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…
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…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site Honest History’s Alternative Guide to the Australian War Memorial: context and contestability Across the sea to Ireland: Australians and the Easter Rising 1916: highlights reel Rush delivery from Ankara: building the Ataturk Memorial in…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site In the matter of Agent Orange: Vietnam veterans versus the Australian War Memorial. Jacqueline Bird describes a 20 year struggle to properly tell the story of servicemen’s exposure to chemicals in Vietnam. Constructing nationalism:…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site There is a new Minister for the Centenary of Anzac. Will he be too busy with his other jobs to do the Anzac job properly? David Stephens writes. Seeking him here, there and everywhere.…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © Centenary Watch: an open letter from Honest History to the new Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Centenary of Anzac Since our last newsletter the government has changed and so has the Minister Assisting the Prime…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site https://honesthistory.net.au/ Freedom and the Australian War Memorial: is Honest History not a force for good? Wilfred Burchett (in Moscow and out of it) recalled by Rupert Lockwood: highlights reel (I) Clive James' book…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site (https://honesthistory.net.au/) Hiroshima-Nagasaki 70 and Lone Pine 100: images for two anniversaries History of unrest and turmoil: Barbara Carol Heaton on coal miners during World War II Hands on History kids program pulls some…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site https://www.honesthistory.net.au/ Money, Monash and motive: DVA, the Public Works Committee and 'an international standard interpretive centre' in France (Immersion I of II) Sideways towards conscription: WM Hughes and the War Census of 1915…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site https://honesthistory.net.au/ Getting right with Vietnam: some myth-busting is needed Ataturk in the City of Hume: an exchange of correspondence Anzac and Anzackery: David Stephens contrasts the ideal and the caricature Sex on the…
Here is a miscellany of briefs from 2014-15, to stir up the entrenched and focus the mind. Click for links to Why whizzbangs, and our Newsletter archive (including Whizzbangs 2016+).
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site Asking difficult questions: two major Anzac speeches from Douglas Newton (author of Hell-Bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War) VDs as well as VCs: Diane Bell reviews Raden Dunbar’s probing book The Secrets…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site https://honesthistory.net.au/ Women’s power to stop war: Margaret Bearlin on the 100th anniversary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Gallipoli 1915: a century on: Peter Stanley reports on the Australian War Memorial-ANU…
ISSN: 2202-5561 (c) New on the site Defining Moments lets people decide on our national stories (plural): National Museum of Australia Is this ‘our story’? Another look at the Australian War Memorial’s refurbished galleries and what lies beneath Words in the trenches:…
ISSN: 2202-5561 © New on the site (honesthistory.net.au) Anzac’s unauthorised biographer talks at ADFA Summer School: Carolyn Holbrook Cowardice: A Brief History: Chris Walsh’s book reviewed by Diane Bell Indigenous tactics in the Frontier Wars: Ray Kerkhove explains A family viewpoint on Anzackery: former soldier David…
ISSN:2202-5561 © This is our final newsletter for 2014. We resume newsletters again early in February. We will still be updating the site regularly; subscribe to our RSS Feed to get advice of updates or simply browse the site, particularly under…
He was “disturbed” by what he called the Anzac myth, “revitalised with a new and wrong emphasis, and at a time when successive Australian Governments have felt a need to rekindle a commitment to war as a means of responding…
The fact that none of these [Ballarat 1854] women’s names is as familiar to us as that of Peter Lalor points to the inherent gender bias of Australian nationalism. In fact, men and women from many lands stood together beneath…
If I stayed in Scotland … I should have been able to heckle my member on questions of Imperial policy and vote for or against him on that ground. I went to Australia. I have been Prime Minister. But all the time I have had…
I wanted to talk about the damage war does through generations … It doesn’t stop at the people who actually fought. It affects children and the children of the children. I’m afraid the guys get excited about a war and…
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the…
Who built Thebes of the seven gates? In the books you will find the name of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? And Babylon, many times demolished. Who raised it up so many times? In what houses of gold-glittering…
Federation and everything it encompassed, like workers’ rights, the welfare safety net and suffrage, and not the criminal Gallipoli landings, constituted the birth of Australian nationhood. Yeah, I’ve always had a thing about 1 January 1901 and why the Founding…
The foreign policy of this country [Australia] is in ruins; the foundations on which it rested for more than twenty years have crumbled. Yet we pass on with scarcely a tremor of alarm or a gesture of remorse. There is…
