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| ISBN-13: | 9781742241814 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 11/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 414 KB |
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Anzac
The Unauthorised Biography
By Carolyn Holbrook
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Carolyn HolbrookAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-700-7
CHAPTER 1
BEFORE 1914: NATIONALISM AND WAR
WHY DO SO MANY AUSTRALIANS BELIEVE that their nation was born on a battlefield in Turkey on 25 April 1915, rather than in Melbourne on 1 January 1901 when six colonies became one Commonwealth? If the nation had to be born on a battlefield, why was it not born on the South African veldt during the Boer War, in a campaign that coincided exactly with Federation, rather than at Gallipoli fourteen years after Australia came into official existence? The attitudes that Australians have held towards the Great War of 1914–18 for a hundred years have been influenced in large part by how they understood war at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter considers the crucial link between nationalism and war commemoration before 1914, through an examination of Australian involvement in the Boer War.
Anxious nationalism is the curse of settler societies such as Australia. These societies struggle to conform to the conventions of nationalism that developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe. Those conventions place an emphasis on the historical past of the nation, something that settler societies conspicuously lack. The French-Canadian scholar Gérard Bouchard has proposed that there are three ways in which settler nations have dealt with 'the problem of historical time': they have borrowed the history of their mother country, they have co-opted the history of the indigenous population, or they have rejected the need for history in the making of the nation. Australia is a clear example of the first solution; Mexico illustrates the second, and the United States the third. While riding on the coat-tails of the mother country lends instant 'strength and credibility' to a fledgling nation, the price to be paid, according to Bouchard, 'can be enormous: bound to imitation and dependency, the founding culture settles into an inferiority complex that stifles its creative potential'.
Bouchard's analysis has the ring of truth, though it does not allow for the varying shades of Australian nationalism that existed in the late nineteenth century, and the fact that an American-style repudiation of the mother country was arguably present to some extent from the early years of settlement. While loyalist Australians clung to their British heritage and basked in the reflected glory of racial superiority, as evidenced by the 'largest and greatest' empire in the history of the world, there had developed by the 1880s and 1890s a vocal section of the population that denounced the British connection. It seemed to these people that Australians were a different type from Britons: tall, strong, athletic, loyal, practical, unaffected, informal and irreverent (the national type was assumed always to be male). The icon of this radical nationalist movement was the bushman and its hymns were the ballads, poems and songs that took the bush and the bushman as their subjects. By 1900 the Bulletin magazine was bringing the stories and poems of writers such as Joseph Furphy, Bernard O'Dowd, Henry Lawson and 'Banjo' Paterson to a circulation, in both rural and urban areas, of 80 000. It cultivated a mockingly anti-British sentiment and professed the view that Australia ought not to cling 'to the coat-tails of a respectable old body in the Northern Hemisphere', because it 'possesses in itself the materials for a great Republic'. Despite the popularity of the 'bushman's bible', as it was known, in the years between 1890 and the Great War, the Bulletin's vocally expressed republican and anti-imperialist opinions remained minority views.
Whether they were imperial loyalists, radical nationalists or 'independent Australian Britons' (in the words of the parliamentarian Alfred Deakin), European Australians subscribed readily to the conventions of nationhood. During the middle of the nineteenth century, those British-derived conventions encompassed a benevolent liberalism and faith in international peace. However, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century the military threat posed by the unification and rise of Germany had led to a more aggressive form of British nationalism. In addition to the escalation of imperial rhetoric and monarchical pomp, British nationalism was infused with the ideas of social Darwinism, an ideology that applied the biological theories of natural selection and evolution to human societies. The concept of 'nation' became conflated with that of 'race', and a host of categories such as 'the British race' and the 'higher and lower races' appeared. The naturalist Charles Darwin had decreed that the fittest, by which he meant those animals best adapted to their local environment, survived in nature by a process of natural selection. When transferred to the human sphere, social Darwinism conceived the fittest humans as those who were physically strongest and morally the most courageous. If the measure of a nation's or a race's fitness for survival was its moral and physical strength, then the logical test was war. Blood must be spilled in the drawing of the physical and psychological boundaries of the nation; only then had it proved its fitness for survival in the great war of the races, according to the laws of science.
If war was the true test of nationhood, then Australia felt keenly its deficit. The Australian colonies' martial dearth compounded a sense of disquiet about their lack of history. Writing in 1890, the respected Victorian educator and politician Charles Pearson espoused a common view:
There is very little that is romantic or picturesque in the early history of a penal settlement on a continent peopled by some of the lowest savages known ... We miss the grand procession of the ages; the conflicts of Church and State; the wars of rival nationalities; the relations of baron and knight and serf; all the colouring and light that we find in Chaucer, or Froissart or Shakespeare.
