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+).
Reality of war deja vu, including Long Tan 49
We presented these items in our e-Newsletter no. 28 earlier in the month on the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima-Nagasaki (and the 100th anniversary of Lone Pine). We wanted to run them through again. Also, given today’s 49th anniversary of Long…
Four takes on war and how to look at it
We wanted to run these again, particularly a week ahead of the simultaneous (pretty much) anniversaries of Lone Pine and Hiroshima. The first two items put our war history in perspective; the third might look like an easy mark but…
If not the Bush then what?
These four quotes from our Whizzbangs collection suggest that, while the Bush may have made us, we’ve moved on to drier country. We ignite Whizzbangs in our monthly newsletters. Before. ‘It is easy enough to see why men went to the…
Ted Dionne’s politics of history
Honest History tries to draw links between current events and their precedents and analogues. EJ (Ted) Dionne is a liberal American political commentator who thinks along similar lines. These two paragraphs come from his most recent book, Our Divided Political…
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Taking liberties? five whizzbangs about testing the limits of power
Sometimes the connections within our monthly collections of Whizzbangs only become clear after they are posted and we look at them again on their way to our Choice Whizzbangs section. Some, indeed, have quite long fuses. Some are timeless; some…
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Some whizzbangs are more equal than others
Whizzbangs are Honest History’s miscellany of briefs from past and present, to stir up the entrenched and focus the mind. We fire them initially in our monthly e-newsletter (subscribe on our home page) but usually recycle them later, as most…
War whizzbangs in the month of Anzac
Whizzbangs are Honest History’s miscellany of briefs from past and present, to stir up the entrenched and focus the mind. During April 2015 most of them had a war angle. Centenary. ‘Peace is not merely an absence of war. Peace…
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Fear, politics and what wins elections
‘There are three things that will guarantee votes in an election: favors, hope, and personal attachment. You must work to give these incentives to the right people.’ Cicero, How to Win an Election: an Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians (64 BC) translated Philip…
What is the state for?
‘A good society is one characterised by a collective concern with social justice and a capacity to act in pursuit of that objective. That this case even has to be made is symptomatic of the pervasive influence of neoliberalism during the…
The benefits of banking oligopoly
‘The Australian banking industry is the most concentrated in the world and also the most profitable. In fact the “big four” Australian banks make up four of the eight most profitable banks in the world. The big banks have conceded that…
Getting war death numbers in context has long been a problem
Australian military deaths in the Boer War 1899-1902: 606; Boer civilian deaths, mostly women and children in concentration camps, 27 927, plus an unknown number of black Africans.
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Death cults were around in 1914
‘Whatever cult of the fallen was invented afterwards to invoke the Australian people’s perpetual care for the Anzacs in death, their neglect of them in life was starkly revealed in the plunge into war in July-August 1914. Constantly confronted, as…
Parsimony in Anzac donation
The Commonwealth Bank has donated $2 million to the Anzac Centenary Public Fund. This is 0.02 per cent of the bank’s 2014 profit.
