GriffithREVIEW48.indb 1 13/03/2015 3:58 pm Praise for Griffith Review

‘Essential reading for each and every one of us.’ Readings ‘A varied, impressive and international cast of authors.’ The Australian ‘Griffith Review is a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in current affairs, politics, literature and journalism. The timely, engaging writing lavishly justifies the Brisbane-based publication’s reputation as Australia’s best example of its genre.’ The West Australian ‘Griffith Review enjoys a much-deserved reputation as one of the best literary journals in Australia. Its contribution to conversations and informed debate on a wide range of topical issues has been outstanding.’ Hon Ian Walker MP, Minister for Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts, Queensland Government ‘This quarterly magazine is a reminder of the breadth and talent of Australian writers. Verdict: literary treat.’ Herald Sun ‘Griffith Review editor Julianne Schultz is the ultra-marathoner of Australian cultural life.’ Canberra Times ‘At a time when long form journalism is under threat and the voices in our public debate are often off-puttingly condescending, hectoring and discordant, Griffith Review is the elegant alternative.’ Booktopia Buzz ‘Griffith Review is Australia’s leading literary journal.’ Monocle ‘Surveying the textured literary landscape that constitutes a Griffith Review issue can lead to some surprising reappraisals of the way we read texts, culture and ideas.’ Melbourne Review ‘Griffith Review is a wonderful journal. It’s pretty much setting the agenda in Australia and fighting way above its weight… You’re mad if you don’t subscribe.’ Phillip Adams ‘Griffith Review is the vantage not of the outraged so much as the frustrated, a reliable forum for passionate criticisms aimed at the inadequacy of political discourse in contemporary Australia.’ Australian Book Review

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 1 13/03/2015 3:58 pm SIR SAMUEL GRIFFITH was one of Australia’s great early achievers. Twice the premier of Queensland, that state’s chief justice and the author of its criminal code, he was best known for his pivotal role in drafting agreements that led to Federation, and as the new nation’s first chief justice. He was also an important reformer and legislator, a practical and cautious man of words. Griffith died in 1920 and is now best remembered in his namesakes: an electorate, a society, a suburb and a university. Ninety-six years after he first proposed establishing a university in Brisbane, Griffith University, the city’s second, was created. His commitment to public debate and ideas, his delight in words and art, and his attachment to active citizenship are recognised by the publication that bears his name. Like Sir Samuel Griffith, Griffith Review is iconoclastic and non-partisan, with a sceptical eye and a pragmatically reforming heart and a commitment to public discussion. Personal, political and unpredictable, it is Australia’s best conversation.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 2 13/03/2015 3:58 pm GriffithReview48 Enduring Legacies Edited by Julianne Schultz and Peter Cochrane

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 3 13/03/2015 3:58 pm GriffithReview48

INTRODUCTION 7 Making nations JULIANNE SCHULTZ: A hundred years of war

ESSAY 13 The past is not sacred PETER COCHRANE: A dangerous obsession with Anzac 25 The Boer War JIM DAVIDSON: A longer shadow 30 Immigration, integration, disintegration GERHARD FISCHER: The perilous road to Australian multiculturalism 45 Breaking ranks with Empire CHRISTOPHER PUGSLEY: New Zealand's Gallipoli graves 55 What was lost ROSS MCMULLIN: More than battle casualties 72 Family casualties MARINA LARSSON: Private pain, invisible carers 79 An unexpected bequest JILL BROWN: Freedom, fashion and being modern 83 A legend with class FRANK BONGIORNO: Labour and Anzac 92 Gough’s war JENNY HOCKING: Making a politician, changing a nation 102 Reaching to homelands JOY DAMOUSI: Greek war memories 110 Marked men STEPHEN GARTON: Anxiety, alienation and the aftermath of war 137 Dangers and revelations TIM ROWSE: World War II in Indigenous autobiography 149 Forgetting to remember CLARE WRIGHT: Time to be brave 165 War stories JEANNINE BAKER: Remembering women conflict reporters 181 Continuing fallout MEREDITH MCKINNEY: From Hiroshima to Fukushima 202 Dear Mother ROSETTA ALLAN: Songs of the Kamikaze 231 Terrorism and the Cold War DAVID MCKNIGHT: Avoiding false comparisons 236 Allies in name alone PAUL HAM: Collapse of a gung-ho alliance 256 Barrier thinking GREG LOCKHART: The monument and the minefield 262 A hundred in a million PETER STANLEY: Obsession with the Victoria Cross 272 Anzac instincts JAMES BROWN: The missing modern military voice

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 4 13/03/2015 3:58 pm MEMOIR 61 Lots of rabbits this year TOM BAMFORTH: Letters between the farm and the front 116 A Christmas story BEN STUBBS: Exploring the island’s hidden war narrative 122 A remarkable man JOHN CLARKE: Ray Parkin, 1910–2005 158 The bronzista of Muradup DAVID CARLIN: Friends in Venice 174 Claiming the dead CORY TAYLOR: Awkward moments for past wrongs 194 Know thy neighbour DAVID WALKER: Save the date, 7 July 1937 217 The uses and abuses of humiliation BARRY HILL: Rabindranath Tagore's management of deceit 248 Set it down! GERARD WINDSOR: Full disclosure and Vietnam veterans 296 My grandfather’s head TIM BONYHADY: A discovery

FICTION 282 Recessional CRAIG CLIFF

POEM 270 When I look upon the suffering LAURA JAN SHORE

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Griffith Review gratefully acknowledges the support and generosity of our founding patron, the late Margaret Mittelheuser AM and the ongoing support of Dr Cathryn Mittelheuser AM.

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GriffithREVIEW48.indb 6 13/03/2015 3:58 pm INTRODUCTION Making nations A hundred years of war Julianne Schultz

IT SEEMS POIGNANTLY appropriate that the web address gallipoli.net. au, which features the logo ‘Gallipoli: The Making of a Nation’, is owned by Michael Erdeljac of the Splitters Creek Historical Group. Splitters Creek is now a suburb on the western edge of Albury, better known for its active Landcare group, and as the home to the endangered squirrel glider. In the competitive market for Great War memorabilia, Michael Erdeljac deserves to be congratulated. He has owned the URL for fourteen years – well before commemoration became a national preoccupation – motivated by his own conviction ‘we must remember’. The history recalled on the site is serviceable, the list of names of those killed at the Gallipoli landing, Lone Pine and Nek battles heartbreaking, the opportunity to ‘own a piece of history’ well priced: $1,200 for a framed print of a photo from the front. The photo was donated by the late daugh- ter of Corporal Herbert Bensch, one of the many Australians of German heritage who fought for the AIF in the Great War. It was in a camera belong- ing to his mate, who was one of the nearly nine thousand Australian soldiers, three thousand New Zealanders, thirty-five thousand Brits, twenty-seven thousand French and eighty-six thousand Turks, who died on the peninsula a century ago. Years after returning, Corporal Bensch processed the photo and it became a family heirloom. It is poignant because it was settlements like Splitters Creek in the Riverina that were home to many of the almost sixty thousand Australians who died during that war. As has been graphically captured on the screen, and is now easily accessible in the digital records of those who fought, many of the young men who volunteered to travel across hemispheres were country

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lads woefully ill-prepared for the slaughter they would face. Not all, like Corporal Bensch, traced their forebears back to England. For many of those who fought it was a chance to be involved in a great adventure, albeit often with tragic consequences.

THE NOTION THAT this blooding and the other epic battles of the Great War made Australia a nation has become a truism, but it is one that needs to be examined. Australia was already a (teenage) nation in 1914. It was a nation crafted from and for the times, eager to assert its independence (in most things) from the motherland, infected by a racism made (almost) scientific by Darwinism, egalitarian, protectionist and, in important democratic domains (compulsory voting), marked by a progressive spirit. In many ways it was a world leader – forging both a civic and an ethnic idea of nation. In Europe, by contrast, at the beginning of the war, as David Reynolds details in The Long Shadow (Norton, 2014), there were only three republics – France, Switzerland and Portugal – but five major empires: the Ottoman and British, and those headed by the Romanovs in Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs and the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Five years later, all but one of these empires had imploded – there were thirteen new republics and nine nations that had not even existed before the war. In Europe, the sixteen million lives lost and twenty million injured liter- ally created nations. The carnage emboldened a democratic, nationalist and in some places revolutionary, spirit. It led to major political changes in Great Britain, the beginning of the end of the old aristocracy, and eventually the devolution of Ireland. In Australia, by contrast, it divided the progressive movement, tingeing the country with grief. Although the trauma and loss was profound in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, there were no battles on home soil in either the motherland or the dominions. In Britain the outcomes were less concrete – more tied, as Reynolds argues, to ‘abstract ideals such as civilised values and even the eradication of war’. In Australia, as John Hirst has written, ‘Gallipoli freed Australia from the self-doubt about whether it had the mettle to be a proper nation’.

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So in Australia, the experience of war became shorthand for nationhood, while in New Zealand it marked the beginning of a long journey to even fuller independence. It is an ancient notion that equates battle and blood with independence and freedom; that there is life in death. The very idea that war ‘was the truest test of nationhood and that Australia’s official status would not be ratified psychologically until her men had been blooded in war’ is, as historian Carolyn Holbrook persuasively argues in Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (NewSouth, 2014), evidence of ‘muscular nationalism [that] was given legiti- macy by Social Darwinism’. The Great War did not make Australia – that had been a relatively cerebral activity, notwithstanding the conflicts of settlement, which reached its conclu- sion on 1 January 1901 when the colonies federated into a nation. It was a nation that began as penal colonies, prosecuted battles of settlement, welcomed people from many lands and crafted one of the first written constitutions. But like many adolescents it was conflicted, as Holbrook argues, ‘the very nation that it sought to distinguish itself from was the nation whose approval it craved’. The Great War was not even the first foreign war that Australians fought in alongside Britain – that was in South Africa. But as the legend of Breaker Morant has captured, there were important differences in attitude between Australia and Britain that came to the fore in foreign battles. Many historians have argued that the lingering feeling of illegitimacy, of having a chip on the shoulder that needed to be avenged, helped fuel the idea that participation in the Great War was a coming of age – proof, as John Hirst noted in Australian History in 7 Questions (Black Inc., 2014), that Australia really had the ‘mettle to be a nation’. Eagerness to participate was not universally shared. This is illustrated most powerfully in the failure of two referenda to introduce conscription – another important mark of an independent nation, of a place where people had the right to make their own decisions rather than being the property of the state. So those of Irish heritage expressed anti-British sentiment, those of German descent were regarded suspiciously, and Indigenous Austra- lians joined the fight. It was complicated. Afterwards, the tragedy of loss and grief was palpable and Australia’s progressive spirit was slowed and lost momentum.

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And then, in little more than a generation, another war began which layered trauma on catastrophe, left the air full of human smoke, changed global geopolitics and renamed the Great War – World War I. In an endur- ing sense, it was the Second World War that really changed the world. It consolidated the American Century, defined in part by conflict with the Soviet Union and its empire; triggered the end of colonialism and its multi- faceted implications; created space for the assertion of international law; and provided the framework for the remarkable transformations of the past seven decades.

UNDOUBTEDLY, THE WARS of the twentieth century shaped, arguably even made, modern Australia. But this was not because of an ancient blood sacrifice in distant lands or even the closer strategic battles that followed; it was a product of the responses, realignments and decisions that followed. Every country has its most symbolic year from each of the world wars, and can trace the consequences of the bloodletting that accompanied the global realignment of the last century. In Australia this can be measured in many ways, but three major legacies stand out: increasing independence from Britain, deeper engagement with the rest of the world and more multicul- turalism at home. It was in the aftermath of these wars that Australia found its voice in international forums – at Versailles and in the formation of both the League of Nations and United Nations. After excluding the Chinese, deporting German residents and treating the first Australians as subhuman a century ago, Australia slowly let down the gangplank and after the Second World War began again to welcome large numbers of people from all around the world. While full legal separation from Britain took much longer to achieve – and is still a work in progress – the reaction to the knighting of Prince Philip on Australia Day 2015 suggests this is a project nearing comple- tion. At a more prosaic level, one of the greatest media empires the world has ever known can trace its antecedents to the wartime reporting (and political deal making) of Sir Keith Murdoch. As Jenny Hocking documents in Enduring Legacies, it was the wartime experiences of Gough Whitlam that shaped his political agenda that was implemented three decades later, and still upholds the foundations of contem- porary Australia.

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IT IS STRIKING that 2015 is the centenary of the Gallipoli offensive, the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in the Pacific, and the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This is a good time to reflect not only on the actions of those wars, but on their consequences and their enduring legacies. The battles are important, but the lessons to be learnt in their aftermath need to be interrogated, to explain how we got to where we are. This is essentially an intellectual exercise, and Australians generally shy away from such activity, preferring celebration, commemoration and consumption. This year is replete with travel agents offering guided journeys to far away battle sites (because, apart from Darwin, none of these modern wars occurred on mainland Australian soil), books, films, television series, exhibitions and coins. The ballot for places to attend the Gallipoli Commemoration was massively oversubscribed and the Perth Mint’s 99.9 per cent gold ‘Baptism of Fire’ $5,050 coin sold out quickly, but there are still plenty of the 99.9 per cent silver ‘Making of a Nation’ coins for just $99 and others with similarly overblown names. The first episode of Channel Nine’s magnificent Gallipoli series attracted millions of viewers before sinking into ratings netherland. And the Splitters Creek Historical Group still has copies of Corporal Herbert Bensch’s colleague’s battlefront photo and the list of many of those who died at Gallipoli a hundred years ago.

IT HAS BEEN a great pleasure and privilege to work with my colleague Dr Peter Cochrane on this edition of Griffith Review. Peter’s network of eminent historians have risen to the challenge of exploring many of the multifaceted legacies of the wars of the twentieth century – and have provided new insights, graphic portraits and telling analysis of their consequences. We have chosen to organise the edition chronologically, so it starts with the Second Boer War and ends with a haunting reminiscence about the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht. In between, we address most of the wars of the twentieth century, as well as the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with new insights, poignant tales and surprises. It is the beginning of a much bigger project to explore the enduring legacies of wars in shaping who we are, and why.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 11 13/03/2015 3:58 pm REMEMBERING THE FIRST AUSTRALIANS Honouring Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women through a community funded memorial.

Many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women fought for our country from the Boer War onwards. However, their stories are rarely acknowledged in the fabric of our nation’s history.

We’re honouring these First Australians by building a memorial in ANZAC Square, Brisbane City.

We need your help.

To donate call 07 5552 7218 or go online www.atsidmcq.com

All gifts of $2 or more are tax deductible. Should the campaign raise an excess of funds, all remaining monies will be contributed towards ATSI Student Scholarships at Griffith University. The Promoter of this Appeal is the Director, Development and Alumni Office, Griffith University pursuant to Sanction Number CP5701.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 12 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY The past is not sacred A dangerous obsession with Anzac Peter Cochrane

THE TERM ‘HISTORY wars’ is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today. That debate, though hardly resolved, is now taking something of a back seat to a public controversy focused on Australia’s wars of the twentieth century and particularly on the war of 1914–18, called the Great War until the Second World War redefined it as the First. If ‘history war’ is a public controversy about past events that raise disturbing contemporary questions about national legitimacy and identity, then this Great War controversy also qualifies as such. The polemic unfolded in a familiar fashion, with ‘history warriors’ from the political right publicly insisting that historians and left-wing commentators were distorting the past and violating cherished understandings about the First World War. In various forums they stated and restated their now-familiar case: Australia’s vital interests were at stake in the Great War and it took part to protect these interests. The warriors insist there is a left-wing ‘orthodoxy’ arguing that Australia’s national interests were not served by participating in the war and that Australians were duped by the British into fighting.

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The recent past and the present loom large in the warriors’ anxiety. They insist that Australia is not in the habit of sending troops overseas to fight ‘other people’s wars’, as critics suggest, and that participation in overseas wars throughout the twentieth century (and since) has been overwhelmingly in Australia’s interests. They have loudly condemned, and continue to condemn, historians and journalists who see this differently. Broadsides along these lines have been heard for a generation. I’m not certain where it started, but an early shot fired in Quadrant in July 1982 by the columnist Gerard Henderson merits closer inspection. Henderson was unhappy with the then-emerging field of social history and its emphasis on ‘waste’ and suffering, because – in his view – it undermined the rightness of the cause. He targeted the distinguished social historian Bill Gammage, whose celebrated ‘emotional history’ of the war, The Broken Years (Penguin, 1974), was based on soldiers’ diaries. Gammage was guilty, Henderson claimed, of distinguishing ‘between the Anzacs as individuals and the cause for which they fought’ – of feting the soldiers but condemning the war. Gammage was a consultant on the Peter Weir film Gallipoli (1981) wherein the same distinctions were evident, and equally odious, to Henderson. Henderson stated his belief that the war was right for Britain and Australia, and he took issue with the notion of the war as tragedy: ‘The Great War was “futile” and a “waste” in one sense only – in that the Western Allies in the 1920s and 1930s surrendered much of what had been won in 1914–1918 due to their all-embracing guilt.’ So the tragedy ‘in one sense only’ is to be found in foreign policy errors made after the war. Had these errors not been made, nothing about the Great War would be tragic, ‘futile’ or a ‘waste’. This, presumably, is the hard-nut indifference to suffering (even on a massive scale) that is required by the men of high politics. But I find this interesting for another reason. At the time, Gammage was researching and writing social history, or ‘history from below’. He was determined to show how this war was experienced by ordinary people and to document their terrible ordeals on the field of battle and, yes, the horrendous waste of human beings, talent and potential.

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Australian history probably followed literature here, for it was a novelist who put the human legacy of war on the national agenda. George Johnston’s bestselling novel My Brother Jack (Collins) was published to great acclaim in 1964. The novel explored the disastrous impact of war for a single family on the home front. It opened up a national conversation about the true legacy of war. Gammage picked up the baton and ran. In this capacity he was a part of – or more accurately ahead of – a cultural shift in the history business, with a newfound concern for the traumatic impact of war experience right across the wars of the twentieth century, and thereafter. The historian Christina Twomey wrote about this shift in the Decem- ber 2013 edition of History Australia. In an article titled ‘Trauma and the Reinvigoration of the Anzac: An Argument’, Twomey argues that social history’s focus on suffering in war is but one part of a fascination with the traumatic in contemporary society. She calls this change ‘the rise to cultural prominence of the traumatised individual’ and argues that this rise is not peculiar to Australia, or even to the military sphere, but is evident throughout the western world. In this vein, though years earlier, Gammage explicitly rejected the label ‘military history’ for The Broken Years. He wrote ‘to show the horrors of war’. The book has never been out of print and trauma is now a field of study in Australian history, with titles such as Joy Damousi’s Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Stephen Garton’s The Cost of War: Australians Return (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Peter Stanley’s The Lost Boys of Anzac (NewSouth, 2014), among others. But this new focus is perhaps best summed up by Marina Larsson’s Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (UNSW Press, 2009). In her article, Twomey concludes that the ‘trauma’ perspective – this understanding of what war does to people – has been the principal reason for the resurgence of enthusiasm for the Anzac tradition. No doubt there’s some truth in this idea of a congruence between the personal and the political, empathy working to bind people together in solemn tribute to our nation’s military endeavour over a century and more. But it’s a shaky foundation.

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A military heritage understood as trauma and suffering will always threaten to undermine narratives constructed around strategic necessity. Tragedy can too easily extend to critical evaluation of the political necessity for war, both then and now. To emphasise the human side of the war might even break the airlock that shields high politics and belligerent journalism from such considerations. Perhaps this tension is behind one of the oddities of the current ‘history war’: never has the Anzac tradition been more popular and yet never have its defenders been more chauvinistic, bellicose and intolerant of other viewpoints. One only has to read the Murdoch press editorials, features or op-eds on Anzac Day (or thereabouts), or the polemics in Quadrant, to know this. Every year the hard heads kick in – ‘we got it right,’ they say – and serve up the summary analysis, column after column, never failing to fire a shot or two at the doubters, the usually unnamed ‘orthodox’ school that peddles the fiction of ‘other people’s wars’ or ‘futility’.

ANU HISTORIAN FRANK Bongiorno has argued that it is precisely the renewed cultural authority of Anzac – the popular enthusiasm for remembrance – that has had unanticipated and, for some of us, unwanted consequences, notably a declining toleration of any critique of Australian military endeavour. In an edited collection called Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration (Peter Lang, 2014), Bongiorno charts how Anzac commemoration has changed in recent times, with ethnic groups and Aborig- inal people claiming a part or a familial connection in one or another of Australia’s wars across the twentieth century – somewhat like Australians finding a link to a convict ancestry and with it a newfound pride in their national identity. There is now a small wing of Australian publishing that is busy with books about German Anzacs and Irish Anzacs, Black Diggers, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, Chinese Anzacs, Russian Anzacs and so on. The new inclusiveness is one of a number of causal factors underpin- ning the resurgence of enthusiasm for the Anzac tradition. There is, also, the metaphysical pull of the occasion – the obstinate or perhaps eternal need for the sacred in a secular society; there is the rise of genealogy, linking families to forbears who fought and suffered and died for us; there is the

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progressive broadening of criteria for participation in the marches; and there is the all-important role of governments (Labor and Liberal) in the lavish promotion of a war-centred nationalism going back at least to the Hawke government. It has been noted, for instance, that Anzac Day works better as a national day because it avoids the contentious matters that Australia Day brings to the fore – Aboriginal dispossession and colonisation. So, Anzac’s popularity is on a high and, buoyed by this popularity, the ideological guardians of the tradition seek to press home their advan- tage. As Bongiorno points out: ‘There is a long history of contention over the significance and meaning of the Anzac legend. But once a tradition is defined in more inclusive terms, those who refuse to participate can readily be represented as beyond the pale. To question, to criticise – to doubt – can become un-Australian.’ The vitriol has been warming for some time. An editorial on 26 April 2013 in the Australian is instructive. It had suggestions for the bureaucrats responsible for organising commemorative events in the centenary years to come:

The best advice we can offer is that they ignore the tortured arguments of the intellectuals and listen to the people, the true custodians of this occasion. They must recognise that the current intellectual zeitgeist is at odds with the spirit of Anzac. It recog- nises neither the significance of a war that had to be fought nor the importance of patriotism. Honour, duty and mateship are foreign to their thinking. They may be experts on many things, but on the subject of Anzac, they have little useful to say.

Two days later, Andrew Bolt chimed in on cue in the Herald Sun. Intent on vilifying academic critics of the Anzac legend, he suggested they were lining up with Islamic extremists. He named two respected scholars – Marilyn Lake and Clare Wright – and suggested that their expertise ‘on many things’ had abandoned them on matters Anzac. Doubt and debate in Bolt’s worldview is not only unpatriotic, it is the mark of fanaticism and treachery.

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Now the Great War centenary has arrived and the history warriors have chosen their weapons. Paul Kelly set the tone on 2–3 August 2014, when he railed in the Australian that Australians had been mugged by an anti-war mythology. The film Gallipoli got another blast, as did ‘the legacy of poets and “anti-war cultural practitioners” who, since the 1960s, have peddled the lie, the “delusion”, that the Great War was a terrible blunder… that saw millions sacrificed in vain’. In Quadrant, the busiest critic of late has been Mervyn F Bendle, an untiring polemicist who has made no scholarly contribution to the history of Australia’s twentieth-century wars. His concerns run entirely contrary to the historical project – he wants the Anzac past to be fixed and sacred. He thinks the issue here is ‘respect for Australian society’, and describes critical interventions in military history as ‘an elitist project explicitly dedicated to destroying the popular view of these traditions’. The agents of this conspiracy are at one time ‘little more than a pampered coterie’ and elsewhere a more considerable force (one assumes), since they are ‘led by a cadre of academics, media apparatchiks and some disaffected ex-army officers’. Bendle seems entirely uncomfortable with the vigorous, contested nature of the discipline. He caricatures these rival interpretations as ‘an iconoclastic holy war against the Anzac tradition’, and in one instance as ‘a jihad’. Quadrant has published Bendle’s denunciations regularly since 2009. Bongiorno’s take on such intemperate reaction is well put: ‘Anzac’s inclusiveness has been achieved at the price of a dangerous chauvinism that increasingly equates national history with military history, and national belonging with a willingness to accept the Anzac legend as Australian patriotism’s very essence.’ But if the new inclusiveness of Anzac commemoration provides backing for this kind of intolerance, it is also true that the centenary (now with us) has heightened anxieties about the legitimacy of the so-called Great War, as has the widespread questioning of recent wars in Iraq and Afghani- stan. The context for intolerance has, in this sense, been overdetermined.

IN THE PAST two decades, as the centenary has crept up, the scholarly contest around the origins and the meaning of the Great War has intensified.

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The anniversary has lifted the game to a new intensity – nowhere more evident than in Britain, where historians and politicians have eagerly put their case. Some of the most intemperate interventions seem designed to caricature critical reflection and shut down debate. Michael Gove, then British education secretary, set the tone in January 2014 when he tore into ‘left-wing academics’ for ‘peddling unpatriotic myths’. He cited satire such as Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder as grist to the left-wing mill that encouraged these myths and denigrated the ‘patriotism, honour and courage’ of those who served and died. The bizarre edge to Gove’s intervention suggests a fear that the contest may not be going his way. As Oxford’s Professor Margaret MacMillan put it: ‘He is mistaking myths for rival interpretations of history.’ Gove had tried to enlist MacMillan to his cause, referring favourably to her important (if oddly titled) book, The War That Ended Peace (Random House, 2013), but MacMillan said he got it wrong: ‘I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one.’ Good advice. The history business is more richly resourced, sophisticated and nuanced, more exhaustive and rigorous and more openly scrutinised by a fascinated general public than ever before. A vigorous contest about the origins and meaning of the war continues unabated. Broadly, two schools of thought have been contesting the ground at least since AJP Taylor’s War By Timetable (1969): one insists Germany was hell-bent on world domination and had to be stopped; the other (including Taylor) sees the great powers as collectively responsible in varying ways and to varying degrees. And inextricably tied into these two schools are views set on a spectrum between ‘high and noble purpose’ and ghastly ‘futility’. The complexity of this debate should not be understated. My grasp of it suggests the ‘collective responsibility’ school of thought is far more soundly based in history than the nationalistic ‘evil Germany’ version. Perhaps the best example of this headway is Christopher Clark’s celebrated volume The Sleepwalkers (Allen Lane, 2012). Clark is an Australian, and now a professor of modern history at Cambridge. His delightfully readable account of the polarisation process that led to war teases out this collective responsibility against a background of ethnic and nationalistic ferment in Europe at the

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time. ‘The outbreak of war,’ he writes, ‘is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol.’ Clark sees smoking pistols in many hands. He sees a Europe in which all the great powers were pursuing their own interests, willfully indifferent to the interests of others and, to that end, ready to risk a major conflict, having no idea of the horrors they were about to unleash. The point is this: the debate in Britain is not closed. It is perhaps more wide-open than ever and well able to resist the forces that would shut it down and render history into a hammer in the sectarian tool box.

IN AUSTRALIA, THE scholarly scene is similarly robust and, one trusts, similarly resistant to bullying and coercion. Here, too, the coming of the centenary has heightened critical scrutiny and a reactive anxiety that insists the past is sacred. While social historians continue to track the personal cost of our wars among soldiers and their families, and the cultural industry produces countless books, movies, TV series and tours of battlefields, a more political line of inquiry has in recent times tracked the ‘militarisation of Austra- lian history’ since the 1980s. The evidence of this obsession is found in patterns of government funding, in the media, publishing and education, in documentaries and electronic media programs devoted to the history of Australians at war – to the detriment of our many other pasts. The imbal- ance here has dire consequences for the breadth and depth of understanding of the past, as Henry Reynolds has pointed out:

The implications fly off in all directions – nations are made in war not in peace, on battlefields not in parliaments; soldiers not statesmen are the nation’s founders; men of blood are more worthy of note than negotiators and conciliators; the bayonet is mightier than the pen; a few fatal days on the shore of the Ottoman Empire outweighed the decades of civil and political pioneering by hundreds of colonial Australians.

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The centenary has galvanised this concern with numerous authors, several key titles and the website Honest History raising the critical standard. In What’s Wrong with Anzac? (NewSouth, 2010), edited by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, the contributing scholars sought to explain how this obsession with military history has been manufactured and to highlight how it eclipses a rich and diverse history of nation-making, civil and politi- cal traditions of democratic equality and social justice. It must be said that the book has sparked fierce criticism from within the history community, with distinguished scholars Inga Clendinnen and Ken Inglis contesting the ‘top down’ explanation of the resurgence of Anzac and others pointing to misapprehensions about ‘propaganda’ being fed into schools and about both teachers and students as passive recipients. But there is much in the book that merits attention. It set out to provoke discussion and debate and in that it has been entirely successful. Other scholars have indirectly shaped the critique of the obsession with Anzac by contributing to a broadly conceived cultural history that places Asia (and thus our racial anxieties) at – or near – the centre of our national story. Australia’s Asia, edited by David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (UWA Publishing, 2012), is a key text in this regard. Within this framework it has become possible to rethink Australia’s entry into the Great War, notwithstanding the voices that insist there’s nothing more to know. A number of authors have taken up this challenge, notably John Mordike and recently Greg Lockhart, whose essay in Griffith Review 32: Wicked Problems, Exquisite Dilemmas charted the secret commitments that shaped Australia’s entry into the war and the racial fears that motivated Australian politicians to make these commitments. Mordike, Lockhart and Walker, and predecessors such as historian Neville Meaney, have reshaped the way we think about the racial frameworks that governed political thought and the fears that underpinned Australian defence policy leading up to the First World War – notably the obsession with Japan. The great irony here is that Japan was a reliable British ally throughout those years of war, yet it was fear of Japan that drove White Australia’s commitment to an expeditionary war long before war broke out.

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Another constructive contribution is Douglas Newton’s Hell-Bent (Scribe, 2014). The title suggests the author’s revisionist perspective. Newton’s aim is to ‘interleave the story of Australia’s leap into the Great War and the story of the choice of war in Britain’. His interpretation sets Hell-Bent firmly in the collective responsibility camp, with Australian government intent – if not impact – as culpable as Britain and the rest. Newton’s book surveys the obsession with racial fitness, the post-Federation longing for blooding in battle, the searching for confirmation of racial viril- ity and the almost universal belief that the one true test of national vigour was war. Newton quotes Australian Prime Minister Joseph Cook’s diary of Monday 3 August 1914, the same day that he promised the Royal Australian Navy and twenty thousand troops to Britain: ‘The good to come, [the] moral tonic. Luxury, frivolity and class selfishness will be less. A memory for our children, bitter and bracing for many.’ Cook’s earnestness was at least preferable to Churchill’s effervescing glee at the prospect of war in July 1914, and his enjoyment of war thereafter – he could still call it ‘delicious’ in January 1915. War as socially uplifting and purifying was a common theme among Australia’s political elites in 1914. War was an antidote to ‘effeminate think- ing’, ‘sentimentalism’ and the way that too long a peace ‘can rot all manly thought and action out of our race’, as Melbourne academic Archibald Strong put it. War was a curative. War was a way to rescue the British race from the brink of destruction. Such were the attitudes that underpinned a political elite ‘hell-bent’ on war. The celebrants today would have us forget this. They would have us forget both the racial framework and the obsessive paranoia that inspired the push to war in Australia. They would have us forget the lessons, too. In Gallipoli: a ridge too far, edited by Ashley Ekins (Exisle, 2013), the historian Robert O’Neill describes how ‘blindness and miscomprehension’ about Turkey’s ability to defend itself was repeated in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘How strange it is that Winston Churchill, a voracious student of military history, thought that a force of some sixty-thousand men, backed by the Royal Navy, would rapidly induce a Turkish collapse leading to the seizure and occupation of Constantinople.’ O’Neill goes on to note how the decision-making process

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was dominated by Churchill, and to record Charles Bean’s observation in The Story of Anzac (1921) – how through the ‘fatal power of a young enthusi- asm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born’. CEW Bean was the great official historian of the Australians in the First World War. He will be quoted liberally in the course of the centenary, but his blunt summary of the Gallipoli venture as a reckless fantasy may not get the attention it deserves. No chance of that with James Brown’s Anzac’s Long Shadow (Black Inc., 2014), an unusual intervention that has stirred debate and critical reflection, and fury in the Quadrant ranks. Brown, a former officer who commanded troops in Iraq and served with Special Forces in Afghanistan, was the military fellow at the Lowy Institute when the book was published. ‘This year an Anzac festival begins,’ he writes, ‘a commemorative program so extravagant it would make a sultan swoon.’ He argues that Australia is spending too much time, money and emotion on the Anzac legend at the expense of current serving men and women, and he rejects the sophistry that suggests any criticism of the Anzac myth is anti-military. He also provides a sharp critique of the clubs and corporations that exploit the Anzac theme for commercial gain. He does not dwell on the particulars of Australian involvement in the Great War but he does stress the importance of informed memory, of knowing Gallipoli for what it was: ‘A century ago we got it wrong. We sent thousands of young Australians on a military operation that was barely more than a disaster. It’s right that a hundred years later we should feel strongly about that.’

POLITICIANS AND A retinue of warrior commentators want us to be proud of our martial history, lest the nation fall apart. Historians worth their salt want us to know that history critically, lest the nation be deceived, or simply dumbed-down. This is a great divide. History is a cautious, ever- questioning discipline, well aware that all historical truth is contextual and contingent and thus open to revision or to new ways of seeing the past. Politics is a profession played out with dogmatic certainties that are wielded like baseball bats. Where historians must be ever critical, ever ready to go deeper, politics (and national history as set down by politicians) must be

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unimpeachable. Drape ‘Anzac’ over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct. History will not stand for that. In history nothing is sacred. History is open inquiry; politics is slogans. Australia’s finest historian, Inga Clendinnen, explained the great divide between politics and history in the following way: ‘The discipline of history demands rigorous self-criticism, a patient, even attentiveness, and a practiced tolerance for uncertainty. It also requires that pleasure be taken in the episte- mological problems which attend the attempt to recover the density of a past actuality from its residual traces. These are not warrior virtues.’ Political agendas require a national story that is simple, fixed and invio- lable. Thus the centenary is committed to locking in a glorious military past but, like the 1988 Bicentennial, it is raising more questions than the celebrants want. Centennials can backfire. That is the heart of the problem for the history warriors on the conservative side of politics. That, more than any other factor, explains their bellicose insistence on the rightness of what happened.

Peter Cochrane is an honorary associate in the Department of History, University of Sydney. His most recent book is the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man (Penguin, 2013). A forthcoming essay on the World War I diaries collection at the State Library of New South Wales will appear in Humanities Australia (no. 6, 2015) in May–June.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 24 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY The Boer War A longer shadow Jim Davidson

THE ANZACS AT Gallipoli have not only eclipsed the greater Australian involvement on the Western Front, but have occluded another war altogether. This is the Boer War – more properly the Second Boer War – fought in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, where our troops actually saw real action in Africa, unlike the Sudan contingent of 1884. There would be some twenty thousand Australians involved, a proportion of the population equivalent to the number who served in Vietnam. And importantly, there are a number of ways the war cast a long shadow over Australia. It was in South Africa that the distinctive qualities of Australian soldiers were first identified: tenacious fighters able to live off the land, sceptical of military rules and procedures, and in matters of discipline (as a British officer put it) ‘curiously lax’. Even so, the Boer War slipped from public consciousness relatively quickly. Although some two hundred monuments went up across the country, a number were shifted and some disappeared. The national monument in Melbourne – a plinth near the Shrine of Remembrance – is often overlooked even by historians. (A new one is currently being erected in Canberra.) The longer they lived, the more Boer War veterans felt sidelined. Some young people even thought it had been a foreign war. There are a number of reasons why the war quietly faded away. Collect­ ive memory of the Boer War was soon swamped by the Great War. The total

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518 deaths were eclipsed by those killed at Gallipoli alone in a week or two; given this, it is not surprising that the Australian War Memorial should have seen its commemoration as effectively beginning with the later conflict. The Australians in South Africa were integrated with British regiments, took no distinctive part in major battles and, embarrassingly, lost slightly more men to disease than to enemy action. The low profile of the Australian contingents in the war contributed to its relegation. Moreover, in important respects, this was a colonial war. The first Commonwealth contingent did not set out till it was nearly over; the soldiers’ affiliations were usually with the colonies (then states), and they preferred it that way. Even so, South Africa was also seen as an Australian frontier: volunteers, much better paid than the British soldiery, were keen to follow Australian miners there, and hopefully make their fortune. When, in 1902, the shire of Kilmore in Victoria faced the expenses of celebrations for both the new king and the impending peace in South Africa, it opted for the latter. Compared with ‘opening up a new country in South Africa’, Edward VII’s coronation ‘was a secondary matter’.

COMING WHEN IT did, the Boer War crystallised a double, British– Australian identity. The ‘union’ with the motherland was ‘now cemented by their blood’, proclaimed the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. Indeed, Chamberlain held out the prospect of Australia being consulted with regard to the postwar settlement in South Africa. In 1900, he conceded that the projected High Court, rather than his preferred (British) Privy Council, should be empowered to deal with Australian constitutional issues. This concession was made the day before Mafeking was relieved. It was a receipt for military aid; or perhaps, given that the future founder of the Boy Scouts was still cooped up in the besieged town, a proficiency badge. The new Australian federation was felt to have been ratified by partici- pation in the war. And at that moment – in contrast to the Canadians, say – something entered Australia’s DNA. Ever since, we have rushed to volunteer troops for overseas service, in support of a great and powerful friend. (I do not refer here to Menzies’ famous 1939 statement, ‘Great Britain is at war; therefore Australia is at war’.

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That was a simple statement of contemporary legalities.) Nor has this impulse been confined to the conservative side of politics alone. In 1990, Bob Hawke was quick to announce the sending of battleships to the Persian Gulf, in support of America’s first Iraq war. He did not have the approval of the full Cabinet, and his was a rather broad interpretation of a Security Council resolution. Similarly Tony Abbott, in the way conservative leaders somehow manage to coincide their Washington visits with first-class crises, easily slid in 2013 into offering our support in Iraq. Since then, of course, troops have been despatched. And unlike the United Kingdom – or following Hawke’s initiative in the Gulf War – there was no debate of the issue in parliament. Of course, such a commitment is helping an ally. But as people need reminding, ANZUS is not NATO. There is no strong commitment to military aid in the event of attack, just consultations. And so we have to demonstrate our attachment to America again and again, to prove our worthiness. The assumption is abiding affinity, a convergence of interests – as was assumed in the British Empire at its peak. The corollary is that we have no sixth sense, as other countries do, of how their activities will be read internationally. Reintroducing knights and dames while turning back asylum seekers – when the two are placed alongside – can look very much like a White Australia hankering after the late British Empire. Similarly, the recent change in designation of East Jerusalem from ‘occupied’ to ‘disputed’ is not, given its singularity, the action of a country used to conducting a sophisticated foreign policy. The sending of troops overseas, effectively beginning with the Boer War, has induced in us a sense of always being secondary players – with diminished responsibility. Sharing some premises with British embassies, as is planned, will only strengthen the perception that basically we behave like a satellite. Of course, it is justified on economic grounds as cost cutting. That is precisely the kind of folly that happens when countries think of and describe themselves as economies, rather than nations. As sport looms ever larger in Australian life – the Christian citadel of Good Friday has just fallen to the AFL – so too has there been some conver- gence with the military. For some time now, there has been a special Anzac

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Day football match – televised complete with advertisements recruiting for the army. Meanwhile, sporting teams seeking to build team spirit as well as raise fitness have deliberately chosen to walk the Kokoda ‘Trail’. Military and sporting consciousness seem to have accelerated together in recent years. Both draw on group identification and stirring individual action, united in the concept ‘Team Australia’. The effect is that Australians seem to be slipping into regarding war as sport with guns. This attitude was implanted, loosely, by the cheery departures of the colonial contingents to the Boer War. It has subse- quently taken root because, while Australia was attacked during World War II, no actual engagement has been fought on Australian soil. War for us has always been a series of away matches.

