‘The war myth that made us‘, The Age, 25 April 2007
Asks why Anzac Day has become our most important national day. Manne suggests, with John Hirst, that the Gallipoli landing helped Australians overcome a sense of colonial inferiority and that Australians felt the months in the Dardanelles had revealed particular national characteristics, as promoted particularly by CEW Bean. ‘Australians were innocent and fit; stoical and laconic; irreverent in the face of hidebound authority; naturally egalitarian and disdainful of British class differences. Above all, in times of trouble, they stood by their mates.’
The author also notes Anzac’s ‘capacity to adapt to the temper of the times’ and that ‘politicians seem incapable of leaving it alone’. Prime Minister Keating tried unsuccessfully to substitute Kokoda for Gallipoli.
John Howard has attempted something rather different. He has sought to strip from the story of Gallipoli the sense of war’s ultimate futility and to graft it on to something he calls “the great Australian military tradition”, which stretches, in his opinion, from Gallipoli to Iraq. In our history of loyal military service alongside Britain and America we have made no mistake. This bombast is both new to Australian politics and, as the catastrophe of Iraq reveals, fuelled by a dangerously uncritical self-regard.
Like Keating’s initiative, Howard’s will most likely also fail. One of the most interesting and unpredicted features of recent times is the way so many young Australians have been drawn to Gallipoli and Anzac. My guess is that they are attracted by the need to feel they belong to something larger than themselves and, living as they do in a hedonistic age, by astonishment at the sacrifices young men in a different time had been willing to make.
For these young people, if I am right, Anzac is not about great military traditions or the supposed glory of even justly fought wars. Rather it is about national identity, inter-generational gratitude and deep pity and horror concerning war.