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National blend
‘The Australia of Australia Day is a land, a nation and a people with many different histories, cultures, ideas and stories to tell. They may not merge into a single, or a binding, story about ourselves, and some of them…
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Burdens of battle
‘Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died…
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Plus ca change
‘We have budgeted for a surplus; nothing is more inflationary than for governments to live beyond their incomes and draw upon Central Bank Credit for the deficit. We have reviewed the Commonwealth Departments, and have effected a net reduction in…
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National development
‘Our success as a nation has come from rewarding clever investment, innovation and ideas. We have sustained high real wages throughout our history by encouraging growth and avoiding a flood of unskilled immigrants which fuels rampant inequality.’ (Angus Taylor, Liberal…
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Weaponising
‘History isn’t what happened, but a story of what happened. And there are always different versions, different stories, about the same events. One version might revolve mainly around a specific set of facts while another version might minimize them or…
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Auschwitz
The stuff of memory. ‘We survivors do not want our past to be our children’s future.’ (Roman Kent, Auschwitz survivor, at 70th anniversary commemoration) Breadth of vision. Number of items in Australian War Memorial collections tagged ‘Gallipoli’: 13352; number of items tagged…
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Where you stand
I wish I wouldn’t have to live in a world where people who are willing to kill others are called “heroes” and people who don’t want to kill others are called “cowards”. In a way, this little morsel of language convention sums…
Brand Anzac
Is there any Australian brand worth more in the hearts and minds of Australians than “Anzac”? While Aussies might get parochial about Qantas and misty-eyed about Vegemite, such household names cannot compete with a brand so central to the national…
Standing stones
The grave marker of Private WL Rae (killed 8 August 1918, aged 24) in the Villers Bretonneux cemetery reads, ‘Another life lost, hearts broken, for what’. This sentiment on Great War graves is unusually frank but not unique. Australian War Memorial…
Direct Action, then and now
Direct Action a century ago was a newspaper published in Sydney by the International Workers of the World. Its first edition, dated November 1914, included a cartoon, ‘The advancing proletariat’, the words of ‘The Internationale’ and articles critical of the…
Afterwards
The end of World War I brought to Australians not tranquillity but unrest and anxiety, political, economic, cultural (a sense of being swamped by alien influences) and moral. Bolshevism threatened all, and explained to the establishment nearly every act of working-class…
Court short?
[T]he effect of the [High Court’s] decisions on the life of the country and its relative freedom from direct control are too great for it to be insulated from vigorous discussion and criticism. But, although humility is not the appropriate…
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Promises, promises
If you break a promise, the outcome is uncertain and the number of people affected is small. But if you refuse to make a promise, the result is certain and produces immediate anger in a larger number of voters. (Cicero,…
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Exponential
The catalogue of the National Library of Australia (NLA) records that during the 1970s just 51 personal narratives of the Great War were published. That number grew to 98 during the 1980s; there were 153 published during the 1990s and 215…
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Bishop remembered
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…
Women missing from the story
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…
Unhappy High Commissioner
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…
They also serve
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…
American cousin
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…
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Questions from a worker who reads
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…
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Novel politics
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…
Whitlam back from China 1971
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…
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Trade-offs
(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…
History pumped in
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)
War and sentimentality
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 Playbook
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…
Jokes at the Front
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…
Beautiful the next
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 thickets
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…
Team Australia?
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…
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Ever thus?
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…
Muscular patriotism
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,…
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Advice to Western Australians
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…
Lessons in the sand
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…
Defining moment
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…
Cultural heritage
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,…
Fear sells
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)
Soldier’s faith?
[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,…
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Making war acceptable in the UK
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…
PM Abbott joins the roll of Anzac PMs
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…
Camping made us
[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.
General racket
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…
Support ineffective dissent
‘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…
Responsible Government NSW 1856
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,…
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Mark Twain Down Under
‘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,…
December in Kabul, 1841
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…
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The history curriculum, 1904
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…
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From the archives of war and peace
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…
Anzac and the Australian republic
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…
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Water, water not everywhere
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…
The small print on Veterans’ Affairs
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…
Paul Keating on Jack Lang on World War 1
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…
Coining our history
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…
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General Morrison at the UN
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…
The land speaks
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…
Our martial tradition
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…
Anzackery – not new
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…
Backpackers and Eureka
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…
Brutality at Swan River, 1837
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…
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Dressing – 1880s Melbourne
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…
Class War 1930
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 wonders what he has done
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.’…
Political pledges
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…
Universal soldier
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…
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Primordial state
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…
Children and history
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…
If equality returns
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…
Vicious voters, 1891
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…
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Real soldiers, real lives
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…
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Fear beats reason, since 1756
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).
History v. Economics
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.…
Media profits
[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…
Inventing in Australia
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.
Britain’s biggest error?
‘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,…
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Subversive suburbs
‘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))
Government and media – who should support whom?
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.
A Gippsland massacre
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…
Anzac spirit in Bali?
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”,…
Afghanistan at Australian War Memorial
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,…
Universal solder? Universal birthing myth?
‘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…
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Have we forgotten?
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…
Fires breaking out
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…
Whizzbangs what, why, when
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…
Many Australias
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…
History teaches us
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…
Consistency
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…
The cornerstone
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…
Toning it down
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…
Political heroism
‘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…
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