AUSTRALIA’S INVOLVEMENT IN the Boer War may have been marginal, compared with the world wars that followed. But now that our soldiers have fought in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, together with unilateral operations elsewhere, it looks less aberrational. Limited actions (hopefully) are more likely to be the style of Australian participation in future wars. The Boer War is thus coming to be seen as more and more in the mainstream. Country towns tell it true. In some of them, later war memorials take their alignment from the Boer War one. Indeed, in the case of Casino, NSW, the later wars are but additions to the ‘Mafeking Lamp’ standing at the town’s main junction; the war becomes almost generative of Australia’s later military involvements. Coming as it did just as we were entering Federation, the Boer War caught Australia on the hinge of history. Protocols for notifying the Austra- lian government of important decisions involving our soldiers were not yet in place: Prime Minister Edmund Barton heard of the execution of Morant and Handcock only from a returning soldier. Such disregard, as well as other tensions, fed a determination that, in future, Australian troops abroad would be under Australian command. Meanwhile there remains what some see as the unfinished business of the Morant affair. Scapegoats of the Empire, George Witton (the third man) memorably entitled his 1907 account of the affair. The title encapsulates the argument that the

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Australian troopers were sacrificial victims to a broader cause. In Bruce Beres- ford’s film Breaker Morant (1980), the scriptwriter came up with the wicked line, said by a British officer of the Australians, ‘They don’t understand our altruism, sir’. And it is a striking fact – if generally unnoticed – that the two men were shot on the national day of the Transvaal republic. As the British were anxious to bring the war to a close, and induce the Boers to surrender, this is scarcely likely to have been a coincidence. Even so, there are serious difficulties in endorsing the campaign to secure pardons for Morant and Handcock. That it should even be contemplated reflects the postmodern practice that history is no longer granted integrity – in other words, it is no longer protected by the recognition expressed in the old saying d’autre temps, d’autre moeurs (other times, other customs). Apart from that, the argument that the pair should be pardoned on the basis of irregular procedure in their trial is fallacious. Narrowly, it might be correct – various legal worthies have argued so. But this totally disregards the subsequent enunciation and elaboration of war crimes, which would place any such pardon against the spirit of the later development of the laws of war. Besides, if one is to judge the affair by the military law of 1902 – as has been urged – then the question of context must also be considered, which is exactly why tampering with history is a dodgy practice. The stickiest of the charges the three faced was the murder of the missionary Mr Heese, of which, for want of evidence and a serviceable alibi, they were acquitted. The enormity of this offence has paled with time, as secularism has advanced. But Mr Heese was not only an unarmed civilian; he would have commanded enormous respect as, the expression went, ‘a man of God’. The ghost of ‘The Breaker’ still rides. And the shadow of the Boer War still falls, however long.

Jim Davidson is a historian and biographer. His best-known books are Lyrebird Rising (MUP, 1994) and A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian WK Hancock (UNSW Press, 2010). Together these books have won half-a-dozen prizes, including the Prime Minister’s History Prize, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction and the Age Nonfiction Book of the Year. He is now writing a double biography of Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 29 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY Immigration, integration, disintegration The perilous road to Australian multiculturalism Gerhard Fischer

ON 26 SEPTEMBER 1999, the Governor-General delivered the opening address at the inaugural Australian Conference on Lutheran Education at a Gold Coast resort. In his speech, Sir William Deane offered an apology to members of the German–Australian community present at the meeting:

The tragic, and often shameful, discrimination against Austra- lians of German origin fostered during the world wars had many consequences. No doubt, some of you carry the emotional scars of injustice during those times as part of your backgrounds or family histories. Let me as Governor-General say to all who do how profoundly sorry I am that such things happened in our country.

The little-known apology invites reflection on a number of issues, particularly in the context of the centenary commemorations and the privileged role the Anzac myth as Australia’s foundation narrative has been accorded in recent years. The story of the German–Australian commu- nity offers an alternative view of Australia’s history as a nation. While the Governor-General refers to ‘scars of injustice’ and family histories, and thus to individual grief and loss, it might be appropriate also to recall

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the experience of a collective loss the nation incurred when a significant community within its ranks was destroyed during the Great War.

DURING THE NINETEENTH century and well into the twentieth, German-speaking immigrants constituted the largest non-Anglo–Celtic group in Australia. Organised large-scale immigration had begun with the arrival in 1838 of groups of Lutheran farming communities from the eastern provinces of Prussia. They settled in South Australia, and the foundation of their first villages, Hahndorf and Klemzig, served as a point of attraction that was to bring many more immigrants to the Barossa Valley. A smaller wave in the wake of the failed German revolution of 1848 brought a different group of immigrants: urban professionals and intel- lectuals, outspoken democrats and liberals who were dissatisfied with the lack of political reforms in Germany and preferred to live in a country that promised constitutional democracy and progress towards their ideal of a unified nation state. A third wave of German immigrants was contained within the huge number of fortune-hunters who came to Victoria during the gold rush years of the 1850s. When the goldfields were exhausted, many of the diggers and tradesmen of German origin took up farming in Victoria and New South Wales. After 1860, government-sponsored immigration and free passages coupled with the prospect of cheap land brought large numbers of agricultural settlers to Queensland. Around 1880, the number of German immigrants in Queensland had surpassed that of South Australia. There was a sizeable urban community of merchants, tradesmen and labourers living in and around Brisbane; however, most of the German immigrants settled on the land, along the coast and on the Darling Downs, where they played a significant role in the pioneering work of opening up the country for agriculture. In New South Wales, no such areas of contiguous settlement existed, but a substantial number of German immigrants, mostly skilled tradesmen, chose to live in or near Sydney. By around 1860, a very visible German–Australian community was well established. It was prosperous, sophisticated and generally highly

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regarded by their British–Australian compatriots who preferred to think of the immigrants from the Continent, with some patriarchal condescen- sion no doubt, as our Germans. In the towns, German clubs, complete with their marching bands, athletics associations and Liedertafel choirs, consti- tuted centres of social activity that attracted wide audiences not limited to members of their own ethnicity. There were prominent business estab- lishments that carried German names. Australians of German origin were active in the medical and legal profession, in education, the arts as well as in commerce and industry, science and politics. In the metropolitan cities, and in Adelaide in particular, one could spend the day easily without having to speak a word of English: shopping, attending doctors’ or dentists’ surgeries, relaxing over a cup of coffee and a piece of cake while reading the Australische Zeitung in a German Konditorei (coffee shop), or wining and dining in one of the city’s two German hotels, the King of Hanover or the Hamburg Hotel, both in Rundle Street. In 1861, towards the end of the Victorian gold rush, people of German origin comprised 4.32 per cent of the total Australian population. They were by far the largest non-British immigrant group: the Chinese, as the second largest, came to 3.28 per cent by comparison; the Italians as the third largest made up only 0.21 per cent, and the total migrant population of forty-eight other ethnic communities amounted to only 3.25 per cent. By 1895, the overall number of German–Australians, including the descendants of immigrants of the second and third generations, had been estimated at approximately one hundred thousand, and this figure remained stable until 1914. As the total Australian population was approaching five million at the outbreak of war, the percentage of Germans in Australia comprised roughly 2 per cent: hardly a significant number statistically.

THEIR HISTORY, AS Augustin Lodewyckx noted in 1932, is the ‘history of their Anglicisation’, although ‘Australianisation’ is perhaps a better term. To compete socially, in business and on the labour market, it was necessary to speak the language and to become familiar with the vernacular, the customs and norms of the new country. In rural districts, where the church was the central focus of the community, assimilation was a slower process, but the

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Lutheran pastors were in no position to resist the process of assimilation, nor – it must be emphasised – was it in their interest to do so. Loyalty to the state and respect for the secular authorities, based on the concept of the Zwei-Reich-Lehre (that is, the doctrine of the two kingdoms, spiritual and temporal), had been central tenets of Lutheran theology ever since the Reformator’s dilemma in having to side with the feudal princes against the rebelling peasants during the Peasants’ War of the early sixteenth century. This was a point that was emphasised over and over again: as Lutheran Christians, their allegiance was to the government of the state in which they lived, its institutions and constitutional authority. The Lutheran pastors were very conscious of their identity as represen- tatives of an Australian, not a German, church. They were subjects of the British Crown and citizens of their respective Australians colonies, and of the Commonwealth after 1901, and it made no difference to them whether individual parishioners had become naturalised or not. Relations with Germany were of a purely private nature, concerning the maintenance of language, family ties and cultural traditions. At the same time, the Lutheran clerical establishment fastidiously insisted on its autonomy in religious and cultural–educational matters, including the teaching of German in its schools. To be sure, the German language reminded the German–Australian Lutherans of their country of origin, but it was above all the language of Martin Luther, his Bible and catechism, and of his wording of the Lord’s Prayer. The decline of the Lutheran schools gives a clear indication of the process of Australianisation. Around 1900, there were forty-six Lutheran schools in South Australia, forty-five in Queensland, ten in Victoria and one in Sydney. They were all primary schools, small to very small (average size: thirty-five pupils) with only one or two teachers. English had become the main medium of instruction in most of the schools; only classes in religious studies were conducted in German. In the following years, most schools were forced to reduce their operations from five days to one; to become purely denominational Saturday schools, devoted to maintaining the German language for the purpose of reading liturgical texts. By 1913, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Australia had begun publishing in English; its monthly periodical, now titled The Australian

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Lutheran, had a decidedly national tenor, as the foreword of the first edition explained: ‘The term “Australian”…is a “national” cognomen, signify- ing that the paper is published in Australia, by Australians and, first and foremost, for Australians, be they Australians by birth or adoption.’ All Lutheran schools were closed during the war, as were all German clubs and German-language newspapers.

THE ARRIVAL OF immigrants, who left Germany for political reasons after the disappointing failure of the March Revolution of 1848 – known as ‘48ers’ – marked a new beginning in the history of the German–Austra- lian community. Their numbers were comparatively small, but they exerted considerable influence due to their role as journalists and publishers of German-language publications. The most prominent 48er was Hermann Püttmann (1811–74), previously arts editor of the Kölner Zeitung, a friend of poets Heine and Weerth and associate of Marx and Engels. Püttmann arrived in Melbourne in 1855 after residing for a few years in London; as author and publisher of journals and calendars he soon played a leading role in the German-speaking community in Victoria. In Adelaide, Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Mücke (1815–98), head of a group of like-minded immigrants from Berlin, was no less prominent as the spiritus rector of the South Australian German community. He had studied classi- cal philology and sciences in Bonn and Berlin; his special interest was the propagation of a new curriculum where scientific and technological topics were to be given a prominent role. In 1847, a year before he arrived in South Australia, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Univer- sity of Jena for his achievements as a pedagogue. In 1878, the University of Adelaide followed by awarding him an honorary master’s degree, the highest academic honour that was available in Australia at the time. Mücke’s Australische Zeitung, a newspaper that grew out of his earlier Tanunda Deutsche Zeitung, eventually became the flagship of the German-language press in Australia. During the 1850s, Mücke and his journalistic collaborators played a major role in a public debate on the issue of ‘German rights’ that was being discussed in the context of introducing ‘responsible government’ – that is,

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a local colonial legislature. The German immigrants protested vehemently against plans to exclude them from standing for election to the proposed parliament. They were supported by a number of British-born Australians, including the Governor, but there were many who voiced opposition, arguing ‘the Germans should be grateful that they were even allowed to come to South Australia and stop demanding equal rights with English- men’. There is no doubt that the writer’s sentiment represented a substantial popular feeling, one that would re-emerge time and again in the decades to come. In the 1850s, however, the German–Australians carried the day: they were granted the right to stand for parliament, and in the first elections of 1857 one of the 48ers, Friedrich Krichauff, became the first legisla- tor in South Australia of German descent. The winning of both active and passive voting rights was an important step in the integration of the German–Australian community in the public life of the colony. The German-speaking minority now had a voice in the highest constitutional body and their spokesmen were accepted as co-legislators with full equal rights. German–Australians were assured of being able to participate in the political affairs of their new home country and to enjoy the privileges and liberties the democratic institutions offered, including the privilege of working towards new political goals and of disagreeing with the politics of the government of the day. Between December 1883 and February 1884, the Australische Zeitung ran a series of articles that amounted to a campaign for Australian independence. A comparison was repeatedly made between US and British–Australian citizenship; the comparative analysis clearly suggested a deficiency in the status accorded to ‘naturalised British subjects of Australia’:

The acquisition of citizenship in the US affords full equality and protection. This is not so in British colonies where the German immigrant gives up his German citizenship for a thing of little significance. Through naturalisation in a colony, he only becomes a citizen of that colony but not of all colonies, and especially not a citizen of Great Britain, although he has sworn an oath of allegiance

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to the Queen of England. If a naturalised German leaves his own colony, he is completely homeless, a pariah, a member of no nation, whereas the British colonist remains a Briton.

The final article in the series, on 28 February 1884, concluded with an eloquent call for Australian sovereignty in which the alternatives, Australia as a free country or as an inferior colony under the tutelage of Great Britain, were clearly spelled out:

Only with independence can a truly national life develop in which immigrants from everywhere fuse into one free nation. This is impossible as long as there is a mother-country to which Australia is politically subordinated, to which the British colonists look and whose ways they seek to force upon the other non-British colonists.

MÜCKE’S VISION CERTAINLY has a very contemporary resonance in terms of suggesting a fusion of different ethnic groups into a multicultural society. But how could a ‘truly national life develop’ in Australia, and how could German immigrants, representing a small minority within a British colony, put forward a claim towards defining Australian nationhood? To the overwhelming majority of Anglo–Australian immigrants at the time, ‘home’ meant the British Isles, their ‘nation’ was the British Empire. Mücke and his friends saw Australia as a nation in statu nascendi and they recognised it shared a common fate with the Germany they knew. To become a nation, Australia had what Germany lacked, namely a constitu- tional form of government that ensured individual freedom and civic rights to guarantee the democratic participation of its citizens in the development of their country. What Germany had, on the other hand, was what Australia lacked or did not yet possess, namely a consciousness of its mission to become a nation. This was precisely what the 48ers thought they were able to contrib- ute: their experiences in the struggle towards a unified, democratic nation state in Germany, unsuccessful though it had been in 1848, could be made productive in an effort to create a national consciousness in Australia.

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The 48ers were Australian nationalists and early republicans who devel- oped a concept of triple identity: a cultural identity linked to the German language and to the immigrants’ intellectual heritage; a political identity that implied loyalty to the King or Queen of England as the constitutional head of Australia; and a national identity as Australians committed to a nation in statu nascendi. The 48ers firmly believed that Australia would eventually follow the American model and develop into an independent republic. Their concept of an Australian nationalism had a number of things in common with the ‘Australianism’ that was beginning to be propagated by Anglo– Celtic Australians around 1890. It shared a belief in a singular Australian identity, based on an appreciation of the land and of the unique experi- ence of the pioneers who first developed it, on the special geographical, floral and faunal features of the continent, as well as a shared history. But the inclusive commitment to an Australia made up of ‘immigrants from everywhere’ offered a sharp contrast to the vision of the Australian Natives’ Association or the writers of the Bulletin who also advocated a separate Australian identity. The Bulletin’s masthead motto ‘Australia for the White Man’ was clearly incompatible with Mücke’s vision that was based on the universal principle of the Rights of Man and the ideals of the European Enlightenment. On 16 July 1883, a festive banquet was held at the Adelaide German Club to mark the election of Carl Mücke as an honorary member. The occasion was his sixty-eighth birthday, and it was a special, symbolic event: on this day Mücke had spent exactly half his life in Germany and the other half in Australia. Before an audience of over four hundred German– Australians, Mücke gave a vote of thanks that spelled out his vision of an Australian nation:

All of us have found in our dear Australia a new home [Heimath] which we sincerely love and where we can be happy, happier – for the most part – than we perhaps could have ever been in our old home country. Let us therefore return our active thanks to this our new home country. And what could our thanks be? Let us not forget

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that it was our fate, when it led us with broken hearts out of the old country to this place here, which destined us to help forming a new nation coming into existence in Australia, a nation made up of citizens of all nations but notably from England.

ON 10 AUGUST 1914, all ‘Germans’ living in Australia were called upon to report to the nearest police station: it was the beginning of the end of the once prosperous and proud German–Australian community. Registration involved filling out a yellow form which asked a number of personal particulars – name, address, date and place of birth, trade or occupation, marital status, property, length of residence in Australia, nationality, naturalisation details. It was then up to the local police officers to impose any restrictions they may have thought fit; usually these took the form of a Provisional Order, the aliens in question had to notify the police of any change of address or to report at daily or weekly intervals. The officers were subsequently required to fill out a second form (‘secret and confidential’), entitled Report on Person reputed to be an Enemy Subject, in which they had to state whether they believed their clients’ statements ‘to be frank and truthful’, and whether the aliens were ‘reputed to be anti-British’ or consorted ‘with persons believed to be of enemy origin’. Finally, they had to give an opinion as to whether or not the aliens ‘should be sent forward for examination by the military authorities’. On 29 October 1914, the Commonwealth Parliament assented to the War Precautions Act, conferring upon the government and the military authorities a wide range of powers. As Frank Crowley observed, the Act ‘gave the Commonwealth Government complete control over the press and the economy, and enabled it to establish a centralised and militarist administration’. The Manual of War Precautions listed no less than eighty-one separate offences and contained a bewildering collection of rules, orders and prohibitions – such as measures that forbade enemy aliens the possession of motor cars, telephones, cameras or homing pigeons. Internment was only one, albeit the most severe, infringement of their personal rights and liberty imposed upon German–Australians during the war.

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By the end of 1914, the commandants of the military districts had been given the authority to intern ‘enemy subjects with whose conduct they were not satisfied’, while the Minister of Defence George Foster Pearce reserved for himself the right to order the internment of naturalised subjects when he thought they were ‘disaffected or disloyal’. In 1915, paragraphs 55 and 56a enlarged the power of the minister ‘to cover the internment of disloyal natural born subjects [Australian by birth] of enemy descent, and of persons of hostile origin or association’. Once a military intelligence officer had decided an individual ‘enemy alien’ or a person of ‘hostile association’ constituted a ‘possible danger’, that person was arrested and placed in a camp behind barbed wire. It was ‘internment without trial’: the govern- ment routinely refused to submit the complaints of internees to the ordinary procedures of legal arbitration. In October 1916, the registration regulations were extended to apply to ‘all aliens, whether enemy or otherwise’. In the end, the machinery of registration, censorship, surveillance, internment and deportation set up by the department to control the resident ‘enemy’ population in Australia was also being used to investigate and prosecute pacifists, unionists, radical socialists, Irish nationalists, anti-conscriptionists of all ideological persua- sion, practically anybody who dared to speak out against the government’s commitment to the war. A precedent was established, involving the use of the state apparatus for the purpose of suppressing political opposition that constitutes one of the ominous features of the political culture first developed in Australia during the war. On the economic front, too, measures against perceived German business interests were enforced on the basis of comprehensive legislation. The Enemy Contracts Annulment Act and various Trading with the Enemy Acts, passed between 1914 and 1918, imposed restrictions that ranged from the prohibition to buy or sell land to owning or managing a business. Suspected aliens were ordered to disclose holdings in shares, securities or bank accounts; businesses were wound down and assets transferred to a trustee. The war provided a welcome opportunity to realise one of Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ long-held aims, namely ‘the eradication of German influences from the trade of all parts of the Empire’. This was

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to be achieved by diverting ‘trade from enemy to Empire’, as Hughes put it. The Trading with the Enemy legislation was designed not only to prevent Australian products from reaching Germany during the duration of the war, and vice versa; it was meant to destroy permanently what the Commonwealth Government considered to be German firms operating in Australia, regardless of whether they were branches of foreign companies or whether they were businesses founded in Australia and run by Austra- lian residents. Hughes was not afraid to point out that the war was being fought for economic supremacy; this was an argument to support Australia’s unreserved commitment to the war rather than to oppose it. Since it was physically impossible for the Australian authorities to detain all adult German–Australians, the government decided early on to pursue a policy of selective internment, even though ‘patriotic Britishers’ continued to call for the internment of all enemy aliens (‘Intern the lot!’) throughout the war. While the internment process was to a large extent improvised and capricious, there were nevertheless distinct policy objectives. The Common- wealth Government had announced early in the war that destitute enemy alien males could volunteer for internment if lacking any prospect of being able to pay for their livelihood. Their families, after being means-tested, were granted a small allowance. Progressively, the government then developed a policy of interning destitute or unemployed enemy aliens even if they did not volunteer. The Aliens Instructions, a military handbook detailing the rules of how to deal with ‘aliens’, explicitly gave district commandants the power to arrest aliens who they considered to be without a regular income. If the intelligence officers found that such individuals had no ties in the Commonwealth and were likely to become a burden on the government, it was routinely recommended that they should be deported after the conclusion of the war. The internment system thus developed into a tool of social control. It was used to segregate and, after the war, to exclude undesirable residents not only because of their ethnic origin but also because of their poor socio- economic status. Internees who had been imprisoned because they were

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considered mentally weak were similarly singled out. Yet other people were interned and later deported because they had criminal records. In South Australia and Queensland, the Department of Defence also pursued a policy of actively seeking out and interning those residents who were regarded as the political and spiritual leaders of the German– Australian community. The aim of the government was to destroy their community as an autonomous, socio-cultural entity within Australian society. This objective was pursued through many different avenues: the closing of German clubs and Lutheran schools, the cancelling of German place names and the internment of community leaders in order to deprive German–Australians of their spokesmen in the mainstream public sphere of Australian society. Thus, the Honorary German Consuls (as opposed to official members of the German diplomatic mission), usually prominent German–Australian businessmen residing in the capital cities of the different states, were all interned. The government firmly believed they were working in alliance with the Lutheran clergy on behalf of the Imperial German government. In South Australia, Consul Hermann Mücke, son of Carl, was briefly interned during April 1916 and subsequently detained in his home in Adelaide under military guard; at the same time his youngest son, Francis Frederick, was serving with the AIF in France after being wounded at Gallipoli. The Lutheran clergy were also believed to be leaders of the German– Australian community under orders from Berlin. In Queensland, nine pastors were interned. Six of them were naturalised, two of them had been born in Australia. One of the latter two was Pastor Friedrich Gustav Fischer of Goombungee, born in South Australia in 1876; both his parents had also been born in South Australia. Fischer’s internment was approved by Prime Minister Hughes’ Cabinet following a recommendation by George Pearce, who had based his opinion on an intelligence report prepared by his department. It read, in part:

The situation in the German districts gives great anxiety to British residents, and the best way of relieving their anxiety, as well as of keeping German residents in check, is to intern occasionally a few

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leading German residents. From this point of view it is considered that the internment of Fischer would be justified.

Of course, the government steadfastly maintained in public that its policy was to intern only persons who were considered ‘dangerous’. However, the recommendation by Pearce that was accepted by Cabinet clearly spells out the actual motivation of the government, namely to intern the leaders of the German–Australian community, dangerous or not, in order to keep the rest of the community ‘in check’ and, at the same time, to accommodate the wishes of the local ‘British’ community.

IN TOTAL, 6,890 persons were interned in Australia during the war, including sixty-seven women and eighty-four children. Despite the official designation ‘prisoners of war’ given to them by the Commonwealth authori- ties, the internees were mostly civilian Australian residents. They included approximately seven hundred ‘naturalised British subjects’ and some seventy ‘native-born British subjects’ who were Australian by birth, sometimes second- or even third-generation Australians of German ancestry. At the end of the war, a total of 6,150 persons were ‘repatriated’, that is summarily shipped to Germany: a mass deportation unparalleled in Australian history. Of these, 5,414 had been interned, the others were family members or non-interned ‘ex-enemy aliens’ who either accepted the govern- ment’s offer to be repatriated or were ordered to leave the country. Six hundred and ninety-nine people were compulsorily deported. The internees who had been brought to Australia from British dominions overseas were not allowed to return to their previous places of residence; they were all summarily deported. Most of the internees consented to leave Australia voluntarily; they were convinced that there was no future for them in a country that had robbed them of their rights and freedom. A few protested and appealed to stay, only to be rejected by the Aliens Tribunal that had been set up by the Department of Defence. The tribunal, consisting of a single magistrate, rubber-stamped the applications according to the guidelines issued by the government: as a rule, businessmen and importers were to be deported,

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while farmers – who were said to ‘have shown themselves of less potential danger than the German businessman’ – were allowed to stay, unless there were unspecified ‘special reasons’. Workingmen were to be deported ‘if there seems to be any doubt of their obtaining regular employment’ after the war. Here, as elsewhere, the official language with its curious linguis- tic construction – that is, some individuals had shown themselves to be less potentially dangerous – reveals the real political motivation hiding behind the bureaucratic rhetoric. When the war ended in November 1918, the government was confronted with the task of organising the transport of thousands of deport- ees. While negotiations were under way with the British Government to requisition ships, 104 internees died of the worldwide pneumonic influ- enza that struck Australia in 1919. The last prisoners were released on 5 May 1920, a year after the Treaty of Versailles had come into effect. They included fourteen ‘mentally feeble’ internees (of the fifty who had been brought to the Holdsworthy camp from insane asylums around Australia) who were transferred back to their original institutions; the other thirty-six had either died or had already been put on ships to be ‘repatriated’. By the end of the war, the once proud and highly visible German– Australian community had disintegrated. German immigrants, if they had not been deported, had gone into assimilationist hiding. It was the end of a process towards a multicultural society that would eventually lead to an independent Australian nation – or so had been the hope of the spokesmen of the German–Australian community who had publicly proposed the notion of a republican Australian citizenship as early as the 1870s. How can one explain the Australian home-front experience during the Great War: the extraordinary conversion by which an apparently peace- ful, largely homogenous, ‘optimistic’ society with strong traditions of British-style liberal democracy based on constitutional rule of law, turned into a violent, aggressive, conflict-ridden society, torn apart by invisible lines of sectarian division, ethnic conflict and socio-economic and politi- cal upheaval? How did domestic co-operation and laissez faire change into spiteful intolerance and blatant injustice?

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The war at home against an imaginary enemy, waged by a govern- ment that called on the Australian people to assist in every way possible, fuelled a jingoistic atmosphere of demarcation and exclusion; its aim was to emphasise the ‘Britishness’ of Australian society and to reinforce its links to the Empire. As a civil, pluralistic, liberal and democratic society, Australia did not pass the test of the crisis brought about by the Great War in Europe. The country suffered a setback in its political culture from which it did not recover until long after the next world war which, with regard to the treatment of ‘enemy aliens’, was largely a repetition of the experiences of 1914–18. It was another sixty years before Carl Mücke’s nineteenth-century dream of an Australia with citizens who felt able to embrace multiple identi- ties began to be revived following the postwar immigration program, which doubled the population and gave birth to a new multiculturalism. In a forerunner of other apologies, it took almost a century before the ‘shame- ful discrimination’ and its consequences were to be acknowledged.

References at www.griffithreview.com

Gerhard Fischer is adjunct professor of German and European studies at the University of New South Wales and fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. A literary scholar and historian, Fischer has published on World War I (Enemy Aliens, UQP, 1989) and on nineteenth-century migration history, as well as on modern German and European literature and drama. His book The Enemy at Home: German Internees in WWI Australia (with Nadine Helmi, UNSW Press, 2011) won a 2012 National Trust Heritage Award.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 44 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY Breaking ranks with Empire New Zealand’s Gallipoli graves Christopher Pugsley

IN 1920, THE New Zealand official war artist George Edmund Butler presented a painting to the New Zealand Government for the proposed National War Memorial Museum. It is titled Butte de Polygon with the subtitle, Thy Father and I have sought thee sorrowing. Luke II: 48. It depicts an aged couple standing over a soldier’s grave in the wasteland of the Western Front. In the background is the Butte de Polygon at Polygon Wood, to the east of Ypres, in the half circle of hills savagely fought for in the battles of Ypres from 1914 to 1918. This ground was occupied by the New Zealand Division in the winter of 1917–18. What the picture depicts was the hope of every New Zealand family that had lost a loved one in the First World War. They needed to believe that it was possible to travel across the world and visit a battlefield where their boy had fought and find his grave. The difficulties can be imagined, but Butler understood the powerful emotional impulse of what he portrayed, encapsulated in the words of the subtitle. Most would never be able to attempt such a journey but every family in New Zealand wanted to believe that it was possible and that once there they would find a grave or memorial on the battlefield where he fell. This desire of the mothers of New Zealand grew out of the Gallipoli experience. Unlike Australia, we did not claim that Gallipoli is where New Zealand became a nation. However, the New Zealand Gallipoli experience

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forged a national response that led to New Zealand taking an independent stance on the question of war graves and battlefield memorials that still resonates today, even if we – as New Zealanders – have forgotten why. The scale of the Gallipoli casualties shocked the country, and delays and the breakdown in the system of official reporting of the losses shook the public’s faith in William Massey’s Reform government, forcing him into a national government with the opposition leader, Sir Joseph Ward. In setting out to regain the country’s trust, Massey determined that it was not enough to have an imperial memorial to commemorate where New Zealanders fought and died, it must be a New Zealand monument that reflected our achievement and not one subsumed into an Empire’s efforts. He also determined that the Gallipoli Peninsula should be annexed to the British Empire. This became an important plank in government policy, even if New Zealand had little or no influence on the operational conduct of the war. Massey’s war cry became one of ‘Gallipoli graves’. This continued to resonate into the 1920s, and today is the answer to questions as to why New Zealand has its own memorials to the missing both on Gallipoli and in France and Belgium, and why there are no New Zealand names on the major imperial memorials at Cape Helles in Turkey, Menin Gate at Ypres in Belgium and at the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme in France.

THE NEWS OF New Zealand’s involvement in the landings on 25 April 1915 was received with great pride throughout the country. The congratula- tions of King George V was proof that New Zealand was playing its part as a junior partner in the British Empire. It had committed a New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) numbering some 8,500 personnel. This was less than half the strength of a standard British infantry division – the normal battle formation. In Egypt, the New Zealanders – under the command of Major-General Alexander Godley – had joined with Australian units to form a mixed New Zealand and Australian Division that, together with the First Australian Division, formed the Anzac Corps. For both countries, forces were largely made up of citizen soldiers with a small cadre of professional officers, with the majority of its officers and soldiers lacking military experience and any depth of professional knowledge. This amateurism was to be exposed in the Gallipoli landings.

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The high hopes of the Gallipoli landings foundered in the mistakes made by the Anzacs in the first day’s fighting. Instead of a rapid advance across the peninsula, they found themselves besieged by a professional and experienced Ottoman Army that was intent on driving them back into the sea. Neither country had thought through the implications of sending a citizen army to war. The time spent training in Egypt had already raised questions of national administration concerning what had previously seen to be mundane matters – pay, reinforcements, mail and hospitalisation. These suddenly became some of the many questions that both governments needed to answer to satisfy the public at home that their boys were being effectively cared for. Answering such questions by putting an efficient system of admin- istration into place became an umbilical cord between each country and its army overseas. In the first weeks after the landing, Massey’s government suddenly found that it did not matter how effusive King George V was in his praise of the Anzac achievement; it meant little if the women of New Zealand could not hear news of their sons. It brought home to Massey and his ministers the sober reality that war was a political act with immediate political consequences, where pragmatic matters of news of the dead and wounded became one of immediate national concern, outweighing New Zealand’s role in the larger imperial strategic picture. Praise was irrelevant if the government was not able to tell its citizens who of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) were dead or wounded, and if wounded, what was their condition and where were they being treated? The chaos of the first days ashore saw the Anzacs intermingled and fight- ing for their survival. It was not until May 1915 that the survivors carried out an effective rollcall. In the first hours on that crowded beach, the evacu- ation of casualties broke down, no records were kept and hospital ships and transports carrying wounded were directed to wherever hospital beds were available: Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar or the United Kingdom. The news of the wounded was cabled back to New Zealand as and when the hospital ship or transport arrived at port. This meant that, apart from a handful of names and vague suggestions of heavy casualties, no word at all was received by the New Zealand public.

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It was not until 3 May 1915 that the first names were released. Two officers were listed as wounded, and in addition private cables notified relatives of a further five wounded. The first official lists were published on 4–5 May 1915, ten days after the landing. They reported eight officers killed in action, two officers dead from wounds, nineteen officers and 107 men wounded. These reports were cabled back from the New Zealand Base Depot in Egypt. Here, New Zealand staff met the hospital ships as they arrived and compiled the cables to be sent home. The information they gathered concerned only the wounded who had arrived in Egypt and those who were known to have died of wounds on the voyage from Gallipoli. There were as yet no reports from the front at Gallipoli.

IN NEW ZEALAND, there were already disquieting undercurrents. The first wounded to reach Egypt sent private cables home to inform parents and next of kin. In many cases, cables mentioned men killed and wounded who had not yet been reported in New Zealand. The Defence Department and the government were inundated with inquiries from anxious parents and relatives. On 4 May 1915, Massey attempted to reassure the country that the government was releasing all details as they came to hand: ‘…and I deprecate the mischievous rumours which have been put into circulation.’ On the following day, he acknowledged the current anxiety at the absence of a complete list of casualties. ‘Only a few particulars as to the killed have yet been received. We are working at high pressure.’ On 5 May 1915, the national dailies reported that ‘a conviction was secured against Isabella Margaret Morpeth of Picton Street’, Auckland. She had sent a ‘misleading telegram’ – contrary to the War Regulations Act of 1914 – to her aunt, who had two nephews at the Dardanelles, stating ‘700 New Zealanders killed’, which she had overheard from a gentleman in the street. The Defence Department stated such prosecutions were necessary to ‘stop a prevalent and most deplorable practice’. Each private cable and then the letters home became ripples in an increasingly disturbed pond. By mid-May, the casualties published in New Zealand totalled 1,162, seventy-six men killed or dead from wounds, four dead from disease, two missing and 1,080 wounded. But New Zealand casualties from Anzac operations were already double that figure.

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The first lists compiled by the New Zealand units on Gallipoli were not received in New Zealand until 17 June, and inevitably were riddled with error. Many soldiers reported wounded on the first day – seen by their comrades to be making their way back to the beach – collapsed and later died in the scrub on ground that was retaken by the Turks, and so they lay unknown in no-man’s land. Private cables continued to arrive that contra- dicted the official lists and the growing demand for information could not be stilled. The feeling grew that the casualties were so bad the government was holding the true figures back. In every district, telegrams were arriving: ‘We regret to inform you that Private…has been wounded in action at the Dardanelles.’ Parents anxiously waited for more news, and were assured by the government and the Defence Department that further details would be sent and that ‘no news was good news’. This backfired when, for the first time, men previously reported wounded were now said to be missing. These soldiers could not be found in any hospital in Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar or the United Kingdom and so next of kin were informed that the casualty was now ‘wounded and missing’. These lists were published on 13 August 1915, concurrent with a flood of casualty notifications from the August offensive. All this simply added to the disquiet. Ministers and members of parliament were besieged by deputations of soldier’s mothers, ‘who urged an immediate improvement in the system of notifying casualties and the progress of wounded soldiers in hospital’. The government had no immediate answer and bore the public’s anger. Massey had a minority government and, in August 1915, was forced into forming a national government with the opposition for the duration of the war. A Cabinet minister with military experience was sent to Egypt as a ‘Special Representative’ to seek advice on how casualty reporting could be improved. By now Gallipoli was a stalemate and, increasingly, a sideshow; yet it was clear that it had consumed almost all of the 8,500 men of the original main body that had sailed from New Zealand on 16 October 1914. In all, 8,556 New Zealanders of the NZEF served on Gallipoli: 2,779 died, 5,212 were wounded. A soldier could be wounded and later killed and so appear a number of times within the statistics, but even allowing for this the figures are horrific. Out of 8,556, that 7,991 is 93 per cent of those who served

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on the Peninsula: far in excess of any other country involved in the campaign, and this figure does not include those evacuated with sickness and disease. Australian battle casualties numbered 28,150, including 8,709 dead. This dwarfed the New Zealand total, but as a percentage of the fifty to sixty thousand Australians who served in the campaign – curiously still an estimate, given the Australian preoccupation with Gallipoli – amounts to 47–56 per cent. Indian Army casualties were similar, with 46 per cent of their estimated 10,500 soldiers. French battle casualties numbered twenty-seven thousand or 34 per cent, British battle casualties numbered 73,485, including 21,225 dead – 22 per cent of 330,000 soldiers, many of who were logistic and supporting troops. Newfound- land’s contribution of a battalion numbering 1,076 in September 1915 suffered 146 casualties, 13 per cent of those serving on the Peninsula. New Zealand’s share of the burden was out of proportion to any other member of the British Empire and the implications of this preoccupied Massey’s government for the rest of the war. No country had come so far to fight in this campaign or had suffered so much.

THE ANZAC PERIMETER was evacuated in December 1915 and Lieuten- ant-General Godley, having been promoted and now commanding the Anzac Corps as well as the NZEF, wrote to James Allen, the New Zealand minister of defence.

I have written to the Turkish commander who will come in when we leave asking him to take steps to preserve the graves of our men. I feel sure that this will be effected, as the Turks have been most honourable during the eight months we have been fighting them, and will not do anything to desecrate our men’s resting places.

In January 1916, New Zealand girded itself for a long war with the prospect of further heavy casualties. Massey gave a manifesto to the people, setting out New Zealand’s war aims and the need for volunteers to maintain the numbers of what was to be a New Zealand Division of some eighteen thousand men. At this point, New Zealand had sent thirty-four thousand men overseas and had twelve thousand in training at home. It was committed to sending 2,500 men every month for the duration of the war.

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The New Zealand dead on Gallipoli were central to his appeal. ‘The graves of Gallipoli appeal to us silently, yet eloquently, that the sacrifices made there, and the heroic lives laid down on that shell-swept Peninsula shall not have been given in vain.’ The New Zealand government willingly spoke out on the blunders and mistakes of the Gallipoli campaign. This willingness not to whitewash what had gone wrong was reflected in Sir Thomas Mackenzie’s stance as New Zealand High Commissioner in London and member of the Darda- nelles Commission, which reported on the conduct of the campaign. The Australian High Commissioner and former prime minister, Andrew Fisher, absented himself from much of the consideration and chose not to sign the final report. Mackenzie, while ‘substantially in agreement with the findings of the Commission’, held stronger views on some of the issues that he included in a supplementary report, which was far more critical about the planning and conduct of the campaign, raising questions on command performance that he believed had not been adequately answered and were particularly critical of the treatment of wounded. This willingness to speak out was also reflected in New Zealand’s dealings on the issue of war graves. Throughout the war, Massey and his coalition partner, Sir Joseph Ward, visited the Western Front and England for extended periods and returned again for the treaty negotiations at Versailles. As a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, Massey accepted that he had no voice in the conduct of opera- tions but insisted that he be listened to on the matter of Gallipoli graves. It was a promise he repeated to the New Zealand public each year of the war. He wanted the Gallipoli Peninsula to be ceded to the British Empire and argued for this at Versailles. He was rewarded with agreement by the major powers that the peace treaty with Turkey would include a clause ceding perpetual ownership of the Gallipoli battlefields to Great Britain. Massey did not get all that he wished. The Treaty of Sevres dismem- bered the Turkish Empire and led to the rise of Kemal Atatürk. The Gallipoli area was garrisoned by a British Army Corps and Atatürk’s advance threatened British control of the straits, and with it the Anzac graves. British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George appealed to the Dominions for military support and New Zealand offered a contingent of twelve thousand men.

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The military crisis was defused and the contingent was never sent, but historians see this as proof that Massey remained a fervent imperialist. This is not the case: Massey’s offer was not to protect the Empire’s interests but to protect New Zealand’s graves and ensure that they remained under British control. He was honouring his promise to the people of New Zealand.

