What is wrong with Anzac Day services at the War Memorial? Symptom of a broader problem

Update 25 February 2025

Lots of good comments on the Crikey article, most supporting change to the War Memorial status quo. There’s also a petition.

***

Honest History has followed the Rationalist Society of Australia’s (RSA) campaign to get the Australian War Memorial to make Anzac Day Dawn Services look more like modern Australia and less like a 1950s Army base Church Parade. Our earlier posts link from here.

The RSA has complained that Christian domination of the Dawn Service discriminates against non-Christians. The Memorial says it just hosts the event on behalf of RSL ACT and that ‘traditions move slowly’.

We recognise the efforts of the RSA to push this issue. Progress seems to have stalled.

Now, Amy Fallon has written up the story in Crikey. She tracks RSA’s efforts and the response to them, has some great quotes from veteran Sam Proctor about the nature of the Memorial service and Defence protocols about such services, and notes the more enlightened approach of Melbourne’s Shrine.

Comments from Professor Peter Stanley, former President of the Honest History Association and now President of the Defending Country Memorial Project Inc., and from David Stephens, editor of the Honest History and Defending Country websites, bring out the broader implications.

Professor Stanley said the episode showed that keeping up with change in Australia was ‘beyond the imagination or the courage of the RSL and the AWM’.

“Anzac Day may ultimately be fated to be regarded as a relic of old Australia”…”That slide into irrelevance could be arrested if it became more representative and less the property of a small and exclusive minority.”

Dr Stephens concluded that ‘despite all our rhetoric about modern multicultural secular Australia, we still have the old God-fearing, male, Anglo-Celtic Australia lurking and ready to throw its weight around — or simply to defend the status quo’.

The other element present here – as it often is in matters involving the Memorial – is the silence or straight bat confronting legitimate inquirers. Ms Fallon got that treatment from RSL Australia, RSL ACT, the Memorial, both Human Rights Commissions and the Australian Defence Force.

Meanwhile, as Ms Fallon notes, ‘Nearly 64% of ADF members* now have no faith, according to Defence statistics (compared to 40% of all Australians)’. Lest We Forget.

*Update 24 February 2025: latest figure: 61 per cent.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition (1942: Bing Crosby cover; skip the advert at the beginning)

David Stephens

22 February 2025