ANZAC Day is almost all we've got left to share with each other.
National Days are necessary to countries that are more than just geographical expressions. People living in a community need something in common and beliefs and experiences that are shared in some way.
In Australia today there's not much that brings us together. By themselves events and symbols can't unite us - but they help. Despite the overwhelming majority of Australians supporting the celebration of Australia Day on 26 January the media and political elites are doing their best to cancel the day. The symbolism of the Albanese government allowing public servants to work on 26 January was significant. As was the statement from Vicki Brady, the chief executive of Telstra that she'd been working on that day because 26 January was 'a painful reminder of discrimination and exclusion' for indigenous Australians. Our national flag is going the way of Australia Day. One flag has become three.
According to the Bureau of Statistics there are 278 cultural and ethnic groups in Australia. Meanwhile the last census showed that less than half the population regard themselves as Christian (compared to 61% ten years ago), and 39% now tick the box of 'no religion'. Last year I wrote about this in my column in the Australian Financial review - 'What makes Australia a home?' It was prompted by something seemingly inconsequential. The name of the trophy that the Australia and England rugby teams compete for was changed from the 'Cook Cup' to the 'Ella-Mobbs Trophy'. Apparently - 'Cook has become a divisive figure in recent years, with a statue of the pioneering British sailor in Melbourne vandalised on Australia Day this year [and] a statue in Cairns that has long caused angst for the region's first Australians removed last month by the new owners of the land on which it stood.'
And so it goes on. I said:
Never has it been more important for Australians to have a sense of their nation's identity and purpose, yet such a sense is now almost completely absent in this country.
The findings of last year's census released this week reveal that for the first time in our history, more than half the population was either born overseas or has a parent who was.
Out of more than 30 countries in the OECD (leaving aside Luxembourg and it's 650,000 residents), Australia has the highest proportion of foreign-born people in its population at 29.9% [emphasis added]. The countries that follow are Switzerland at 29.7%, New Zealand at 26.8%, and then Israel at 21.2%. The figures for the United Kingdom are 13.7% and for the US 13.6%.
Rather than creating and renewing our country, we're deconstructing it - piece by piece by piece. 'Pride in your work', 'pride in your appearance', and 'pride in your country' are today all concepts nearly completed erased. When we welcome new Australians (a term I use deliberately and which likewise has gone completely out of fashion) we don't know what we're welcoming them into.
'The Rise and Fall of Australia - How a great nation lost its way' by Nick Bryant is sort of book about Australia you'd expect to be written by someone who worked at the BBC. Apparently Australia is riven by racism and xenophobia and we're 'a global laughing stock'. Relevant to today, Bryant is mystified by the hold ANZAC Day seems to have on young people.
One possible explanation is that commemorations have come to fill a vacuum; the void left by the failure to define Australia in a less maudlin, sepia-tinted or mateship-oriented manner. Whereas for older generations ANZAC Day has become a firm anchor, for the young it shows their sense of national identity to be somewhat adrift. They need to travel to the cliffs of Pine Cove to go in search of their country.
Yes - they do. But they're not really travelling to Pine Cove 'in search of their country' - they're going there in search of themselves, because ultimately we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
I remember a few years ago when I was a semi-regular listener to ABC radio. One of the afternoon programs in the lead up to ANZAC Day had a short segment of the host interviewing a schoolgirl who had just returned from a school excursion to the memorials of the Western Front. As far as I can recall she had no family connection to the ANZACs. As the schoolgirl talked about what she'd seen she started crying on air and the host trying to console her said something like 'but it happened more than a century ago'.
The effort to deconstruct Australia has reached ANZAC Day, as it was always bound to. Notoriously, a draft of the national curriculum was to tell children its commemoration was 'contested'. And also, inevitably, in response to those who said such an interpretation was an effort to eventually remove ANZAC Day as a day of national significance, The Guardian claimed that defending ANZAC Day was merely to employ 'dreary, condescending, cliched cultural themes' with 'each instalment a little more ridiculous for its hysterics'.
According to Peter Stanley, the former principal historian at the Australian War Memorial 'We are also now seeing calls that ANZAC Day should embrace all of Australia's wars, not just those fought overseas, but also the 'Australian Wars' fought for the possession of this continent between 1788 an say, 1928.' Stanley has endorsed the call that the War Memorial 'recognise frontier conflict, perhaps Australia's most costly war.' (Stanley is not afraid to also talk about contemporary political issues. He believes the AUKUS alliance and the country possessing nuclear submarines will make Australia less secure.)
Bryant is correct though in his observation about 25 April.
ANZAC Day has defied the predictions of those in the early 1970s who thought they were witnessing its last gasps to become the de facto national day. Its enduring appeal like in the simple truth that it remains, as [Donald] Horne noted in the early 1960s, 'an expression of the commonness of man'.
'The commonness of man' doesn't quite capture what I think Horne is trying to say. ANZAC Day is an expression of 'our common humanity' that says it better.