THE TREATY OF Lausanne was signed in 1923 and, while it did not meet the full extent of Massey’s wish in terms of control, it ceded ‘the land occupied as British war cemeteries…together with the area known as the “Anzac” area…for the perpetual resting place of those who are laid there.’ Control was vested in the Imperial War Graves Commission, which recommended the erection of an imperial memorial at Cape Helles to repre- sent the British Empire’s efforts in the campaign. The walls surrounding this would list the names of those with no known graves. By now, it was evident from the reports of the grave identification units working on the Peninsula that there were very few identified New Zealand graves. In fact, of the 2,779 New Zealand dead there were only 344 known graves on the Peninsula, on Lemnos or in Istanbul. In addition, 252 were buried at sea. Massey’s government determined that New Zealand names would not appear on the imperial monument but be recorded on New Zealand Memori- als to the Missing, located where the men had fought and died. Over the opposition of the Imperial War Graves Commission, New Zealand decided on four locations for the memorials. One is at Twelve Tree Copse at Cape Helles, for the 179 who had no known grave after the Second Battle of Krithia on 8 May 1915. Another is at Lone Pine, for the 709 unidentified dead who died between April and December 1915 and also to commemorate the 252 buried at sea. The New Zealand Memorial to the Missing on Chunuk Bair carries the names of 853 New Zealanders who died in the August offensive and had no known graves. This is in stark relief to the ten identified graves in the Chunuk Bair Cemetery, eight of which belong to New Zealanders. There are 632 unidentified graves in the cemetery. The New Zealand Memorial to the Missing at Hill 60 records the names of 183 New Zealand names with no known graves. By contrast, the Australian dead with no known graves are only recorded either on the Cape Helles Imperial Memorial or at Lone Pine.

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Today, many assume that the Australian national memorial is at Lone Pine. This is not the case – it is a shared memorial with the names of the Australian missing on the walls in front of the memorial while the New Zealand names are on the memorial itself. Australia has no national memorial at Gallipoli. New Zealand was also the only member of the British Empire to insist on its own national ‘battle exploits’ memorial on Chunuk Bair, to commemorate New Zealand’s achievement in taking the summit during the August 1915 offensive. At its unveiling on 13 May 1925, General Godley stressed why it was important:

Can there be any doubt as to the suitability of the site of this great New Zealand memorial or the right of New Zealand to it?… What can I say? Only this – that the leadership, the spearpoint, the backbone and the impetus of the attack was provided by the New Zealanders, that it was primarily a New Zealand feat of arms, and that never in the history of the world has a more beautiful or a more suitable monument been erected to perpetuate the memory of a more gallant exploit.

Once again, this was against the wishes of the Imperial War Graves Commission, who wanted the campaign memorialised with the single Imperial monument at Cape Helles. New Zealand determinedly got its way and indicated that it would erect similar national Battle monuments in France and Flanders. These were erected at Longueval on the Somme, at Messines and at Gravenstafel, to record the New Zealand battles before Passchendaele on 4 and 12 October 1917, and at Le Quesnoy to mark New Zealand’s taking of the town on 4 November 1918 in what was the New Zealand Division’s final battle.

NEW ZEALAND’S INSISTENCE on having its own battle exploits memorials won support from both Australia and Canada and led to them following a similar policy in erecting national memorials – Canada at Vimy and Australia at Villers-Bretonneux. But of all the Dominions, New Zealand alone marked each of its major battle sites with a national memorial. In addition, New Zealand also insisted – as on Gallipoli – that its Memorials to the Missing be located on the actual site where New Zealanders

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fought. Because of this, one looks in vain for New Zealand names on the major imperial monuments to the missing in Belgium and France. There are no New Zealand names on the Menin Gate Memorial, nor on the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme. Instead, New Zealanders with no known graves are recorded on national memorials at Caterpillar Valley Cemetery with views towards the New Zealand Battlefield Monument that marks the first objec- tive taken on the morning of 15 September 1916. There are New Zealand Memorials to the Missing at Armentieres, Messines, Tyne Cot Cemetery, Polygon Wood, Grevillers and – smallest of all – at Marfaux, with ten New Zealand names from the Cyclist Battalion who died in 1918. The Imperial War Graves Commission also made provision for headstones to have inscriptions from the family, which incurred a small charge. The New Zealand government determined that, with so few known New Zealand graves on Gallipoli, it was iniquitous that 344 families would have that right when most New Zealanders who died in the campaign had no known graves. Unlike Great Britain, Australia and Newfoundland, New Zealand families were not given that choice – any words expressed remained in the hearts of the families that mourned them. This extended to the New Zealand graves on the Western Front and in Sinai and Palestine, and continued to be policy in the Second World War and ever since. Today, one is conscious of the many new memorials that Australia has erected to its soldiers in France and Flanders. On the Gallipoli Peninsula, it is the multiplication of Turkish monuments that grab one’s attention. It is easy to overlook the comparatively large number of New Zealand sites and the boldness behind the siting of the Chunuk Bair Memorial, which – when it opened in 1925 – was deliberately designed as a visible beacon that would reveal to ships passing through one of the world’s key strategic waterways the efforts of the soldiers of a small nation, who journeyed ‘From the uttermost ends of the earth’ and who saw it important to record New Zealand’s achievement.

Christopher Pugsley, ONZM, FRHistS, is a former New Zealand army officer, a freelance historian and the author of eighteen books. His book Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (Libro Press), first published in 1984, has recently been revised and republished in a fifth edition. He would like to acknowledge the research of his friend and colleague, the late Dr Don Mackay, whose thesis underpins the theme of this article.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 54 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY What was lost More than battle casualties Ross McMullin

DURING THE CENTENARY commemorations of the Great War, it will no doubt be frequently asserted that the conflict ‘made’ Australia (in a positive sense) after the nation was ‘born’ at Gallipoli. Such claims are dubious. It’s true that what Australia’s soldiers did and how they did it established a tradition of courage and endurance, effectiveness and resourcefulness, which was widely admired at the time and still is today. In addition, at the start of the war many Australians were looking forward to their nation distinguishing itself in an international context, and saw this conflict as the perfect opportunity. Among the soldiers imbued with this sentiment was Alan Henderson, a talented twenty-year-old lieutenant who earnestly assured his parents, as his troopship headed towards the Gallipoli coast on 24 April 1915, that the landing was ‘going to be Australia’s chance and she makes a tradition out of this that she will always look back on… The importance of this alone seems stupendous to Australia while the effect of success on the war itself will be even greater.’ Indeed, a more national perspective did seem to develop during the war years. Citizens who had regarded themselves mainly as Queenslanders or Tasmanians became more likely to see themselves as Australians, the soldiers in particular.

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With such considerations in play, the conclusion that the war ‘made’ Australia may be understandable. But the combined effect of these factors is substantially outweighed by the catastrophic AIF casualties. More than sixty thousand dead, all the severely wounded, the loss of so many talented prospects in so many spheres – such losses surely invalidate any notion that the war was beneficial for Australia. The experience of Alan Henderson’s family was typical. He died of wounds at the landing, his even more talented brother was killed within a fortnight, and their mother, a purposeful and widely esteemed social-welfare activist, had a nervous breakdown.

IN VIEW OF those ghastly casualty statistics, it’s not surprising that evalua- tions of the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus on the numbing numbers, on the collective impact of all those losses. This is appropriately democratic and consistent with our egalitarian traditions. That there must have been exceptionally talented individuals among them has been implicitly accepted, but not analysed until the publication of my book, Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (Scribe, 2012). It contains biogra- phies of ten Australians of outstanding potential from diverse backgrounds and specialties. They include an internationally acclaimed medical researcher; a talented engineer who distinguished himself with Mawson in Antarctica; a visionary vigneron and community leader; a Western Australian Rhodes scholar; a rising Labor star from Sydney; a brilliant Tasmanian footballer; a popular farmer who became the inspiration for the celebrated film Gallipoli; and a budding architect from Melbourne’s best-known creative dynasty, who combined an endearing personality with his family’s flair for writing and drawing. Besides such appalling individual losses, the war inflicted grievous damage on Australia’s cohesion. This effect was all the more damaging because of Australia’s impressive social development before 1914. The young nation was progressive, forward-looking and advanced. Many Australians welcomed the advent of welfare measures and innovations in public policy that confirmed their nation’s emergence as a relatively cohesive society based on egalitarianism and democratic principles, such as the secret ballot. The first national labour government in the world came to office in Australia in 1904,

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and six years later Australians elected the world’s first labour government with majorities in both parliamentary chambers and the ability to introduce substantial change. Glorious Days: Australia 1913, an exhibition at the National Museum of Australia two years ago, superbly depicted the sense of national confidence and optimism in that pre-war period. The degree of social harmony should not be overstated – some reforms were vigorously opposed in bitter disputes. However, it was widely and understandably accepted that Australia was leading the world in progres- sive, forward-looking initiatives. Some European analysts crossed the globe to inspect what they regarded as the advanced social laboratory taking shape in Australia. However, the war generated political, industrial and cultural upheaval in Australia. The nation became more bitterly divided than at any other time and the relatively cohesive social progress of the pre-war years was ruptured. Afterwards, Australia was no longer an innovative social laboratory that attracted admiring overseas visitors. Admittedly, the focus of many Australians, both during the war years and afterwards, was primarily on their own individual circumstances – simply getting by on a day-to-day basis with the added burden of anxiety about loved ones in the trenches, an anxiety that could last for years unless it was superseded by crushing grief. This focus on the micro was understandably more relevant to many of them than whatever they absorbed about macro developments such as plummeting national cohesion. Other Australians, however, were appalled by the way the psyche of the nation was harmed during the war years as the bitterness and violence of the recruitment and conscription campaigns kept increasing, sectarianism kept intensifying, and Prime Minister Billy Hughes kept exacerbating the sense of turbulent crisis with his recklessly inflammatory style of leadership. It was hardly surprising that the conscription referenda were so fiercely contested and engendered fervent animosity. By late 1916, when the first conscription referendum was held, it was already evident that to be compulsorily sent to the Western Front was equivalent to a potential death sentence. This was clearer still by the end of 1917, when Hughes resorted desperately to a second referendum. That year had been especially grim and bleak, both at home and overseas. The war itself

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seemed endless, a raging juggernaut of destruction, grief and misery. New names of faraway places struck dread into Australian families – Bullecourt, Messines, Ypres, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde. Furthermore, the labour movement’s pent-up frustration with uncongenial industrial, political and social developments during the war culminated in a massive strike in 1917, which reinforced Australia’s home-front divisiveness. The disharmony and discontent was not just about conscription, though this was a crucial ingredient. Australians could – and many did – adhere to a position broadly in favour of their nation being involved in the war without going along with conscription: this was the biggest war there had ever been, and it was better for Australia to be on the winning side than the opposite, so it would be appropriate for us to contribute to the winning of it if we could. By the end of 1917, though, a contrasting view was gaining adherents: this ghastly conflict, careering along like an avalanche, was so damaging for Australia and Australians that participation in it could no longer be justified. There was, therefore, a growing hostility not just to the kind or level of involvement – that is, opposition to conscription – but a fundamental hostility to Australia’s involvement at all. For many pro-war ‘loyalists’ anxious about loved ones in the trenches, such a view was, of course, utterly repugnant and tantamount to treason. The upshot was that Australia’s home-front divisive- ness was further exacerbated.

THE CLAIM THAT the nation was ‘born’ at Gallipoli has had other consequences. The Australians’ contribution at the Western Front has been under-recognised – both the casualties and the achievements. Not only were the losses in France and Belgium much greater than at Gallipoli, what the AIF accomplished was much more significant as well, particularly in the final year of the conflict. In fact, what the Australian soldiers did in those climactic months prompts the conclusion that Australians were influencing the destiny of the world in 1918 more than they had ever done before, and more than Australians have done since. This encompasses not only the dramatic weeks of desperate defence in March and April, but also the contrasting phase of relentless offensive in the second half of the year that was instrumental in Germany’s defeat.

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On 21 March 1918, the Germans launched an immense offensive that drove the British back forty miles. There was widespread concern that after years of ghastly hardships and casualties, Britain and its allies might lose the war. Australian units were rushed to the rescue and played a significant role in plugging various gaps in the vulnerable British defences. Their resolve, resourcefulness and spirited morale amid demoralised disarray were admirable. For many of them, it felt satisfying to be at last doing what many of them had enlisted to do – stop the Germans from rampaging across Europe – instead of making the kind of costly and mostly ill-conceived attacks they had been repeatedly called on to carry out since 1915. Distressed French civilians, having left homes vulnerable to the advanc- ing Germans, paused when the Australians arrived with their nonchalant reassurance: Fini retreat madame, beaucoup Australiens ici. Many of these civilians, confident the AIF would be able to stop the Germans, joined in the rapturous cries of Vive l’Australie! and actually turned back to reoccupy their homes. Will Dyson, an Australian artist on the scene, depicted these stirring developments in a drawing he called Welcome Back to the Somme. Australia’s most famous fighting general, Pompey Elliott – a veteran of the landing at Gallipoli, the cauldron of Lone Pine and the calamity of Fromelles – declared in April 1918 that he ‘was never so proud of being an Australian’. Six days later, with the sense of crisis unabated, the Germans attacked and captured the tactically important town of Villers-Bretonneux, east of Amiens. Anxiety about the situation energised strategists at the highest levels. Eventually, after hours of frustration and delay, Pompey Elliott’s brigade was authorised to counter-attack Villers-Bretonneux in association with another Australian brigade. This complex manoeuvre in the dark with minimal artil- lery assistance proved outstandingly successful – the most brilliant exploit of the war, some said – and ended the German threat to Amiens. Although the Germans had begun to overextend themselves in the onslaught, the Austra- lians’ resistance had been pivotal. In the transformation that eventuated three months later, the Australians advanced seven miles in seven hours and captured 7,925 prisoners and 173 guns. Afterwards, General Ludendorff concluded that only one side could now win the war, and it wasn’t his. And this Australian triumph was achieved

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despite the inability of a neighbouring British corps to capture the village of Chipilly. This had implications for ensuing operations, as German gunners positioned there could continue to disrupt the Australians, who were intent on maintaining their attacking momentum. Astonishingly, an AIF patrol of two sergeants and four privates managed to do what the British corps could not: these intrepid half-dozen Australians (with British infantry following up behind) drove the Germans out of Chipilly. The influx of American formations at the Western Front has often been seen as decisive. When they were in engagements alongside Austra- lians, though, their reliance on the AIF was pronounced. For example, on 29 September 1918 Pompey Elliott was appalled to learn that casualties were accumulating in his brigade because the Americans had not secured their objective. He also found that the lieutenants he had provided to inform the Americans about front-line know-how had not done so, because an American general had retained them at his headquarters to tell him how to run the battle. Elliott sorted things out with typical verve, and his brigade succeeded in attaining most of the Americans’ objectives as well as its own, but the Americans’ reliance on the AIF in 1918 could hardly be more unlike the relationship between the two nations a century later. Pompey Elliott returned home to a hero’s welcome and was soon elected to parliament. Immensely popular among returned soldiers and their families, he was a household name throughout the 1920s, prominent in politics, the law and the history of the war. However, he became a tragic symbol of the endur- ing legacy of the conflict. What we now call post-traumatic stress, combined with the profoundly disturbing effects of the Great Depression and also his grievance about being overlooked for promotion to divisional command, so undermined his equilibrium that in 1931 he committed suicide.

Ross McMullin’s biography Pompey Elliott (Scribe, 2002) won awards for biography and literature. His biography Will Dyson: Australia’s Radical Genius (Scribe, 2006) was highly commended by the National Biography Award judges. Dr McMullin’s most recent book, Farewell, Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (Scribe, 2012), has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History and the National Cultural Award.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 60 13/03/2015 3:58 pm MEMOIR Lots of rabbits this year Letters between the farm and the front Tom Bamforth

DISPERSED AMONG LENGTHY discussions of cycling, which must have been their shared passion, a teenage Charles Harlock was given some erratic career advice by an amiable relative in Sydney called Thomas Love in 1903:

You say you are going to leave school soon. What are you going to do for your living then? Are you going to learn the art of catching rabbits or electrical engineering, or typewriting or photography? Whatever you do, don’t learn to be a shoemaker because it’s a poor trade.

When I think of my great-uncle Charlie, this whimsical image comes to mind along with an old sepia photograph of dry-stone walling in Victo- ria’s Western District at the end of the nineteenth century. The people in the image are posed – standing with wheelbarrows and examining the fruits of their labour – but the dog is not. An endearing blur of overexcited collie still smudges the corner of the photograph more than a century later. I knew Charles Harlock when I was a child, as he approached the end of a long life and I viewed him with the awe and fascination that the very young sometimes have for the very old. Even today, when I think of him, it is with the impressions of a young mind in formation rather than the compartmen- talised and formulaic memory of an adult. I can’t remember particular things

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he said or did, but I still retain a sense of amazement at someone who was so vast, craggy and ancient, and yet seemed to radiate the benign tolerance of a curious and rather awe-struck youngster. More than two decades after his death, I am still aware of a childish glow of affection for what I then thought was the oldest living thing in existence – a kind of shy, grandly avuncular tortoise in human form. On entering the Harlock family home in Geelong, still occupied by Uncle Charlie’s surviving daughter, there is a full portrait photograph of a young man in uniform, shoulders back, feet apart, slouch hat freshly plumed, staring fervently into the horizon – exactly the pose struck by millions of other young men heading optimistically to the Great War. To our relief, the war experience of Charles Harlock seemed remarkably benign. The story went like this: Uncle Charlie enlisted late in the war, and had been sent out on a troop ship that took so long to get to Europe that the war was over by the time it arrived. He explored London and visited Windsor Castle (where he was served tea by a princess along with the rest of his battalion). He then visited Belgium, where he got on so well with the local family who billeted him that they gave him a piece of lace cut from the same cloth as his host’s wedding dress. This account of Charles Harlock’s war experience seemed to be quite appropriate, if rather lucky – the prospect of sending a young dairy farmer from the hamlet of Pomborneit in Victoria’s Western District to the industrial carnage of Ypres, Pozières and Harfleur seemed incandescently wrong. The Harlocks were much more interested in local weather and cows than they were in the European balance of power. The recent discovery of a biscuit tin, however, containing a fragmentary collection of letters, photographs and field notebooks reveals a different story. Far from arriving late and experiencing a genteel war of tea and tourism, he spent two years fighting on the Western Front. Uncle Charlie enlisted at Warrnambool in Victoria in October 1916 and arrived in Plymouth on the troopship Honorata in early 1917 to join the other young men of the district. These were the Boyds, McGarvies and Hallyburtons – friends, neighbours and relatives who, like the last of the medieval armies, had all joined up as villages to fight together. A life-saving bout of flu kept Charles Harlock in hospital for three months, which meant he missed the slaughter at Bullecourt in May 1917 that killed 80 per cent of his battalion. He entered the line shortly

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after and remained on the Western Front until the end of the war before being repatriated in late 1919, unharmed. But the letters are not an account of the Western Front. As in Charles Harlock’s later life, this experience is only half alluded to in the correspondence, much of which is about the life left behind on the farm and in the district.

TWO SNAKESKIN POUCHES, scored with the words ‘6460 c. harlock 24 btn’, held the trove of letters (whose address bore only his name followed by ‘Australian Imperial Force, Abroad’), photos and two small field notebooks that contained scrawled, cryptic and laconic details of life on the front. The minute, fading scratches of watery ink read as a shorthand inventory of movements into and out of the line, inspections, parades and vast lists of correspondence owed and received from home. They represent a random selection of tesserae from a greater mosaic of lost experience. The notebooks are interspersed with pressed poppies, gum leaves and what appears to be a small sprig of wattle whose fading brilliance is a counterpoint to the restraint of the notebooks themselves. The entry for 11 November 1918 – now a hallowed moment – simply reads ‘Armstice signed’, but the preserved foliage speaks of hidden memories and a silent expansiveness. A faded red-and-black petal taped to a card reads ‘Pozières Ridge 1917’. Private Harlock records a succession of calm seas and bright, sunny days on the way over. Two men – sensing what was in store – deserted at Cape Town but were captured the next day. He saw a whale and a stop at St Helena reveals a ‘barren looking island with high cliffs…a few scrubby trees’. There are festivities on New Year’s Day 1917: ‘sausages for breakfast, pudding, tea and tug of war won by 24 Btn’. It is cold and rough as the Honorata nears England, and a day out of Portsmouth, ‘five torpedo boats come out to meet us’ and escorted them into port. He is issued with a service rifle – number 9800 – and given detailed technical training, which is faithfully recorded. The gun’s loading mechanism is described: ‘the ball strikes against the base of the cartridge and forces it into the chamber where the extraction springs over the rim of the cartridge… the left side of the bolt face strikes the side of the ejector causing the bolt to progress out ready for the next.’ But after this the entries become short expressions of fact. ‘27/3/1917 Went into line’ is a typical entry. He records

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that it is ‘very hot at Harfleurs’ and later that he had ‘done 36 hours water & mud over our knees and come out with trench feet’. Easter Sunday in 1918 is spent ‘on the Warrington Front about 1/2 mile behind the line in pill box, machine gun post & gun guard’, and not long afterwards the ‘battalion badly gassed about two companys almost wiped out D & A’. Boxing Day 1917 and New Year’s Day 1918 are spent loading shells, while New Year’s Eve is spent making barbed-wire entanglements. And then there is a ‘beautiful sunny day in the sappers trench’.

BUT IF CHARLES Harlock’s personal notes were sparse, letters from home kept him informed and attempted to foster a bit of jolly war spirit that is entirely absent from his own account. His uncle, William Dillon from Pomborneit, writes:

Glad to know you were alive and well and feeling fit for old fritz for he takes a lot of beating my word it must have been cold over there Cows are coming in now milking eleven ourselves and our neighbours likewise.

And:

There seems to be a stiff time ahead of Allies but hope and trust they will pull through and smash old fritz up to pulp.

There is also good news from injured friends and relatives who’ve been repatriated, although William Dillon rather charmingly seems to confuse descriptions of young relatives returned from the war with cattle, ‘Jim McGar- vie is back again and looks splendid and is stout fat and rosy looking’, while ‘we had Jock for a day he looks splendid big and plump and rosy and weighs 12–13 stone he says’. But not everyone was stout and rosy: Harry Parson had ‘gone under…he had worked himself up to Sargeant they say too poor fellow’. There is other news from the district. The ‘Boyds are getting a new Ford car Colonial body like ours’ and, inevitably, there are ‘lots of Rabbits about this year I’ve caught over 70 myself’. There is also a hint of scandal: ‘Albert Lucas married again took on little Gertie Moore this time a school girl you might say

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just about 17 years old and he is about 36 they say. Something disgusting aint it.’ News also comes from Marguerite Gardner, a student at The Hermit- age, Geelong’s pre-eminent ladies boarding school, who had been assigned a soldier to write to. Unlike all the other correspondence, which is handwritten, this letter is typed and the tone is both articulate and prim. ‘I must also thank you for the details about these battalions which were last in the firing line – yours was one of them and no doubt you feel glad to have this honour,’ she writes from the prosperous seaside suburb of Brighton in 1919. Reflecting on Charles Harlock’s impending homecoming, she writes: ‘I think there must be a feeling of gladness and thankfulness too deep for words, in the hearts of those at home, for their brave soldier here has been spared to see them again.’ But these are the only references to the war. She is excited about a new development in the district: the arrival of an electric train which breaks down unexpectedly during a trial run, owing to a suspected ‘escape’ of electricity:

A party of officials arrived on the scene, to investigate the mystery, while some subordinates awaited commands. One of the latter, in the most approved Australian style, leant against a stanchion. He no sooner touched it than he described one or two somersaults over the ground. The others ran to him to know the cause of this unexpected demonstration and he answered ‘I found the leak’.

But there is a more sombre allusion to the after-effects of war. Talking about a relative who has also returned from the front, she writes:

I don’t know what you and Harry have done but he thinks there’s no one like you – but I know others that think the same. I think he has aged a good bit and he says the gasses are starting to affect him again but so many of the boys say the same.

JOHN HARLOCK’S LETTERS to his son, signed ‘Your affec Father’, are both anxious for Charlie’s safety and eager for his return to help with the demands of running the farm. In March 1917, shortly before Charlie was sent to the front, John Harlock writes that he is glad to hear ‘you were well we are all well things are all looking well there has been a good lot of rain lately the

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grass is growing well Arthur and I are trapping rabbits’. They pay income tax of twenty-eight pounds, and ‘got six bags of peas and twenty bags of potatoes…the wool sold well about a penny more than last year’. The work is unending, ‘milking cows about 55 gals a day from 22 [cows] the dam broke away again’, although the ‘thistle are not really so bad this year’. But after these descriptions, he adds ‘this is all I can think of to write so good my boy my thoughts are always with you’. As Charlie is away longer, the tone of the letters appears to become more concerned, but the subject, as ever, quickly reverts to the all-consuming work of the farm:

I am writing a few lines to let you know that I have not forgotten you but I cannot forget you for one hour in the day we have finished shearing and sent the wool away the grass is green.

Being so far away, John Harlock repeatedly offers financial assistance as the only thing that he can do at a distance for his son: ‘…let me know if money would be any good to you and I will send you some that is the only thing that I can do for you now hoping you are well we are well’. But by 1919, as Uncle Charlie awaits the lengthy process of repatria- tion to Australia, John Harlock increasingly needs his son back on the farm. ‘When do you think you will be able to come away home if you think that you can get away by paying your passage home I will send the money to pay it’ he urges. There is work to be done, prices are coming down, and there is physical labour that needs extra farm hands. Although it is not stated, like much else in the Harlock correspondence, it is clearly time for Charlie to come home. The anxious tone has gone and is replaced with the endless and myriad demands of primary production:

I have got the thistle all cut I am at the rabbits now they are bad this year I have sold all the sheep and lambs that I am going to… sheep have come down very low…the wool is not sold yet the dam is getting very low we will have to sink the old bore a bit deeper… I hope this finds you well.

BY FAR THE most visually arresting letters are those from Uncle Charlie’s

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mother. His father’s letters are neat and concise, written in a controlled, backward sloping copperplate script. Elizabeth Harlock’s letters, however, stride boldly across the page in strong strokes that almost defy readability. As the war wears on, they become bolder, strokes across the page increas- ingly disconnected from the actual shape or forms of letters and words, but nonetheless recognisable as the lilt and flow of language. The letters convey an almost musical impression in their illegibility, with a barely contained energy that increases as the letters progress into a crescendo of downstrokes and dashes across the page. It is likely that she is not fully literate and what can be deciphered conveys a mixture, much like that of her husband, of concern for her son’s safety and farm news. They are also the only surviving letters that contain any religious references.

My Dear Boy I hope you are still out of Danger am afraid you will soon be in the Trenches…to think thear will be a great battle soon and so hoping for a letter soon…. All are well at home Jim was down on Thursday and bort 4 Effers at 14 pounds 10 a dreadful price… Hill is sending you a pare of socks.

And:

We are having Very Cold Wether latly and you ar having it very Hot in france By the way…your trees ar growing well now Every- thing as going well if you were only Home We Would be Happy but we must trust in god to bring you Home safe and sound. Well Dear Boy I must say goodby and god bless you both your father so good and he takes the Milk to the Factory himself I did not think he would doo that goodbye once more. Your loving mother E H xxxx

WHILE THE CARES and concerns of work on the farm dominate his parents’ letters, Uncle Charlie is clearly beginning to have the time of his life now that the war is almost over. On writing paper from the AIF & War Chest Club (97 Horseferry Road, London SW1) he provides an account of the

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‘absolutely marvellous Windsor Castle’ where he was impressed by enormous rooms, polished floors, vast carpets, paintings and gem-studded thrones. There was also the delight of tea, which was ‘better than we are used to the sugar being a big improvement, first sugar I have had in England’. The troops are expecting to be greeted by a princess and there is much speculation about this until it becomes apparent that one of the young women serving the tea is, in fact, Princess Alice. She makes a favourable impression on Pte Harlock. ‘She was very plainly dressed had no jewellery hanging about as most of them do here but had a very nice face,’ he writes. Following this, he takes the train back to London and is ‘shouted tea at Trafalgar Square by some lady or other I do not know her name’, then is taken to the theatre in the evening. ‘They look after us well here,’ he observes cryptically, although ‘the Australians make a good impression here and behave very well of course there are a few who make fools of themselves but not as many as you might think.’ But the war still dominates. While he thinks it is ‘only a matter of time before we will be pulled out altogether’, there is still much fear and privation in the capital. ‘The people here are terrible afraid of air strikes you will see the women and kiddies asleep on the floors of the tube railways frightened to go to bed.’ The war had necessitated a near command economy and while a comparatively good living was possible farming in Australia, Uncle Charlie finds that many food items are simply unobtainable in London – the situation is ‘a long way worse than what the papers say… Money is not much use here you cannot get only a certain amount of bread or anything else and meat is almost a thing of the past. Sausages is the only meat we get and they are nearly all head.’ There is also a dissenting analysis of the futility of trench warfare, although it appears that the end of the war is now coming into sight:

Even in France things are at a standstill now I think it is impossible for either side to move the line is like a fortress talk about guns you cannot imagine what it is like. It was said out in orders that the British would not attack this year that they were going to wait for Fritz but I think he knows better as it is impossible for him to get very far through and he would lose too many men. These stunts don’t pay, the stunts we had at Ypres cost the Australians 80,000

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casualties and they gained about a mile and a half which is very little use. If they could have got on about 3 miles further it would have been alright as they would have been able to reach Ostend with the big guns but like everything else it has been a failure.

But peace was at hand, and among the curiosities of Uncle Charlie’s biscuit tin is a ‘peace edition’ of the Daily Mail from 30 June 1919 – two days after the Treaty of Versailles was signed – printed in gold leaf. The front page shows the signatures of Herr Hermann Müller and Dr Bell, who signed the treaty on behalf of Germany between a gilded portrait of ‘Their Majesties the King and the Queen’, and a panorama of the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles Palace where the peace negotiations took place. Toward the back of the paper are illustrations of the ‘brothers in arms’ – the ‘types of men from the far off Dominions and India’ who fought in the war. Kilted Canadians, turbaned Indians and slouch-hatted Australians march fraternally with New Zealand, South African, Newfoundland and British soldiers of Empire.

AMID THE FINAL letters and scraps of paper from the war – old ration coupons, regimental Melbourne Cup sweepstakes, leave passes and lottery tickets – are the minutes of a ‘Digger’s Parliament’ held aboard HMAT Chemnitz on the return voyage to Australia in 1919. This was a mock parlia- ment in which the troops’ aspirations for recognition and a changing society, along with a sharp satirical eye for parliamentary pomposity, are recorded along with strict instructions for the conduct of the battalion lottery at sea. Among the proposals are calls for the nationalisation of the coal industry, the commemoration of AIF battles and the reservation of the term digger ‘exclusively for those who have served in the AIF’. Satirical questions put to the relevant ‘minister’, presumably selected from among the wittier soldiers, by the MPs for the constituencies of ‘Bon Jour’ and ‘Ma Cherie’:

Member for ‘Bon Jour’ to ask the Rt Hon Minister for Customs ‘So as to strengthen the entente cordiale between France and Australia, will he permit Vin blanc, Vin rouge, Cognac, and Beck to be placed on the free list for the exclusive use of bona fide members of the RSA?’ Member for ‘Ma Cherie’ to ask Rt Hon Postmaster General

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‘If he will take steps to protect the returned soldiers from domestic troubles at home by judiciously censoring or destroying letters of an amorous nature addressed to married men from lovers abroad?’

There are also songs – sung to the tune of ‘John Peel’ and composed by a ‘member of the Bath’ (signed ‘The Blighter’) – that, in stilted couplets, recounted the fortunes of the 24th Battalion AIF during the war:

In Egypt sands we learned the game Through weary months the sun aflame To stick like death and honor our name Till we sailed right away one morning

On the sunburnt cliffs of the Dardanelles You know the story history tells Till Abdul increased his stock of shells And we glided away one morning Our next opponent was dear old Fritz Who tried his best to break us to bits But we plugged him back and gave him fits His neat little stunts idly scorning

And the ships came in and we filed to the deep Past the crosses white, where the vanguard sleep Forever our hearts their memories keep Since we left them in glory that morning

IN GEELONG, THREE armchairs stand side-by-side in the Harlock family sitting room. The farm has been long since sold and Uncle Charlie, his wife Lalla, and their daughters Patricia, Marjorie and Elizabeth left Pomborneit in 1960 following Charlie’s retirement. A grandfather clock, bought for a few shillings in 1905, still ticks resonantly in the entrance next to the century- old photograph of Pte Harlock in uniform and older family photographs of Benjamin and Rebecca Harlock. These were the first members of the family to arrive in Australia as indentured labourers in 1851 and were ‘disposed of’

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on arrival to a certain T Armstrong for thirty-five pounds and twelve months of rations. They eventually settled in Pomborneit, although during the voyage their daughter, Louisa, died of hydrocephalus. Two of the chairs sit empty now – the third is occupied by Pat, Uncle Charlie’s sole surviving daughter. One day while I was visiting, there was a knock at the door and a sprightly ninety-year-old appeared, bright-eyed and full of vigour. She pointed to a picture on top of the television set in Pat’s sitting room, which showed two young men in uniform sitting in a rickshaw in Cape Town on their way to the Western Front in 1916. They were Pte Charles Harlock and his best friend and neighbour in Pomborneit, Pte Harry Boyd – the sprightly old lady was Harry Boyd’s daughter. And as we met, I felt a sense of continuity with the two elderly daughters of old friends whose families had settled in the Western District 160 years ago and who are still visiting each other today. For a moment, the empty armchairs, the ticking clock and the fading photographs seemed to come back to life in the half-formed echoes of the past. Emptying the biscuit tin to be sure I haven’t missed anything, I find a small piece of Belgian lace.

With special thanks to Patricia Harlock and Robin Droogleever

Tom Bamforth is a writer and aid worker whose articles have appeared in the Age and Granta. He is the author of Deep Field: Dispatches From the Frontlines of Aid Relief (Hardie Grant, 2014), and an adjunct research fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. His essay ‘How to survive an earthquake’ was published in Griffith Review 35: Surviving.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 71 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY Family casualties Private pain, invisible carers Marina Larsson

IN 1927, MRS Clara Stephens wrote to the Repatriation Department describ- ing life with her son, a returned soldier who had seen active service on the Western Front during the First World War. Herbert Stephens was discharged in 1919, suffering from shell shock. He was a ‘shattered’ man – a term used within the ex-service community during the postwar years. In the mid-1920s, Herbert was treated at Mont Park Hospital for the Insane, Melbourne and after an improvement in his condition he returned to live with his parents in Western Victoria. The Stephens’ new life with their middle-aged son was difficult because – as they put it – he was ‘not normal’, and was unlikely to ever improve. Herbert slept erratically and was of a nervy temperament. He was heavily dependent on his parents and never married. In her letter, Clara sought financial assistance, pointing out that she was sixty-five years old and Herbert’s father was seventy-three. She reflected on her war-damaged son and the burdens of care they carried, writing ‘it has been a long war to us’. The Stephens were one of over ninety thousand Australian families to experience the physical or mental disablement of a relative during this war of epic proportions. By November 1918, the total number of casualties, both military and civilian, had reached an estimated thirty-seven million: sixteen million deaths and twenty-one million wounded. This was a war without

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parallel, and the modern technologies of this war – including machine guns and poison gas – had a devastating impact on soldiers’ minds and mutilated their bodies in a manner and on a scale that was hitherto unseen. The impact of 1914–18, however, was local as well as global. The conflict was attended by millions of smaller, personal crises – in London, Berlin, Istanbul, Paris, Melbourne – for families whose sons had died, or who welcomed home men ‘changed’ in body and mind. The cost of war disability for Australian families was significant. The First AIF (Australian Imperial Force) lost sixty thousand service people and more than 156,000 were injured – wounded, gassed or taken prisoner. Medical advances in antiseptics, blood transfusions and surgical techniques meant that the death rate among the wounded was low in comparison to previous wars, but better survival rates resulted in a proportionately higher number of disabled soldiers. The families who welcomed home these men observed how they had been ‘altered’, and spent years caring for them, sometimes at a great cost to themselves. During the postwar period, the number of Australian families left to support those disabled by the conflict was markedly greater than those who mourned the ‘fallen’. The return of a physically damaged or shell- shocked soldier could be devastating for families. While bereaved families mourned soldiers killed and buried on overseas battlefields, the families of the war-disabled faced a different kind of grief; although their soldiers returned, they faced the grief associated with a myriad of physical and mental losses. The disabilities were diverse – lost and damaged body parts, painful internal wounds, lung conditions, blindness, facial disfigurement and psychi- atric conditions. These had profound consequences for young soldiers, their families and their interdependent futures. And most of these men were young: half of the First AIF were aged between eighteen and twenty-five, and 80 per cent were unmarried.

THE RECENTLY OPENED repatriation medical files at the National Archives of Australia (NAA) powerfully reveal the stories of the families who were left to care for the nation’s ‘broken’ soldiers. During the war, Australia’s newly established repatriation system was charged with repairing

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and restoring these men to civilian life. But the archives suggest another story. Once the limits of medical treatment and rehabilitation were reached, most soldiers – apart from a tiny minority permanently accommodated in convalescent facilities – were sent home to be looked after by their kin. While doctors, nurses and psychiatrists all had an important role to play, it was within families that the really painful social and emotional legacies of war were managed in the longer term. In the first instance, most returned men – unmarried and in their twenties – were cared for by their mothers and sisters. If they were already married or able to find a wife, this burden then fell to her. Some of these women spent years, even decades picking up the pieces scattered in 1914–18. Yet their service and sacrifice was never publicly acknowledged by the Repatriation Department, nor were they officially supported in their caregiving and emotional labours. These family members, too, became casualties of the Great War. After their discharge from the First AIF, soldiers preferred to live with their families rather than reside in repatriation homes or hospitals – if there was a choice. Within the home, relatives provided practical and therapeutic care. Wives and mothers typically took a leading role in dispensing medica- tion and maintaining surgical aids. The provision of medication, home remedies and health-giving foods was as important a part of the daily routine as was lifting the morale of invalid men. The detail of individual families, now captured in the NAA archive, tells the story. In Sydney, Mrs Louisa Hogan commenced a regime of hand- feeding her son, Frederick, who had returned home in 1917 after his lower jaw was shot away and his right arm disabled. Louisa prepared liquid meals for him every day, until he died in May 1918. Families of shell-shocked soldiers had to become accustomed to psychological symptoms such as sleeplessness and memory loss, and the relatives of men whose wounds required constant medical attention found their lives became organised around hospital visits. Disability required returned men and their families to adjust their expecta- tions for the future, and milestones in men’s lives became reminders of their health problems. Walter Frank joined up in splendid health as an eighteen- year-old, but faced his twenty-first birthday gasping for breath as ‘chest troubles’ due to the effects of gas set in.