ISSN:2202-5561 © New on Honest History website: https://honesthistory.net.au Does arms spending lead to war? we ask questions about the links over fifty years between Australian spending on arms imports and our commitments to wars Honest History is a cause, not a…
(I) For some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift … so that there can be more protection. (Prime Minister Abbott, 22 September 2014) (II) Those who would give up essential Liberty, to…
More and more, what we “feel” about collective history seems like something manufactured, and kind of pumped into us, rather than a real emotion. (Michael Stipe, musician and commentator, writing about 9/11 and related issues)
Sentimentality distances and fetishizes its object; it is the natural ally of jingoism. So long as we indulge it, we remain incapable of debating the merits of war without being charged with diminishing those who fought it. (Elizabeth Samet, West…
The formula for saving any dictatorship is universal: create an enemy, start a war. The state of war is the regime’s elixir of life. A nation in patriotic ecstasy becomes one with its “national leader”, while dissenters can be declared…
One can joke with a badly-wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three…
The support we receive from the school community is most rewarding and plays a vital role in our mission to ensure that the youth of today are aware of and appreciate the importance of our military history to our Australian…
History is a dense, wild, bramble-choked thicket of unpredictable events, causes, effects and interconnecting influences from which jobbing historians hack out messy clumps sized to become books, articles or – should some competing vandal have already slashed through an area…
Those who have attacked the old Australian character and the very notion of a national character argue that a diverse nation has no need to discover or define or celebrate a distinctive character; it should be committed solely to the…
ISSN:2202-5561 © New on our website honesthistory.net.au Defining moments and strands of our history: we compare notes with the National Museum of Australia Is Gallipoli at risk of disastrous bushfires? Peter Stanley reports; Guardian Australia Family focus allows better remembrance: Richard Reid writes…
The young reporter in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962; directed by John Ford, screenplay by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck) hears the truth about the death of the outlaw Liberty Valance. Nevertheless, the reporter decides to destroy…
Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice,…
Perhaps you will be content with a moderate and humdrum success, but I hope not. I hope that the more adventurous and enterprising spirits among you will be inspired by a golden vision of a possible future, and will be…
The Australian Army has commenced ‘a significant study of Army’s institutional lessons of the past 15 years … Learning from operational experience and encoding in the force the key elements of those lessons is a core function for any professional…
The arrival of the first fleet was the defining moment in the history of this continent. Let me repeat that: it was the defining moment in the history of this continent. It was the moment this continent became part of…
Middle-class Australia’s shallow, derivative culture has in part been a consequence of the willful and continuing denial of its debt to the Aborigines, and its refusal to think about the nightmare on which the Australian dream has depended. (Judith Brett,…
Politicians and media populists are expert at the manipulation of fears to exercise control and ratchet up their approval ratings. And we are conditioned to respond. Fear sells – and it gets governments elected. (Carmen Lawrence, 2006)
[T]he faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion,…
ISSN:2202-5561 © Not just a newsletter, also a website; these are new Loyalty long ago and honesty today: Pamela Burton on claims that Dr John Burton was a spy Pioneering writing on the Frontier Wars: Humphrey McQueen (1973, 1977 and 1981) Blokes…
‘Lest we abuse their memory’, Honest History, 7 August 2014 Richard Thwaites* reviews Shanti Sumartojo and Ben Wellings, ed., Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Lang, Bern, 2014 The powerful…
‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum …’ (Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, 2002). ‘We will tolerate dissent as long as…
An exotic in the US Army was Major General Smedley Butler, who served in the Marines from 1898 to 1931 and was highly decorated. Having retired, he described his service as being ‘a gangster for capitalism’, wrote a book called…
The Ministry of Defence in the United Kingdom has been advising the government there about ways in which war can be made more palatable to the general public, including by reducing the ‘profile’ of repatriation ceremonies (code for returning the…
The Prime Minister gave a speech to Legacy. Much of the publicity was about his proposal for an Arlington-style national cemetery in Canberra ‘in which significant ex-soldiers could be interred’. What this might mean was left for later consideration, particularly…
[S]ome of our most widely held values, especially egalitarianism, tolerance and the premium we place on practicability, have been nurtured by the experience of camping. Bill Garner, author of Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian, 2013.
