Review note: Irish Easter Rising commemoration has lessons for Australia

Memorial to executed leaders of Easter Rising, Arbour Hill Prison (Wikimedia Commons)

Commemoration is as much about the present as the past

Every big national anniversary is about now as much as then, a renegotiation between past and present on the latter’s terms. Ireland, for all its lived experience of coming to terms with unquiet history, had little practical guidance in how to bring this one off. (Hayes)

The first sentence sounds about right for Australia: during the Anzac centenary we have reached back into our past for the bits that put us in a good light, the stories about how well we fought, how we looked after our mates under appalling conditions. We have been less keen to pull out and burnish the bits that reflect less well, particularly the bits where we were brutal to each other (the battles over conscription, industrial unrest, surveillance under the War Precautions Act, including of Irish-Australians and German-Australians).

We have a tradition of this sort of thing: Con Sciacca, who was minister in charge of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, didn’t want us to remember ‘the bad parts of what happened’; Bruce Scates, leader of the Great War 100 Stories project, tells of how Anzac centenary bureaucrats insisted on projects that gave off ‘a warm and fuzzy feeling’. As we pass ‘Peak Anzac’, there are bureaucrats of that ilk gearing up for the 75th anniversary of 1945. Unlike the Irish, we have loads of ‘practical guidance’ in how to make these occasions slide down as painlessly as possible, while bringing a sentimental tear to the eye.

Let’s hear it for the people

Another indicator of the negotiations between past and present has been the detailed attention paid to the experiences of “ordinary” people a hundred years ago: as participants in the rising, for example, but also as diarists and letter writers, affected bystanders and children. (Hayes)

We in Australia in the era of Anzac100 have not done much of this at the official level. Prime ministerial commemorative speeches often include a vignette or two about relatives who fought (Turnbull) or individual soldiers (Gillard, Howard) but it is the big numbers (casualties, deaths, deaths as proportion of those who enlisted, enlistments as proportion of males) and the object lessons for us all that still get more airplay, most notably from Abbott and Rudd.

Generalised speeches are easier for prime ministers or their spinmeisters to write, of course, just as standard Anzac stories roll easily onto the screens of journalists. The surprisingly similar successive speeches of War Memorial Director Nelson (one example suffices) nevertheless do include individual stories – albeit often the same ones – and the Memorial’s research facilities complement Ancestry.com and local historical societies in bringing out family war history. Ordinary Aussie Diggers do emerge from the sepia.

We have noticed, however, that it is a lot easier to obtain from official displays (the War Memorial itself and its travelling show, the Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience) an impression of grainy pictures and war memorabilia rather than of the thoughts and words of those who fought and died. Perhaps many of us lack the time to read crabbed script or densely packed transcription and it is easier to connect emotionally to a boot with a bullet hole in it or a watch stopped forever at the moment a boat scraped ashore at Ari Burnu.

Three ticks out of four

A confluence of four trends foreshadowed the entry of these new actors and experiences into the commemorative landscape. The first is a burgeoning interest in family history, aided by access to online databases and networks, which can facilitate a more personal encounter with the past and its precious lack of fit with backdated orthodoxy. (Hayes)

• Australia: tick; see above.

Second is the greater availability of digitised archives … (Hayes)

• Again, Australia: tick. The availability of repatriation records from the Great War, in particular, could change our views of that conflict and its effects – unless squeamishness and military politics leads to cost-cutting.

Third is a favourable political climate between Ireland and Britain … (Hayes)

• Australia: tick, but substitute ‘Australia and Turkey’ as the former enemies, now friends.

And fourth is a new body of well-researched and acutely judged works underlining the complexity of the period, often including its international connections. (Hayes)

• Australia: umm, not so much. With some notable exceptions, like Beaumont’s Broken Nation and Connor, Stanley and Yule’s The War at Home, Australia’s collected oeuvre is heavily about simple stories of blokes in khaki trying and dying. Apart from books like the two mentioned and Douglas Newton’s Hell-Bent it is also heavily Australo-centric.

Anzac Day AFL game, Melbourne, 2011 (Wikimedia Commons)

Do we yearn for ‘sites of memory’?

Dublin’s “sites of memory” – including the Garden of Remembrance, which honours those who fell in the cause of Irish freedom, the GPO itself, and the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol where the executions were carried out – formed the centrepiece [of commemoration of the Rising]. (Hayes)

‘Australian reactions to death [wrote Bart Ziino] were defined by distance, a circumstance that impelled mourners towards communal responses to their loss.’ The lack of local sites of memory has forever defined Australian remembrance of overseas wars; it is a crucial difference between our commemoration of Anzac and Ireland’s of the Easter Rising. Perhaps we have always gone in harder on commemoration at home because the battlefields and the cemeteries are half a world away. Most of us never seem to have considered compensating for this by making more of local sites of memory like Coniston, Convincing Ground and Myall Creek. Instead, we go to football matches on Anzac Day and observe a minute’s silence in memory of earlier ‘teams’ who played well.

Australia and the 1916 Rising in Ireland: The Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS), part of UNSW Canberra, and Canberra Friends of Ireland has a one day conference at the National Library on 1 August.