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Family caregivers could substantially improve returned soldiers’ quality of life: a devoted and dependable wife or mother was the key. In the immedi- ate postwar years, popular magazines and newspapers encouraged young women to marry disabled soldiers. In 1918, the Everylady’s Journal columnist ‘Domina’ urged women to reach out and embrace their feminine role as nurturers and healers. Implicit in this was a powerful message that soldiers’ war disabilities should be viewed as honourable scars of sacrifice rather than disfigurements. In 1921, the Truth even suggested that the helplessness of disabled soldiers awakened a spirit of ‘mothering’ within women that should be acted upon as they chose their marriage partners. Women’s support was crucial to veterans’ success in civilian life. During the 1920s and 1930s, an intricate world of family support, struggle and survival was hidden beneath Australia’s first repatriation bureaucracy. The family, more than the ‘Repat’, became the key site of repatriation for disabled soldiers. The domestic sacrifices made to support disabled ex-servicemen were great. Often, the true extent of soldiers’ need for assistance only became apparent after marriage, and some wives realised they faced years of caring for an invalid. Wives who supported their disabled husbands at home often found that their own physical and emotional health was taxed, particularly on soldier settlement farms where they had to assist with labouring work. The attention and care that wives gave to their disabled husbands could be extremely trying; in 1932, one member of the Blinded Soldiers’ Association concluded that women’s health ‘must suffer, in consequence, under such a strain’. In the 1920s, as the economy recovered, many Australian women looked to take advantage of increased leisure and employment choices, and valued the greater independence that became possible. But these new freedoms were beyond the reach of women whose lives had been forever changed by war disability. Despite the significant labours of ex-servicemen’s family members, the Repatriation Department did not formally recognise their responsibilities, nor the stress these families endured. Instead, official commentary presented a more individualistic account of disabled soldiers, which optimistically focused on their heroic journey towards becoming ‘independent men’ and

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‘self-supporting citizens’. The Repatriation Department assumed the family to be a natural site of care and never adequately acknowledged the innumer- able hours of unpaid family labour that complemented its own programs, and greatly reduced the national repatriation bill. Family caregiving propped up the formal repatriation system; the domestic labour of kin was rendered invisible within official repatriation rhetoric, which insisted that the role of families was to ‘stand behind’ the disabled soldier and stimulate self-depen- dence in the home environment. Repatriation literature insisted that families must encourage veterans on their journey towards manly independence, and not undermine their ambition by smothering them with pity. In 1919, the Repatriation Department declared that families ‘must be sensible and urge the man to get back on the job’. Some rehabilitation experts even argued that sympathising relatives and friends actually lessened men’s success in civilian life. In reality, however, those closest to disabled soldiers knew all too well that it was often the compassion and care of family members that assured a decent quality of life for veterans. Indeed, without it the repatriation system surely would have collapsed.

THE OFFICIAL SILENCE surrounding disabled soldiers’ dependence on their family members, and the cost of caregiving, is perhaps not surprising. In the early twentieth century, failure of a man to support himself and his family was shameful and a sign that he had not attained the ideal of ‘manly independence’. Yet the ideal of independence – most clearly symbolised in the form of breadwinning through paid employment – was not easily attained by many disabled soldiers. Their dependence on wives and mothers also sat uncomfortably beside the burgeoning Anzac legend. Within this powerful cultural narrative, there was little room to valorise physically or psychologically damaged men, much less pay tribute to the sacrifices of their familial caregivers. Some forty-five years after the war, George Johnston vividly brought this challenging domestic world to light in his 1964 autobiographical novel, My Brother Jack (Collins, 1964). It made public ex-servicemen’s private stories of pain by revealing the ‘mess’ war had created for them and their families. Despite the cultural impact of this book, mainstream Great War narratives

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have been reluctant to shine a light on the impact of war trauma on families. Even today, in the national memory of war, the iconic Anzac soldier – a young, independent bushman of perfect and unblemished physique (think of the blond, sun-kissed Archy in Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli) – stands alone in the absence of family relationships, eternally enacting a story of individual- ism, independence and mateship. Stories at odds with this narrative – the struggles of disabled soldiers, their dependence upon their families and the domestic heroism of predominantly female caregivers – have been marginalised or forgotten. After the First World War, Australia’s official repatriation system was underpinned by an invisible tier of support provided to damaged ex-service- men by their family members. Today, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA, renamed from Repatriation Department in 1976) gives greater public recognition to the therapeutic role of family members in ex-servicemen’s lives, and acknowledges the personal cost. This reflects a broader acknowledgement of ‘carers’ in the health and welfare sector since the 1980s: ex-servicemen are encouraged to consider their own health, and that of their family members, in holistic terms; family members can access government-funded support services such as the Veterans’ and Veterans’ Family Counselling Service (VVCS), which was unheard of in the 1920s and 1930s; medical and allied health researchers are promoting the need to provide support to veterans and their carers across the life course. More than ever before, the repatriation authorities are recognising the ripple effect of war disability within families as well as the importance of recognising and harnessing kin support. Yet the DVA appears to be struggling with the cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in recently returned veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts. This is hard to understand, given that the latest generation of war-damaged service personnel represents a much smaller burden on the state compared with the First World War generation. In 1918, the Repatria- tion Department was faced with the return of over ninety thousand soldiers with disabilities. We know that the psychological and psychiatric treatment of veterans is clinically challenging – some scars of war cannot be readily healed. We have had nearly a century, however, to put effective systems into place and develop the expertise to skilfully manage the repatriation of our

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service personnel. During these decades, and in the shadow of subsequent conflicts such as the Vietnam War, it has become clear that when the state does not provide adequate services it is families who suffer, as they are left to cope with their ‘broken’ loved one. Given this knowledge, and the resources at our disposal, we can only hope that in the coming years our repatriation authorities become better at listening to and working with returning service personnel to provide the responsive and dependable support services that are so badly needed – both for veterans and the family members who care for them.

References at www.griffithreview.com

Dr Marina Larsson is an award-winning historian who has lectured at La Trobe and Monash universities. Her book Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (UNSW Press, 2009) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Australian History, the Ernest Scott Prize and the Asher Literary Award. She was a researcher for Museum Victoria’s groundbreaking centenary exhibition World War I: Love and Sorrow, and a historical advisor for the ABC documentary The War that Changed Us (2014).

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 78 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY An unexpected bequest Freedom, fashion and being modern Jill Brown

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to look at daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century Australian women in their hats and heavy, long dresses without wondering how they managed to wear all those clothes in the summer heat. Or when enduring a heavy period or a hot flush. Poor things. The standard daywear of an elegant, upper middle-class Victorian lady consisted of laced petticoats, high stiff collars, padding, boned lining, frills, bows, buttons, bonnets, veils and corsets: attire that would have required daily stoicism and self-control to tolerate. By 1923, a graceful flapper on the cover of the Australian Women’s Weekly is described in the cover line as ‘uninhibited and unfettered’. She wears a loose, straight dress that falls to her knees. We can see glimmers of our own age in that image and description. We applaud our modern sisters for liberating themselves from Victorian furbelows and strictures. Aren’t 1920s frocks gorgeous? ‘Events don’t happen: things emerge,’ Emeritus Professor Jill Matthews told me in conversation. Those cumbersome, confining crinolines were gradually supplanted by the softer silhouette on the cover of the Weekly for many reasons, as intricately interwoven as lace. Surprisingly perhaps, the terrible events of the war had far-reaching implications for petticoats.

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Privilege does not give way easily or graciously. The ‘new woman’ who emerged in the 1920s endured relentless derision from cartoonists and commentators, and it is possible the snarky tone in the popular press echoed all the variations of ‘you’re not going out like that’ voiced in scandalised homes around the nation. Girls were only working to nab an unsuspecting husband. They were determined to make spectacles of themselves with their outra- geous, unladylike behaviour. They lived only for the fugitive gaiety of the moment. While these women were celebrated as carefree, healthy, youthful and athletic, for anxious moral guardians they were a symbol of the meretri- cious elements of modernism. But still – this did not deter the shop girls and business girls from buying new dresses, silk stockings, rouge and a cornucopia of other consumer goods. Why? Glamour and fun. The move from the private to the public sphere for women of all social classes meant that life could be much more interesting; it is exciting to wear something new. All the alluring appurtenances of fashion contain a promise of transforming the wearer into someone else. For all our sophisticated understanding today of how marketing exerts its power, we participate in the ever-renewed pleasures of shopping and dressing. For the young women who were active economic agents for the first time, this must have been exhilarating. Young people are more influenced by their peers and idols than their families or the custodians of civilisation, so the girls were wearing what their friends were wearing, and they were all wearing variations of what movie stars and models in popular magazines were wearing. There was no day zero to mark the beginning of modernism: things emerge. These social changes – women entering the workforce, hemlines creeping up, morals relaxing – were underway before the terrible caesura of the Great War. Had it not happened, they would have continued. The war restricted the pursuit of glamour and pleasure, but once it was over the efforts of modernism redoubled. The pace quickened.

THE WAR ITSELF was a contributor to innovation and social change in unforeseen ways. Some of these were practical and technological. For example, the machinery developed to manufacture army uniforms was

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repurposed in the mass-production of clothes for the fashion industry. And one new product appeared whose significance for these modern girls cannot be overemphasised: disposable sanitary napkins. During the war, resourceful army nurses used absorbent bandages as napkins. After hostilities had ceased, American company Kimberly-Clark furthered this ingenuity by turning its surplus bandaging into disposable napkins for the retail market. They were a hit. By the mid-1920s, a great many such sanitary napkins were available everywhere, including Australia, and contributed immeasurably to women’s increased freedom of movement. It was not just a question of offering greater security from embarrassment when playing tennis ‘in the sheerest of frocks’ (as an advertisement for the British pad Menex expressed it); they enabled women’s move into the workplace – young factory girls were more willing to leave home and move into dormitories, for example, now that they had a discreet option for quietly managing their periods. The Great War and its horrible epilogue of the influenza epidemic also brought about less quantifiable changes in perspective throughout society. The world order that Australia so gallantly entered the fray to preserve was destroyed and imperial relationships had shifted in those four years of death and disfigurement, as Joan Beaumont wrote in Broken Nation (Allen & Unwin, 2013). By the time of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Dominions viewed the imperial powers through wary, jaundiced eyes. Prime Minister Billy Hughes showed himself to be a single-minded and tenacious negotia- tor; he had no faith that the British would represent Australia’s interests. The legitimacy of the old authoritarian structures had been compromised and power relations were on a new footing. Australian society was not as profoundly altered as many European societies, but this tectonic shift in relation to authority and power echoed all the way down to the stenographers and waitresses, even if they were unaware of it. These girls were a different generation from those who had served as nurses. And the terrible burden of battle did not affect all families equally: not everyone lost a father or brother. The war was a long way in the distance by the mid-1920s. Even so, the high-spirited energy of this era of fast living – the quest for novelty, distraction and fun – may reflect some manic energy finding its expression after the horror of conflict.

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VICTORIAN DRESS MAKES us uneasy. It is comforting for us to see 1920s dresses as liberating: ‘You go, girl!’ We adore the narrative of the downtrodden little woman coming into her own. And we have a tendency to mythologise the clothes and the manners of the 1920s as reassuring repre- sentations of our own preoccupations with self-expression and freedom. It was not like living in a jazzy Baz Luhrmann film. Living standards were low. By 1921, women might have constituted just over a fifth of the workforce, but their lives were still circumscribed in ways that would make us aghast. Their aspirations were not honoured, and more meaningful equality lay far ahead as a consequence of the struggles of second-wave feminism. Moreover, the high degree of visibility they began to enjoy ushered in complicated new pressures: to regulate the body through diet and exercise, to achieve idealised standards of beauty and to be subjected to critical appraisal of their appear- ance – thoroughly modern anxieties. We owe these postwar women a debt of gratitude for the radical new ways they adopted. All the repeated, small actions of buying and wearing new fashions contributed to ways of dressing we can take for granted. While there were other modes of dress in the 1920s beyond the waistless frock and cropped hair of the flapper, and older women would continue to cling to their longer dresses for years, the break with absolute Victorian womanhood was complete. A new concept of authority and power emerged from the ashes from the Great War. All was changed utterly. Modern girls increasingly refused to listen to the wowsers. The conditions of society had been remade. People’s fundamental view of the world had shifted and, after the next world war, this lead to contemporary assertions of the universal human right to full participation and dignity. It is a profound legacy.

References at www.griffithreview.com

Jill Brown is an author and editor based in Sydney and Byron Bay. She works in both digital and print publishing. She is the author of Temptation Busters (Ebury Press, 2010) and ghostwriter of No Excuses (Random House Australia, 2010).

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 82 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY A legend with class Labour and Anzac Frank Bongiorno

FOR THE AUSTRALIAN labour movement, Anzac has been more like a first cousin than a close sibling. There is no missing the family connection: the first Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was an overwhelmingly working- class army, with an ethos instantly recognisable as such. Its members valued social egalitarianism while accepting the substance of inequality – just like most of the Australian working class in civilian life, who well understood the difference between a boss and a worker. It nurtured a powerful sense of entitlement – reflecting the idea of a living wage, which had begun to make its mark by the time war broke out, as Justice Higgins’ Harvester Judgement of 1907 found wider acceptance. And, just as in civilian life, members of the AIF were sometimes prepared to withdraw their labour when they believed their rights were being disregarded, or their dignity insulted. Like the working class of Australia’s cities and towns, the AIF contained its fair share of crooks, crims and ne’er-do-wells, but alongside them were the steady and the respectable – men who saw the demands that war made on them as a test of their moral character. As late as 1916, there was little reason to expect that the history of the relationship between the labour movement and Anzac would be other than a comfortable coupling. Labour was certainly active in early Anzac commemo- ration. The first Anzac Day occurred not on 25 April 1916, as one might reasonably assume, but on 13 October 1915 in Adelaide. It was a rebadging of Labour Day, and was designed to raise funds for wounded soldiers. ‘The workers readily yielded up the identity of their day,’ explained the Adelaide

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Advertiser, ‘and while celebrating the attainment of brightened conditions of labour took their places in a bigger scheme of things.’ The South Australian labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, was no less enthusiastic in celebrating ‘a grand united community carnival of practical patriotism’. But such unity would not long endure. Indeed, even in 1915, Anzac Day was marred by the street violence of drunken soldiers. And not every- one in the labour movement appreciated the merging of the traditional festival of labour with the nascent culture of war commemoration. Some trade unionists refused to participate because they objected to the hijacking of their day. Meanwhile, a few imperial patriots, already giving thought to how the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing should be marked, were concerned about the light-hearted spirit of Adelaide’s October Anzac Day, as well as of a number of other fundraising events of the period such as Violet Day and Australia Day. They wanted a solemn and sacred occasion that would honour the dead, sanctify the cause for which they had given their lives and encourage in others a willingness to serve the Empire. Anzac Day should not be an occasion for fundraising or hedonistic pursuits but, as Brisbane’s Anglican Canon David Garland put it, should become ‘Australia’s All Souls Day’. The Queensland Labor premier, TJ Ryan, gave enthusiastic support to the efforts of Garland and his colleagues on Brisbane’s Anzac Day Commemoration Committee to estab- lish Anzac Day as a solemn occasion, predicting that, to Australians, Gallipoli ‘would always be holy ground… It was the scene of undying deeds of young Australia’s sons and the last resting place of her noble dead.’ But by the end of 1916, Ryan was the sole anti-conscriptionist in the country still leading an Australian government, rivalled only by his co-religionist Archbishop Daniel Mannix in the imperial patriots’ rogues’ gallery.

LABOR’S STANCE ON defence up to this time was impressive. Its pre-war refusal to contribute a Dreadnought – the great battleship of the day – to the Royal Navy arose from nationalism, not pacifism: Labor wanted Australia to have its own navy. It also wanted a citizen army for home defence. By 1911, it had agreed with London – although quietly – that in the event of a European war it would raise an expeditionary force for service

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overseas, even if men could not be compelled under Australia’s Defence Act to fight in it. As a party that strongly championed White Australia, Labor was also seen as least likely to be complacent about a threat from Asia. It would be able to balance national assertion with imperial obligation – and the 1914 election, which coincided with the European crisis of July–August, was inevi- tably a referendum on which party could best be trusted to lead Australia in the dangerous times ahead. Under its leader Andrew Fisher, and with Billy Hughes already recognised as its most dynamic and defence-minded figure, Labor won the election easily. In October 1916, Hughes initiated the conscription crisis, which split the Labor Party and destroyed the government. From then on, Labor would rarely appear comfortable with either defence policy or the Anzac legend. During the Depression, the Scullin Labor Government abolished compul- sory military service and drastically cut defence expenditure – for reasons of economy, but the decision was consistent with the party’s ethos. A majority of the Labor Party had opposed conscription for overseas service during the Great War, but its hostility now extended to compulsion more generally. This spilled over into a suspicion of defence spending and a general discomfort with military affairs. The shock of the Japanese southward thrust a decade later disturbed this state of affairs. Suddenly, in the face of an unprecedented threat to the Australian continent itself, Labor was well placed to exploit its reputation as the party of white nationalism and brawny manhood, and to revive its reputation as a party capable of giving due weight to defence. Even before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Labor showed that it had a leader capable of speaking the language of Anzac when the previously anti- conscriptionist John Curtin spoke at the opening of the Australian War Memorial on 11 November 1941. Prime Minister Curtin said the building ‘gives continuity to the Anzac tradition… It is a tribute which a grateful country pays to those who have served it so steadfastly.’

THE APPARENT ALIENATION of the labour movement from Anzac in the years between 1916 and 1941 has been a salient theme for historians of the twentieth century. Russel Ward puzzled over it, somewhat indirectly, in his

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most famous book, The Australian Legend (OUP, 1958). In it, Ward identified the pastoral worker in colonial Australia as the main bearer of the values that many liked to think of as Australian – egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, talented at improvisation, loyal to mates. Towards the end of the book, drawing on the writings of CEW Bean, he recognised in the figure of the Anzac a continua- tion of the values of the noble bushman. It was only in a later work, A Nation for a Continent (Heinemann Educa- tional Australia, 1977), that Ward fully acknowledged the Anzac image had been appropriated by the conservatives. Other historians of the nationalist left, such as Geoffrey Serle and Noel McLachlan, also grappled in the 1960s and 1970s with how and why a radical legend had taken such a conservative turn after 1916. The answer to the question of why the bush legend had, via Anzac, taken a conservative turn seemed to hold a key – possibly even the key – to understanding what, from their radical-nationalist perspective, had gone wrong in Australia between the world wars. Ward’s noble bushman seemed to be radical – to the extent that he had a political leaning – his bush mateship providing fertile soil for the pioneers of the new unionism in the 1880s, his nationalism laying the groundwork for the literature of the Bulletin writers in the 1890s. In short, the collectivism of Ward’s bush proletariat was understood as a progenitor of the wider culture of national- ism, democracy and egalitarianism, of what Albert Metin called Australia’s ‘socialism without doctrines’. But the Anzac and the digger seemed a pesky conservative Empire loyalist who had somehow pushed Australia off its natural course. In this reading, the returned men’s collectivism had found an inferior expression in the bonds between members of an exclusive cast defined by their common experience as soldiers of the king, not as men owing a primary allegiance to a working class more disposed to national than to imperial patriotism. The radical-nationalist reading of the politics of Anzac had merit. In some contexts, returned men were a force for imperial conservatism. But the association of political conservatism with the Great War digger or Anzac should not be taken for granted: there was no particular reason to imagine that a working-class army immersed in the horrors of the Western Front would lean right rather than left when it returned to Australia.

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IN FACT, MANY leaned left. Returned men were involved in public vio ­lence from 1915 and especially in 1919, when so many of them returned to a divided country that was torn by industrial strife and in the grip of a deadly outbreak of Spanish influenza. At Fremantle in May 1919, conflict on the waterfront led to a bloody clash between strike-breakers, accompanied by the conservative premier Hal Colebatch, and unionists and their support- ers – in some instances returned soldiers. Several people were injured and a unionist was killed. The historian Robert Bollard has recently uncovered a rich history of industrial action and radical agitation by returned soldiers in the tense period immediately following the First World War. The Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Austra- lia (RSSILA) – later the Returned and Services League (RSL) – has sometimes been given the credit or blame for directing the politics of Australia’s returned soldiers away from class struggle of this kind and into more conservative channels. In 1919 returned soldiers, probably organ- ised by RSSILA officers, were prominent among rioters in Brisbane who responded to a leftist ‘red flag’ rally by attacking members of the local Russian community. And in Victoria in the same year, members of the Essendon RSSILA travelled to the Western District to tar and feather former Labor politician JK McDougall after an anti-war poem he had originally written in opposition to the Boer War was republished, imply- ing that he was referring to the AIF. Recent research on the RSSILA’s early history suggests that its political impact should not be reduced to a survey of these kinds of incidents. The league’s first president, William Bolton, was an unquestionably partisan figure who had been elected to the federal parliament as a Nationalist senator in 1917. He aroused fury among his colleagues in the RSSILA after issuing a statement in May 1919, in the midst of widespread industrial action, that ‘in order to protect our league from the obvious intrigue of disloyal extremists under cover of industrial strife’ it was necessary ‘for all members to strongly abstain from active participation in any industrial dispute’. There was widespread dismay within the organisation over this state- ment, issued without consultation and, equally seriously, without any apparent understanding of ‘the awkward position of returned soldiers in time of industrial trouble’. Accused of being unable to devote sufficient time to the

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organisation he had been involved in founding, it was not long before he was replaced by a very different figure. Gilbert Dyett had been badly wounded at Gallipoli and returned to Australia as an advocate of voluntary recruitment, but an opponent of conscription. He was a Catholic, secretary to the Victorian Trotting and Racing Association, and a close associate of the controversial entrepreneur, John Wren. He was also an astute negotiator; the historian Martin Crotty suggests that his success in gaining concessions for returned soldiers from Prime Minister Billy Hughes in 1919 probably helped to keep the RSSILA in one piece. Eschewing the kind of ‘law and order’ campaign in which his predecessor had tried to entangle the organisation, Dyett emphasised the RSSILA’s role as lobbyist. He valued his access to government, for which he thought his own critics among returned soldiers gave him too little credit. None of this should be taken as indicating that the RSSILA was therefore politically irrelevant beyond its particular concern with returned soldiers’ interests, since plenty of scope remained within state branches and local sub-branches for conservative politicking. But the divisions within the RSSILA about the issue of political neutrality should guard against hasty conclusions concerning its role in shaping the broader political allegiances of returned soldiers. During the 1920s, the organisation struggled to gain members. In 1919, it probably had between one hundred thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand members, a figure that declined rapidly and markedly thereafter, dipping to twenty-five thousand members in 1923, before beginning a slow climb that saw numbers reach around eighty thousand by the late 1930s.

THERE IS A complicated story involving the Anzac legend and the left between the 1920s and the 1960s, which historians have barely begun to untangle. During the Depression, there appears to have been a reinvigorated effort on the part of the mainstream labour movement to engage with the legacy of the Great War, to articulate a progressive Labor nationalism in which Anzac had a part to play. It seemed natural enough to identify the suffering of the working class during the Depression with the earlier battles abroad, especially as many of those suffering in the 1930s were returned men.

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The fight for a more just economic system in the face of a crumbling capitalist system was an extension of the sacrifices made by the Anzacs for the sake of a better world. But further to the left, activists, speakers and publications associated with the Communist Party (and even, on occasion, with more moderate elements in the labour movement) criticised the ‘imperial boasting and military boosting’ of 25 April. Such criticisms – the preserve of a small minority from the 1920s to the 1950s – became part of mainstream public discourse during the 1960s, especially among the young. The Vietnam War is usually associated with the eclipse of Anzac in the 1960s. Its resurgence in the 1980s is seen as dependent, to some extent, on the bitterness and division engendered by that war giving way to a growing sympathy for the young Australian men whose lives were blighted by their participation in it. Certainly, the 1980s and early 1990s have recently been recognised as a crucial period in the resurgence of Anzac, an era that might be seen as beginning in 1981 with the Peter Weir film Gallipoli and ending with Paul Keating’s 1993 eulogy for the ‘unknown soldier’ at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It is ironic that this reinvention and revival occurred during a period of Labor Party dominance. But both Bob Hawke and Paul Keating – Labor’s two prime ministers of the period – would each, in different ways, seek to align the Anzac legend with his sense of national identity. Hawke came to office in 1983 evoking Curtin’s wartime legend. He was fond of comparing the economic challenges faced by the country to the problems John Curtin encountered in 1942. He engaged with Gallipoli and the First World War more generally, drawn by circumstance and a highly developed political instinct. In 1984, Hawke responded to a proposal from the Gallipoli Legion of Anzacs by announcing that his government would ask its Turkish counter- part to rename the beach on which the Australians landed on 25 April 1915 as Anzac Cove, a change which occurred in 1985. But it was the 1990 pilgrimage to Gallipoli that truly gave Hawke an opportunity to put his mark on the legend. In his memoirs, Hawke places his account of the pilgrimage out of chronological sequence, at the end of a chapter on the Gulf War of 1990–91, as if one were comprehensible in light of the other. ‘As I looked back nearly a year later,’ he explained, ‘Gallipoli and the Gulf merged in a swell of pride for my country and its people.’ Hawke was

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more successful than any other Labor leader, except John Curtin, in identify- ing the Labor Party with ‘pride for my country’, but the juxtaposition of the two events – the Gallipoli commemoration and the Gulf War – anticipates the ways Anzac would later be used to legitimise the Howard Government’s highly contested commitment to the Iraq War. Fifty-two men, aged between ninety-three and 104, accompanied Hawke and Opposition Leader John Hewson on the 1990 trip. Intriguingly, the Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, who wrote Hawke’s addresses for the commemoration, thought Hawke’s bicentennial speeches of a couple of years before ‘had failed to resonate’; Freudenberg saw Gallipoli as an opportunity for Hawke to ‘break the conservative monopoly on the interpretation of Austra- lian military history’. This background, recently explored by Carolyn Holbrook in Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (NewSouth, 2014), might lend some support to Mark McKenna’s theory that a reinvented Anzac Day emerged in the 1990s out of the failure of the 1988 Bicentenary as an exercise in enacting national unity as a result of Aboriginal dissent. Anzac Day, McKenna argues, emerged ‘as a less complicated and less divisive alternative’ to Australia Day. Hawke’s two key addresses at Gallipoli on 25 April 1990 – at the Dawn Service and later in the morning at Lone Pine – were well received. The speech at the Dawn Service borrowed – to put it politely – from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and an agnostic prime minister declared the beach ‘sacred because of the bravery and the bloodshed of the Anzacs’. Later in the morning, he declared that Anzac’s ‘meaning can endure only as long as each new generation of Australians finds the will to reinterpret it’. But what he saw in the story of Anzac was ‘recognition of the special meaning of Australian mateship’.

AS PRIME MINISTER, Paul Keating elevated war commemoration to at least equal heights as Hawke, but, as is well known, he sought to shift the focus from Gallipoli to Kokoda, from a war fought far from home in defence of an empire to one fought on the doorstep in defence of a nation. His eulogy to the unknown soldier, however, required reflection on the meaning of the First World War. With the historian Don Watson as his speechwriter, Keating delivered a widely admired speech in which he declared the man

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being reinterred was ‘all of them’ and ‘one of us’. The message was egalitarian, democratic, nationalist and, in the context of Keating’s broader concerns and rhetorical armoury of the early 1990s, subtly republican. But above all, the speech elevated ordinary men and women to war heroes – delivering ‘the lesson...that they were not ordinary’. These two streams of rhetoric have arguably been critical in shaping the language of modern Anzac commemoration: Hawke’s story of sacrifice and mateship, Keating’s of the heroic and history-making status of the common man and woman. In each case, the personal was seen to transcend the cause for which the war was fought. Prime Minister John Howard has been given great credit for his skill in crafting a persuasive political language, yet with respect to the Anzac legend he did not depart significantly from the scripts set down by the two Labor prime ministers who preceded him. Indeed, this shared rhetoric of war commemoration should alert us to one of the most significant and neglected aspects of Anzac: that it has functioned since 1916 as a site of social consensus and shared values, more than of contestation or disagreement. Anzac, however, is never just about mateship and democracy; it is also always about war and nationhood. As the political and diplomatic contexts of the First World War became increasingly lost to public memory, the new post-1990 Anzac ‘consensus’ has been forged around amorphous civic values so widely shared that anyone inclined to question them runs close to disqual- ifying themselves from Australian public culture – or, if you belong to a suspect ethnic or religious group, from the national community entirely. The defence of Anzac Day commemoration – as common in the 1920s as today – turns on some fairly familiar arguments: it does not glorify war; it does not cultivate hatred; it is about honouring and remembering, not celebrating. Yet a sense of sacred nationhood created through the blood sacrifice of young men remains at its core today, as in 1916. Is this not to glorify war?

References available at www.griffithreview.com

Frank Bongiorno lectures in history at the Australian National University. This essay is part of an Australian Research Council funded project examining war and memory, Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: A Centenary History of Australia’s National Day.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 91 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY Gough’s war Making a politician, changing a nation Jenny Hocking

It took Gough’s war years and his time in the RAAF, freed from the happy but sheltered home life of a public servant’s son, to turn Whitlam into a politician. Craig McGregor, Good Weekend, October 1988

IN JULY 1944, stationed with RAAF Squadron 13 in Gove, Flight Lieutenant Navigator Gough Whitlam wrote ‘a letter of passion’ to his wife, Margaret:

Darling… You must conjecture what State administration would have been like in war and compare it with what Commonwealth has been. Similarly you may conjecture what Commonwealth admin- istration may be like in the five postwar years if this Referendum is carried and compare it with what the States’ administration was like in the two previous peacetime periods of stress after the last war and during the depression… You can hardly fail to see that the Commonwealth is better fitted to deal with such nation-wide problems. And so to bed. Love, G.

Whitlam’s ‘passion’ for the animating question of Commonwealth–State relations was a thinly disguised, self-deprecating acknowledgement of the depth of his own ‘aching to return home’ – of the dread loneliness of years of war service, which he had increasingly filled with politics. Margaret and Gough had been married for barely six weeks when he left Sydney to begin

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his training with the RAAF, and for the next three and a half years as an air force navigator Whitlam operated across northern Australia and the South Pacific – from Coffs Harbour, Cooktown and Gove, to Milne Bay, Biak, Hollandia (Jayapura), Merauke, Leyte, Morotai and Palau. Whitlam had applied to join the RAAF in December 1941 – the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor – and four years later, as the war in the Pacific ended, he navigated the only Empire aircraft assigned to the RAAF Pacific echelon at General MacArthur’s headquarters at Leyte and Manila. The contrast between American power and dynamism in the region, its keen engagement with the Australian services, and the tired unchallenged British expectations of deference and support could not have been starker. And it did not go unnoticed.

GOUGH WHITLAM WAS no stranger to the changing dimensions of international politics. His unusual childhood was spent in the earliest years of the new national capital, Canberra, where his father, Fred Whitlam, was Crown Solicitor and one of Australia’s most significant public servants. Even as a child, Gough had been immersed in the dynamics of internationalism, current affairs and political debates, always in the structured context of parlia- mentary democracy, which Fred Whitlam considered ‘the best political system for the ordering of a humane organised community life’. Their reading matter was the Round Table, the Observer, the Children’s Encyclopaedia and the Times Literary Supplement, and their guests were a broad mix of politicians, lawyers and senior public servants. Whitlam emerged with an astonishing breadth of knowledge and familiarity with international politics and governance. It was the perfect civic grounding for a future prime minister. Despite the notable distinction between the gentle tolerance and deter- mined political neutrality of Fred Whitlam and the biting wit and fiery political oratory of his son, Fred Whitlam was an undoubted yet underplayed influence on Gough, in particular on his internationalism and confident view of Australia’s place in the world. In the postwar formation of the United Nations, Fred Whitlam played a major role as a member of Labor Minister for External Affairs HV Evatt’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, and as Australia’s key legal advisor in the drafting of the Universal

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Declaration of Human Rights, the greatest legacy of Evatt’s presidency of the United Nations General Assembly. The first indications of Gough Whitlam’s abiding concerns for social equality, electoral equity, post-colonial national independence, enhanced federal powers and Aboriginal rights – the pillars of what would become his government’s reform agenda – also emerged at this time, seen most clearly in his unstinting support for the Curtin Labor Government’s 1944 Commonwealth Referendum on Post-war Reconstruction and Democratic Rights – the ‘14 powers’ referendum. Stationed in Gove, Whitlam had first come into contact with Aborigi- nal Australians and was shocked by the conditions in the missions and the towns, and dismayed by the discrimination that he witnessed not only in the community but also in the services. It was the beginning of his determined policy of recognition of Aboriginal land rights, acknowledgment of wrong and a commitment to end residual discriminatory policies. In his own modest assessment, ‘That gave me an insight which nobody in the parliament had so well.’ In Cooktown, Whitlam led what he termed ‘my first political campaign’, agitating among his own squadron in support of the 1944 referendum to extend the Commonwealth wartime powers for a further five years, to enable it to undertake the extensive national reconstruction effort needed once the war had ended. Evatt called it ‘planning for peace’.

THE REFERENDUM POWERS to be transferred to the Commonwealth included national health, employment and unemployment, ‘reinstatement and advancement’ of service personnel and their dependents, uniform company legislation, trusts and monopolies, profiteering and prices, overseas exchange and investment, air transport, uniform railway gauges and family allowances. The fourteenth of the Commonwealth powers sought was for ‘the people of the aboriginal race’; the inclusion of the race power in the 1944 referendum was both a reflection of a ‘new wartime idealism about the position of Aboriginal people’, and an acknowledgement of the growing international dimension to national considerations of Indigenous affairs. Paul Hasluck, then a senior member of the Department of External Affairs, tried

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to impress upon successive Australian governments that ‘in the postwar settlements, the treatment of native races is likely to be made the subject of international discussion’. This international dimension to postwar national developments is the critical framework for understanding Gough Whitlam’s own political trajec- tory. The extensive reform agenda he later spearheaded through the ALP platform, and the blueprint for ‘the Program’ once in government, provided the domestic articulation of these same postwar international principles of justice and rights first seen in the 1944 referendum. Whitlam was already a strong supporter of the Curtin Government and of Curtin’s determination that the expansive reach of Commonwealth powers in wartime should not be seen as just a ‘passing phase’. Curtin’s refusal to concede the undoubted difficulty of reform or to accept ‘the paradox that the Labor Party was free to enact its policies in times of war alone’, was particu- larly compelling. It drove Whitlam’s proselytising for the referendum and his belief – as his war service had already shown him – that only the national government had the capacity to undertake the massive, nation-wide postwar reconstruction effort that would be essential once the war ended. From Canberra, Fred Whitlam (who had drafted the terms of the refer- endum) sent Gough the paperwork – in typical disinterested public service style enclosing both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ cases – together with Evatt’s 188-page 1942 ‘booklet’ Post-war Reconstruction: A Case for Greater Commonwealth Powers, and UAP leader Robert Menzies’ second reading speech in forensic opposition to it.

THE REFERENDUM’S APPARENTLY pedestrian proposals to continue the expanded federal powers of wartime were in reality a powerful mecha- nism for change. Often forgotten yet fundamental to any understanding of it, the earliest iteration of the necessary Commonwealth postwar powers considered at the Constitutional Convention in 1942 had also included four key ‘democratic freedoms’ considered, in the context of world war and the rise of fascism, as central to the postwar spread of liberal democratic citizen- ship and to future world peace: ‘freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear’.

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In this original specification of core political and democratic rights, postwar reconstruction would enable a radical reconfiguration of pre-war certainties, ‘to lay the foundations for a new social order’ through its recog- nition of fundamental civil and political rights, and of social justice. It was a dramatic conception, an expression more of hope than possibility, which drew clearly on the urgent political poetry of the Atlantic Charter – a vision- ary wartime commitment by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 to a world without war, free of deprivations, tolerant and non-discriminatory. A world that would, with harmony and security at home, never again see the insidious rise of fascism. At its heart, the Atlantic Charter – a pact of mutual aspiration rather than a binding treaty – pointed to a new world order of self- determination and nation building, of territorial respect, economic security, human rights, international governance and, above all, of peace; ‘all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force’. Roosevelt had first articulated the four freedoms in his January 1941 ‘Four Freedoms’ address as ‘a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation’: freedom of speech, of worship, from want and from fear. The inclusion of the freedoms from want and from fear in those four fundamental freedoms represented both an early notion of economic security as a human right in this post-conflict democratic paradigm, and an internationalism within which the national elaboration of rights and freedoms should be understood. Like the Atlantic Charter and the initial terms of the Post-war Reconstruction referendum to follow, Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ brought the specifics of national reform into an international framework for a democratic future and was a forerun- ner of the postwar international organisations to come. Evatt’s elevation of the Atlantic Charter and these ‘four great freedoms’ can be seen in his concluding remarks of his first ministerial speech in the House of Representa- tives on 26 November 1941: ‘…international peace can be maintained only through international justice, and…the four great freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, and freedom from want – are meaningless unless they be enjoyed, not in one or two or three countries, but, as President Roosevelt insists, “everywhere in the world”.’ To Curtin, the four freedoms and the ‘common principles of national policies outlined in

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the Atlantic Charter’ were at the very heart of a new and better world order, describing them to the 1943 Labor Party national conference as ‘comparable in their significance to the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence’.

THE 1944 REFERENDUM was in its conception decades ahead of its time and, remarkably, Curtin initially appeared to have secured the necessary cross-party support for its success – after all, in 1942 the states had agreed to the voluntary transfer of much of these same powers. What defeated the 1944 referendum in the end was time – the end of the war quickly brought an end to any appetite for what was readily depicted as a continuation of onerous wartime regulation and control – while the capri- cious politics of federalism saw the support of the states evaporate. Hasluck recalled that the referendum had provided one of the few rallying points for the rapidly disintegrating UAP and Country Party unity, feeding conserva- tive concerns over ‘the possible use of wartime powers and arrangements to inaugurate lasting socialist or unificationist programmes’. The campaign became further mired in petty squabbles with the states, both Labor and conservative, over the detail of the fourteen powers and the implications of the four rights and freedoms. When the revised refer- endum bill was finally put to the House of Representatives after two years of escalating division, the ‘four freedoms’ had been its greatest casualty and none appeared in the version introduced on 10 February 1944. Curtin and Evatt insisted that the provisions would be put as one, arguing that they made little sense in isolation and refusing to be drawn into endless arguments about specific clauses, state rights and confected fears of federal control – driven by dire press claims that the referendum would ‘impose a dictatorship in Australia’ and that freedom ‘would vanish entirely’. In its final form, the ‘democratic rights’ referred to in the referendum’s formal title – Constitu- tion Alteration (Post-war Reconstruction and Democratic Rights) Act 1944 – bore little resemblance to the powerful and purposive ‘four great freedoms’ originally proposed. Instead, the referendum question would now include provisions ‘to safeguard freedom of speech and expression and freedom of religion’ – the latter by extending the provision of Section 116 guaranteeing

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freedom of religion to include the states – and to increase regulatory oversight of delegated government decisions. This only served to further confuse an already confused debate over the nature of and powers needed for postwar reconstruction and in which, as Ian Milner described, ‘the referendum campaign politics twisted beyond recognition the actual basic issues involved’. Gough Whitlam had campaigned fervently for the 1944 referendum, convincing even long-term RAAF pilot Lex Goudie – a paid-up member of the UAP – to support it. But despite majority support from within the services the referendum did not succeed; it was carried in just two states and failed even to reach the necessary nationwide majority. The greater degree of service support showed the willingness of those already familiar with and personally reliant on the adequate reach of Commonwealth power in wartime to accept its extension in peacetime, particularly given the specified power for the ‘reinstatement and advancement’ of service members. The service vote also evinced an anomaly in the broader voting system, as the Commonwealth Electoral War-Time Act enabled all service personnel to vote in the refer- endum even if they were not on the electoral roll. This led to the unusual outcome of an apparently greater than 100 per cent turnout in the referendum vote in some divisions. The failure of the 1944 referendum had an immeasurable impact on Whitlam; it was not only personally disappointing, but in his now-committed Labor view it was politically devastating. Nearly sixty years later, Whitlam reflected that ‘the campaign had an immediate and lasting effect on my attitudes and career’. Whitlam understood the almost insurmountable diffi- culties faced by reforming Labor governments with the Constitution deemed to minimise the reach of federal powers except during wartime, and he saw the failure of the 1944 referendum as a singular lost opportunity for future Labor governments. The ‘fourteen powers’ propounded by Curtin and Evatt foreshadowed the expanded federal responsibilities in health, welfare, regional and urban development, trade and industry regulation and Aboriginal rights later intro- duced by the Whitlam government, as well as the protection of basic rights and freedoms that are its hallmark. Much of what was set out in that refer- endum, and in the arguments for the expansion of Commonwealth powers

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first rehearsed there, can be seen in a direct policy line from the extensive renovation of the Labor party platform of the 1960s driven by Whitlam and the ‘modernisers’, to the reform agenda of the Whitlam government itself. This was unfinished Labor business – expanding the reach of Commonwealth powers, ensuring the rights of Aboriginal Australians, recognising interna- tional responsibilities and agreements, an independent foreign policy stance and a fundamental notion of equality of opportunity as the gateway to social and economic progress – that he would pursue in the Labor Party, in opposi- tion and in government. Whitlam’s appointment of Curtin’s Director-General of Post-war Reconstruction, Dr HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs, as his personal adviser in the days before the 1972 election was an equally powerful reclamation.