School textbooks were frank about the lowly status of the colonies in the hierarchy of nationhood. The Royal Readers taught children that 'Australia is essentially a new region, containing no human beings but a few of the lowest race of mankind'. In the century or so of British settlement in Australia, there had been no heroic wars or bloody revolutions. It did not occur to European Australians that their conflict with Indigenous peoples might be understood as a form of warfare, let alone that the long inhabitation of the continent by Aborigines might constitute 'history'. It followed therefore that 'Australia has no history, but that of a few squabbles with the Colonial Office'.
Some, like the Federation poet George Essex Evans, tried to muster pride in Australians' 'bloodless flag' and the fact that theirs was 'Free-born of nations, / Virgin white, / Not won by blood nor ringed with steel'. But the sentiment of the journalist and author AG Hales more accurately represented the view of the majority: that nationhood was not achieved until 'mothers have sent their firstborn / To look death on the field in the face ...' and there is 'a soldier's grave for our dead'. It was Henry Lawson, the short story writer and balladist, who articulated most famously the baying for baptismal bloodshed. The Star of Australasia eschewed conflict on the frontier and dismissed the achievement of peaceful federation, warning Australians to 'boast no more of our bloodless flag'. This sensitive man of radical political sympathy foresaw the glorious moment when 'The Star of the South shall rise – in the lurid clouds of war'.
White Australians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood themselves to be participants in a scientific experiment that the world was watching with interest. A great race had been transported to a new environment, 'where snow was almost unknown, and where a hot summer sun baked and parched a thirsty soil'. The vexed social Darwinian question that lay at the core of Australians' unease about their nascent nationhood was how that 'mighty race' would fare 'beneath bright and unclouded skies'. Would it maintain 'the determination, self-reliance, energy, and enterprise ... that had been the guarantee of England's greatness'? Or would the 'fatal influence of a warm but enervating climate' see the transplanted Britons 'degenerate into a weak, lazy, and inferior race of men, unfit to be classed amongst the world's great peoples?' Only the test of war could answer that fraught question.
Australians would not have wished for war so fervently had their impression of battle borne close relation to reality. The end of the nineteenth century was a high watermark in the romanticisation of warfare. Young Australians, like Britons, were steeped in what the cultural historian Graham Dawson has called the 'pleasure culture' of war. The values of physical strength and prowess, courage and loyalty, emotional stoicism and sacrifice for monarch and Empire were celebrated in everything from popular literature and school textbooks to sporting pursuits, schoolyard ceremonies and children's toys.
In Britain, the adventure story genre was particularly influential in breeding young men for battle. The weekly magazine, the Boy's Own Paper, for example, while not explicitly militaristic or jingoistic, promoted the values of patriotism, gentlemanliness and stoic masculinity to generations of young men in Britain and around the Empire. There were rollicking adventure stories, all with happy endings, and pages of practical information about morally sanctioned pursuits, such as stamp-collecting, photography, fishing, bee-keeping, taxidermy and aviary building. Should all these physical activities fail to distract boys from the temptation of 'secret vices', they were advised to take a cold bath.
The many pages of the Boy's Own Paper devoted to games, particularly to rugby and cricket, did much to encourage fanciful notions of war. W Cecil Laming's popular poem, 'Play the Game', which compared the 'schoolboy pluck' of the rugby field to 'the British pluck' of the battlefield, appeared in the magazine. To Laming and the impressionable young readers of the Boy's Own Paper, sport and war summoned the same qualities of physical and moral courage. Whether in the scrum or on the battlefield, the rallying cry was the same: 'Play up! Play up! And play the game!'
Young Australians were exposed to this idealisation of war, both through their consumption of British publications such as the Boy's Own Paper and through literature produced at home. For most Australian schoolchildren of the late nineteenth century, school textbooks were the principal source of reading material; for some, they were the only source. Nelson's Royal Readers had been amended to cater for antipodean tastes, but their content still betrayed their British origins. The sturdy blue books were infused with the optimism of the age and assumptions of British good sense, justice and superiority. Dispersed among the poems, songs and lessons on technology and natural science were passages about British military victories and patriotic heroes. The Commonwealth School Paper and the various state School Papers responded to growing calls for more local content and proved exceedingly popular. The early School Papers typically ploughed more benign ideological ground than the Royal Readers, though there were exceptions.
In 1901, the Victorian Education Department embarked upon a project designed to increase patriotic sentiment among schoolchildren. It was felt that the introduction in schools of a weekly flag ceremony around the British Union Jack would encourage 'devotion to the Sovereign, love of country and respect for the laws'. The Department issued detailed instructions for the ceremony, including a labelled diagram.