The mainstream media always gets excited by significant changes in government. This was particularly so at the beginning. This from the Sydney Morning Herald, 22 May 1856: The youth of the colony will cherish the memory of this day. They,…
‘Australian history’, according to Mark Twain, lecturing in Australia in 1895 to raise some much needed cash, is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer,…
In December 1841, the British Envoy in Kabul, Sir William McNaghten, wrote to his superior, Lord Auckland, in these terms, as the British occupying force prepared to leave Afghanistan. ‘We shall part with the Afghans as friends, and I feel…
As the teaching of history again looms into the spotlight, this statement echoes back to us from a century ago. A course which entirely ignores history, which knows nothing of political economy or philosophy, and which expunges anything related to…
Treaty between the United States and other Powers providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy… ARTICLE I: The High Contracting Parties solemly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to…
Does harping on Australia’s role in an imperial war 100 years ago slow our path to a republic? Here is the view of Sarah Brasch, national convenor of Women for an Australian Republic: The Anzac Centenary is due to take…
Talking of what has shaped our national destiny (as we inevitably do when centenaries loom), H2O deserves a close look. Plunging into Michael Cathcart’s 2010 book The Water Dreamers we find a quote from German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (‘History…
Administrative history throws up interesting stories. Here’s one. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs has been involved in commemorations since 1990, implementing such notable enterprises as Australia Remembers in 1995, Saluting their Service after that, and now the Anzac Centenary Local…
Some time before the Chief of Army fixed the camera with a steely gaze to condemn misogyny in the Australian Army he gave a speech at the United Nations in New York. The occasion was International Women’s Day and the…
Marilyn Lake’s essay ‘Fractured nation‘ brings to mind a remark made by the former Premier of New South Wales, JT Lang, to a young Paul Keating, later Prime Minister. Lang was around during the buoyant days of Australian nationalism, the…
Australian anthropologist Ian McIntosh at Indiana University is trying to work out whether five coins found in the Northern Territory during World War II are evidence that sailors from Africa reached Australia up to 900 years ago. The coins originated…
An English observer, Richard Twopeny, writes about female dress in 1880s Melbourne: I fancy that the French modistes manufacture a certain style of attire for the Australian market. It is a compound of the cocotte and the American. Nor when…
To understand our history, you need to understand the land. Individuals, cultures, persistent ideologies (substantiated or not) and the innate nature of humanity are major forces too. But the land itself is underestimated. Jackie French, Let the Land Speak: A…
Conflict, it seems, is part of the human condition, and we must always be ready for it… This exhibition … shows the continuity of our martial tradition and of our national character. Tony Abbott, as Opposition Leader, speaking at the…
Researching the history of the term ‘Anzackery’, we came across this, published in 1967: Australians must be in many respects among the least nationalistic people in the world and, on the surface anyway, most sceptical of patriotic gestures. It is…
Eureka was a youth movement. The inhabitants of Ballarat, like the youth of a century later, believed that the times they were a’changing. And like today’s backpackers, the gold rush generation was transient, expansive, adventurous: in search of experience, questing…
It is a truth which is painful to relate, that in the 19th Century Englishmen and protestants, shall be so cruel and hunt after the aborigines like after a game, the innocent child is not spared; they are shot in…
I … a member of the working class do hereby solemnly swear to protect the working class against armed and other aggression of our capitalist class enemy… should I betray the trust imposed upon me I will receive the scorn…
Woodrow Wilson was puzzled at the exultant reaction to his April 1917 speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war. ‘My message tonight was a message of death for our young men… How strange it seems to applaud that.’…
We are not free to break our word, abandon our principles, desert our party, betray our constituents. But the pledge cannot prevent us doing any one or all of those things if our inclination lies in that direction. (William Morris…
The early circumstances of New South Wales were against its rapid growth. Founded as a receptacle for convicts, a system akin to slavery soon took root. Such of the early settlers as were neither gentlemen nor convicts belonged to the…
I was at the front for thirteen months, and by the end of that time … [t]he war had become an everyday affair; life in the line a matter of routine; instead of heroes there were only victims … [T]here…
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756).
To put it bluntly, the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.…
[P]eople value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus. There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence…
Every State wishes to promote national pride, and is conscious that this cannot be done by unbiased history. The defenseless children are taught by distortions and suppressions and suggestions. The false ideas as to the history of the world which…
Liberal democracy has allowed more and more of both the best and the worst to exploit the new superiority of minority attack against majority defence. Participation makes conflicts fairer, but it doesn’t resolve many of them: and an equal society…
One-man-one-vote would mean the enfranchisement of whole armies of idle or vicious nomads … the lazy sundowner, the spieler, would all be enfranchised … it would place another weapon in the hands of the plutocracy. Western nomads, like all such…
While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty…
The perennial question was raised again with the Prime Minister’s remarks about the ABC’s duty to support ‘Australian interests’. Previous protagonists include Abraham Lincoln, Josef Goebbels and John Curtin.
They drove the abos in to a bend beside Warragal [sic] Creek homestead and killed all that were there. Then they loaded the bodies into bullock drays and took them up into the sandhills about half a mile away and…
The release of Schapelle Corby led Paola Totaro in The Guardian Australia to reprise public attitudes to Corby’s case. She noted one journalist’s view from 2005 that Australians ‘seemed to “fancy they see something of the Gallipoli spirit in Corby”,…
‘Britain entering first world war was “biggest error in modern history”” (English historian Niall Ferguson; attracting 800 comments) ‘If war breaks out, it will be the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen’. (British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, 1914,…
‘So – to sum up – you don’t have to be a mindless conformist to choose suburban life. Most of the best poets and painters and inventors and protesters choose it too.’ (Hugh Stretton, Ideas for Australian Cities (1970))
Michelle Starr reports in CNet Australia that some of the best Australian inventions are the refrigerator, the (military) tank, the medical applications of penicillin, the Ford ute, the surf ski, budgie smugglers, and the splayd. Not just the Hills Hoist.