PERHAPS MOST SIGNIFICANTLY, the nature of the referendum and its defeat did not consign Whitlam to the pessimism and constitutional impotence that would soon engulf the Labor Party during the bitter infighting of the postwar decades. Instead, it gave way to Whitlam’s energetic search for alter- native means to accrue federal powers within the confines of the constitution – to enable a reform agenda despite the apparent strictures of Section 92 (that trade, commerce and intercourse among the states shall be ‘absolutely free’), long seen as a historic constitutional barrier to fundamental Labor reform. In this, Whitlam would follow – with greater success – Evatt’s defiant attempt through the 1944 referendum to remove any such constitutional barriers to ‘building a better world’: ‘If there are constitutional limitations on such bold and imaginative action, then the Constitution has become the instrument of reaction. Let us not fear to change it.’ Ultimately, Whitlam would realise this shift in federal–state powers without constitutional change, through his expansive application of the interstices of Section 96 enabling the use of ‘tied grants’ of federal funds to the states: ‘I went from the despair of Section 92 to the confidence of Section 96 – 92 was the barrier, 96 the avenue’. Both the reach of the Whitlam govern- ment’s comprehensive reforms – ‘the Program’ – and the means through which to achieve it had their origins in his own wartime experiences, and in particular in the lessons of the Curtin government’s 1944 referendum. Out of failure had come opportunity.

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Although rightly seen as a moderniser in terms of Labor reformism and policies, Whitlam’s approach to policy and method also evidences a continu- ity to this earlier Labor tradition. As an unashamed protector of the Curtin legacy, Whitlam’s novelty in government was less about policy reform and more about finding a means to achieve, within the existing constraints of the constitution, Curtin’s stalled vision for postwar reconstruction, democratic rights, social justice and peace. Whitlam’s RAAF missions across the Pacific had reinforced the simple reality of this profound geopolitical shift in Australia’s international and security relations, expounded by Curtin in 1941 when he shocked the colonial relics with his candid assessment that, at this time of war; ‘Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’. For Whitlam, the continuing, quasi-colonial deference to the United Kingdom was little more than an embarrassing reminder of an arrested national development, and he enthusiastically took up Curtin’s shifting rheto- ric and embraced the security implications of the growing US influence in the region – not least because he had experienced its implications in action.

IN 1945, TWO days after the death of John Curtin, Gough Whitlam returned home on leave and joined the Darlinghurst branch of the Australian Labor Party the following month. Twenty-seven years later, as he began the final stage of his long road to government, the opening words of his now famous ‘It’s Time’ policy speech were also the words of John Curtin: ‘Men and women of Australia.’ In this continuity of political influence and history, Whitlam was more than just a product of these postwar global forces – he was an ardent proponent of them, and while in government drove Australia’s recommitment to them after decades of desuetude. Under the Whitlam government, more than 133 international treaties were entered into force, including the ratification of the Treaty on the Non-Prolifer- ation of Nuclear Weapons; fifteen significant human rights treaties, including the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Convention on the Political Rights of Women, Convention (No. 87) concerning Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise and, most importantly, the Conven- tion on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; and the two

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covenants giving effect to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Whitlam’s appointment in 1983 as Australia’s Ambassador to UNESCO by the Hawke government gave him a rare opportunity to meet that commit- ment to international governance from within one of the key international organisations itself. ‘For the rest of the decade I sometimes had to apply as much intensity to international politics and administration as I had often applied to national politics and administration during the three previ- ous decades,’ he remarked. As a specialised agency of the United Nations, UNESCO was itself a product of the postwar drive for internationalism, peaceful conflict resolution and universal human rights that was also funda- mental to Whitlam’s domestic political agenda. Although Australia had played a major role in the creation of the international organisations, this early engagement had waned during the decades of conservative government that followed and not a single UNESCO convention had been ratified by the Menzies government, an inertia comprehensively overturned by Whitlam. There is a fine circularity in Gough Whitlam’s appointment as Australia’s Ambassador to UNESCO (1983–86) and his subsequent election to its Execu- tive Board, as emblematic of the lasting impact of the postwar influences of modernism and internationalism on Australian politics. This was the overdue transformation of the postwar political settlement, promised yet unmet through the decades of Liberal–Country Party government. The Whitlam government was the necessary rupture with that strained past, a reformist vision whose origins lay in Whitlam’s own wartime experience, and which saw in the developing institutions of international law the mechanism for the peaceful resolution of conflict, for equity and democratic rights.

References available at www.griffithreview.com.

Jenny Hocking is an Australian Research Council DORA professorial fellow at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University and the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow with the Whitlam Institute at the University of Western Sydney. She is the author of three biographies, including the two-volume biography of Gough Whitlam, Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History (MUP, 2008) and Gough Whitlam: His Time (MUP, 2012), short-listed for multiple awards including the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the National Biography Award.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 101 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY Reaching to homelands Greek war memories Joy Damousi

STORIES OF WAR never lose their power to shock, sadden and confront. Witnessing death and experiencing violence and atrocities creates traumatic memories. Indelible and unavoidable traces of these events are left behind – not just for those who witness them, but also for future generations. How these events and their effects are understood and discussed over time is a perennial challenge to those who experience them and those who attempt, long after, to fathom the enduring depths of past human violence. The complexity of reconstructing, recapturing or representing acts of extreme violence in war has been well documented. Debates surrounding how such representations can or cannot be achieved have proven open ground for writers, artists, theorists and historians alike. In one regard, however, there is agreement. War memories and legacies often haunt individuals, and the effects of this ripple out from these individuals to families and communities for decades after the episode occurred. This being said, when we consider the legacies of war in Australia there is an aspect that remains largely unexplored. Australian history is dominated by stories of populations that have fled or migrated from war zones. The experiences of these migrant groups, and the place that war memories and stories have within their communities, are essential to understanding how war has helped to define their ethnicity, and that of their children. There is a need for a broader understanding of both the history of those

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who have fled wars and their aftershocks, and how their experiences of conflict have been remembered. This would encompass a largely unexplored dimension of the impact of war in Australia. That is, the enduring trauma of intergenerational war experiences as stories passed on to subsequent genera- tions, which move beyond their original homes and nations to inhabit new contexts and new meanings. What has been the fate of these memories when people immigrate to another country where the culture, language and history of the host nation are foreign and unfamiliar, even hostile? In the great movement of peoples after the wars of the twentieth century, the place of war memories assumed varying significance. For some individuals, the need to forge a new future and forget the past was imperative. For others, the desire to remember drove the need to pass on their family histories. In attempting to explore war legacies in migrant populations, an ideal starting point can be found in the history of the Greek diaspora in Australia – one of the country’s largest migrant communities – and the lingering place of their war memories.

AT ONE LEVEL, these are deceptively simple notions. Existing scholarship on migration allows us to recognise the ways in which some groups have remembered and commemorated certain events – or at least how government authorities might have perceived them – and the specifics of past wars that migrants recall. But the actual effect of trauma, dispossession and repression on individuals, families and communities is often rather different from the literature. It’s much more than the official and symbolic; it relates to how individuals made sense of their lives in relation to their wartime experiences and, later, to the alien society in which they found themselves, and to how they have re-created themselves in these new environments. World War II brought forms of war trauma and legacy to Australia in the soldiers who returned. But war trauma and its legacy were also transported with the arrival of Australia’s migrant population. The influx of migrants post-1945 was unprecedented in Australia’s history. Immediately after the war, the Curtin Labor Government and the Chifley administration that succeeded it undertook an ambitious immigration policy to expand Australia’s population of seven million. The reason for this expansion had its genesis in Australia’s experience of the war. The possibility

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that Australia could have succumbed to a Japanese invasion brought home the fact that such a vast country had very few people to defend it. Many believed that, with such a low number of inhabitants, Australia would not be able to take care of its own national security and that increasing the popula- tion was imperative. There was also a clear need to boost and diversify the economy, most specifically through manufacturing and infrastructure, and large numbers of workers were required to provide labour for major projects and new industries. Only migration could supply a sufficiently large body of mature and skilled workers. Despite this seemingly radical change in immigration direction follow- ing the war, Arthur Calwell, the minister for immigration, was determined that the arrival of new migrants would not challenge the principles of the entrenched White Australia Policy, which supported racial and cultural homogeneity. To ensure this, and to allay the fears of Australians about aliens and foreigners entering the country, Calwell had initially emphasised attracting British migrants. However, it proved difficult to obtain large numbers from just one country – it had always been unlikely that, of the seventy thousand immigrants required, most would come from Britain alone. The Australian government soon had to look further afield. After failing to attract migrants from Scandinavia, the government finally agreed to take twelve thousand Baltic refugees. They arrived between 1947 and 1951, and were joined soon after by 180,000 more displaced persons – ‘DPs’ or ‘reffos’ as they were dispar- agingly called – most of whom came from Eastern Europe. During this period, net migration to Australia was 450,000. British migration made up just under half of the intake, with an additional fifty thousand from Southern Europe, thirty-four thousand from northern Europe and seven thousand from Asia.

THIS POSTWAR GENERATION of newcomers was collectively distinct for two reasons: firstly, the sheer volume ensured a historical legacy; secondly, the high representation of people from southern Europe in the mix of those who arrived was unprecedented. These people made up the first wave of immigrants who brought a specific past with them, one that was hitherto unknown in Australia; that is, they had lived in a war zone. Migrants came with traumatic and often brutal experiences of war – not necessarily refugees themselves, but people for whom war and its aftermath was the decisive factor

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in their decision to migrate. Their experiences formed a significant aspect of their ethnic identity and were a fundamental part of their personal history. The policy of assimilation that was in place at the time did not encour- age public expressions of grief or loss over previous experiences, or emotional responses to the challenges of migration by those who arrived themselves. In a country where even local-born returned soldiers barely spoke about their experiences in conflict zones, war stories of migrants had little place in the new Australia of New Australians, and were viewed as best forgotten. Assimilationist policy was the cornerstone of postwar immigration policy, and it was based on a new identity that was to be built by relinquishing one’s personal past and one’s history. Effectively, the expectation of assimilationist policy that migrants would readily and seamlessly ‘adopt’ their new country aimed to construct a nation-building discourse by denying the past experiences of migrants that were, and are, central to the creation and maintenance of a collective identity and individual sense of self. This policy disavowed a multi-dimensional identity – one in which stories and identities from the past remained intact, but which could be integrated with new experiences. The assumption that the migrant would readily merge or be subsumed in Australian cultural life ignored the ways in which past narratives, stories and memories fundamentally shaped the self and sustained or enriched the act of renewal which is migration. This response is given example in the Greek communities. Mass migra- tion took place to the US and Canada, but Australia attracted a significant number of Greek immigrants; at the time, their massive postwar migration was one of the largest in Australia’s history. In the thirty-five years between 1947 and 1972, the postwar immigration policy drew 214,304 assisted and non-assisted Greek immigrants to Australian shores.

THE CHILDREN OF Greek migrants formed their core selves through their family history of Greek involvement in the 1940–45 war, and the brutal Greek Civil War that followed until 1949. These children found themselves ongoing custodians – willingly or unwillingly – of the war memories of their forebears. In interviews I have conducted with second-generation Greek adults, there is a tension in the two extremes of imparting war memories and past histories. For some this involves obsessively repeating stories; for others, refraining from telling children details of the past so as not to ‘contaminate’

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them. This is a familiar tendency in several contexts. ‘Joanna’, a second generation Greek–Australian born in Melbourne in 1961, told me that it was within the intimacy of family relations that war experiences and trauma could be explored. She felt it was a matter of ‘bearing witness through these stories of [her parents’] trauma. In the safety of the home and familial setting these stories can circulate, find legitimacy, and be affirmed.’ War stories were central to framing her Greek identity, to understanding why the family migrated to Australia. She recalls how her mother speaks at length about the war: ‘The stories of Germans violently raiding villages for food, or of the devastating impact of bombings on families…or of cruel starvation and hunger during the wars filled our childhood imagination. Clearly she felt the need to speak and continue to speak about these experiences.’ For others, silence was a major theme in the legacy of war. ‘Peter’, whose family migrated in 1957 to a migrant hostel in Newcastle, discusses how he ‘grew up on the stories, on the war stories...[it] was kind of like a staple diet, always there in the background. When relatives would come over we would go over the same ground and once upon a time I could recount the stories, because Dad had a limited repertoire of stories.’ But the tales were selective, and the level of detail limited and specifics were vague. Overall, in Australia, his parents attempted to protect him and his younger brother from the ‘contamination’ of the past, and especially from the details of the brutal murder of his grandmother. He recalls: ‘It was never telling the children… When I was a young adult and I wanted him to tell me about the stories and he refused to tell me… Because he felt his whole life was about protecting us and he didn’t want us to be contaminated. In his mind that’s how he organised it, and he felt he didn’t want us to be contaminated by the politics of the time. He said they were the kind of things best left – left back there – he didn’t want to carry it into this country. But it would come out in terms of him saying things like “Never speak your mind”; “Don’t let anyone you know let people know what you actually believe”.’ ‘Stephen’ was born in 1951 in Chalkis, and arrived in Australia in 1954. After his grandmother and pregnant aunt were executed by leftist guerillas, his father decided to leave Greece. He remembers how the war stories he grew up hearing defined his own identity as Greek, and his ‘Greekness’ in Australia. These have never left him and continue to define his own ethnicity: ‘[T]he degree to which I am framed by that history…it permeates me. It’s woven

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into me, my sense of who I am, so profoundly that I am intensely emotional about it… I am Greek. I am nothing but Greek… I am not Australian. The reason I am not Australian is that…in the most profound influences, the really emotional formation has been drawn from my relation to my mother and my father and the presence of their history.’ Stephen feared his father, particularly the intensity of his author- ity, which was shaped by the experience of war. His father served in the regular army in Greece and fought against the Germans. ‘He has grown in an environment where if you didn’t know how to deal with pain then you couldn’t cope with life.’ This violent past would break through in his language and in his demeanour: ‘One of the things my father used to say when he got very angry at me was “I will cut your throat”. I have observed the degree of control my father exercised over the intensity of his emotion and the way that can very easily lead to a physical expression and encounter.’ The omnipotent ghosts of violent pasts are powerfully captured in Two Greeks (UQP, 2011), John Charalambous’ insightful, compelling novel about a boy in a Greek–Australian family growing up in the 1970s. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 is the shadow that overhangs the story. Andy, the ten-year-old narrator, sees a photograph of a man killed in the street in Cyprus in 1955. The image stays with him, and he asks his mother about the role of his father, Harry, in the conflict:

‘Did Dad kill people?’ I ask. You give me a startled look. ‘In the war,’ I explain. ‘He was too young for any of that.’ ‘I mean when they kicked the English out.’ Harry tells stories about Cypriot independence. He boasts that his brothers were freedom fighters. ‘They didn’t kick the English out,’ you correct me. ‘The English went of their own accord. And your father wouldn’t have the guts to fight anyone. When all that happened he was sitting on his backside here in Australia.’ I believe you. I have never heard Harry claim a central part. ‘But his brothers fought,’ I persist. ‘So he says.’

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‘Would they have killed anyone?’ ‘They blew up innocent women, I remember that. Soldiers’ wives. It was a disgrace.’ ‘Dad’s brothers blew up innocent women?’ ‘Not them personally. Their side. The terrorists.’ ‘Maybe they meant to get someone else.’ ‘They didn’t care who they got.’

IMPARTING STORIES OF past wars and the involvement of families is a theme in Eleni Frangouli-Nickas’ Athina and Her Daughters (Owl, 2009), which retells the stories her mother told her and her sisters. Many of these stories have a war theme, and capture the experiences of war. Fundamentally, they are of migration and the need to keep the many stories alive that describe a wartime experience. Many of them are entertaining and evoke laughter. The following story, set in wartime Greece, encapsulates this humour in the most dire and desper- ate circumstances. Zoi tells the story as a young child, starving in Greece during the war and her desperation for food.

I just can’t stand it any longer! My stomach is hurting. We haven’t had bread now for days. But we’re not the only ones. Since the Germans came to the village, lots of people are going without bread… Our cousins from Athens are suffering more than us. They’re used to a better life in the big city. How can I ever forget the day I wanted to go to the toilet and found the door slightly ajar? I sensed that someone was in. ‘Who is there?’ I asked, but no response came from inside. ‘Open up,’ I said again, ‘I want to pee. Come out, quick.’ So, who comes out but my Athenian cousin Alexandra standing there with this half eaten huge slice of bread in her hand. She looks at me with terror in her eyes. ‘Please, don’t tell anyone, Zoitsa mou. I was so hungry. I went begging for bread and got this slice and I just couldn’t bear to share it with anyone.’ ‘How can you eat,’ I say to her, ‘in this smelly toilet?’

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But smell or no smell, I would have done the same. Her pitiful look makes me feel sorry for her. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say to her, ‘I won’t tell. Just give me half of it and I’ll forget the whole thing.’

War stories are central to Eleni’s Greek identity, to her family’s history and to her own identity negotiation and family story in Australia. They also enable her to look back not only with trauma and tragedy, but also with humour and wit. Writing allows her to recollect, record and frame the stories in ways that can be read and understood for her children and grandchildren. They are written with this use in mind, for these stories and memories shape a fundamen- tal aspect of family history framed by war. Committing them to the page gives them a permanence that transcends the potential loss of memory of the details.

JUST AS THERE are families in which the stories of the past are told and retold, laid out and examined, there are also families where information about the past has been scant or nonexistent, or passed on in an indirect way. Some families have chosen not to say much at all about their violent war past or communicate the stories of how they came to Australia. These gaps and silences inevitably create their own presence and narrative, especially when they are around experiences of war. For the children of these families, they are no less affecting. However, war memories have sustained a presence in Greek commu- nities as a way of forming identity or providing a backdrop to family history. The Australian postwar policy of assimilation failed to take into account the trauma and tragedy of so many of its migrants. As a result, there was a limited place for the full range of war stories in the national narrative. The memories of those who directly experienced war continue to influence the Greek–Australian identities of their families. This legacy is an ongoing theme that informs the children of migrants in ways that are often unexpected. The preservation of these memories remains a challenge to current and future generations, as the wars of the twentieth century cast their shadows.

References available at www.griffithreview.com.

Joy Damousi is an Australian Research Council laureate fellow and professor of history at the University of Melbourne. Her book Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 109 13/03/2015 3:58 pm ESSAY Marked men Anxiety, alienation and the aftermath of war Stephen Garton

GERMAINE GREER’S FATHER never hugged her. Born just before World War II, Greer’s childhood was overshadowed by a father who had served in military intelligence and survived the protracted horrors of the German siege of Malta, and returned suffering the effects of anxiety disorders and near-starvation. Greer found him cold, reserved and distant, unwilling or unable to respond to her desire for familial intimacy. Her story of a father altered as a returned serviceman – alienated and aloof, seemingly out of place in the feminised space of home and family – is one echoed in the stories of Australians from many walks of life. War service may have been mytholo- gised and enshrined in the national narrative, but the private experience of return is all too often suffused with personal ache and anguish, marking out a profound generational and inter-generational legacy of psychological loss. Twenty years ago, when I first began to research the experiences of returned Australian servicemen from the major wars of the twentieth century, evidence of the costs of war – material and emotional – surfaced in abundance. Official archives contained numerous reports of the pressures on widows and children struggling to survive when breadwinners had fallen in combat, or the burdens on wives and mothers caring for severely injured and ill veterans. More commonly, however, these dusty files held disquieting accounts about the strain of living with those demobilised soldiers who were seemingly fit and healthy, but had returned moody and withdrawn – by turns sullen and

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violent, prone to fits of rage, unable to hold down jobs and salving their private torments in drink or drugs. Australia’s pre-eminent historian of the Great War, CEW Bean, asserted that the returning Anzacs ‘merged quickly and quietly into the general population’. The records of repatriation authorities, returned services chari- ties, support groups and comfort funds tell a different story. Australia has continually faced a returned soldier crisis, something that marked men returning from all the wars of modern memory – from the Great War to Afghanistan and Iraq. There have now been three times as many suicides of Australian veterans of Afghanistan as combat deaths. In the 1930s, the RSL graphically encapsulated the problem in its successful campaign for a special pension for the ‘burnt-out soldier’. After the Vietnam War, a more specialised language took hold – post-traumatic stress disorder – now enshrined in the ways we think and talk about returning men. What this term obscures is the private pain of families who bear the brunt of these psychological strains.

THIS WAS THE archival account; yet equally striking was how my research prompted stories and reminiscences of returned soldiers from friends and strangers alike. These were invariably stories of loss or distant, disturbed and damaged men, enshrined in family narratives and transmitted across the generations as a talisman of connection to the horrors of war. Is it possible to capture and do justice to these enduring legacies? A pallid echo of private anguish is evident in the statistics of public support for veterans and their families. Over a quarter of a million Australians – veterans, widows and children – are currently in receipt of war pensions, a figure roughly equivalent to the numbers supported in the 1920s and 1930s when repatriation constituted a fifth of all Commonwealth Government expenditures, although the Australian population has quadrupled since then. More revealing is the fact that during the interwar years, pensions for psycho- logical disability rose while for all other categories they fell (owing to death or recovery). The scars of war sometimes took years to emerge, something that puzzled Australians in the 1930s but seems unsurprising to those raised in an era where discourses of psychological trauma abound. The financial burden of war pensions on governments can be surprisingly

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enduring. A century after Australia mobilised for the Great War, there are still a hundred Australians receiving Commonwealth war pensions as a result of the conflict. They are, of course, war widows, the wives of any veteran already receiving a pension or a veteran whose death was war related, even if death occurred decades afterwards: the last Australian Great War veteran passed away in 2009. The tendrils of war can stretch across generations, well beyond the life of the combatants. If the American experience is any guide, Australia might see many years before the last Great War pension file is closed. The last widow supported by an American War of Independence pension died in 1913, and the last receiving an American Civil War pension in 2004.

THE MATERIAL AND social impact of war might be tangible and, in some oblique way, quantifiable. Less easy to grasp are the emotional, psychological and familial residues of war service – on the people left behind by men who died in service, and on surviving veterans and those who shared their lives. We can find the traces of these deeper personal currents in family memoirs and reminiscences, many of them classics in the genre, such as Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (Viking Penguin, 1989); Donald Horne’s The Educa- tion of Young Donald (Angus & Robertson, 1967); Ric Throssell’s My Father’s Son (Heinemann Australia, 1989); and Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs (Pan Books, 1980). The ramifications of war on servicemen and their families and friends also abound in fictional accounts, most famously George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (Collins, 1964). Other notable contributions include the final volume of Martin Boyd’s Langton series, David Malouf’s The Great World (Pantheon, 1990), Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour (Penguin, 1932), William Nagle’s The Odd Angry Shot (Angus & Robertson, 1975) and Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year (1958). Less well known perhaps are Vietnam novels, such as Rhys Pollard’s The Cream Machine (Angus & Robertson, 1972) and David Alexander’s When the Buffalo Fight (Hutchinson Australia, 1980). In many of these works a profound alienation between men at war and those at home plays out, echoing the oral accounts and archival files of many veterans. The horror of war, the death of mates and the insidious growth of the belief that men at the frontline were abandoned to their fate by those at

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home – unsympathetic politicians, profiteers, shirkers, Vietnam war protes- tors and the ‘girls who wouldn’t wait’ – were common themes in the private reminiscences, and frequently in the public utterances, of returned men. However for some return was not a welcome release from horror but rather the loss of comradely friendships forged at the frontline – a leaving behind of the intense bonds of the trench, the jungle and the desert to be thrust back into a mundane, hostile and unmanly environment of family and work. Historians have traditionally shied away from personal and private emotions, except in historical biography. The rise of social and cultural history in the late twentieth century, however, increasingly focused attention on a broader range of collective and personal experiences, although not always in the most elegant of conceptual frameworks, as indicated by the short-lived fashion for ‘emotionology’. Australian historians interested in the history of private emotions found fertile ground in war and return. The pioneering work of Joy Damousi and the subsequent work of many others such as Marina Larsson, Pat Jalland and Bart Ziino has focused on death, grief, mourning, memorialisation and the burdens of caring for ill and injured returned servicemen. This has greatly enriched understanding of the personal consequences of war and their impact on the shape of Australian life and politics long afterwards. It is perhaps not surprising that Australian historians have turned to the consequences of war with such enthusiasm; it seemed a natural fit for the social and cultural turn in the discipline. More importantly, Anzac looms so large in the national consciousness that studies of grief and mourning offer an oblique entry for social and cultural historians into the national debate, without having to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ Anzac.

THE IRONY OF these new personal and familial approaches to the history of the Anzac legend is that the deeper historians go into the private dimensions of war, the less distinctive the Australian experience seems to be. The history of damaged and ill veterans is hardly unique to Australia. The significance of post-traumatic stress in the lives of returned servicemen and their families, and the impact on rehabilitation and repatriation systems, is common ground for historians of North America, Britain, Europe and other parts the world. From there, it is a short step to questioning the distinctiveness of the

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Anzac legend itself. The more we place the Australian experience of war in a transnational context the more obvious our shared experiences and responses become. The historiography on the experience of modern warfare – from Germans in the Great War to Americans in Vietnam – stresses the impor- tance of group bonds among soldiers. In other words, what Australians have called mateship was exactly how soldiers on all sides of the major wars of the twentieth century survived (and if they didn’t develop such bonds, they did not survive for long). Servicemen from all modern wars commonly felt that generals were sacrificing them for worthless purposes, people at home were ignoring their plight and profiting from their absence, and wives and girlfriends were betraying them. What is distinctive about the Australian experience of modern warfare is not the experience itself but our refashioning of it into a national secular religion. For most countries, occasions such as Remembrance Day are solemn occasions for commemoration of the dead. In Australia, Anzac Day mixes solemnity with celebration of national becoming. The ink spilt trying to explain this has been extensive and at times illuminating. But is there more to the Anzac legend than just the flowering of emergent nationalism? I’ve never been well disposed to psychohistory, generally finding it vague and speculative; yet the more I look at the history of Anzac and how it has waxed and waned in national consciousness, the more I think collective psychology might have something to tell us. The Anzac legend emerged in the aftermath of Gallipoli, but only came to national prominence in 1916 and beyond – just as the conscription referenda convulsed the nation. In the end, Australia was one of the few combatant nations that did not institute conscription, a fact sometimes used by veterans and their representatives to suggest that Australia had failed its men and owed them a special debt. By the 1970s, the power of the Anzac legend seemed to be on the wane, only to reawaken in the 1980s when discourses about the betrayal of Vietnam veterans – a lack of sympathy for their war service – encouraged many to support the ‘Welcome Home March’ movement. Since then, Anzac commemoration has undergone a remarkable revival, particularly among younger generations. In this light, could it be said that Anzac has been fuelled in part by collec- tive guilt? Have discourses of betrayal fostered compensatory discourses of

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national embrace? Are these anxieties amplified by the fact that unlike many nations Australia’s modern wars have been fought overseas, with civilians a long way from theatres of combat (except perhaps in Darwin)? Answers are elusive; there is clear conjunction, but causation is harder to prove. Australian opposition to war, from the divisive votes of 1916 and 1917 onwards, has often failed to disentangle legitimate criticism of the war effort from criticism of those Australians who accepted the call to arms. In this failure, ordinary soldiers have felt themselves at the brunt of public opprobrium, even when the critics were clearly a minority of Austra- lians. Can we find ways to criticise wars, while at the same time hold the valour and sacrifice of the soldiers themselves in high esteem (except when military atrocities have been proven)? If cultures fail to perpetuate warrior myths, do they make their veterans’ alienation worse? Does the inevitable gap between discourses of debt and the reality of its repayment create the conditions for disenchantment? Germaine Greer’s story of familial disharmony, however, refuses the easy discussion of Anzac alienation, instead exploring more discomforting theories about paternal disaffection. Greer’s brilliance lies in moving beyond the obvious narrative lynchpin to deeper undercurrents of masculinity, class and status. Similarly, recent research on suicidal veterans questions whether high rates are peculiar to war service or reflect an emerging masculinity crisis in young men. In this light, are our collective discourses on Anzac – even on the alienation of Anzacs from all our modern wars – ways of deflecting more troubling interrogations of the evidence, something that both reveals and disguises? What is inescapable is that the legacies of Anzac story-making, whether praising Australian virtues or highlighting loss and sacrifice, are in many respects efforts to render meaningful the unfathomable pain and anguish experienced by generations of Australians as a consequence of war.

Stephen Garton is deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Sydney and the author of four books, including The Cost of War (Oxford University Press, 1996).

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 115 13/03/2015 3:58 pm MEMOIR A Christmas story Exploring the island’s hidden war narrative Ben Stubbs

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, six soldiers were shot in their beds in the Officers’ Quarters on Christmas Island. Their bodies were wrapped in bed sheets and mosquito nets, and tossed off the cliffs into the Indian Ocean where the silhouette of five ships could be seen, lingering on the horizon. It was 10 March 1942, and Singapore had just fallen to the Japanese. The Indian army stationed on Christmas Island had been tuning into Axis propaganda and did not want their British superiors to resist the coming invasion (three workers had already been killed from an exploratory Japanese bombing raid); to fight would mean certain death. Rumours were circulating that the Indians would gain their independence and side with the Japanese soon anyway, so Sergeant Mir Ali decided to act. He convinced twelve of his countrymen to lock the ammunition store and to attack their commanders after they returned from an evening party. The Sikh soldiers threw their superiors from the cliffs to ensure that as the Japanese naval forces approached, there would be no resistance. This is a story of occupation and incarceration on Christmas Island that dates back more than sixty years. There is a rich and fascinating history to the place, though the legacy of war is one that is often buried beneath many others on this most controversial island.

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Christmas Island is an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, named by English captain William Mynors, who sailed past it in on Christmas Day in 1643. It has a legacy of colonisation, segregation, exploration and commerce. As we know, Christmas Island is difficult to consider in a contemporary setting outside of it being the Australian epicentre of the asylum seeker and immigration situation. While this island of barely two thousand full-time residents is never far from the news, there is one part of its past that has remained buried in the jungle surrounding the township.

JON SCRAMBLES DOWN the rock face and hacks away a tangle of brush with his machete. ‘Just so you know, we’re trespassing right now,’ he says matter-of-factly. We skid down the slope, which is littered with fallen trees and jungle debris from the January 2014 cyclone. At the edge of the cliff, Jon pulls back the creepers to reveal a Japanese observation point and bunker hidden in the undergrowth behind the phosphate mine’s conveyor belt. Jon Stanhope is the outgoing administrator of the Australian Indian Ocean Territories, which also include the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. His office overlooks the cove and the rusting phosphate chute. He rummages through a cabinet and produces a box. ‘It’s back here somewhere, sorry, my cleaners are superstitious and think there might be ghosts around. They wouldn’t come back until I locked it away.’ The ‘it’ he is referring to is the material that was found with the Unknown Soldier, who was exhumed from Christmas Island in 2006 and is now buried in Geraldton. On 6 February 1942, locals on Christmas Island noticed a ‘strange object’ offshore and soon discovered the corpse of a man in a blue boiler suit, adrift in a life-float with the marking ‘Made in NSW’ on its sides. Decades of research have gone into identifying the soldier – so far inconclusively – whose body was the only one recovered from the HMAS Sydney, which was destroyed by the German raider Kormoran on 19 November 1941 off the coast of Western Australia. ‘They didn’t know what to do with this stuff, so I said I’d keep it here,’ Jon informs us. We rummage through old gin bottles, metal shards and other

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material, which might have helped to identify the soldier. As I will learn, the memory of war on Christmas Island is still treated quite casually. Jon looks up from his rummaging. ‘Have you heard of the World War II remnants on Christmas Island?’ he asks. I shake my head. ‘Christmas Island was bombed. The USS Wolf sunk a Japanese sub just here,’ he says pointing out to the pier outside his window. ‘If you’ve got nothing to do we can go exploring,’ he suggests. ‘Most of the locals don’t even know about these places,’ he adds, grabbing his keys. We head out into the areas around ‘The Settlement’ where most people now live, to uncover the story of the Japanese occupation on Christmas Island.

THE LEGACY OF war on Christmas Island has been buried behind the concerns for government infrastructure, the resources devoted to the deten- tion centre and the tourism focus on the natural attractions of the island, which lies 2,600 kilometres from Perth and only three hundred and sixty kilometres from Jakarta. When the Japanese arrived on 31 March 1942, with the support of nine bombers, two cruisers, two battleships and a destroyer, the white flag was hoisted and the Japanese began their occupation of what was a strategic point between Australia and Asia. The Japanese commander gave his soldiers ‘three days to have a free hand with the population’, and they set about looting and drunkenly cavorting, and assumed control of the opium stores on the island. Despite the fears of the population, there was only one instance of sexual assault – on a sick Chinese resident who ‘died a few days later’, according to John Hunt’s book on the occupation of Christmas Island, Suffering Through Strength (self-published, 2011). The British, Indian, Chinese and Malay prisoners were told to ‘work hard and be loyal to the Emperor’, and so began their three years of imprison- ment on the island. While many of the workers fled to the jungle, there were more than a thousand under Japanese watch in the beginning. The Japanese forced the prisoners to continue with the lucrative phosphate mining that had been sustaining the island and, by all accounts, they kept their heads down as much as they could during their internment.

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THE JAPANESE ESTABLISHED defences for any attempted retaking of the island, and remnants of these still remain. Jon and I follow a hand-drawn map from 1977, searching for what is buried beneath the jungle at the edge of town. From the observation points above the yellow and dusty phosphate belt, we head to one spot that Jon knows better than most. Across the bay is Jon’s white, wooden house. As administrator of the Indian Ocean Territories he is given the use of a beautifully kept colonial mansion overlooking coconut trees and the Indian Ocean; we’re there to look under the floorboards. The Japanese commandant used this house during their three-year occupation. Jon shows me a neat line of faded black graffiti, about thirty centimetres long, on one of the support pillars. It is written in Japanese script and he has no idea what it says. He says it is just one example of the interpretation that needs to be done on the island. Across the road, we pull back a tangle of scrub to reveal a hidden and crumbling Japanese pillbox, right on the corner of their suburban street. ‘This is emblematic of where all the Japanese war legacy on the island will be in twenty years I think,’ Jon says. We drive up to Smith Point to search out further evidence. Such is the casual regard for the war relics here that we pass a Japanese ammunition store and anchor point on the side of the road; it is left to rot and fade into the jungle, among a sprawl of wild dragon fruit vines. We pass my hotel and the Golden Bosun pub. These were the sites of the old hospital, morgue and psychiatric facility – not that you’d know it now, looking at a balcony of drinkers and a solitary life buoy. According to our map, this was also where the Japanese had their brothel of ten women imported from Java, and the British and Indian prison huts. Up to 60 per cent of the Christmas Island residents were removed to Surabayan prison camps, though many workers remained. Out on the point is the restored Tai Jin House – the former garrison barracks of the Royal Hong Kong Artillery. It is now used for functions, along with the British-built battlements. There are various plaques and memorials to the soldiers and an unmarked Japanese two-pound gun, but Jon points us straight towards the cliffs and a mess of fallen trees and jungle scrub. After twenty minutes of hacking, climbing and

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scrambling we find an old British bomb shelter dug into the rock on the point. It is covered with graffiti from locals and soldiers, though it is all but forgotten. We find the remnants of a World War II road and an old defensive barrier – now just rusted barbed wire covered in jungle. Jon finds a concealed gun site on Smith Point; it hasn’t been officially identified as Japanese although the structure, using railway sleepers as fortifications, is identical to others we find against the cliff. We climb into the box, which looks out towards Java, and Jon says there used to be an electrical board in here too. ‘I reckon it’s just been thrown away,’ he laments. ‘We should be respecting this. It doesn’t mean we’re condoning their behaviour. Though it is part of the history of the people on this island.’ We scramble back down the hill and pause at the memorials for the SIEV (Suspected Irregular Entry Vessel) X, which sunk in 2001 and drowned 353 asylum seekers, and the SIEV 221, where fifty people drowned in 2010. Jon points out the old residence, guns and ammunition stores. They are well kept and newly painted. ‘The asylum seekers painted all this,’ he tells me as we walk to the shade of two nearby trees. Jon points to etchings on their trunks, ‘They’ve all carved their names in the trees to be remembered. It’s poignant really, considering what went on here before all this.’ Then, to no one in particular, he says, ‘I hope they’re safe and in Australia.’ Jon thinks the legacy of Australia’s involvement in the war here should be remembered, just as the asylum seekers hoped to be by carving their names in the trees. As we drive on to another remnant, I get the impression that Jon feels Christmas Island is forgotten and disregarded in a broader sense, too. He continually reminds me that it is part of Australia as well, though it’s not always treated as such: ‘People talk about forgotten Australians in the context of war. What about these guys here?’

OUR NEXT STOP is out in the ‘Drumsite’ community. We find gun installations and observation points, and behind a house now occupied by the Australian Federal Police we pick past old chook pens and gigantic robber crabs to another bomb shelter.

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‘Watch out for that one,’ Jon says, pointing to a barbed creeper next to my leg. ‘We call it the “gotcha”!’ This shelter uses sleepers; it has a much narrower opening and a kind of steel gate – distinct from the carved hole and stonewalls of the British shelters. It also has a perfect view down to Flying Fish Cove. ‘Can you see the difference here?’ Jon confirms that this was a Japanese construction. Our final stop is behind the post office and in the grounds of the church. The grand, sweeping stairs are those of the former Japanese Shinto temple, which was destroyed promptly after the Japanese departed. This is one of the few remnants that have had some recognition, though not nearly enough. The only mention of the temple comes in correspondence from Major Van der Gaast after the British returned. He noted: ‘The temple, which was quite attractive, made a good bonfire and also served to burn a large number of Japanese signposts, previously collected by the population.’ The Japanese retreated to Java on 24 August 1945, displaying none of the bravado with which they arrived. They divided out the provisions, gifted the opium stores back and defused the sabotage mines before leaving Christmas Island for good. Once again, Jon shows me that the legacy of war here is immense, though its importance has been swept aside by other concerns. There is an entire war history sitting in the hills of Christmas Island waiting either to be recognised and remembered – as many other worthwhile memorials here have been – or swallowed by the jungle until there’s nothing left. On the hundred-year anniversary of World War I, Jon wonders what state this place will be in for its own war centenary, in 2042.

