as Victorians
or New South Welshman but as Australians. And at Anzac, and other theatres of the Great War,
Dominion troops came to contrast themselves with those of the so-called Mother Country.
Australian soldiers, many volunteers from the bush,
were said to be taller and stronger than conscripts from the slums of Manchester or London.
A class-bound society, Britain created soldiers trained to obey.
Australian soldiers, many claimed, were resourceful, confident, fiercely independent
in their outlook and really quite attractive to the ladies.
Cartoons of the day celebrate the ‘Digger’s’ larrikin flair; this was the legendary bushman in uniform.
SUSAN CARLAND: Many of those ideas actually run counter to the evidence.
Most of the Australian Imperial Force had been raised in cities and towns; many in fact
had been born in Britain. But Australia’s foundation myth, like the foundation myths
of other nations, owed more to mythology than it did to history.
And Gallipoli itself seemed to set the stage for a legend. The country around Anzac is rugged,
impenetrable, rather like much of the Australian bush and very, very different
to the flat killing fields of Flanders or the Somme.
It's also a landscape that stirred powerful emotions. Not far from where the Anzacs landed on
the Dardanelles, Hector fought the great battles of Troy.
The Great War was one of the most industrialised wars of modern times –
and yet it was read through the potent prism of this classical imagery.
BRUCE SCATES: All things considered then, it’s probably not surprising that Anzac, and the Great War
in its entirety, is seen by many as the birth of the nation.
And the 25th of April, the day of the Gallipoli landing, more of a national day than the 26th of January.
That last problematic date marked the sad beginnings of a convict colony
here in Sydney. Anzac, on the other hand, represented the day Australia
stepped onto the world stage, escaping what many called ‘the convict stain’
of its colonial past, enduring, surely, a baptism of fire.
SUSAN CARLAND: Anzac might seem like a myth that privileges men. And yet here at the Anzac Memorial,
right in the centre, is this remarkable sculpture by Rayner Hoff called ‘Sacrifice’.
Rayner was a veteran himself and he’d seen far too much of war to ever want to glorify it.
But arguably this memorial doesn’t pay tribute to martial values, it embodies loss.
Those three figures – a wife, a mother, a daughter –
carry a slain soldier on his shield. He’s far from the usual
caricature of an Anzac, some sort of superhuman warrior. This man is a victim
rather than a fighter; his nakedness connotes his vulnerability.
And perhaps this memorial embodies another message as well. The cost of war isn’t confined
to the men sent to fight it; its pain is carried by families and communities as well.
BRUCE SCATES: Rayner Hoff’s compelling sculpture is our object for this week’s episode,
and really memorials like this one are scattered all across the Australian lanscape.
It’s been argued that Australians raised more war memorials
per head of population than any other nation in the world.
And the question for us, really, is why?
To answer that question we’ll be travelling thousands of
kilometres from here to South Australia and the Women’s Memorial Gardens in Adelaide.
SUSAN CARLAND: This is Adelaide, the capital of South Australia and one of the
country’s most beautiful cities. Adelaide is known as the City of Churches but
it’s also a vibrant centre of the arts, the gateway to the Barossa Valley,
and a metropolis ringed by gardens and lakes and parks.
BRUCE SCATES: Within just a kilometre of here,
we found no fewer than four major war memorials.
BRUCE SCATES: Another Rayner Hoff; South Australia’s state memorial; a monument to
Australia’s black diggers and this tribute to Simpson and his donkey –
the Great War’s humblest hero, a medic who carried the wounded to safety
on the perilous slopes of Gallipoli.
SUSAN CARLAND: This is the fourth memorial we’ve found today –
and it’s the most eloquent. Why?
Because these Women's Memorial Gardens, not far
from Adelaide's Great Cathedral, answers that question we posed back in Sydney.
Which is – why are there so many war memorials raised the length and breadth of Australia?
BRUCE SCATES: You know, it’s not just the scale of the carnage – though that was terrible enough.
In the early 20th century, and still today, laying a body to
rest is an integral part in the whole process of mourning.
BRUCE SCATES: Time-honoured rituals revolved
around a loved one’s physical remains, empowering families in the face of loss,
offering solace and sometimes acceptance.