The Australian War Memorial has mounted a new exhibition, Afghanistan: the Australian story. Director Brendan Nelson has recognised the need to get the balance right between depicting past and current wars and this exhibition delivers on that commitment. The exhibition,…
Fire is a particularly powerful theme in Australian history. Paul Collins wrote in Burn: the Epic Story of Bushfire in Australia, about how Australians have been shaped by fire. Keith Hancock and Bill Gammage have written about fire in aboriginal…
There is no doubt that during the latter half of last century [that is, the nineteenth century] the Australian people were acutely aware of their isolation, and were determined to turn to account the freedom it gave them by building…
‘In those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation.’ These words were not said by an Australian or British observer at Gallipoli but by Brigadier-General AE Ross from Canada, recalling just after the war his feelings at the…
This is to explain our section ‘Choice Whizzbangs‘. Whizzbangs first appear in our regular newsletters and we then reload most of them as Choice Whizzbangs. If you need the source for a particular Whizzbang you can usually find it by…
Stephens, David ‘The children suffer‘, Honest History, 11 August 2014 A version (including links) of an article that appears on John Menadue’s blog, Pearls and Irritations. An earlier piece on the same subject appeared in Honest History’s first newsletter. There…
ISSN:2202-5561 © Not only a newsletter but also a website, with these new items: And the war came (rapidly): the Australian press in the final, nervous days before the Great War Kokoda revisionism: does it matter that we were not outnumbered? Anthony…
Sumartojo, Shanti & Ben Wellings, ed. Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Peter Lang, Oxford, 2014 Sixteen contributors discuss aspects of how Great War commemoration has developed in a range of…
Australians have always been over-concerned about what the BBC thinks about us but this BBC man may be onto something. ‘A common failing of these kinds of columns [about national identity, often around Australia Day] is that they insist on defining a singular…
To the English intelligence’, reported the London correspondent of the Argus in 1934, ‘it seems strange that a change of Government should mean the eclipse of one form of history teaching and the rise of another’. The article goes on…
In New South Wales the historical pattern of settlement and the development of the state’s economy have encouraged this concern with pork-barrel politics. Distance, isolation and a rural-metropolitan division have bred parochialism at the same time as encouraging dependency on…
Military history provides the foundation for Army training, education, esprit de corps, and decisionmaking. The lessons of the past form the doctrines of the future. These lessons are not based on poorly recorded or understood events. History is a way…
Mr. Howe [of Kansas] declares that Australians’ tones contradict the sentiments expressed in their words. If Australians have a fault in their speech it is that they fail to intone. Questions, answers, and boasting (which we indulge in infrequently) are usually…
‘Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for…
Update 21 August: Lists and Random strands In recent weeks we have been introducing changes to the way the Honest History website works. We want to help readers find and explore the full scope of the rich content we are…
This category shows feature articles published by Honest History from our team and contributors. To explore by individual themes, use the Themes menu. To trace items by author, use the References by author: A-Z menu.
Book and resource reviews, surveys of published works, ‘highlights reels’ (extracts from sometimes hard-to-get works), ‘factsheets’ (current issues), ‘lists’ (selections from the site). To explore by themes, use the Themes menu; by author, the References by author: A-Z menu.
ISSN:2202-5561 © Honest History Inc. 2014 Not only a newsletter but also a website … with these new items The Simpson Prize: civics education or proper history for Years 9 and 10? NAIDOC Week and Indigenous warriors: copping out or playing it carefully? Anzac and…
‘The Great War centenary in the United Kingdom’, Honest History, 5 November 2013 and updated [Links checked and present, 26 October 2017. HH] Update 8 August 2014: There is British material in our ‘Review note‘ of events and articles during…
Reflections on an Anzac Day service Doug Hynd* The first Anzac Day of the millennium saw me make the substantial sacrifice of the several hours sleep required if I was to get up in time for the Dawn Service in…
ISSN:2202-5561 © Honest History Inc. 2014 Not only a newsletter but also a website New on honesthistory.net.au Battlefield tourism: Paul Daley (author, columnist with Guardian Australia) brings a different perspective; haunting photographs by Mike Bowers (ABC Insiders) True face of war: Kerry Neale…
ISSN:2202-5561 © Honest History Inc. 2014 Not only a newsletter but also a website New on honesthistory.net.au Alison Broinowski: fascism and Malcolm Fraser’s new book on us and our allies Ben Wadham: camouflage and our national identity (illustrated Amy Hamilton) Tom O’Lincoln‘s…