Ben Stubbs is a lecturer in journalism and writing at the University of South Australia. His writing has been published in Australian Geographic, Meanjin and the Sydney Morning Herald among others. His book about the Australian utopia in Paraguay, Ticket to Paradise, was published by ABC Books in 2012.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 121 13/03/2015 3:58 pm MEMOIR A remarkable man Ray Parkin, 1910–2005 John Clarke

RAY PARKIN TOLD stories. He wasn’t exactly the Ancient Mariner, but there was an insistence and a very steady eye about the way he did it. It was Ray’s way of passing on what he knew and what he wanted you to understand. Some of the stories described things he’d known since child- hood, and were based on observations about nature; others were lessons he’d learned from later experience. Many of them were about the Second World War. Ray would argue that his stories and the images that illustrated them were non-fiction – they were simply a record of what happened. This wasn’t entirely convincing; a significant aspect of the stories was what they told us about the storyteller. Ray entered the navy in 1928 and joined the light cruiser HMAS Perth when it was commissioned in 1936. During the war, the ship saw active service in the Pacific, Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans. After the terrible battles of Greece and Crete, the ship’s captain, who was English, was promoted to a higher command. Ray heard him ruminating on the bridge about his respect for the Australian crew. ‘I’ve never known such men,’ he said. ‘What I’d really like to do is invite all of them to dinner on the captain’s deck. But there’s not enough room for the whole crew and I’d want them all there.’ The Australians respected this

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man; his fine judgment and seamanship had zigzagged and smoke-screened them through the blistering German sea and air attacks, which had sunk many of the other Allied ships during the evacuations. ‘Can I make a suggestion, sir?’ asked Ray. ‘Yes,’ replied the captain. ‘Have you thought of asking the men if you can come to their deck for dinner?’ After the Battle of Java in 1942, HMAS Perth and USS Houston were the only large Allied ships to have survived, and had put into the Indone- sian port of Tanjung Priok for supplies. When they returned to the open sea they encountered a number of Japanese ships, and after another fierce battle they were disabled and sunk in the Battle of Sunda Strait. HMAS Perth’s new captain, Hector Waller, and two thirds of the ship’s crew were killed in the action. Ray and some other survivors made it to shore, where they rigged up a lifeboat and headed out to sea again in an attempt to reach Australia. They were hit by a typhoon and blown east. After eleven hours at sea they came ashore at Tjilatjap, on the coast of Java, where they walked straight into Japanese captivity. Ray spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Bandoeng (now Bandung) in Indonesia, at Changi in Singapore, on the Thai–Burma Railway, and in Japan. Throughout these years he kept a diary and made drawings in secret. Were he to have been discovered, the penalty was summary execution. When Ray talked about this remarkable experience, I listened. I knew very little about the war in the Pacific, or about the navy. My father was in the army, his service split between the North African desert and Italy. Ray regarded the navy as the senior service and the army as a commendable, but relatively recent, development. I was at his house in Ivanhoe with my daughter one day, when a wattle- bird flew into a bush and attacked a honeyeater. She pointed it out to Ray, who said, ‘Yes, you should have seen it this morning. That big one came flying out of that tree straight at the honeyeater and he got her athwartships.’ Listening to Ray’s stories involved learning a new way of using language, injecting it with naval terminology.

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RAY WROTE THREE books about the sinking of the HMAS Perth and being a prisoner of the Japanese. The first of them, Out of the Smoke (Hogarth Press, 1960), has a foreword by Laurens van der Post in which he recalls having met Ray in 1942, when they were both prisoners. Ray was sitting and doing some drawings in Bandoeng camp when van der Post introduced himself, admired the drawings and asked Ray how he came to be there. Ray told him the story of the Battle of Sunda Strait, the survival in the burning sea, the regrouping ashore, the attempt to reach Australia in a small boat and the storm that delivered them into enemy hands. ‘That’s a great maritime war story,’ said van der Post. ‘You should write that down.’ ‘Yes I’ve done that,’ said Ray. ‘It’s written down.’ ‘I mean it should become a book,’ said van der Post. ‘Yes. It is a book,’ Ray replied. ‘How can it be a book? We’ve only been here a week.’ ‘I met a bloke in the camp here, who was a bookbinder, and he bound it for me.’ ‘Can I see it?’ Ray showed his careful project to van der Post. It was written in pencil on small individual sheets of shiny toilet paper, sewn together at the spine. When Ray was moved from camp to camp it fitted in his shoe, down behind his heel. Van der Post explained that he had written books, and he took it upon himself to introduce Ray to his publisher once the war was over. Years later, when Ray was a tally clerk on the Melbourne waterfront, he received a phone call from Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia. Woolf was Laurens van der Post’s publisher and had been told about the book. Ray went to England, where Out of the Smoke, Into the Smother (1963) and The Sword and The Blossom (1968) were published by Hogarth Press, with Cecil Day-Lewis as his editor. ‘Wasn’t he the poet laureate?’ I asked, impressed. ‘Yes he was,’ said Ray. ‘But he didn’t change anything in the books.’ Like his friend Weary Dunlop, Ray had been through a great ordeal and, like Weary, he harboured no racial prejudice. He did not hate the Japanese. ‘That was one of the causes of the war,’ he said. ‘It cannot be the result.’ Both men were influenced by the East – by the place and the ideas they were

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exposed to there. I sometimes witnessed others ask Ray about his experiences, and his responses were seldom what they expected. ‘You worked on the Burma–Thailand Railway didn’t you?’ they asked. ‘That’s right,’ said Ray ‘You were there for the whole time, including during the Speedo, in Hellfire Pass, where so many men died.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What was that like?’ they’d ask. ‘Well,’ Ray would reply, ‘the flowers in that area are among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. We were lucky to be there at that particular time of the year.’ Ray said that the reason Australians survived better than others in the camps was not that they helped each other and were mates; in fact, he said the best thing you can do for anyone else in a situation like that is be completely self-reliant. A few years ago he fell over in his garden and could hardly move. It turned out he had a neurological virus with a French name. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t write. After a period in intensive care, he went to a conva- lescence centre. Then one day, he told me he thought he might come home next week. ‘Do you want to come home next week?’ I asked. ‘I’d want to know I could walk four kilometres, up to the Ivanhoe shops and back, so I can do for myself,’ he replied. ‘Do you think you can do that?’ ‘Well, I can do three and a half.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I measured it out around the hospital and I’ve been doing it for a fortnight.’ This was a very self-reliant man.

WHEN RAY WAS taken further north by the Japanese, to work as forced labour in a coal mine under the inland sea in Japan, Weary Dunlop took a lot of Ray’s prison diaries and artwork and hid them inside a false base in his operating table. Ray didn’t see them again until he returned to Australia after the war. Among them was a series of little drawings of merchant ships.

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‘Oh yes,’ said Ray, ‘there was an English bloke in one of the camps. He’d been in the merchant navy before the war. After lights out we’d lie there and I’d get him to remember ships he’d seen. Sometimes I’d seen them myself, before the war. Sometimes they were ships I had never seen. I’d ask him to describe the details. Where was the funnel? What colour was it? And then I’d draw it. And then I’d show him the drawing and he’d look at the drawing and he’d say, “Yep. That’s it.”’ The drawings provide a beautiful record of these conversations. When the war finished and the camp was liberated, the authorities came around and asked the men to fill out forms describing the appalling treatment they’d endured and naming the commandants and guards who had done these terrible things. Ray called it ‘Name Your War Criminal’. He realised that anyone listed in the forms was going to be charged with war crimes. ‘We won’t be here,’ thought Ray. ‘These people will be charged and we’ll be back in Australia. They’ll have no defence. They can’t cross-examine us.’ Ray thought the commandant of this last camp had shown them kindness. Instead of marching them down the beach before they went into the coalmine each morning, he let them walk at leisure and Ray was able to pick up flowers and leaves and butterflies. One day the commandant summoned Ray to his office, sent the guard out of the room and gave him a small tin of children’s watercolours. This meant he knew about Ray’s drawings – a summary offence. Maybe it was a trap. But Ray trusted him and took the paints. The commandant called the guard back in and dismissed Prisoner Parkin. Later, this same commandant had the prisoners dig a big pit in the yard, but he didn’t shoot them. Each day he’d get them to re-dig it, or to dig an extension on, or something. But he didn’t shoot them. So when they were liberated, Ray didn’t fill out his form. He drew a picture of the camp and gave it to this man, having written on it: ‘To Commandant X, with thanks for his kindness, Prisoner Parkin.’ The commandant was later charged with war crimes. Unlike a lot of the others, he wasn’t executed; he had one piece of evidence to present in his defence.

ANOTHER THING RAY told me about was Captain James Cook. Ray was a great admirer of Cook’s seamanship and gifts as a navigator. Ray’s

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neighbor, Max Crawford, was a history professor at Melbourne University and had asked him various questions about the ship. Ray knew so much about Cook and his voyage that Crawford encouraged him to write it down, which he did. He recorded the whole voyage in big foolscap books, covering each day of it – Cook’s log, Cook’s diary, what Banks wrote, what Parkinson wrote. He also wrote about what the average person on board would have experienced in the course of each day. There were also the exquisite drawings he made of sails and ropes and equipment, and all of the charts – all done by Ray. ‘This should be published,’ I said to him. ‘If you can get it published, good for you,’ Ray replied. H.M. Bark Endeavour: Her Place in Australian History (1997) was eventually published by The Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Press. In 1999, it won the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year award. Ray, who was eighty-eight by this time, thoroughly enjoyed its success. After that, Ray began writing about his philosophy of life. It was not always clear to me whether the world had a kind of order for Ray, or his philosophy was imposing one on it. One day, he told me that he felt particu- larly close to Thelma, his late wife, in a couple of places in the garden. I asked him where he met Thelma and he pointed down to the Yarra River at the bottom of the property. ‘Do you see the way the river comes around that corner there, and that bump there, and that tree?’ he asked. ‘Thelma was sitting under that tree when I first saw her.’ ‘Is that why you bought this piece of land and built the house here?’ ‘Of course it is.’ Ray had arrived at a Taoist position that expressed a deep respect for nature. He spoke about the way a tree has knowledge: it knows where the sun is and where water is. He remembered being in the small park over the road from the house where he grew up, in Vere Street, Collingwood, and seeing a dragonfly under a leaf, hiding from a bird. They have knowledge, he said. ‘We have knowledge too, in each cell. We should listen to that knowledge. Not be fooled by desire for things we don’t need.’ Scattered among the things he wrote are ideas from the books he read: the Bible, Plato, Freud, Jung,

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Spinoza, Kant, novels, political works, philosophy. I once asked him what it was that he needed. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘I found that out in the camps. I need good food twice a day and it’s better if I sleep dry’. A handful of other moments gave Ray satisfaction. When he led the Anzac Day parade in Melbourne a few years ago, they asked if he wanted a jeep to ride in. ‘No thanks’ he replied. ‘It’s a march. I’ll march.’ But he wanted a navy uniform; he didn’t want anyone thinking he was army. ‘They won’t give you a uniform,’ his son John told him. ‘Why not?’ ‘They gave you one in 1928 and you lost it.’ He got one in the end and marched all the way. Another satisfying event came in 1967, when they found HMAS Perth in the Sunda Strait. People had been looking for it for years and someone eventually consulted Ray. It was where he said it would be. ‘Is there anything you’d like from the ship?’ asked Dave Burchell, the diver who was to explore the wreckage. ‘Yes,’ said Ray, and he asked for the save-all from the wheelhouse, where he had been standing during the battle. The save-all is a small, scallop-shaped metal holder in which a bosun’s whistle or keys might be put for safekeeping. Burchell did the dive, found the save-all and brought it back to Ray, who sat it on the wall of his study. A place for everything. And everything in its place.

John Clarke is one of Australia’s best-known and most loved faces on TV. A comedian, writer and actor, his appearances include the famous Fred Dagg character, The Gillies Report, The Games and ABC TV’s weekly satire Clarke and Dawe.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 128 13/03/2015 3:58 pm PICTURE GALLERY Ray Parkin

At the back of Ohama POW camp, Japan, 1945

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Our first POW accommodation, Tjilatjap, Java, 1942

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Singapore Harbour, 1943

Moored barges, Kinsaiok camp, 1944

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Jungle lily, Siam jungle, 1943 Konyu River camp, Siam jungle, 1943

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16th April 1942

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Butterflies, Siam, 1944

Ohama, Japan, 1945

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Will-o’-the-wisp beetle, Siam, 1944

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A shipmate, Petty Officer Abbott, HMAS Perth survivor, lifeboats crew, 1942

All images reproduced with the kind permission of the Parkin family.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 136 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Dangers and revelations World War II in Indigenous autobiography Tim Rowse

FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS, experience of the Second World War went beyond service in combat roles. Consider the Davis brothers in Western Australia: as Jack Davis tells us in A Boy’s Life (Magabala Books, 1991), his brother Harold ‘was taken prisoner at Tobruk and was imprisoned in North Africa and then in Italy. He escaped and fought with the partisans. He saw the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hung up by their heels in the streets of Milan…’ For Jack, the war was humdrum by comparison. Remain- ing in the Gascoyne region, where he had lived since January 1937, Jack Davis continued to work as a stockman. Some Indigenous autobiographies do not recall the conditions of war as being of any significance. Why would they? Their life course was determined by institutional routines unchanged by the war. For Ruth Hegarty, the period of World War II coincided with the years in which the Queensland govern- ment staged the termination of her childhood and her entry into a kind of adulthood. As she tells in Is That You Ruthie? (UQP, 1999), at age fourteen (in 1943 or 1944) and having completed schooling at Cherbourg settlement, Hegarty became available as a domestic servant to white families in rural Queensland. It was this scheduled life transition, rather than the contingen- cies of war, that isolated her from the only community she knew – the ‘kids who were one big family’ in Cherbourg’s dormitory. Her first position – in a household at Jandowae – taught her that asserting herself was both possible

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and effective. A sense of self that had not been attainable at Cherbourg grew in her tense dialogues with her mistress and in her correspondence with the Department of Native Affairs. These exchanges allowed her ‘to realise that I was a person with feelings, that I was important too’. Such realisations evolved independently of the context of the war that was gripping the world at large. However, for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the disruption of wartime made possible their discovery that Australia held more opportunities than their supervised life had ever allowed them to imagine.

THE FEAR OF imminent Japanese invasion militarised the Northern Territory and much of northern Australia, turning the homelands of many Aboriginal people into theatres of war. On 12 December 1941, within days of Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor, the Australian government decided to evacuate all non-essential civilians from the Top End. Among those to be moved were some who had only recently been settled there: Aboriginal children (girls mostly) placed under Methodist care on Croker Island, off the Northern Territory coast. These children had been living in government institutions such as the Kahlin Compound (Darwin) and the Bungalow (Alice Springs), but these had been closed so that the children would not be exposed to the white population in those two centres, which was anticipated to grow quickly due to the war. However, Japan’s surge south endangered those who had been relocated north. As Claire Henty-Gebert recalls in Paint Me Black (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), the government at first encouraged Croker Island’s female missionaries to evacuate, but they refused to leave the children. They were further disturbed, she recalls, to hear on the radio ‘that cows were being evacuated from some parts of the North. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They said they would have liked to ask if we ninety-six children in the path of enemy bombers weren’t more important than cows.’ Before deciding on evacuation, the government had advised the Methodists to assemble a large white cross to inform planes flying overhead that they were a mission station. The first contingent to leave the Croker Island mission began their journey on 3 March 1942: east, by boat, around the Arnhem Land coast via Groote Eylandt to Roper River; then by truck to Mataranka, and truck and train to Balaklava, South Australia. By the time the second group were able to leave Croker Island, on 5 April 1942, the

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Methodist Overseas Mission had decided that Balaklava was unsuitable; so the second batch of ninety-six children journeyed to Mulgoa (south of Penrith) and to Otford (between Wollongong and Sydney). In Cockatoo: My Life in Cape York (Magabala Books, 2010), Roy McIvor recalls how in May 1942 soldiers interrupted his family as they celebrated his sister’s birthday at the Cape Bedford Lutheran mission (north of Cooktown), to tell them to leave everything and board a truck. The entire mission (some 235 people) was evacuated to the Queensland government reserve Woora­ binda, and mission leader Pastor Georg Heinrich Schwarz was interned until 1944. There are grounds for thinking that the government’s motive was not only to mitigate the perceived ‘fifth-column’ threat – that is, German Luther- ans – but also to use the site for an airfield. McIvor describes the arduous journey from Cooktown to Woorabinda (inland from Rockhampton), and how the confused evacuees suffered from sickness, hunger, dehydration and lack of sleep. He refers to the Woorabinda period as ‘Years of Exile’. He and his friends got into fights with Woorabinda children, particularly when they accused McIvor and others of being Nazi sympathisers. In a stroke of fortune, however, his mother met relatives whom the government had moved to Woorabinda many years before. Arriving in autumn, far to the south and inland, these people of Cape York had to adjust to the cold. Many became ill and Roy’s sister, Emily, aged thirteen, was one of the many ‘exiles’ who died. ‘The old horse trooper was busy pulling coffins to the cemetery. One coffin after the other went there. These were such sad times.’ Under the authority of Pastor Schwarz, the Cape Bedford people had become a strongly Christian community. McIvor’s countryman, Willie Gordon, wrote in Guurrbi: My Family & Other Stories (Guurrbi Tours, 2012) that the war’s interruption of Schwarz’s authority allowed the Cape Bedford people ‘to maintain their culture again for a time.’ This account of resurgent ‘culture’ is corroborated, up to a point, by McIvor when he recalls that it was at Woorabinda, during the war, that he first saw a traditional Aboriginal ceremony: ‘…we saw people dressed up in costumes, painted up, preparing for a corroboree. We had never seen these costumes before. Once the kids stopped being scared, they were interesting to watch!’ However, he also recalls the desire of the Cape Bedford people to maintain their Christian beliefs while at Woorabinda. Roy’s father Paddy took over

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‘spiritual leadership’, and conducted twice-weekly services and funerals. Not far from Woorabinda was a station called Foleyvale, with working camps on either side of the McKenzie River, where McIvor and the other men from Cape Bedford and Woorabinda received wages for the first time – two pounds ten shillings per week, in McIvor’s case.

It was good to be out in the bush and working with men from Woora ­binda and our home country. Our community leaders operated in the same way as they had at Cape Bedford among the boatmen, the stockmen, and farmworkers at the outstations. Billy Jacko was the elder at top Foleyvale, taking devotions night and morning and leading the singing from the Sankey and the Lutheran hymn books. Major Mango was in charge at the bottom camp.

For those steeped in the Old Testament, ‘exile’ names a testing inter- regnum that is followed by (rewarded by) return to a desired place. War’s end allowed the return home to Cape York for these Christians, but home was a new site – Hope Vale, under Schwarz’s renewed care.

ANOTHER YOUNG NORTHERN Territory evacuee, Hilda Jarman Muir, was charmed by the city of Brisbane. ‘In Brisbane I had to go into the world,’ she recalls in Very Big Journey (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004). By the time the war broke out, Muir had been living in Darwin for eleven years, having been removed from the Borroloola area when she was eight to live in the Kahlin Compound. She had her first child when she was sixteen. As war broke out, she and her husband Billy were among the many ‘coloured people’ living in makeshift housing at ‘Police Paddock’ (now the suburb of Stuart Park). Billy was assured a role in Australia’s defence: having joined the Citizen Military Force before the war, he was called into the AIF to guard Darwin’s infrastructure. Hilda was evacuated to Brisbane with their three children in January 1942, a month before the bombing of Darwin. Billy’s foster mother Sarah was already there and, ‘like a fairy godmother’, helped them to settle. When Sarah showed her the city, Hilda was thrilled by its size and material abundance. At her hostel accommodation in Wynnum, she felt too shy, at first, to mix with other evacuees. Sarah soon found a house in

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Bowen Hills that was large enough for two mothers and their children, and they schooled the children in Fortitude Valley. Later, they moved to Milton ‘with lovely old Aboriginal people’. Muir’s account of Brisbane is a story of her own emergence as a confident young woman. For some of that Brisbane time, Muir was joined by her sister Bridget, whose ship voyage from Darwin had been traumatic. Muir mentored Bridget in city life, as Sarah had mentored her. Their Bowen Hills household was increased by the arrival of two old Filipino people: ‘I don’t know where they turned up from, but…Sarah hated to see anyone left out.’ Muir and her evacuee network, receiving letters in Brisbane, knew more than officials were allowing them to know about the bombing of Darwin: ‘…in Brisbane we were cut off. We were safe living there, but the War still scared us.’ At the end of the war, with Billy demobbed and wanting to return to Darwin, Muir found that she was ‘a city slicker now and I liked the big city with good shops, trams and buses’. ‘It was such a good life with the shops, people I knew, and my new friends. The kids were doing well at school and they had friends there, too. After the freedom of the big city, I didn’t like the idea of a small place. But I had no choice: my husband wanted me back in Darwin…’ Because her husband’s work postings for the Department of Native Affairs took them to rural parts of the Top End (Billy worked at the Aborigi- nal settlement Delissaville), the children had to be left in the care of the Retta Dixon Home to receive schooling. Hilda recalls being restless:

Living in Brisbane for four years had showed me what life could be for me and the children. I’d enjoyed the shops and met and chatted with people. The children were happy and accepted in school and had friends there, too. Now I was feeling lonely and missing my children.

Billy arranged for her to have domestic help – ‘a beautiful old Larrakia woman’. That this helper was deaf and dumb limited her companionship. Muir eventually persuaded her husband to get a transfer closer to town, but their home was not right in Darwin, where she wanted to be, but at Berrimah. Whereas Billy worked outside the home and had plenty of male companionship in the evenings, Hilda found herself repeatedly pregnant and living in substandard

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accommodation on Darwin’s periphery. Her demobilisation, so to speak, was her disappointment. ‘The evacuation had shown me that I could live in a big city.’ Brisbane held promise for the Torres Strait Islander Ellie Gaffney, too, as she recalls in Somebody Now (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989). Gaffney moved with her mother and her sisters from the Cape York hamlet of Allau (now known as Umagico) to Brisbane, where her brother Ted Loban was living. Ted had enlisted in the AIF, but had been severely wounded by German fire and then repatriated. Now out of action, he could accommodate his family in the city. For Ellie, Brisbane presented new opportunities. Lying about her age, she began to work as a pantry maid in a café in 1944. This suddenly urbane teenager ‘was utilised by [her] parents and relatives as their guide in the big city and their interpreter’.

WHEN PEOPLE WERE relocated south, they were potentially escaping more than one kind of danger. Northern Australia was poised to repel the anticipated Japanese invasion – yet, as Ellie Gaffney recalls in Somebody Now (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989), the Allied troops also presented a danger. When Thursday Island was under Allied occupation, ‘it was unsafe for any female to walk the streets, or to be walking anywhere at any time, especially after dark’. Gaffney’s older sister Jean had a job, but ‘for someone as fine looking as Jean that was very risky’, so her family had to escort her to and from work. Concerned with this threat, Gaffney’s father, Tommy Loban, had first shifted the family to Allau, where there was a school, a church and a store. Loban, a man of Scottish, Indonesian and Torres Strait Islander descent, continued to work on Thursday Island, but on Friday nights his family would call for him by boat and, unknown to the authorities on Thursday Island, he would spend the weekend with his family at Allau. When the opportunity came to move to Brisbane to stay with their brother Ted – wounded serving in the AIF – the Loban women took it. Similarly, the Anglican mission Forrest River, established near Wyndham in 1913, was changed by the war in ways that puzzled Connie Nungulla McDonald. In When I Grow Up (Magabala Books, 1996), McDonald describes how she and her mother had been brought to the mission soon after her birth in 1933. Her mother died within a year, and the mission entrusted Connie to an Aboriginal family. Like other children, she slept in a dormitory

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once she started school in 1939, joining her adoptive family for the short ‘walkabout’ that the mission permitted in the middle of the dry season. By March 1942, once Darwin and Wyndham had been bombed, and with the mission under Japanese aerial reconnaissance, the missionaries evacuated. The departing Anglicans left the responsibilities of ‘taking the daily services in the church, teaching in the schools, running the hospital, overseeing the sawmill, the stockwork and the running of the mission in general’ to the ‘educated’ Aboriginal people, ‘while the roles of caretakers, peacemakers and law enforc- ers were left to the tribal elders’. McDonald refers to the principal Aboriginal men as ‘kings’. McDonald herself became an assistant to the acting teacher, a ‘senior girl’ called Coralie Roberts; McDonald also worked in the hospital. She thus witnessed Forrest River Mission’s war years as both a child (only twelve and half years old, at the war’s end) and as a junior member of those Aboriginal elders entrusted to run the mission. It fell to these men to organise the Patronal Festival of Saint Michael and all Angels in September 1942 – a day of competitive sports and prizes. To their surprise, a ‘commando’ force (the North Australia Observer Unit or ‘Curtin’s Cowboys’, volunteers from the region) appeared and, after due courtesies, joined the games and gave out the prizes. With co-operation from the ‘kings’, the NAOU soon established a base at Bremlah, on the other side of the Forrest River. The elders told the mission residents that this was to protect women and girls, who were forbidden to visit the soldiers; the dormitory girls proved an irresistible temptation. Some soldiers persuaded an Aboriginal man (a brengen, whose alignment with the mission was weak) to break into the senior girls’ dormitory and fetch them some companions. Their plan was thwarted the next day and the girls returned; they were ‘grounded for three months’ and three soldiers were transferred out of the unit. The idea that white men in uniform could be a source of safety was counterintuitive to Aboriginal people in the Kimberley – brutal police action on a violent frontier was within the living memory of folk not much older than McDonald. The soldiers turned out, in a number of ways, to be an ambiguous presence, and their authority was repeatedly subverted by how the mission people discussed and evaluated them. The unit – no doubt with helpful intentions – dug trenches as air raid shelters near the mission’s main buildings. However, the residents soon heard that the use of such shelters

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had maximised casualties when the Japanese had bombed and strafed the Kalumburu mission in September 1943. McDonald recalls how the mission folk resolved that, should any planes attack, they would ignore the trenches and run into the bush. The residents of Forrest River heard a rumour that if the Japanese invaded, all Aboriginal people would be rounded up and shot, presumably to prevent them from assisting the invaders. A subsequent rumour then emerged that the unit at Bremlah had assured the mission they would refuse to carry out such an order. This story has been the cause for much controversy. Eliza- beth Wynhausen interviewed McDonald when her book came out in 1996. After looking into the factual basis of the rumour, Wynhausen reported in an article for the Australian that ‘no one has produced the documents as yet’ to prove that the unit’s orders included killing Aboriginals if the Japanese landed. However, the historian of the Forrest River mission at the time, Neville Green, relayed to Wynhausen that a missionary, John Best, had been told by an officer that it might be necessary to do away with the Aboriginals, should the Japanese invade. Morrie Vane, who was a nineteen-year-old member of the squad camped at Bremlah, has since become the unit’s historian and insists that there is no evidence of such an instruction. Some members of the public and the Australian military were not confi- dent that Aboriginal people would side with Europeans against the invading Japanese; frontier memories were fresh on both sides. McDonald recalls what ‘King David’ said when the rumour that soldiers might kill them began to circulate. He reminded them that gudiyar (Euro-Australians) had been killing Aboriginals since entering their country, and insisted that if all the residents were killed it would obviate the greater tragedies of children being left without parents, and parents losing children. Mediated in these terms by the Aboriginal delegates of the evacuated missionaries, the ‘security’ offered by the commandos seemed a mixed blessing to mission residents such as McDon- ald. ‘We, the children, were now sad and afraid, to think that although these men cared for us, they had the power to end our lives.’

ON MORNINGTON ISLAND, when war broke out, some young men at the Presbyterian mission were restless and hoped for work and money on the mainland. As Dick Roughsey recalls in Moon and Rainbow (Rigby

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International, 1971), he and his friends borrowed a dugout canoe and paddled to a point on the mainland whence they could walk to Burketown. The police told them there were no jobs, and put them on the first boat back to Morning- ton Island. Roughsey and his friends then killed a bullock. The Protector of Aborigines had recently begun to punish such actions by expelling the perpetrators to Palm Island – a penalty that worried the mission’s women, but promised much to the men who received it. ‘They had to be fed while in jail,’ Roughsey recalls thinking, ‘and when they got out they had a chance of getting a job on cattle stations out from Townsville and Burketown.’ The same exit to a wider world did not open for him and his mates: even though the mission authorities reported the cattle killing to the Department of Native Affairs, no action was taken against the offenders. Apparently, the demands of wartime administration were giving the department more to think about than a few purloined bullocks. Fortunately for Roughsey, the war was also luring white workers out of the beef industry. The Burketown police were soon approaching the mission, asking for young men to come to the mainland to work the cattle. Roughsey found employment that required him to learn to ride a horse: ‘I had money in my pocket for the first time in my life.’ For Alec Kruger, working for Harry Bloomfield on Loves Creek Station (east of Alice Springs) had become hard to endure by 1942, and stockmen such as he were attracted to the unprecedented alternative of joining the army. ‘The idea of getting equal pay was a shock for us all,’ he recalls in Alone On the Soaks (Institute for Aboriginal Development, 2007). ‘The local station owners and bosses were not happy about it.’ Indeed, in order to get to the recruiting office he had to evade Bloomfield’s supervision, and local officials with little regard for Bloomfield were pleased to sign him up. According to Kruger, Bloomfield began to pay his remaining workers better. Kruger found himself in a unit with many young men who had been with him at the Bungalow – the Commonwealth’s Alice Springs institution for ‘half-caste’ children. ‘We found ourselves mixing with more strangers than we had ever had to deal with before.’ Within a short time – after some use of the football and their fists – they had established relationships of respect with the white soldiers in the unit. To exchange labour time for cash was an exhilarating break from Bloomfield’s penny-pinching oversight. ‘The army had taken over telling me what to do, but it didn’t care what I did

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with my own money. Just as long as I turned up when I was told, ready for duty.’ Kruger was also free of the Aboriginals Ordinance. ‘With money and a uniform I could go wherever other soldiers could go.’ He had never been so well fed, and he realised that past regimes – at the Bungalow and under Bloomfield – had made him a compulsive hoarder of food. For all its liberties and generosity, however, the army had its own ideas of obedience: ‘They would call parades any time.’ Kruger had been born at Donkey Camp, just outside Katherine, but the Aboriginal Protectorate had relocated him, as a child, to Pine Creek and then to Alice Springs. Now the strategic need to fortify the north was taking Kruger back there. Stationed at the Larrimah army camp – to unload trucks and load the train that supplied bases further north – he had a chance meeting with his brother George, a fettler. They had not seen each other for nine years. George brought him up to date with his dispersed family’s history. Their father had died, but their mother was alive and living at Donkey Camp, now under army supervision. Alec had not seen her for fifteen years. When George and Alec went to visit her, a police sergeant told them that their mother’s compound was off limits to soldiers; they must leave or be charged with co-habitation. When he was able to spend time with her, Kruger found his mother inaccessible in other ways: her English was poor, and she had become a devout Christian and pacifist who worried that, as a soldier, Kruger might have to kill. Kruger looked back on his army time as both emancipating and inhib- iting. The army’s model of mateship enabled him to be a ‘regular army bloke’, keen to be accepted in the company of men – white and black – older than himself, and to drink and fight as they did. But it provided no space for the person that he had started to become – ‘a person of magic in the world of the Eastern Arrernte’ – and so ‘I missed doing things I was good at. I missed the horses and the individualism of working out bush.’ The army did not bring him any closer to the world of women either: ‘I still hadn’t been kissed or had someone love me. This was part of my anger. The army was a womanless world.’

BILL COHEN, SON of a New England black tracker, found himself deployed as a soldier on a beach in Sydney Harbour when depth charges knocked out two Japanese submarines. His memoir, To My Delight (Aboriginal

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Studies Press, 1987), reveals a man keen to boast his masculine attributes, and his story of soldiering is consistently upbeat: the war was an occasion to amplify his masculine self. His enlistment answered the self-posed question: am I a coward? ‘This word “cowardice” seemed to worry me,’ he recalled in 1980. Sent to Dubbo for training, he excelled at orienteering and shooting. ‘I was one of many crack shots at the targets. Well this could be understand- able as I was a notable dingo hunter.’ Proud of his boxing skills, he only got better as Army training made him fitter. ‘Oh, my mates all around me with words of praise! Little did they know I was claim [sic] Bare Knuckle King of the Tablelands.’ His ‘delighted’ recollections include trouncing, in a training exercise, ‘the barman from Kempsey’ – a town ‘well known for its prejudice to blacks’. However, fighting with an officer earned him two months in the Holsworthy Camp Prison. Not the least of the Army’s manly opportunities were encounters with the nurses. Hospitalised for nine weeks to have twelve teeth removed, Cohen had time – after a short tussle with his conscience – for an affair with a nurse.

I thought seriously about this act. My wife and small family on the Aboriginal reserve [Bellbrook, McLeay River]. Should I date this angel I’d be coming under the act, committing adultery according to the Bible. Then other little thoughts ran through my mind. Soon I’ll be drafted away somewhere in New Guinea, a Jap creeping up behind me, putting a bayonet through my back. With these thoughts I ignored the Bible.

Cohen was not sent to New Guinea but to Lithgow, protecting a small arms factory. From Lithgow, Cohen’s unit was posted to the Gulf of Carpen- taria, where he spent eight months rebuilding an old army headquarters ‘with a wonderful crew. No prejudice among them.’ Cohen was forced to leave the Gulf when he contracted a virus. Upon returning to Sydney, his record of fighting with fellow soldiers got him a dishonourable discharge. ‘Oh didn’t I jump for joy’, Cohen recalled, irrepressibly, in 1980. Like Bill Cohen, Banjo Clarke was handy with his fists and proud of it. He boxed competitively in western Victoria as a youth in the 1930s. At the outbreak of war, he recalls in Wisdom Man (Penguin, 2003), a recruiting

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officer in Fitzroy persuaded him and his mate Herb to join the Allied Works Council instead of the army. They found themselves in Brisbane, where black American soldiers welcomed their company. Posted to a road-building camp, Clarke soon was unjustly accused by his overseer of creating a drunken row that had kept many men awake overnight. When he was told he must transfer to another gang (dismissal was not an option), his work-mates offered to strike. Clarke was moved by this gesture of worker solidarity, but he declined their offer, only later reflecting on ‘how momentous it was’. Had he stayed and enabled the strike, he rued, ‘It might have taught the people of Australia not to do whatever they liked to someone just because they was Aboriginal.’ Clarke found Queensland pubs unwelcoming at first, though he was served on the basis that, as a Victorian Aboriginal person, he was not covered by Queensland laws. At a dance in Woolooga, Clarke was accosted and pushed down some stairs by a white American soldier. Clarke fought him and was pleasantly surprised that the dance crowd seemed to back him. Queensland might have been racist, he reflects, but it included ‘people what [sic] will side with you if you do the same work as they do’.

ABORIGINAL AND TORRES Strait Australians have long contributed to Australia’s defence, something that I am quite confident will be underlined by the machinery of military heritage – so powerful in this country. Equally open to our historical imaginations is what the threats and opportunities of a nation mobilised for war have contributed to their lives. In reading many of their autobiographies, I have gained the sense of the tightly woven fabric of ‘protection’ being loosened and of Aboriginal and Torres Strait men and women experiencing the boons and disappointments of a wider sociality.

This essay is from a larger study of Australia’s twentieth century experience as a settler colonial society, to be published by Oxford University Press. Tim thanks Elizabeth Watt for her research assistance and the University of Western Sydney for paying for her time.

Tim Rowse is a professorial fellow in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, and a member of the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. His many books include Nugget Coombs: a reforming life (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Rethinking Social Justice: from ‘peoples’ to ‘populations’ (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012). He is currently writing a history of Indigenous affairs in Australia since Federation for Oxford University Press.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 148 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Forgetting to remember Time to be brave Clare Wright

Learning to remember means…transforming individual memories and struggles into collective narratives and larger social movements. Henry A Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting City Light Books, 2014

WHEN I WAS a little girl, I began poking and prodding the world with an infernal curiosity for historical detail: How old were you when you bought your first bra, Mum? What did you wear to your senior prom? Did your date give you a corsage? Why did you divorce dad? What was my birth like? Did you need drugs? Did you hold me right away? My mother had one answer to almost all of my questions: ‘I honestly don’t recall. You know what a bad memory I have.’ Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I beat my head against the brick wall of my mother’s amnesia. She told no stories from her past, and rubbed out my own personal history with the same mental eraser. After I emerged from my teenage rage, I simply stopped asking her questions. My mother lives blissfully in the moment and I have learned to love her for her accidental enlightenment. I am certain she was never being deliber- ately deceitful or tricky by sidestepping my questions. I once thought her

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‘bad memory’ as a benign, if annoying, idiosyncrasy; even the language of forgetfulness is mild and obliging – my thesaurus offers up ‘absent-minded’, ‘scatter-brained’, ‘dreamy’, ‘vague’. There was other evidence of her forgetfulness. It took years for the penny to drop that after every visit to my adult home she left little keepsakes for me. Her watch hanging on a cup hook, her rings next to the sink, a library card, even her wallet. She would call me later that night to ask if I had found the items and I would dutifully return them without rebuke. Only after I figured out the nature of our psychodynamic game was I able to grasp that Mum’s forgetting was a modest act of aggression: she was marking territory. The things she left behind would remind me not to forget her. After I had my first child – a gruesomely long labour culminating in foetal distress and a traumatic birth by emergency caesarean – I realised there was a dangerous side to her memory loss. Standing in the hospital ward, cooing at our miracle baby, my father marvelled that history should repeat itself. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked through the fog of my post-op pain relief. ‘Well, your mother had such a long and difficult labour that the doctor told her she should never attempt another vaginal birth. She had some sort of funny twist in her pelvis.’ Mum had an emergency C-section when my sister was born eleven years later. Clearly she’d forgotten the doctor’s advice. And I had a twisted pelvis, something I didn’t realise we shared. It had never occurred to me to ask my dad what my birth was like.

IT IS POSSIBLE that national historical inheritance operates like the familial bequest of personal information. Historian Anna Clark argues in her forthcoming book, Every Now and Then (MUP, 2016), ‘The need to be told, and retold, the story of our lives shows the need we have to be placed into a longer, multi-generational narrative of belonging, a narrative which then informs our own historical consciousness.’ Clark’s insight into how mindfulness of one’s individual past contrib- utes to a sense of emotional confederacy begs the larger question: how does a nation construct its ‘narrative of belonging’? What is the mechanism for bestowing collective, multi-generational historical consciousness? Is national forgetfulness simply a case of benign absent-mindedness, or is it a ruse?

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Psychologists understand that the transfer of information from short- term to long-term memory typically has some import. ‘Imagine how difficult it would be to forget the day you graduated, or your first kiss,’ the Virtual Psychology Classroom notes in its online Psychology 101 course. ‘Now think about how easy it is to forget information that has no significance [my emphasis]; the colour of the car you parked next to at the store or what shirt you wore last Thursday.’ Forgetting is the counterpoint to memory: ‘It is possible that we are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears pertinent to us.’ How magnanimous of our brains to engage in this act of ‘displacement’ – freedom from childhood trauma to remember PIN numbers. As a historian, I have an alternative explanation. Fortunately, historical memory rests securely in archival and oral inheritance. I don’t need a smell or a song to retrieve the past. I simply need a computer, a keyword, a catalogue number and, finally, physical access to the letter, diary, newspaper, govern- ment report, parliamentary debate, shipping log, painting, poem or published account that is the legacy of one man, woman or bureaucracy’s casual atten- tion to the color of the car/buggy/horse/possum he, she or it sighted. I can also go into people’s homes with a tape recorder and an open mind and ask the right questions. Short of burning libraries and cutting out tongues, eradica- tion of the past is not an option. And yet… We commemorate Remembrance Day each year – bowing heads to recall the war dead, stopping the nation with a minute’s silence. But what would happen if we downed tools for Forgetting Day? In this meditation on the nature of historical memory, I want to think about who we remember and what we choose – to our psychic and civic detriment – to forget. Acts of national forgetfulness are inherently aggressive. An implicit value system cordons off – and then rigorously polices – historical consciousness for state-sanctioned hierarchies of belonging. Institutional memorials, whether shrines and monuments, or moments, like public holidays, tell us which people and deeds merit commemoration. In an era when, as Henry Giroux argues in The Violence of Organized Forgetting, ‘modern society is increasingly defined by the realities of permanent war, a carceral state, and a national surveillance infrastructure’, the ‘Last Post’

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is not a dog whistle; it is a whopping great foghorn and we hear it loudly and clearly. Only some of our ghosts are sanctioned to rest in peace. History professor Joy Damousi writes: ‘Historical memory is not only what we choose to remember, but…that which we disavow…the past we recreate becomes a repository of our emotions, our loves, desires and fanta- sies.’ Australians know we should honour the memory of militaristic actions performed by white men on Anzac Day, the colonising actions of white men on Australia Day, and the gambling and drinking actions of sporting men on Cup Day. Commercialising commemoration is big business. In Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (Redback, 2014) James Brown estimates that the ‘Anzac Industry’ costs the Australian taxpayer many millions of dollars, and insulates the bottom line of brewers that sell beer under the guise of ‘recognising the ultimate sacrifice’. As a former soldier, Brown’s concern is that the emotion and expense of this obscures the realities of serving soldiers. There are other casualties of historical tunnel vision: Damousi argues that we should be asking ‘not which stories we choose to tell, but why we choose the stories we do, to tell about ourselves at this particular moment in time’. The very act of concealment confirms the truth of its existence. To borrow again from psychologists, it was Freud who demonstrated that elements of memory preserved in the unconscious tend to reappear, resurfac- ing through cracks in the seemingly stable facade, just as the roots of a tree must, under duress, ultimately disgorge the earth in which they reside. This is the return of the repressed.