But unlike France or the United States who repatriated their war dead,
Australia’s fallen were buried overseas. And unlike Great Britain, those graves
were oceans and oceans away, not just a short trip across the channel.
SUSAN CARLAND: Most Australians could never afford to visit battlefields or cemeteries overseas,
so they had no way of physically connecting with the faraway lands and places that
had claimed their loved ones. All they could do was imagine them.
BRUCE SCATES: And so it’s not surprising really that the Women’s Memorial Gardens here in Adelaide
takes the form of a graveyard. Flower beds of roses are made out to resemble plots;
they’re symbolising actual graves in France or Gallipoli, Palestine or Belgium.
A stone of remembrance lies at one end of these gardens, a cross of sacrifice at the other.
Those same memorial forms mark the Great War cemeteries all across Europe.
So by walking through this garden of remembrance, families felt the
presence of those distant dead. This place enabled a kind of imaginary pilgrimage.
SUSAN CARLAND: And so to, in a sense, does every war memorial. Whatever form they took,
obelisk or arch, a cross or a statue, all these war memorials had one thing in common.
All were called a ‘cenotaph’; literally, an empty grave.
These were the surrogate tombs of loved ones buried thousands of miles away;
they offered a place to grieve and a focus for our mourning.
SUSAN CARLAND: And one of the largest and grandest
of these memorials lies at the very heart of the nation.
BRUCE SCATES: Well you might have expected an episode that deals with the Anzac Legend to end here.
It’s the Australian War Memorial,
and it’s placed in the very centre of one of the great sight lines that defines the
shape of our national capital, Canberra. The Memorial was built to commemorate
Australia’s appalling sacrifice in World War One, but it’s become the site where
all the wars in which our country has fought are both honoured and remembered.
SUSAN CARLAND: Gallery after gallery deals with both World Wars and the conflicts that followed them;
the Cold War battles of Korea and Vietnam, recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan,
peacekeeping operations and now what’s being called the war on terror.
And the Museum also commemorates conflicts Australians died in before we became a nation;
the South African War, the Boxer Rebellion, and the war in the Sudan.
Here the list of all our war dead is solemnly commemorated, gleaming in bronze,
over 100,000 names.
BRUCE SCATES: But there’s one more we have yet to speak of.
It’s a war of dispossession that marked the very
foundation of Australia. A war that claimed the lives of thousands and was
fought from one end of this continent to the other. And that war is remembered
here, in the National Museum of Australia.
SUSAN CARLAND: Almost 100 years to the day after the
landing on Gallipoli, the National Museum of Australia unveiled a memorial.
To honour Pemulwuy,an Aboriginal warrior who bravely resisted the European invasion of his country,
this plaque was placed here.
SUSAN CARLAND: For over a decade, Pemulwuy fought
a guerilla war against white settlers around Sydney, burning their crops,
attacking their soldiers, rallying Bidigal people. He was killed by the British in 1802.
His head was severed from his body, preserved in spirits, and sent off to England.
Pemulwuy’s head was seen as a kind of trophy, symbolising the
colonialist conquest of Aboriginal Australia.
SUSAN CARLAND: What this plaque reminds us is
that Aboriginal people never ceded their sovereignty; then as today they fought to
preserve their culture and their country. That undeclared war against Indigenous
peoples has long been a silence in the way white Australians remember their past.
We commemorate a landing on the coast of Gallipoli a hundred years ago
and too often disregard the war fought here – at a far greater human cost –
in this very country.
BRUCE SCATES: In 2015, the National Museum declared the beginnings of Pemulwuy’s resistance war
as one of the defining moments of our nation’s history.
It’s no less important than the storming of the Dardanelles in 1915;
or the bombing of Darwin by Japanese aircraft in 1942; or the Vietnam moratorium of the 1970s.
Now that was a people’s movement against war and against conscription.
So you see war has been pivotal in shaping Australia’s past.
And how we choose to remember those wars will help to define who we are well into the future.
[Music]
BRUCE SCATES: If you’d like to learn more about the issues raised in this episode,
why not catch ‘Susan Carland: In Conversation’.
This time Susan introduces the conversation between myself and Bec Wheatley,
a graduate student at Monash University.
[Music]