The Reverend William Henry Fitchett would no doubt have approved of the ceremony; the state was generally far too subtle in its execution of the imperial mission for the loyalist tastes of the preacher, journalist and principal of Melbourne's Methodist Ladies' College. In 1896 Fitchett was commissioned to compose a series of articles for Melbourne's Argus newspaper about significant battles in British history. The articles were received enthusiastically by readers and prompted calls for them to be compiled in pamphlet form, 'so admirably calculated' were they 'to nourish the noble sentiment of patriotism, which is such a powerful factor in binding together the component parts of our grand empire'. Readers' wishes were fulfilled the following year when Deeds that Won the Empire appeared. Fitchett's preface articulated his concern that young Australians were insufficiently inculcated with the martial glories of the warrior race to which they belonged: 'There is a real danger that, for the average youth, the great names of British story may become meaningless sounds, that his imagination will take no colour from the rich and deep tints of history. And what a pallid, cold-blooded citizenship this must produce!'
If Fitchett's efforts to 'nourish patriotism' are measured in book sales, then he was stunningly successful. Australians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were far more likely to be immersed in William Fitchett's 'red-coat dreamings' than they were in the words of writers such as Henry Lawson, 'Banjo' Paterson or Steele Rudd. And Fitchett's appeal did not end at Australian borders. Deeds that Won the Empire was embraced eagerly around the Empire, selling an extraordinary 100 000 copies in its sixpenny edition and running to seventeen impressions of its six-shilling edition by 1904. It became prescribed holiday reading at Harrow and Winchester and was placed in the libraries of all warships in the Royal Navy.
Australians at the turn of the twentieth century were primed psychologically for war. This war would prove that they were not the degenerate spawn of convict stock, but a thriving offshoot of the mother race. The war of Australian imaginations would be fought in the style of the battles described in the Boy's Own Paper and Deeds that Won the Empire. When war between Britain and the Boers was declared in October 1899, Australians would be given the opportunity to measure the war of their imaginations against reality.
Tensions between the rebel South African states and Britain had been festering for a more than a decade before war broke out. When gold was discovered in the Transvaal in 1886 tens of thousands of uitlanders, a few hundred of them from Australia, but most from Britain, arrived to pan for their fortunes. The Boer government of the Transvaal refused to grant the franchise and other citizenship rights to these uitlanders, whose numbers greatly exceeded those of the Boer population by the late 1890s. The Boers feared, justifiably, that Britain would use the enfranchisement of uitlanders to wrest back political control of the resourcerich republic and the neighbouring Orange Free State. It was Britain's professed outrage at the treatment of the uitlanders that led eventually to the outbreak of war.
Each of the six Australian colonies sent contingents to fight in the South African war. After Australia federated on 1 January 1901, its first national military force, the Australian Commonwealth Horse, was recruited and despatched. Half of this contingent arrived after a peace treaty was signed and the rest saw little action. The public response to the initial despatch of soldiers to South Africa was enthusiastic, often wildly so. More than 300 000 people lined the streets of Sydney to cheer the first New South Wales contingent as it marched to the docks, at least double the number that turned out a year later when the six colonies federated into a nation.
Critics of the war were relatively few, but they were outspoken. Despite efforts by conservative newspapers, politicians and commentators such as Reverend Fitchett to portray all opponents of the war (or 'pro-Boers' as they were often called) as anti-British, this was far from the case. Arnold Wood, the professor of history at the University of Sydney, rejected Britain's aggressive foreign policy, though not the imperialist project itself. Wood had been raised as a Congregationalist in Manchester and was influenced by the Nonconformist liberalism of John Bright and Richard Cobden, which advocated an ethical foreign policy. He believed that international co-operation could ensure the triumph of peace over conflict. From the outset, he was suspicious of British motives in South Africa and expressed his opposition to the war in letters to the Sydney Daily Telegraph: the greatness of Britain's Empire should not be measured by 'the extent of the land it could devastate, and "annex", nor by the richness of the gold mines it could secure for its capitalists', but by 'the righteousness of its rule'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anzac by Carolyn Holbrook. Copyright © 2014 Carolyn Holbrook. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Foreword the Hon. Kim Reality, AC viii
Acknowledgments xii
The Anzac Ascendancy 1
1 Before 1914: Nationalism and war 8
2 1916-1936: Early histories of the Great War 32
3 1920s-1930s: The Great War in Australian literature 57
4 1940s-1960s: Marxism and memory of the Great War 91
5 1965-1985: The fall and rise of memory of the Great War 116
6 1980s-present: The Great War as family history 144
7 Since 1990: Politicians and commemoration of the Great War 166
Epilogue 207
Notes 218
Select bibliography 239
Index 256