IF BOOK TITLES are a key to the zeitgeist, we are now witnessing a resurgence of national historical consciousness. Three titles that have been prominent in recent debates, controversies and literary awards – Henry Reynolds’ Forgotten War (NewSouth, 2013), Peter Stanley’s Lost Boys of Anzac (NewSouth, 2014), and my own The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Text, 2013) – indicate a shift. Words matter, and there is a difference between something that is ‘lost’ and ‘forgotten’. The distinction is vast and telling. When casting about for the title for my book, about the previously unrecognised role of women in the Eureka Stockade, ‘The Lost Rebels of Eureka’ was one of the suggestions. I

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didn’t buy it; ‘lost’ suggests that the dopey sheilas simply wandered off into the bush and got themselves in a pickle. The women of Eureka didn’t get lost – they knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. For the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary in 1884, one woman even published a poem in the Ballarat Star about the affair using the pseudonym ‘A Lady Who Was There’.

May all your sons and daughters A glorious future see And ne’er forget the old, old spot Where we fought for liberty

The unbiddable women of Ballarat didn’t get lost. We forgot them. The moral compass of that word points in a very different direction. Henry Reynold’s latest book, Forgotten War (NewSouth, 2013), makes a clear and compelling case for finally acknowledging the frontier wars that were waged here. If it had been called ‘Lost War’, the implication would have been very different. Conversely, the title of Peter Stanley’s most recent book, Lost Boys of Anzac, draws on the literary legacy of JM Barrie, and flags that death is at the core of the narrative. Stanley retraces the steps of a hundred and one men at Gallipoli who never grew up, having been killed on the first day of that ill-fated landing. They were fallen, though not entirely forgotten, unlike the unidentified woman killed in the Eureka Stockade who remained buried in the archive until my research exhumed her. Fancy if we referred to her as ‘a fallen woman’. Language is important. But it is a question of what to do with infor- mation that for one reason or another – misogyny, racism – has previously not appeared pertinent but is empirically present, that is the real test of national maturity.

TWO CURRENT EXAMPLES of national institutions, and their responses to the return of the historically repressed, demonstrate quite differ- ent approaches to addressing remembrance and forgetting.

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The first is the new Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka – MADE is its funky acronym – which opened in Ballarat in 2013 on the site of the Eureka Stockade. MADE uses the Eureka story as the centrepiece for a wider exploration of the nature, function and process of democracy, both in Australia and globally. Imagine a stone thrown in a lake: Ballarat circa 1854 is the splash from which circles of discourse emanate. According to its website, the museum is, at its core, outward looking and remarkably free of both jingoism and parochialism.

MADE is the catalyst for a new national conversation about what Australian democracy could look like and mean to each of us… MADE explores many concepts: what it means to be an effec- tive, engaged Australian; how we can create a more inclusive and connected society in a digital era; how we can thrive as a nation through harnessing our creativity and energy; and, what we can offer to a globalised world.

Its catchphrase is ‘Democracy is not what you have, it’s what you do’, a motto that was put to the test early in the museum’s life. The curatorial team wanted to erect a new monument to those who had lost their lives at Eureka on 3 December 1854, both the miners who were defending their rights and liberties, and the soldiers who were doing their duty. As a consultant to the development, I was asked to scrutinise the wording that would be etched on a bronze plaque. The text read: ‘We honour the memory of all those who died at the Eureka Stockade, 3 December 1854. Those known to us as well as those whose names are unrecorded.’ A list of thirty-four names followed, compiled from various primary and secondary sources. Some were nicknames; others were just fragments. All belonged to men. I had no problem with the sentiment. But I had a big problem with the history. The language on the plaque was gender-neutral, but the list implied a certain truth. It suggested that the historic Eureka was one and the same as the mythic Eureka – the familiar national narrative of male passions inflamed, male blood shed and manhood suffrage won. My research at the time,

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published in refereed academic journals and accepted as the latest scholarship, had busted that myth and demonstrated that at least one woman, and possibly more, had also been killed in that lethal affray. Was this new museum going to ignore the evidence? There is a mighty difference between forgetting and eliding. It is one thing to fail to recall something that once happened, quite another to deliberately overlook the existence of data – a sliding scale of civic culpability between amnesia, inertia and bald-faced denial. I proposed an alternative text: ‘We honour the memory of all those who died at the Eureka Stockade, 3 December 1854. Those known to us as well as those women and men whose names are unrecorded.’ The institutional response was swift and decisive. The museum proceeded with the following wording on the plaque, which would be unveiled at MADE’s opening a few weeks later: ‘We honour the memory of all those who died during or because of the events at the Eureka Stockade on 3 December 1854 – the men known to us, who are recalled below, as well as the other men and women whose names are unrecorded.’ The Museum passed its own test. Democracy is not what you have, it’s what you do.

THE SECOND EXAMPLE of a cultural institution that memorialises those who have died in armed conflict is the Australian War Memorial (AWM). Almost thirty years ago, Peter Stanley, then AWM’s principal histo- rian, gave internal advice that the Memorial should recognise and represent frontier conflict. He argued that acknowledging and commemorating the fatal combat between the original inhabitants of Australia and the colonial powers was within the Australian War Memorial Act’s charter: to remember Australians who have died ‘as a result of any war or warlike operations in which Australians have been on active service’. Other histo- rians, including Geoffrey Blainey, who is more infamously remembered in progressive circles for coining the phrase ‘black armband history’, supported Stanley. The AWM still refuses to accept frontier conflict as part of the story it has been legislated to tell. Journalist Michael Green argues that ‘the Memorial’s

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position appears to be a matter of politics and extraordinary inertia’ given that it has not changed its position in the face of three decades of advice, advocacy and evidence. Indeed, Stanley contends that ‘the historiographical battle [is] over’. Yet the Memorial’s repudiation of any responsibility to include frontier conflict in the commemoration of Australia’s fallen is not technically denial. Psychology 101 defines denial as an ‘ego defense mechanism’, whose function is to ‘argue against an anxiety-provoking stimuli by stating it doesn’t exist’. The AWM does not claim that the frontier wars did not occur, so why isn’t this history of martial conflict in its remit? In his National Press Club address on 18 September 2013, AWM director Brendan Nelson made a telling remark. Discussing the recent inclusion of the Afghanistan chapter of Australia’s military history at the Memorial, he said, ‘I suspect that those men returning from Vietnam might not have suffered quite as much as they have, if the Memorial had been able to more deeply and broadly tell the story of their engagement and what they did sooner rather than later’. Nelson now invites returned soldiers from Afghanistan to spend a month at the Memorial, engaged in various programs. ‘I think it’s therapeutic for them, in fact I know it is, but I also know it’s good for us and our staff to see someone in a uniform there every day, so we never lose sight of why we’re there.’ There is, to my knowledge, nothing in the AWM’s Act that stipulates freedom fighters, patriots, heroes and other combatants must be identified by the fact that they wear uniforms. Brendan Nelson says the national icon he runs ‘represents the soul of our nation’. But he also says this: ‘the Australian War Memorial is not in my very strong view the institution to tell [the] story [of the] cost borne by Indigenous Australians’ through frontier violence. He doesn’t deny the reality of those armed conflicts, but suggests that the National Museum of Australia is the correct place to tell that story. This is because it is ‘most likely to have whatever artifacts or relics that exist from this period in our history’. Yet the legacy of the frontier wars is not ancient history. Battles were being fought into the 1920s, when the bodies of Anzacs were still being laid to rest in Europe. Many of those who fought in frontier conflicts, including ‘women who carried out resistance actions’, as Indigenous activist Celeste Liddle reminds us, have descendants alive today.

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Like MADE, the Australian War Memorial is also investing in new plaques. A portion of the $32 million redevelopment of the First World War galleries will be spent refashioning the room that houses the unknown Australian soldier. Currently, the text surrounding the tomb of the Unknown Soldier reads at one end, ‘Known unto God’, and at the other, ‘He symbolises all Australians who’ve died in war’. The more secular new engraving will say, at one end, ‘We do not know this Australian’s name, we never will’, and at the other, ‘He is one of them, and he is all of us’. Reading the Memorial’s monuments as a whole, a visitor might be pardoned for surmising, ‘We do not know this Australian’s name, we never will, but we sure know he isn’t black or female.’

CITIZENS READ SILENCES just as expertly – if reluctantly, belatedly – as I read the meaning of the lost property my mother left in my house. Anxious detachment – distancing the modern polis from its intractably murderous origins – is as palpable as anxious attachment. I love my Mum. And I forgive her defense mechanisms; they are what make her – and us – human. My mother has never been anything but kind and generous to me. I love my country, too. But I find it hard forgive the way that ‘the politi- cisation of historical memory’, as Gary Foley dubbed it in the Age on Anzac Day 2014, continues to protect our darkest historical roots from exposure, implicitly defending the indefensible and perpetuating a legacy of national immaturity. It is neither kind nor generous, nor does it make ‘the national narrative of belonging’ more inclusive. Democracy is not what you forget, it’s what you are brave enough to remember.

References at www.griffithreview.com

Clare Wright is an associate professor in history at La Trobe University. Her latest book, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Text, 2013), won the 2014 Stella Prize and Nib Literary Award and was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s, Queensland, WA and NSW Literary Awards. She co-wrote the ABC television documentary series, The War That Changed Us (2014).

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 157 13/03/2015 3:59 pm MEMOIR The bronzista of Muradup Friends in Venice David Carlin

NICOLA WALKED WITH his back straight and his shoulders scarcely moving. His upper body perfectly balanced and relaxed, his legs propelled him forward in a gait that seemed to have been born in him instead of learnt – a steady, flowing movement of maximum efficiency. Venetians walk as others breathe. Who knows how far one walks in Venice? There are no rectangular city blocks that one can count; none of the yardsticks are familiar. When we had covered three campos, four bridges, skirted twice as many canals and passageways…how far is that? The map has names for only half of the streets and the numbers of the houses rise one by one into the thousands, counted by the sestiere (the district) not the street. Nicola, at seventeen years old, guided us home because Venice is his city and thus we are his guests, because his parents had asked him to, and because of what had happened between his grandfather and mine back in the 1940s, in a place as foreign to a Venetian as any could be: the little farming community of Muradup, in the south-west of Western Australia.

NICOLA’S GRANDFATHER GIUSEPPE Garizzo was, to our family, always Joe. The last time I saw Joe was in 2009, and he was in his nineties. His legs would no longer carry him down the narrow stairs from his apart- ment to the almost-as-narrow Venetian calle below. Although it was more than sixty years since he had left Rocky Glen – my grandfather’s farm near

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Muradup – for good, the memory shone still in his eyes. Sitting at his kitchen table, he wanted to show us – Linda, me and our kids – the project that Nicola, his only grandchild, had made for high school. It was headed in English in the emphatic block letters of a high school project: pow prisoner of war. Beneath it was written, ‘Diaro di un prigionero di guerra’ (Diary of a prisoner of war). Joe turned the pages with his weathered bronzesmith’s hands, peering at the scans Nicola had interspersed with the writing. Two pages from Joe’s diary of 1941, recording the day he was captured in Bardia, Libya, by Allied troops; the lovingly preserved envelope bearing a letter from his family that reached him months after it was sent, addressed Giuseppe Garrizo, No.12 Camp, c/o GPO Bombay; and here – he points – a photograph of a twelve-year-old Australian girl sitting on a horse in the front of the toolshed Joe helped to build on Rocky Glen. ‘Joan,’ he says and beams at me, ‘your mother.’ Directly below that photograph is another in which Joan appears, this one a holiday snap from 2005. She is posing with family – Joe’s and ours – at the Lido di Venezia, against a sky of watercolour blues. My grandfather, Jack Stewart, was a very reserved man. A classic Scottish–Australian. But when he accompanied Joe in 1946, to farewell him as the Italian prisoners of war were finally sent home from Australia, they stood together beside the car to say goodbye – the boss and the prison labourer, the cockie and the dago – and Joe says that Jack told him: ‘If I can do anything for you, just let me know. If you need anything, just let me know.’ In his project, Nicola transcribes his grandfather’s reaction to the emotion of the moment: ‘I don’t know what to say. It is a moment of confusion.’ This simple debt of kindness was one that Giuseppe Garizzo would never stop repaying.

I ONCE ASKED Joe’s daughter, Alessandra (or Sandra for short: Nicola’s mother), how long her family had lived in Venice. She looked perplexed. ‘Always,’ she said. ‘A long time.’ Joe’s father and his father before him were bronzesmiths – bronzisti – artisans in metal whose work ornamented gondolas and palazzi. Before Mussolini’s war, Giuseppe was learning the trade while courting a beautiful young woman, Venetian style: I imagine them strolling alongside

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faded canals. He was called upon to fight in May 1940. After one week’s training, his unit was packed onto a train to Naples. He was issued with a small revolver but was warned that every bullet cost 1.25 lire (about ten cents at the time). At the train station in Venice he said goodbye to his family, and the girlfriend he would never see again. ‘This is all they’ve given me to fight the war,’ he said to them on the platform, showing them the little gun. In early June, Giuseppe took a boat to Tripoli and the North African frontline. The first night they landed, they camped in a forest while the French dropped bombs from the sky. This would become the pattern for the next six months, as his unit traipsed across Libya in the blazing heat. They worked as firemen and guards at hospitals, military depots and foodstores. Each night the bombs would come. ‘There was nothing to be done except lay and wait, and afterwards go out and look for food,’ he told Nicola. One day, there was ‘complete silence instead of the usual bombings. A stronger than usual feeling of impending danger. After a while, an aircraft flew over the area leaving a strong trail of black smoke. It was an omen.’ The Allied troops had arrived with tanks and guns pointed. Giuseppe asked his captors to wait while he went to fetch his books, photographs and diary. Wherever they were to take him, these things alone would be his constant companions.

THE FIRST TIME I went to Venice to visit Joe and his family was in 1973. I was ten years old and travelling with my widowed mother, on our first great adventure overseas. It was winter in upside-down Europe. For reasons now obscure, I wore a tartan beret everywhere: in the Piazza San Marco, on a vaparetto on the Grand Canal, at the church of San Zanipolo. Joe took us to his bronze workshop, which was one in a row of similar establishments fronting a workaday canal, beyond the tourist’s gaze. On my desk at home I still treasure an ornately molded bronze inkwell – a gift he must have made in that workshop, by that canal. My most vivid memory of that trip is the dinner we were served at Joe’s kitchen table – cooked by his wife, who spoke no English, and his wife’s aunt who lived, with her brother, in the second bedroom of their small apart- ment. For a child far from my sunny home, there in an old, damp and largely incomprehensible city that was barely afloat, that dinner was perfect in every

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way: not only the warmth with which it was served, but the succession of wondrous dishes brought to the table. Homemade ravioli with a delicate tomato sauce, roast beef with chips, a delicious apricot pastry for dessert, and climax of the meal – the aunt’s specialty – dainty doughnut-like apparitions, which Sandra told me were galani, a traditional sweet made during Carnivale. I couldn’t believe it – two desserts! That wouldn’t happen in Perth. I recorded every detail of the meal in neat pencil hand (alongside pictures of me, beret- clad, in front of monuments) in the scrapbook I made when we returned home to a February of summer.

AS A PRISONER in North Africa thirty years earlier, Giuseppe had kept pebbles in his mouth to fight the thirst. Fear of starvation replaced fear of bombs. He ate dried orange peels that he found on the ground, and stole potato skins. After six months in POW camps in Egypt, he was relocated by ship to India, where he would spend another two and a half years marooned in a succession of camps near Bhopal and Bombay, as if forgotten by both the Italians and the Allies. To stay sane he drew pictures of anything he could see – scorpions, local women, copies of the illustrations in his books. He made wooden ornaments and metal trays for the camp kitchen. He read constantly, whatever he could find. He began to learn English from books that the guards exchanged with him for the things he made. By 1944, the Allies were suffering from a shortage of rural labour. Giuseppe Garizzo and thousands of other Italian POWs were shipped in to work on farms across Australia. It is worth remembering that Australians at the time, in the full flush of the White Australia Policy, deemed Italians – like other southern Europeans – to be quasi-White at best. They were dagoes and wops, dark-skinned and ‘dirty’. They were shifty and unreliable. Fears circulated that they planned to stay permanently and drive down Australian wages; or else that they were fifth columnists – Nazi sympathisers. In this climate, the Army issued instructions for farmers like my grandfather who had nominated to put Italian POWs to work on their farms: their ‘mentality is childlike’, the Army advised, but ‘it is possible to gain his confidence by fairness and firmness. Great care must be taken from a disciplinary point of view for he can become sly and objectionable if badly handled.’

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My grandfather requested two POWs to work on his farm. One of them was a man named Gino. He was a good person, Giuseppe told his grandson, but he never learnt much English. It was the other prisoner, Giuseppe – or Joe – with whom the Stewarts clearly forged a bond. Muradup was then a small but thriving outpost: a single street lined with wooden houses, just like you would see in an old American Western, said Joe, ‘complete with a saloon but without the cowboys and the sheriff’. Jack and his wife Barbara (my grandmother) collected Joe from Muradup in their car and drove him along the dusty track to Rocky Glen. Jack and Barbara were originally city people. Well educated and genteel, you might have said. After a hard day’s work on the farm, they always showered and sat down for a sherry or a whisky before dinner. They never voted Country Party, always Liberal – a sign, supposedly, of relative wisdom and discernment in that time and place. Jack was an engineer by trade and an early adopter of technologies – one of the first in the state to own a car and to install a telephone. Barbara held a torch for England and this extended, by and large, to all things civilised and Continental. They were able to see Joe not as an enemy prisoner, but as a sophisticated European artisan who was well read as well as skilful with his hands. Thus, they were happy to ignore the government regulations that prohibited fraternisation with the Italian POWs. ‘They introduced me to their friends around the district as a cultured man from Europe,’ Joe told us in his kitchen in Venice. In Kojonup, the big(ger) smoke twenty kilometres away, ‘people knew us and treated us with respect’. Joe and Gino lived in the shearers’ quarters on Rocky Glen, a hundred metres up the hill from the farmhouse. The Stewarts invited them in to drink tea and share Sunday lunch, and treated them as equals. Joe’s English improved rapidly; Jack gave him a pocket English dictionary, which Joe used to read the newspapers and took home with him after the war. On the farm he became a favourite companion of the Stewart children – Joan and her siblings, Marg and Graeme. They would go out shooting rabbits and riding horses across the paddocks on weekends and on the holidays. Joe and Gino built a tool shed on the farm, which still stands today. They devised a ‘system of levers’ to improve the operations of the tractor, and played midwife to the sheep in lambing season. In the mornings, Joe

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was tasked with making porridge, ‘a white gruel which’, he said, ‘I couldn’t stand’. In turn, Barbara made the effort to learn to make spaghetti. This was much appreciated by the Italians even though it was served bland, accom- panied only by homemade butter. Rabbit ragu was a bridge too far for the Stewarts’ menu in the 1940s. One day, after eighteen months on the farm, a letter arrived for Joe from his brother with the heartbreaking news that Joe’s girlfriend and elder brother had both died from illnesses. Soon afterwards came more news, disaster on an unfathomable scale. Joe recalled Jack running to the sheds: ‘Joe, atom bomb! Atom bomb!’ It had fallen on Hiroshima. For Joe it meant at last the war was over and the long voyage back to Venice could begin. Jack and Joe promised to keep in touch. If Joe wanted to return to Australia after the war, Jack would help him. In less fraught circumstances, Joe might have taken up this offer; but Europe was in ruins, and his father needed him to help make a living in the bronze workshop. He later married his former sweetheart’s sister, but his new wife was afraid to travel so far away and the trip never eventuated. Jack and Barbara visited Joe and his family in Venice several times before they died. The last of these occasions was in the northern summer of 1973. Sandra, who was sixteen at the time, remembers having lunch with her father, Jack and Barbara, at the hotel the Australians were staying in, which overlooked the Grand Canal. When it was time to leave, she recalls, Jack’s eyes were misty. He and Joe embraced.

FORTY-ONE YEARS LATER, in the hot days of July 2014, our daugh- ter Esther was staying in Joe’s old apartment by the Rialto, which had been shuttered up since his death some two years earlier. She was on her gap year, and had brought two Melbourne schoolmates to meet her family friends in Venice. Sandra and her husband, Gigi, took the footloose young Austra- lians out for dinner in a local square. There was a festival, and they watched fireworks explode over rooftops and the water. And for four days Nicola, now in his early twenties, took on the role of host, guiding the three young women through the backstreets of the city, day and night. Each evening he came to the apartment and cooked for them. They were quite capable of cooking for

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themselves, but his mother was afraid the apartment would catch fire. The pipes had grown old and heavy wooden beams weighed down the ceiling. Venice is becoming hollowed out, fears Sandra. Her ancient city is dissolving from neglect, suffocating from the superficial gaze of strangers. Muradup, too, is not what it once was. The pub and shops are gone. It’s not even obvious where the main street used to be. But this year, finally, we got to repay Sandra and Gigi for all of those years of hospitality in Venice. No longer bound by caring for her father, Sandra could fulfil a lifelong desire to visit the place he had carried with him for most of his life. It was our turn to play host. My mother, brother, sister and I hired a mini-van to take our Venetian guests deep into the Western Australian countryside. On the highway down from Perth, Sandra and Gigi gazed out the windows at the endless stretches of pasture and forest. They were fascinated by the sheep: did the farmers bring them inside in the evenings? Rocky Glen was covered in canola, an iridescent yellow shag carpeting the rolling hills. The farm had been recently sold, but the new owners were very happy to indulge us visiting – two carloads of extended family. A man perched high up in a massive gum tree, lopping branches with a chainsaw. Nyeeaaarrgg. Nyeeaaarrgg. Sandra took photo after photo to show Nicola, and to remember this brief, precious time. She lingered in the deserted shearers’ quarters where her father slept and ate. She smelt the air. As it started to mist with springtime rain, Sandra posed with Joan for a picture on the steps of the old farmhouse, the two of them standing in the place their fathers walked. I tried to take a decent snap and thought about the small miracle of friendship. ‘I had such a strong feeling on the farm,’ Sandra told me afterwards, when we were flying together across the continent of Australia, ‘that I wanted to call my father and say: I am here. And I imagined him on the other end of the line. He was so excited! He wanted to know: what has changed?’

David Carlin is author of The Abyssinian Contortionist (UWAP, 2015) and Our Father Who Wasn’t There (Scribe, 2010). He is also a director, researcher and teacher, and co-directs the nonfictionLab as an associate professor at RMIT.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 164 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY War stories Remembering women conflict reporters Jeannine Baker

JUST SIX WEEKS after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki triggered the end of World War II, Australian newspaper reporter Lorraine Stumm was in a small party of journalists taken by airplane over the destroyed Japanese cities. Like other Western journalists in Japan, Stumm had written of her pleasure at seeing signs of the Allies’ supremacy and of Japanese weakness and inferiority, and she was keen to witness the processes of war. But the flight had an unexpectedly traumatic impact on her. In her memoir I Saw Too Much (The Write On Group, 2000), Stumm recalled that she had ‘expected the rubble and the devastation’, but had been unprepared for the horror of seeing ‘the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable’. American reporter Gwen Dew of the Detroit News was also shocked into silence: ‘Never could you imagine such death, such fearful death… I literally could not speak for days.’ The desolate scenes haunted Stumm for decades. In 1989, she told ABC radio producer Sharon Davis:

It was just a vast wilderness with heaps of rubble here and there – absolutely devastated. Dreadful sight... And we just couldn’t believe that one bomb could possibly do so much terrible damage. It was as if you’d just wiped it out with a huge hand – wiped everything out in sight. Shocking thing. When I came back I wrote that it was the most terrible disaster the world had ever faced and who knew what the after-effects would be.

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Stumm was the only Australian woman to be given the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon, awarded by US General Douglas MacArthur to war correspondents who had ‘shared the hardships and dangers of combat with United States troops and whose presence has contributed to the welfare and effectiveness of our troops’. Interestingly, MacArthur’s description did not distinguish between men and women war correspondents. Within Austra- lia, however, women journalists who have reported war, sometimes at great personal risk and long-term cost, are still not celebrated or remembered in the same way as male war correspondents. The fascination with Australian war correspondents and war photogra- phers such as Damien Parer, Neil Davis, Charles Bean and Alan Moorehead continues to grow with each retelling of their exploits. But it is perhaps hard to see where women fit into the picture of the daring, heroic combat war reporter, who shares all the risks and dangers of the troops alongside him. Can a woman journalist confined to the margins of the battlefield, and engaged predominantly in writing non-combat news, rightly be called a war corre- spondent, even if she was officially accredited as one?

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN JOURNALISTS have reported on conflict since 1900, when Sydney nurse and journalist Agnes Macready covered the South African War for the Catholic Press. During World War II, twenty-one Australasian women worked as war reporters in the South-West Pacific Area and in Europe. The Australian Army accredited sixteen women as war corre- spondents in 1942 and 1943, for the express purpose of publicising women’s war work on the home front. Two Australian women, Elizabeth Riddell and Anne Matheson, gained accreditation with the Allied forces in Europe in 1944. Other women reported from overseas without official accreditation, but often with the permission of the Australian or New Zealand military or government. At the end of war in the Pacific, a further group of non-accred- ited women journalists reported from Asia on the cessation of hostilities and the transition to peace. In both theatres, the military defined a ‘war correspondent’ as a reporter of frontline conflict, and a ‘woman war correspondent’ as a reporter of non-combat war news, or what was often referred to as the ‘woman’s angle’.

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Arguments about women’s vulnerability, their need for male protection, their inability to understand or cope with war conditions and their lack of under- standing of military hardware were used to support the exclusion of women reporters from military areas. Australian military authorities, in particular, categorised women reporters as untrustworthy, shallow ‘sob sisters’ and argued that their visible difference from the troops could jeopardise military operations. In late 1942, the Australian Army’s Director of Public Relations, Briga- dier Errol Knox – a former journalist – established a limited accreditation scheme for Australian women war correspondents. The newly minted women war correspondents were provided with a uniform, green-and-gold ‘War Correspondent’ shoulder flashes and a war correspondent’s licence stamped ‘Lines of Communication Only’, meaning they were not permitted in opera- tional areas. Australian military authorities, along with their counterparts in the European theatre, attempted to control the movements and the writing of women reporters by confining them to the periphery of the military zone, where they were mainly limited to covering stories perceived to be of interest to women, such as the work of women’s auxiliary services. While some women reporters were relatively acquiescent, others openly resisted the military’s rigid definition of their role. One woman reporter, Brisbane journalist Lorraine Stumm, in particu- lar, stuck in the craw of the Australian military. Ambitious and competitive, Stumm relied on both her femininity and her tenacity in the pursuit of stories. In the mid-1930s, Stumm had proven herself in the man’s world of Fleet Street, chasing hard news stories for the London Daily Mirror. Stumm travelled to Singapore after her husband, RAF pilot Wing-Commander Harley Stumm, was posted there in 1939, and began working at the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter. In late 1941, she contacted her former newspaper the Daily Mirror and confidently offered to represent them as an accredited British war correspondent in Singapore, a role she performed until she was forced to evacuate ahead of the Japanese advance. From 1942 to 1943, Stumm was based at MacArthur’s Brisbane headquar- ters as an accredited war correspondent, again for the London Daily Mirror. During that time, she ceaselessly needled the Australian military authorities to

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be allowed to report from operational areas, but was refused every time with the excuse that there were ‘no facilities’, which meant no women’s lavatories. In October 1943, MacArthur personally invited Stumm to visit the opera- tional area of New Guinea to cover an aerial attack on Rabaul. While eleven male war correspondents accompanied the Allied air forces on the mission, Stumm was forced to remain behind on the base, interviewing support staff such as Red Cross workers. The Australian Army’s new Director of Public Relations, Colonel John Rasmussen, was nonetheless incensed by Stumm’s transgression into the military zone. Within a month, he had abolished the Australian accreditation system for women war correspondents. At the end of the war, Stumm was working as a general reporter for the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. She had returned to Australia in May 1944 from India, where she had been working for the British Ministry of Information until the death of her husband Harley in an aircraft accident in Calcutta. When peace was declared, Stumm saw an opportunity to report another big overseas news story, and again approached the London Daily Mirror, who agreed she could represent them in Japan. The Telegraph’s editor Cyril Pearl supported Stumm’s trip, partly because she organised her own transport and covered her own expenses. There was no civilian air transport at the time, so Stumm approached the Royal Air Force Command, who offered her a flight to Tokyo out of respect for her deceased airman husband. Over eight weeks, Stumm visited Okinawa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Borneo and Darwin, and spent one month in Tokyo. As she walked through Tokyo, Stumm felt ‘a heady joy’ in the part that Australian troops had played in defeating ‘this nation of fanatics that had been bent on over-running our country’. In late September, soon after her flight over Hiroshima, Stumm obtained an important scoop: an interview with the first known European survivor of Hiroshima, Jesuit priest Father William Kleinsorge. In her dispatch to the Daily Mirror, Stumm reported Kleinsorge’s description of the horrific scenes on the afternoon of the bombing:

People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred

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schoolgirls at the Methodist College survived. Three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

Stumm’s dispatch is significant because by this time virtually all discus- sion of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was strictly censored under the Allies’ Press Code, established soon after the publication of Austra- lian Wilfred Burchett’s exposé of the lingering effects of radiation in the London Daily Express. The US authorities in Japan tended to approve only those news reports that focused on the initial blast and the immediate impact on buildings, and that described Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets. Stumm later wrote that observing ‘the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community’, and the scale of the human suffering in Hiroshima, gave her no pleasure. Stumm’s daughter Sheridan Stumm, also a long-time journalist, told me that while her mother was in Japan she did not openly discuss her feelings, because she could not afford to be seen as weak by the male reporters. Women journalists often had to suppress their emotions, lest they were accused of not being mentally tough enough to cope with war conditions. But towards the end of her mother’s life, Sheridan Stumm said that ‘as dementia was creeping in, the two traumatic events of the war came flooding back – the death of her husband and the horror of Hiroshima’.

JUST LIKE THEIR male colleagues, many women reporters found proxim- ity to danger exciting, and they could be just as fiercely competitive in the pursuit of a scoop. In her memoir No Woman’s World (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), British war correspondent Iris Carpenter described the precariousness of women reporters’ existence. While women felt pressured to file news other than routine ‘hospital stories’ to keep their jobs, ‘trying to get anything else meant breaking rules’, which in turn jeopardised their positions. Elizabeth Riddell, an intrepid and fearless general reporter and accredited war corre- spondent in Europe for the Sydney Daily Mirror, recalled that women reporters desired more than ‘the nice little trips’ they were offered. Proving that women were prepared to take ‘just as many risks as anybody else if they wanted to’,

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Riddell set off without permission from her party of women war correspon- dents in Brussels and travelled with fellow Australian reporter Sam White to Metz in France, which was still under German fire. Riddell claimed that she felt no concern for her own safety, just ‘inquisitive and curious and detached’. Such an attitude of ‘intrepid insouciance’ is common to both men and women war correspondents, as observed by Anthony Feinstein and Mark Sinyor in their study of the psychology of war journalists, published in the Nieman Reports (Winter 2009). Despite this, ABC’s former Afghanistan correspondent Sally Sara recently shared her experience of post-traumatic stress disorder, a result of bearing witness to scenes that were ‘not just physically confront- ing’ but ‘morally wrong’. Even in World War II, when Australian women reporters were supposedly excluded from frontline areas, they encountered the devastating human cost of conflict. In Riddell’s case, the realisation that she had been just ‘a spectator, an observer’ of the war eventually disgusted her and she decided to return to Australia before it ended. ‘When you’re a war correspondent you are, whether you like it or not, part of a great organisation, a machine for war,’ she told ABC broadcaster Tim Bowden in 1978. While the majority of women had little choice but to write non-military stories because they had limited or no access to the frontline, others actively chose to do so because they recognised their importance for understand- ing war. Riddell, for example, wrote incisive political stories about the impact of war on French civilians, and did not see this as taking the ‘soft’ option. Writing about civilians was at the time considered just a ‘superfi- cial sidebar’ to the main story of war, American media historian Maurine Beasley explains in the documentary No Job for a Woman (2011). But this kind of reporting soon became the norm, and twenty-first century war journalism typically focuses on the human story: the flight of refugees, the plight of child victims, the struggle for daily life in a conflict zone. Most of the contemporary conflict journalists who were interviewed by Howard Tumbler and Frank Webster for their book Journalists Under Fire (SAGE Publi- cations, 2006) reject the label ‘war correspondent’, finding it self-important, restrictive and outmoded. They see their role as ‘telling stories about people’s lives and the effects of government decisions on ordinary folk’. Yet instead of being admired as path-breakers, the Australian women who covered the

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human side of World War II have often been disparaged as writers of merely ‘domestic’ articles of limited interest.

ADVENTUROUS NEW ZEALAND journalist Dorothy Cranstone demonstrated on more than one occasion that she did not regard her sex as a barrier. According to family friends, her independent and defiant nature had been forged in childhood: one recalled that Cranstone was expelled from her private girls’ school after bringing in a stock whip, which she had learned to crack expertly. In 1937 she agreed to accompany four men on a big-game hunting trip to Central Africa, partly because she knew she would be the first white woman to make the journey, later documented in her memoir Africa Calling, 1937 (Duncan and Caroline Melville, 2000). In January 1942, Crans- tone reported from Singapore for New Zealand and Australian newspapers just before it fell to the Japanese. She then made her way to India, where her husband, Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) fighter pilot Jim Crans- tone, was stationed with the RAF, and where she was to report on the war situation for the Australian and Natal press. She was seconded to the RNZAF as a service observer and public relations officer based in Ceylon, where she wrote press releases and news stories about the NZRAF and was entitled to accompany aerial operations, a rare privilege for a woman. Cranstone self-identified as a war correspondent despite having no official status or accreditation as such. An article in the Wellington Evening Post in November 1945 claimed she participated in ‘submarine hunts in the Indian ocean, dropped supplies into camps hidden in the heart of Burma, and was flown over Rangoon with supplies for the prisoner-of-war camps there after the capitulation’. After the reconquest of Burma by the British in May 1945, Cranstone was responsible for identifying New Zealand prisoners of war in camps in Calcutta, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore. In Singapore she broadcast news via radio about New Zealand prisoners, took photographs and helped to organise their aerial evacuation. Cranstone’s lack of by-lines, her official status as an observer rather than a war correspondent and her postwar career as a farmer (she named her property ‘Burma’) have all contributed to her virtual obscurity in the histori- cal record, but this pioneering woman journalist deserves to be better known.

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DURING WARTIME, WOMEN reporters were constantly reminded of their difference from the troops and were kept quarantined from them. In the immediate postwar period, Australian women journalists in Asia benefited from a softening of the lines of demarcation between the civilian and military domains, but their gender remained a strong point of focus for authorities and was often foregrounded in their journalism. In late September 1945, Woman journalist Iris Dexter reported from South-East Asia on the restoration of peace and the circumstances of newly released Australian prisoners of war. In 1942–43, Dexter had been an accredited war correspondent with the Austra- lian Army on the home front, but she now referred to herself ‘apologetically’ as a ‘peace or postwar correspondent’. Dexter’s ambiguous status, being neither part of the military nor completely protected from the perils of war, was soon brought home to her. Holed up in Java for over two weeks, due to regional conflict stemming from Indonesia’s nascent independence movement, Dexter found herself ‘hemmed in by [guns] in the hands of English, Indian, Indonesian and Dutch soldiers’. Dexter’s heightened vulnerability was inextricably tied to her gender and race. ‘Being the only correspondent in Java with lacquered toenails has disad- vantages,’ she wryly observed. On the eve of her departure from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Bandoeng (Bandung), where rioting was taking place, local authorities requested she cancel the trip and warned her, ‘One slight incident there…and as a white woman you’d be a liability.’ Although Australian women had proved they could be ‘very solid consci- entious correspondents’ during the war, as Riddell observed, afterwards there was a return to the status quo for some decades. Riddell nonetheless believed that she and other women war reporters had paved the way for later female foreign correspondents such as the celebrated Margaret Jones, who in 1973 became the first Sydney Morning Herald journalist to be based in Beijing since the war’s end. ‘That’s a great thing that’s happened to women,’ Riddell remarked to Bowden on ABC Radio National, ‘that they can be trusted to be sent out, to do the work, go everywhere and run their job properly. So one can only say that if that arose from the war then that’s a good thing. And I think probably it did arise from the war.’ The extraordinary New Zealand- born journalist Kate Webb, who covered the Vietnam War from 1967 to

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1975 and many subsequent conflicts, was also rightly hailed as a pioneering woman reporter. I wonder how much Webb and Jones knew about the Australasian women who preceded them as reporters in Asia? The individualistic practice of claiming to be the ‘first’ or ‘only’ reporter to witness an event, which was embraced by Australian women war reporters, did not encourage acknowl- edgment of those who came before them or who stood alongside them. Women general news reporters such as Cranstone and Stumm are also harder to trace in the historical record in comparison with feature writers, because they were often denied by-lines. The stories they wrote were intended for immediate consumption rather than future study – and then used to wrap fish. And it’s a truism that nobody cares about yesterday’s news. In 1989, former Melbourne journalist Pat Jarrett was interviewed about her wartime experiences. Jarrett was an accredited war correspondent in Australia for the Herald in 1942–43 and also travelled briefly to the Burma front in January 1945 at the request of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the South-East Asia Command. Jarrett observed that the work of Australian women war correspondents was little known, let alone celebrated. ‘I’ve never been asked to march in an Anzac Day march. Men war correspondents have marched – but I think they’ve forgotten that there were women.’ Jarrett and her colleagues had not been content to observe war only from the sidelines. Seventy years after Stumm reported on the horrors of Hiroshima, it is surely time to take the work of Australian women reporters seriously – not merely as the ‘woman’s angle’ on war, but as part of the main story.