When you stand at the Vietnam Veteran Memorial in Washington and see the names on black granite of the 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam war you're not thinking about the geopolitics or military strategy - you're thinking of people and their lives and the lives of who they left behind. A few weeks ago I watched the move, The Cruel Sea made in 1953 for the first time. It's based on the novel by Nicholas Monsarrat about his wartime experience in the British navy in the Atlantic during the Second World War. Now having seen it, The Cruel Sea lives up to what Simon Heffer, the British journalist said about it. 'This is the greatest war film ever made - There's no Hollywood gloss in this heroic masterpiece. Instead, it's ordinary men doing extraordinary things.'
The story of Hugo Throssell, VC is very much the story of an ordinary man doing extraordinary things. The Price of Valour is the biography of Throssell by John Hamilton published in 2012. I read it a few years ago. It's one of those books that stays with you. It's a tragic story sensitively told.
Born in 1884 in Northam, Western Australia, Throssell, was one fourteen children from a wealthy establishment family (his father was the premier of the state). Within weeks of war being declared Throssell had left his struggling farm and joined the 10th Light Horse Regiment recruited in Western Australia. He landed at Gallipoli at the beginning of August 1915 and in an action at the end of the month he won the Victoria Cross while severely wounded he almost single-handedly held a trench against successive assaults from Turkish troops. In December 1915 Throssell accompanied by his friend the artist Tom Roberts was awarded the Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace by King George V. Throssell returned to Australia a war hero. His picture was on Wills's Cigarettes 'Great War Victoria Cross Heroes'. Throssell later resumed active duty and was wounded again in April 1917 at the battle of Gaza.
In Melbourne in 1919 Throssell married Katharine Pritchard, a left-wing journalist and author who the following year became a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. In a speech to a crowd of thousands on 'Peace Day', 1919 in Northam, Throssell declared 'War had made him a socialist'. 'Katharine wrote afterwards to her friend Nettie Palmer: You could have heard a pin drop'. It was described as 'akin to Christ returning to the Mount and telling the multitudes he had lied.'
A bugler sounded the last post after Hugo had finished his speech, and the crowd melted away. The Throssell family sat stunned and embarrassed. The returned soldiers felt somehow betrayed. Hugo had turned his back on both his town and the country's conservatism. He had preached revolution.
The feeling ran so deep that it was not until 28 August 1999 - just over eighty years since Hugo had made his speech - that a modest cream-brick memorial to him the size of a backyard barbecue was unveiled in Northam by the governor of Western Australia, Michael Jeffrey. He said 'it is probably that rejecting the values of his peer group was the reason no memorial existed [before] for Throssell.
After the war Throssell attempted various business ventures and they all failed. In November 1933 he killed himself. He left behind his young son and his wife who at the time of his death was on a two and a half month holiday in Stalin's Russia. 'She remained a complete an unwavering communist until the day she died, rejecting any criticism of Russia or the Soviet Union as 'capitalist propaganda'.'
After an ANZAC Day lunch in Perth in 1916,
A journalist from the West Australian caught up with Hugo at his hotel. Hugo was quite clearly ill and reluctant to give an interview. The reporter was disappointed. 'Physically, although the effects of his wounds and subsequent illness have left their mark, he is a splendid specimen of the Australian race. Yet this young stalwart, who, with his comrades for hours faced a rain of Turkish bombs, shrinks from recounting the story of his heroism in cold type.' It was with the 'gravest difficulty' that the reporter 'extracted a few facts' and a curious expression. 'Really I can't tell you much', said Hugo. 'I don't want to speak about myself. I'm a 'boom'. It's the other fellows who deserve it.'
John,
Watching the ceremonies at Gallipoli and Villers-Bretonneux on Tuesday, it was encouraging to see so many young people at both. Despite their school “education”, growing numbers of young Australians are learning some of our history for themselves.
As you note, speakers in both places referred to the dead of ANZAC and other wars, although none as yet made any reference to colonial times. But in both places didgeridoos were played at the opening and a couple of NZ officers wore capes of Māori feathers, which struck me as anachronistic virtue-signalling.
At the ANZAC Cove ceremony, a Turkish officer gave a short speech in which he quoted the words attributed to Kemal Atatürk:
“ Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ... You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
There is controversy about whether these words were spoken by Mustafa Kemal, but they have been quoted in many ANZAC Day ceremonies and, when delivered by a Turkish soldier, are to me an appropriate and generous sentiment.
At Villers-Bretonneux, the best speaker was the French Secretary of State. for Veterans Affairs, Patricia Mirallès, who spoke convincingly of the gratitude the French still have for the Australians who fought and died on the Western Front. She also spoke about the recent discovery of the wreck of the Japanese ship Montevideo Maru, which sank off the Philippines with 1,000 Australian prisoners of war aboard, for whom their final resting place is now known. Her choosing to mention those lost Australians, so far away in time and place from France, was respectful and moving.
We must keep vigilant against the erosion of the remaining symbols of our nationhood.
First, thank you for referring to it as ANZAC Day and not Anzac day.
Second, I am concerned at Aboriginal and Maori groups are now having their own ANZAC Day ceremonies ((in Perth and Canberra at least) separate from the main non-racial ceremonies organised by the RSL. Another attempt to divide Australia on the basis of race?