References available at www.griffithreview.com

Jeannine Baker is a historian and documentary maker, and is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. She wrote and directed Our Drowned Town (SBS TV, 2001) about the flooding of Adaminaby township for the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and produced Fler and the Modernist Impulse (ABC Radio National, 2011). Her book about Australian women war reporters will be published by NewSouth later this year.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 173 13/03/2015 3:59 pm MEMOIR Claiming the dead Awkward moments for past wrongs Cory Taylor

THE CEREMONY TOOK place on a glorious morning in March at Cowra cemetery, the sky above a flawless blue, the horizon visible in the green distance across miles and miles of rolling pasture. The Japanese dignitaries had arrived before us in their big black cars, driving up from Canberra for a day in the country. The town officials stood around in their tight suits and smiled benignly at the mourners, as if it was within their power to bestow solace for past wrongs. As soon as I saw them I knew what we were in for: a couple of hours of bad theatre in which the story of why we were all here would be bent out of shape to fit the official narrative, its meaning subtly subsumed into the national mythology. The reason I had come to Cowra was both simple and complex. My friend Yuriko Nagata, a historian of the Japanese diaspora, had invited me to take part in a symposium to be held in Cowra to coincide with the unveiling of an interpretive board at the entrance to the town’s Japanese war cemetery. Two years in the planning, the symposium was to be both a meeting of schol- ars and an opportunity for the families of Japanese civilians buried at Cowra to visit the graves of their forbears and honour their story. Yuriko’s work had provided the inspiration behind my novel, My Beauti- ful Enemy (Text, 2013). She had given me advice and support throughout the writing of the book, and her work on the internment of civilian Japanese

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during World War II had provided an invaluable resource in the years it took to shape the novel into its final form. I accepted her invitation immediately. The symposium would give me the chance to argue the case for fiction as a way of telling the truth; but more tantalising than that, it would mean I could finally meet face to face with some of the people Yuriko had researched and written about in her scholarly papers. There would be people attending the symposium who’d been young children in the enemy alien camps. I wanted to see what they looked like in the flesh. Having imagined a story that depended on the real story of wartime internment for its veracity, I wanted to be in the same room as people who’d actually lived that experience. Among them was Evelyn Suzuki. Interned in 1941, Evelyn had spent five years in Tatura, the very camp where My Beautiful Enemy was set. I imagined that laying eyes on her would be like seeing my fictional world transformed into the reality from which it had sprung. It would be life following art following life, a circle gratifyingly squared. I wanted to be there, too, when Evelyn unveiled the interpretive board, on which the story of the internment is illustrated and explained to arriving visitors. Evelyn is in her eighties now and growing frail, but I imagined her becoming for a moment, in the minds of all who were watch- ing, the child again – the helpless innocent whose fate depends so arbitrarily on strangers and events way beyond anyone’s comprehension or control. The interpretive board was long overdue. It would finally make sense of the fact that so many of the headstones in the Japanese war cemetery mark the graves of children and old people. Cowra is most renowned as the site of the Cowra Breakout, a mass escape attempt in August 1944 by a thousand or more Japanese POWs being held in the nearby camp. Two hundred and thirty-one prisoners died during the breakout and four Australian guards were killed trying to prevent the escape. The POWs are buried in the Japanese war cemetery, and the Australian guards are buried in an adjacent Australian war cemetery. Understandably, it is the graves of soldiers that most visitors to Cowra war cemetery expect to see as they wander up and down the neat rows of headstones, each of them bearing the name, date of death and age of the deceased. It is confusing, therefore, to come across those of four-year-olds and men in their seventies. They point to a less well-known aspect of Cowra’s famous cemetery.

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A couple of years before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Japanese Embassy began talks with the Cowra Shire Council to gather all of the Japanese war dead in one place and for the Japanese government to contribute financially to the upkeep of their graves. As a result, it was also agreed that the remains of Japanese civilians who had died in Australian internment should be dis­interred and moved to Cowra from the various scattered campsites in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. I imagine the intention was to bring the civilian dead into the official embrace, to acknowledge on both sides that the war had taken the lives of combatants and non-combatants alike, and that in death each deserved to be honoured. Naturally, the dead themselves were not consulted. Had they been, many might well have requested burial in places that meant more to them – Darwin or Broome for instance, where so many of them had spent their lives as pearlers before being arrested and transported to the south to be imprisoned for the duration of the war. Or New Caledonia, where many of them were born, or Mackay where they’d cut cane, or Sydney where they’d run laundries, taught Japanese to university students, married local women, raised their children. The internment, as I discovered when I was researching the topic for my novel, was a panicky, kneejerk expression of naked fear. Based on race alone, and in some cases on mere appearance, anyone of Japanese descent was rounded up and incarcerated. Very few got out until three or four years had passed, and some of them never got out at all.

IT HAS BEEN half a century since the Tokyo Olympics. I don’t imagine the Cowra cemetery has changed much in that time. Certainly, the war graves appear to be exempt from the normal signs of age and neglect that give the cemetery for the ordinary citizens of Cowra its special melancholy. The ordinary cemetery is a reminder of the democratic nature of peacetime death. Babies who died a hundred years ago are buried in little, crumbling fenced allotments next to octogenarians who died last year. Some of the dead lie beneath unadorned slabs of concrete; others beneath elaborate and expensive granite monuments, daubed with gold lettering; still others beneath marble angels frozen in mid-flight. There is nothing fair or uniform about ordinary

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graves. In this they are a reflection of the unfairness and boundless variety that exists among the living. Not so with military graves. Fenced off in their own paddock, the graves of the war dead at Cowra illustrate an order – something fixed and immutable. The races are separated. The victors are quarantined from the vanquished. The dead are buried in straight rows with identical headstones to mark the graves. The lawns surrounding the headstones are lush and neatly trimmed. Banished are the wild grasses and weeds that flourish in the surrounding countryside. But for the telltale gum trees, we might be somewhere in Europe, on one of the countless battlefields where millions of soldiers are buried in similar fashion and where the global style of military memorials was presumably forged. That civilians are also buried in among the soldiers at Cowra makes their deaths seem inevitable – part of the military order. It would seem that even in death these pearl divers and laundrymen, cane cutters and shopkeepers remain interned, cut off from the general population, denied ordinariness even in the afterlife.

THE CEREMONY TO unveil the interpretive board took a while to get going. First we had to wait until everyone was gathered together: all the family members and scholars who’d attended the symposium, all the town dignitaries and the Japanese government representatives. Yuriko and her fellow organisers were kept busy setting things up, looking out for Evelyn and paying due deference to the Japanese ambassador. I could tell she was nervous, and anxious for the families to feel that their presence was properly appreciated, that their stories weren’t to be lost in the mess of competing narratives as portended by the printed program for the morning. I noted with a sinking heart that the opening event was to be an Anzac Day-style flag raising in the Australian war cemetery, conducted by a band of local war veterans; I saw them on the road rehearsing their routine. They each bore a flag anchored in a leather holster at the waist. On each barrel chest was pinned a yard of medals. I was doubtful that an Anzac Day parade was what anyone from the symposium had expected or wanted, but it’s what the town had come up with. It was apparently their default position when it came to war cemetery events.

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I’ve never liked Anzac Day. I’m particularly uneasy with the way the ‘Anzac spirit’ has been puffed-up in recent times to play a quasi-religious role in expressing a national identity – this in an age when the deadliness of quasi-religious nationalism is present on the nightly news for all to see. Reluctant to fall in line with the quiet ranks of onlookers at the flag raising, I stood watching from outside the fence that marks off the Australian war cemetery. Flags were raised, wreathes were laid, the Last Post rang out across the landscape with a peculiar tinny falseness. This was not the story we’d come to hear. This was a pre-emptive strike by the old soldiers. They were pulling rank on us, reminding us that on a scale of honourable deaths, those of uniformed Australian servicemen killed in the line of duty are at the very top. Somewhat disheartened, I followed the crowd next door to the Japanese war cemetery where we were to witness a series of performances, speeches, prayers and musical items, some of them run concurrently and all aimed – rather desperately I sensed – to demilitarise the tone of the proceedings, to lift the official pall that had been cast over the day by the presence of war veterans and men in suits. It wasn’t easy. The difficulties became glaringly apparent as soon as the artists arrived tossing sheets of parchment up in the air, chanting the names of the deceased internees one by one as the parchment sheets danced briefly in the breeze before crash-landing on the lawn. There were visible signs of upset among the mourners, especially when it was understood that each piece of parchment bore the name of someone’s relative. Clearly, the performance had not been intended to cause offence, but it had anyway. It was something to do with the abandon with which the names were launched into space and then with the sight of them falling so heavily to earth. Wordlessly, almost as a reflex action, a few onlookers ventured out onto the lawn to gather up the pieces of paper, to rescue them from this very public exposure. There followed a performance in which two young women ran up and down between the rows of headstones wearing loose flowing robes, while a young man made dance-like gestures in the background. When the girls had finished running they lay down on the lawn and rolled across the graves like children on a picnic. It was relatively inoffensive compared to the parchment throwing, but it did distract us from the prayers of the Shingon Buddhist monk who had driven all the way from Sydney to be in attendance. The

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monk was Japanese, round-faced, his head bare, his robes brilliant orange and purple. Alongside him were four junior monks – Australians, also in robes – taller than their leader but lacking his charisma. As soon as they started to chant I sensed a new attentiveness in the crowd, a desire to inject a note of real reverence into proceedings before the whole show collapsed into farce. Not everyone was listening however. A couple of the old soldiers stood a few metres back from the Buddhists and conducted a lively conversation over the top of the chanting, as if it was mere background noise and nothing to do with them. It was beyond rudeness; it was the purest illustration so far that morning of the distance between the official story of the Japanese war cemetery and the human story of those who are buried there. Word spread through the family groups that the Buddhists were avail- able to chant prayers beside individual graves if relatives wished them to do so. For an hour or more, while the musicians played and the officials discussed their plans for the weekend, the monks moved from one spot to another and went into a huddle with a granddaughter or great-grandson of the person named on the headstone at their feet. The soft chants sounded like surf on a beach, rising and falling, speaking out of the depths of an ancient tradition and making the kind of sense that had been lacking up until now. Tears were shed, privately, away from the throng. Finally, real emotions were on display. I watched a big and normally jovial man from New Caledonia reach down and place his hand on one of the headstones, then steady his trembling chin with his free hand. Breaking from his private prayers, the Japanese monk made an unrehearsed speech into the microphone to end the morning’s program. Looking uncomfortably hot in his heavy robes, he reminded his audience of why they were all here. The heaviest cost of war is not paid by soldiers, he said, but by civilians. Buried in the soil of Cowra were not just soldiers but civilians – men, women and children whose lives had been tragically altered by events over which they had no control. It is these people we are here to remember today, he said, and all of the millions like them. By the time he had finished speaking I felt the day had been rescued from irrelevance and from irreverence. I noticed that even the old soldiers had finally stopped their chatter to listen to what he had to say.

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IN THE END I didn’t see Evelyn unveil the interpretive board. I was too far back in the crowd and she was too small. But I clapped anyway and went up later to read what was written there. It was all so familiar to me: the facts of the internment and, behind the facts, the sad cost to the people who were criminalised and stripped of everything they owned with no hope of ever recovering materially or psychologically. The photograph that accompanied the text was also familiar: a formally arranged portrait of a group of internees standing outside a tin hut in their winter coats. I had stared long and hard at that photograph while I was writing My Beautiful Enemy. It helped me to focus on war as it is experienced by ordinary people. Hopefully, it will do the same for everyone else who pauses long enough to really look.

Cory Taylor is an award-winning screenwriter who has also published short fiction and children’s books. Her first novel, Me and Mr Booker (Text, 2012), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Pacific Region) and her second, My Beautiful Enemy (Text, 2013), was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2014.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 180 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Continuing fallout From Hiroshima to Fukushima Meredith McKinney

THE STORY OF Japan’s marriage to nuclear energy is so fraught with suffering, you have to wonder why they ever got together. Just what are the dynamics of this abusive relationship? It’s easy to look at a bad marriage and shake your head over it in disbelief. To an outsider, the stark facts of the matter can seem glaringly obvious. But from the inside, the view is often very different. When I went to Japan after the post-tsunami nuclear accident at Fukushima, I anticipated that mention of Hiroshima would be thick in the air. It is an astonishing and tragic fate, surely, to find yourself not once but twice the victim of nuclear damage on an unprec- edented scale, and the terrible story of Hiroshima is very far from forgotten in Japan. But people were oddly resistant when I mentioned the connection: ‘It’s really very different,’ was the general response. This is certainly true – the atomic bomb killed roughly seventy thousand people and left more than two hundred thousand sick from the radiation, while according to official data Fukushima has so far killed no one, and evidence of the effects of the radiation are slow to emerge (an increase in incidences of thyroid cancer among children is beginning to reveal itself). The bomb was an uncontrolled chain reaction, while the nuclear power plants at Fukushima were designed in such a way that this could never happen.

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Their danger is from leaked radiation. None of this means, of course, that the radiation from Fukushima may not prove to be immensely harmful in the long term – it has already proved so to the economy, local industry and the surrounding area both sea and land – or that it is not the same substance that is doing the harming. But it is important to maintain perspective when drawing analogies, and the view from up close makes Fukushima a very different story from Hiroshima’s. Nevertheless, it struck me as odd that so few in Japan were inclined to step back and take a long view that linked Hiroshima and Fukushima in any way. Discussion on the web and elsewhere has, in fact, tended to react defensively and even angrily to any suggestion of a connection. Why should the idea make people so uncomfortable? In some way it is important, it seems, to keep Japan’s two nuclear disasters firmly separate in the mind. This puzzling psychology turns out to be a key to the story of Japan’s unfortunate nuclear marriage. When I said Hiroshima is very far from being forgotten, this was an understatement. Hiroshima dominates Japanese perceptions of their nation’s involvement in World War II, much as Gallipoli increasingly dominates discussions of World War I in Australia. I only fully realised this when I had to teach a first-year university course in Japan on Australia–Japan relations. I’d expected the students to be ignorant of Australia’s role in the war, but I struck a deeper ignorance: at best, most seemed to be only hazily aware that Japan had been the aggressor in the Pacific War. Overwhelmingly, the bombing of Hiroshima was the war’s single defining image in their minds. For my students, as for many others in Japan, ‘the war’ could be summed up in very simple terms: America had been the perpetrator and Japan the (innocent) victim of an unforgivable atrocity. It seems that the single act of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – along with the terrible suffer- ing it inflicted – has had the unintended effect of virtually obliterating any possibility for many Japanese of understanding the Pacific War, its causes and its culpabilities. It has largely foreclosed on remembering, and replaced it with an aggrieved and righteous sense of national victimhood. In fact, with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America unleashed a host of problems it had probably never thought to anticipate – only

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one of which was the ongoing dire effects of radiation on humans, which it then eagerly set to work to study. (Why Nagasaki is so seldom mentioned is another tale.) The story is worth tracing, for it leads, via some interesting historical twists, finally to Fukushima.

THE TERRIBLE EFFECTS of the atomic bomb appalled the world, including America’s allies and indeed most Americans, and there was general horror at the thought that such a weapon could be used again. The ‘atom bomb’, as it was then called, had in fact been so successful that it proved potentially disastrous from the American government’s point of view. In the face of such universal revulsion, what was to become of the precious nuclear research that was the new darling of physics, where America held the cutting edge thanks to the work of Oppenheimer and others? How to win back the public’s trust, reassure the allies, make some amends – or at least seem to – for the atrocity that was raising such howls on all sides, and save the nuclear research project for the job of forging ahead with important, world- changing discoveries and, more importantly, helping to maintain America’s now-superior military capability? The next chapter in the story of Japan’s nuclear marriage begins here. In the midst of the post-Hiroshima nuclear fear that gripped the world, President Eisenhower and those around him began to hatch a plan that would prove to be almost as successful (and, ultimately, perhaps as disastrous) as the atomic bomb had been. It was to be called ‘Atoms for Peace’, and its aim was to present to the world the dreaded ‘atom’ – newly dressed in civilian clothes, taught to smile nicely and be polite – as the promise of future peace and prosperity for all. Behind this plan lay not only the urgent need to reverse public fear of ‘the atom’, but the growing necessity to counter and contain the burgeoning nuclear capability of the USSR. This seemingly harmless project was, in essence, a child of the Cold War. The Atoms for Peace project had about it the same innocent air of Ameri- can generosity as the Marshall Plan: the latest nuclear technology would be offered freely to friendly countries, together with enriched uranium for use in the atomic reactors they would be encouraged to build. This would not only promote the widespread civilian use of the new nuclear technology, and

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thereby reassure the world that the atom was its friend, but coincidentally ensure that America’s allies had the readily available potential to build nuclear weapons at need. Meanwhile, the public must be soothed and won over. The underlying concept was summed up, in the words of Stefan Possony, Defence Department consultant to the Psychological Strategy Board of the time, as follows: ‘The atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends.’ The cynicism behind the project is astonishing. Nevertheless, Eisen- hower probably meant every word when he introduced the plan in his famous Atoms for Peace speech to the UN General Assembly by asserting that nuclear technology ‘can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind’. The project embodies that peculiar combination of think-big idealism and hard pragmatism that is so characteristic of American thought. Eisenhower was not only keen to maintain America’s military supremacy while surreptitiously arming his allies, he and subsequent administrations set about putting his grand civilian promises into practice at home. The string of nuclear debacles attending the mad dreams of Project (or Operation) Plowshare over the following decades attests to the strength of this ongoing faith in nuclear energy – nuclear explosions were seen as the new engineering fix for any US plans that required large-scale blasting, until the combination of public outcry, radiation contamination, failure and expense finally killed the project in the late ’70s. The Pilbara region in Western Australia was lucky to avoid being irradiated by the gift of a new nuclear-blasted harbour, just one of many among Project Plowshare’s cheerful plans.

IN HINDSIGHT, SUCH massive irresponsibility seems entirely culpable. Nevertheless, it’s worth pausing to understand the widespread allure of the new promises of nuclear technology at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. Aside from the wilder ideas (building houses impregnated with uranium to melt the winter snow, and so forth), there was much talk of a future of atomic planes, trains and space ships, futuristic atomic-powered gadgets, and the suggestion that nuclear-generated power would be so plentiful it would be free. Until the limitations of the realistic applications of nuclear technology – and the full dangers of radiation – were understood, this new technology could easily be

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made to promise the world. The massive build-up of America’s atomic arsenal that Eisenhower covertly oversaw during his term in office (from around a thousand nuclear weapons when he arrived, to roughly twenty-two thousand by the time he left), eloquently gives the lie to the formula ‘atoms for peace’. But, for a while at least, atoms for prosperity and a brave new world seemed like a genuine promise. Eisenhower’s UN speech in December 1953 was so winning that it had many convinced. The US testing of a huge atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands less than four months later was, in retrospect, a big mistake for them. The world proved to have been less won over than Eisenhower had assumed, and the fact that an innocent fishing boat outside the exclusion zone had been smothered in deadly radioactive ash made matters worse. It was doubly unfortunate that the boat was Japanese. By the time the poor SS Lucky Dragon 5 had limped home to Japan, all aboard were suffering from radiation sickness and one was already dead. Their catch of fish went to the market and was sold before anyone thought to prevent it. The Lucky Dragon incident provided a potential turning point for Japan. Still reeling from the war, eager to embrace the chance of peace and prosper- ity and already disinclined to look back at the suffering from which they had so recently emerged, many in Japan seemed prepared to be lulled by Eisenhower’s promises. The effects of radiation were only just beginning to be generally understood, owing to the secrecy of America’s research on Hiroshima victims. But the shock of the Lucky Dragon incident suddenly galvanised people: an anti-nuclear weapons petition was immediately begun by a group of Tokyo women. By the following year, it had gathered almost thirty-two million signatures (roughly a third of Japan’s population). From this was born Japan’s formidable and long-lasting anti-nuclear movement, embodied by the organisation known as Gensuikyo. Just when Japan had seemed to be recovering from what the US Admin- istration termed its unfortunate ‘nuclear allergy’, Eisenhower thus found himself with fresh problems on his hands. It made matters worse that Gensui- kyo was closely linked to Japan’s Communist Party, and hence to Russia. Urgent action was needed to save Japan (of immense strategic importance in the US versus USSR stand-off of the Cold War) from a disastrous lurch to the

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left. ‘Japan’ in this case refers to the Japanese public – the Japanese government was never in question. Indeed, Prime Minister Hatoyama and his Cabinet were as worried as Eisenhower by these developments, and all too keen to welcome his solution: a massive exhibition promoting Atoms for Peace that would tour Japan and win hearts and minds. The brave new nuclear world was coming to tout its promises, with no expense spared to impress. Along with the exhibition came another solution of a far less public nature – the offer to freely share nuclear technology with Japan. The Japanese government accepted with quiet alacrity. It was now just a matter of soothing the public’s nuclear allergy and bringing people round to what they would scarcely notice was in fact a fait accompli. The touring exhibition of 1955 was a huge success. To understand its full allure, it is important to remember that Japan was only slowly emerg- ing from the disastrous effects of the war; there was still dire poverty and devastation at every turn. The exhibition’s delightful entertainment and privileged glimpse into the bright new future where anything, it seemed, would be possible was enough to turn anyone’s head. And any head that was turned by this was thereby being turned away from the public fear and anger over nuclear equating to weapons. The two must become firmly separated in people’s minds, if the nuclear allergy was to be abated. It was a brazen move to bring the atom back to Japan, after everything the nation had experienced at its hands and a bare month or two after the Lucky Dragon incident, and attempt to convince the country that, as it were, this guy was worth marrying. But for the blitz of publicity and support provided by the press and the national and local governments, it would surely have failed. The struggle to reconcile the two was solved with some astonish- ing logic. The minister of technology proclaimed that Japan had a right to nuclear technology ‘as the country baptised by the ashes of Bikini’, a bizarre statement which reflected the official American position – that Japan should be offered the ‘good’ atom precisely because of all it had suffered at the hands of the ‘bad’ one. This daring and clever argument served to reassure the public that the two were not only entirely separate things but that the new atom, who was quite as good as the old one had been bad, was deeply contrite about the damage done by its evil twin and eager to make generous amends. It also

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neatly set up a dichotomy between good and bad that made the outcome a foregone conclusion: anyone in their right mind must choose the good. The possibility of choosing neither was outside the equation. With this, nuclear technology had its foot wedged firmly in the door.

THE CRUNCH CAME when the touring Atoms for Peace exhibi- tion arrived at Hiroshima. For reasons that are obvious, Hiroshima had a particular lack of large public buildings that could house the exhibits. It was therefore rather unwisely decided that the recently constructed Memorial Museum, built in memory of the dead and housing the memorial exhibits of Hiroshima’s bombing, would be temporarily cleared out to make way for the new exhibition. Could Hiroshima’s mayor, Hamai (who was only too happy to welcome the exhibition and all it had to offer), really have believed that his bomb- shattered city would accept this without a murmur? He and the American Cultural Centre that was overseeing the tour seemed genuinely surprised at the ensuing outcry. Perhaps he was indeed as naive as he appeared; in January that year, he had been approached with the suggestion that Hiroshima should be the first place in Japan to host a nuclear power plant, a plan conceived in the US as ‘a dramatic and Christian gesture which could lift all of us far above the recollection of the carnage’. His response had been that, as far as he was concerned, ‘starting the peaceful use of nuclear energy in the first city victim- ised by atomic energy would serve as our tribute to the deceased victims. Our citizens, I am sure, will welcome it.’ (The proposal was subsequently dropped by the US Administration, much to Hamai’s disappointment.) Hiroshima’s citizens turned out to need more coaxing than anticipated when their beloved Memorial Museum was gutted to make way for the brave new atomic promise. Most vocal were the many thousands of hibakusha, the surviving sufferers of the atomic bomb, supported by Gensuikyo. Hamai and the American organisers pushed ahead regardless, and over two thousand items commemorating Hiroshima’s terrible recent past were duly removed and replaced by an American vision of its enticing nuclear future. One of the underlying purposes behind the Atoms for Peace project – to remove the memory of searing experiences of nuclear weapons and replace it with

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the glowing promise of a peaceful nuclear world to come – was never more clearly expressed. It had been a close call, however. This short, sharp confrontation between the anti-nuclear weapons movement, behind which the Japanese public had overwhelmingly rallied, and the Atoms for Peace project brought the two into direct collision for the first time. ‘Peace’ was the powerful mantra that united them both, but behind Atoms for Peace lay the unstated aim of convincing the world eventually to accept the bitter pill of nuclear weapons by slipping it down with the sweet syrup of the atom’s technological promise. If Japan’s formidable anti-nuclear weapons movement had decided to swing its full weight against Atoms for Peace, things might have turned out very differ- ently. The Hiroshima Memorial Museum incident not only allowed a glimpse of the true nature of Atoms for Peace, it was a moment when history perhaps hung in the balance. Instead, Gensuikyo and the hibakusha retreated to consider their position, and at Gensuikyo’s 1956 conference in Nagasaki they issued their verdict: ‘Redirecting destruction- and annihilation-capable nuclear power toward the goal of definitive happiness and the prosperity of humanity is our one and only wish as long as we remain alive.’ From having its foot in the door, nuclear technology had now been welcomed at the family table. (‘And to think that I was the one who drafted this declaration!’ Moritaki Ichiro, one of Japan’s foremost peace activists, sadly wrote in retrospect.) Atoms for Peace had made another huge step towards its goal of achieving the complete separa- tion of bad and good atom in the mind of the public. All that remained was to cement its position, and finally to whittle away the opposition to nuclear weapons, until nuclear technology in all its forms became simply an accepted part of life. The Japanese public at large didn’t cave in quite as quickly as Gensui- kyo had done. A US Department of State 1956 survey found that almost two-thirds still stubbornly believed that nuclear energy would be ‘more of a curse than a boon to mankind’. A mere two years later, however, the number had significantly dropped, and it went on falling. To the disappoint- ment of the US Administration, Japan continued to suffer from a chronic nuclear allergy, such that even the government was obliged to pay it at least

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lip-service – but the symptoms had been neatly isolated to relate only to the question of nuclear weapons. And so it has remained to this day. In those intervening two years and beyond, the work done by Atoms for Peace was enthusiastically carried forward by the mass media and others. The idea of all things nuclear became a new craze, epitomised by the famous comic book character Astro Boy, first created by Tezuka Osamu in the early ’50s. His Japanese name was Iron-Arm Atom (tetsuwan atomu), and he belonged to a nuclear (pun intentional) family whose members included his sister, Uran (uranium), and brother, Cobalt. Astro Boy is a vision of technology: a robot who can do just about anything, who flies about in a nuclear-powered future fantasy land fighting the bad and protecting the good as a true hero should. He is not only cute, he has a sensitive heart and a morally upright nature. He’s all that nuclear power promised to be – what’s more, he’s fun. In the aftermath of Fukushima, the internet in Japan ran hot with accusa- tions that Tezuka had been a pawn in the hands of the nuclear power industry, helping to brainwash millions of innocent readers through his pro-nuclear message. But this is rather unfair; Tezuka was a man of his time, as beguiled by the fantastical Atoms for Peace promises as everyone else, and is on record as regretting his unwitting support of an industry he later came to see as deeply problematic. More to the point, surely, is Walt Disney. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Eisenhower’s project from the beginning, and not only infused Disneyland’s Tomorrowland with a strong pro-nuclear message but produced the hugely influential primer Our Friend the Atom, which explained the atom and its wondrous benefits to a generation of Americans, with cute illustrations and barely a passing nod toward its destructive power. It turned out, of course, that aside from its medical application almost none of those brave dreams for nuclear technology were practicable – except for nuclear power. But then, it had always been nuclear power that America was really interested in exporting, for reasons to do as much with the military considerations of Cold War geopolitics as with generosity and a belief in its benefit to mankind. Thus did Japan’s nuclear marriage begin, though private nuptials had already been held thanks to agreements between the Japanese and American governments. By 1957, a nuclear reactor had been purchased and twenty

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more were contracted. The momentum of Japan’s nuclear power industry was already unstoppable.

THE REST OF the story can be quickly told. Through the ’60s, and picking up further pace in the ’70s, earthquake-prone Japan dotted its coastline with nuclear reactors; and not only reactors, but both uranium enrichment and reprocessing facilities, and a truly scary, hideously expensive and dangerous fast breeder reactor, shut down in 1995 after revelations of the cover-up of a negligence-caused sodium leak and fire, and remaining under wraps ever since due to ‘technical problems’. The fast breeder reactor, along with a cluster of rapidly ageing earlier reactors, is located on the Japan Sea coast, less than one hundred kilome- ters from Kyoto, Japan’s beautiful early capital – where I lived for twenty years – and the huge conurbation of Osaka-Kobe. We never heard news of these reactors except in passing, every so often, when reports of an accident would leak out. It would evoke brief outrage, and be quickly buried. The outrage was as much at the revelations of how shamelessly the government and authorities were prepared to lie to protect the reputation of what had momentarily been recognised as extremely dangerous technology. From the days of Atoms for Peace and its open-handed promises, the reality of nuclear technology had sunk into worrying secrecy. I used to go walking along the little back roads of the remote Japan Sea peninsulas, delighting in their sleepy fishing villages and pretty forested promontories and inlets, but again and again I would find myself at the far end facing a mysterious, manned barrier. Nothing was visible beyond, but round a corner, carefully shielded from sight, lay yet another nuclear reactor. You couldn’t help but wonder just what it had to hide. It took the accident at Chernobyl in 1986 to alert the Japanese public to the full dangers of nuclear power. Enough people were sufficiently horrified to boost anti-nuclear sentiment until it became an ongoing movement of sorts, though only with Fukushima has the anti-nuclear movement gained real traction in Japan. Why? Knowing the full story, you can see how Japan was sold the nuclear story. But surely, given the revelations down the years, it could have been met with stiffer opposition? There was probably never

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any stopping Japan’s nuclear choice, but things could have been a lot better if enough voices had been raised along the way at least to make the industry in some way accountable, to make it behave itself, keep it just a bit nervous about its reputation. When I went to live in Japan in the ’70s, I had been educated by the anti-uranium mining movement in Australia and its opposition to the Jabiluka mine in Kakadu, which planned to sell its resources to Japan. I arrived keen to liaise with the country’s anti-nuclear movement and was astonished to discover that, to all intents, such a thing didn’t exist. The Socialist Party had come out against nuclear power, I learned, but it was hardly a force in Japan. The puzzle remained with me until I finally delved a little into the history of nuclear power, and indeed it remains with me still. Perhaps Japan at large was so thoroughly overcome by the Atoms for Peace pitch that, having lain back and said yes, it found it easier never to open its eyes again and look more closely. Doubts about the value of nuclear power can be quieted with a simple formula: ‘We need it.’ As with global warming, any suggestion of a reduction in prosperity and economic growth is enough to make people shrink from facing facts and hard decisions. The important discussion that post-Fukushima Japan could be having about a shift towards renewables, and just how ‘clean’ the astonishingly expensive and problem- ridden nuclear power really is as an energy source, is virtually non-existent. The Japanese public knows now that it hates nuclear power, but it can’t begin to see where else to turn. But what of Gensuikyo and the anti-nuclear weapons movement? Surely they at least could have stepped back from their fateful early decision to welcome nuclear technology to Japan? Here we come back to Hiroshima again, the city that is somehow the key to so much of what has happened. Down the years, Gensuikyo has kept the Hiroshima victims as its primary focus, supporting them in their important struggle to gain recognition and support from a deeply resistant government. The Hiroshima Peace Park’s ‘Never Again’ slogan is still its mantra. That strange unwillingness to recog- nise any link between Fukushima and Hiroshima is mirrored by Gensuikyo’s long focus on nuclear weapons to the exclusion of wider questions about nuclear technology.

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THE STORY OF how Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace project managed to blindside the anti-nuclear weapons movement and the Japanese public into accepting this unconscious separation is told above. Yet there seems to be a deeper psychology somewhere at work. Not only has Hiroshima, that powerful symbol of Japan’s suffering and victimhood, killed any clear under- standing of the story of the war, but for all the differences between Hiroshima and Fukushima, ‘Never Again’ has essentially turned out to be a hollow promise – and this time Japan has brought it on itself. The sacred Hiroshima story is much less clear for anyone willing to examine how Fukushima came to happen; it is perhaps no wonder that so many are disinclined to do so. From September 2013, when the last of the progressive shutdowns occurred, Japan spent a year entirely without nuclear power. It has managed very well, albeit with the aid of coal-fired backup. The nuclear power plants around the nation sat idle, biding their time, while the Abe government inched towards start-ups once again. To date, two have been tentatively brought back into production, against continuing opposition. But Abe is determined, and the public seemingly becomes less inclined to resist. As for nuclear weapons – the bitter pill at the heart of the nuclear technology hard- sell that the public was supposed to effortlessly swallow along with the rest – in the case of Japan, they’re still waiting. There’s little doubt that those on the right would welcome the chance at nuclear armament – every so often, someone in government sticks his neck out and says as much and then quickly pulls it back in again, much as our government occasionally mentions that Australia really should consider going nuclear. Just testing. But the Japanese public still stubbornly clings to Japan’s peace-embracing postwar constitution and the promises contained in its Three Non-Nuclear Principles, which forbid the possession, production or entry of nuclear weapons. (That Japan had secretly long-agreed with the US to violate the last principle – and had very likely done so – was revealed four years ago, and should come as no surprise.) In this case at least, memories of Hiroshima are serving their purpose well. If the charming and morally impeccable Astro Boy was the pop culture embodiment of the Atoms for Peace nuclear promise, perhaps a more apt final image for nuclear technology in all its forms is that other creature of ’50s Japanese pop culture, Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese – God somehow got

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into the name when he went to America). Born in the days immediately after the Lucky Dragon incident, Godzilla is an ancient nuclear monster, his skin a mass of keloid scarring inspired by that of atomic bomb victims. Stirred into life by America’s atomic bomb testing, he rose from the deep and proceeded to wreak havoc on Tokyo, and he has been storming on through the world ever since in movie after movie. Sometimes he is on the side of humanity but, lacking all moral sense, he can as easily turn on us with devastating results. Sixty years later he’s still going strong.

Meredith McKinney lived in Kyoto for twenty years. She is a visiting fellow at the Japan Centre, Australian National University, and translates classical and contemporary Japanese literature.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 193 13/03/2015 3:59 pm MEMOIR Know thy neighbour Save the date, 7 July 1937 David Walker

WHENEVER THE DOORBELL rings late at night in our small Peking University apartment, we know who to expect. Our Chinese colleague in global politics at nearby Tsinghua University keeps late hours. There is now a pattern to these visits: we offer tea, he always declines – ‘no, no,’ – he says with a wave of his hand, ‘just talk, plain talk’. He had visited Japan over the long Spring Festival holiday. Late in February 2014 the doorbell rang and there he was, rugged up against the winter cold, wanting to talk. Like a number of Chinese people we know, he admires the cleanliness and order of Japan. He had once described himself as half-Buddhist and half- Muslim. The comment came over lunch in a Buddhist temple that had been turned into a ‘vegetarian’ restaurant; the menu included beef and chicken dishes. The temples of Japan are not restaurants or museums as is often the case in China, but living places of worship. I asked if he had visited Japan for research. He brushed that aside – he went there ‘just to look around’. Well, that was his business. I inquired if he had been to Yasukuni, a Shinto shrine in Tokyo commemorating those who had died serving the Japanese Empire including, controversially, fourteen A-class war criminals. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited the shrine in December 2012, and a number of his ministers have also been there. These

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visits are seen as acts of provocation throughout the region, particularly in China and South Korea. My colleague said he had been to the shrine several times, adding, ‘terrible, terrible’. Then he leaned forward and asked rather sharply what 2014 meant to me. I knew the wrong answer was the centenary of the First World War. The chess master had me cornered. It was the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of the first Sino– Japanese War of 1894–95, which proved a national humiliation for China. The defeat is commemorated in an imposing museum on Liugong Island, near the coastal city of Weihai in Shandong province. At the outbreak of this war, most informed contemporaries, including the Royal and US navies, expected a Chinese victory. It wasn’t to be. The Chinese fought very bravely, sometimes heroically, but the Japanese were much better trained and more disciplined. The Chinese navy had also been undermined by corruption and mismanagement – an all-too-common story. Naval funds had been diverted to smarten up the Summer Palace by officials seeking to curry favour with the Dowager Empress Cixi. Though often blamed for mismanaged naval funds – and much else – Cixi was devastated by China’s defeat. It not only brought down the navy, but also stalled the reform- ist ‘self-strengthening’ program that she had long supported. The Liugong Island humiliation highlighted the difference between effective modernisa- tion following the Meiji Restoration in 1867 in Japan and the progressive collapse of the Qing Dynasty in China. The circular conversations with our colleague had arrived at an intriguing place. While there was plenty I did not understand about our conversational excursion, I did know that the most important Chinese anniversaries follow a sixty-year cycle. Sixty years traces the journey to wisdom across a lifetime, making one hundred and twenty years more power- ful still. Our visitor had thawed out by now, but it was clear that 2014 marked an anniversary I should have known.

I HAD VISITED Liugong Island with several staff and two students from the University of Shandong, Weihai. The lovely campus meandered down to a beach so golden we might have been in Australia. The students were

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in their early twenties. We spent a lot of time in the museum. Each took me aside and confided that 1894–95 had been a terrible humiliation for China. It had lost most of its fleet (the Beiyang or Northern Seas Fleet) in 1894, but worse followed with the Battle of Weihaiwei in early 1895 and the surrender of Liugong Island to Japan, along with what was left of the Beiyang Fleet. The students and I studied Xie Juantai’s famous 1898 map showing China torn apart by European nations represented as predatory beasts. I did not know then that Xie Juantai (otherwise known as Tse Tsan-tan or James See), was born in Sydney in 1872. He was an early cartoonist and co-founder of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. His map was produced a few years after Kaiser Wilhelm’s even more famous depiction of die gelbe Gefahr – the Yellow Peril. China worried about being dismembered by preda- tory Japan and prowling Europe; Europe worried about invasive Asia. During the 1900 Boxer Uprising, the European powers invaded Beijing as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance to lift the siege against their embassies – the only time in history that leading European powers (with the US and Japan) have acted in concert against any enemy. Troops from the Australian colonies were also involved. Over the next half century, China had more reason to worry about invasion than Europe or Japan. As I was about to leave Weihai, I was given Weihaiwei Under British Rule (Shandong Pictorial Publishing, 2006), a beautifully illustrated paperback. The preface called it a work of national significance that detailed the ‘historic disgrace of our nation, and encourages every Chinese to understand his/her responsibilities to make our great nation strong again’. Before the title page are the words of the ‘Song of Seven Sons’ by Wen Yiduo:

Let me guard China’s most ancient sea once more Our great philosopher’s tomb lies back of this shoreline Mother, don’t forget that I am the brave guardian of the sea I have the island of Liugong for my shield. Make haste to rescue me, the time is ripe! Behind me are buried the remains of our great forebears! Mother! I want to return to you, Mother!

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The philosopher Confucius is buried in Qufu in Shandong province. The ‘seven sons’ of the song refer to the territories taken over by foreign powers in the aftermath of the first Sino–Japanese War: Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Weihaiwei, Guangzhou Bay, Kowloon and Luda (Lushun and Dalian). Wen Yiduo composed his patriotic song in 1925, soon after the 30 May massacre of Chinese students by British authorities in Shanghai – another humiliation, and yet another demonstration of China’s inability to stop foreigners killing its citizens. Wen’s poem (set to new music) became an anthem to mark Macao’s return to mainland China in 1999. For those of us currently in the Asia literacy or Asia capability business – which is supposed to be everyone, or at least it was at the time of the Gillard government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper in 2012 – the anniver- saries that nations in our region celebrate (or remember with shame) are fundamental to knowing Asia. As a settler society, Australia’s major anniver- saries are regular ‘milestones’ in the nation-building process. While Aboriginal Australians find little to celebrate, the inheritors of settler Australia are encour- aged to feel proud of what their forebears have achieved. These anniversaries affirm their idea of the nation. The museum on Liugong Island is very differ- ent; it speaks of the humiliation of the Chinese people. The two students came away with a clear message: ‘never let this happen to China again’. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ended the first Sino–Japanese War, was signed on 17 April 1895. It ceded Taiwan and quite a few other territories to Japan in perpetuity. The Diaoyu Islands are very close to Taiwan (and not particularly close to any other part of China or Japan). Like other unequal treaties, Shimonoseki made China pay a large indemnity for being humili- ated, having some of its territory taken away and its fleet destroyed.

ONE DAY, IN July 2014, I took line four on the subway to meet a colleague at nearby Renmin University. Her given name translates roughly as ‘red star’, one of many patriotic names bestowed upon children throughout China in the ’50s and ’60s. Beijing, the ‘northern capital’, had turned from bitter cold to suffocating heat, from icebox to oven. My colleague and I had barely got past saying ‘hello’ when she told me that this day marked the beginning of the second Sino–Japanese War on 7 July 1937.

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It had begun with what my history books told me was the ‘Marco Polo Bridge’ incident. I discovered that Marco Polo Bridge (known to the Chinese as Lugou Bridge) is no more than an hour from Peking University – I am constantly surprised (a shameful admission) that places in China, which once seemed so utterly remote that they might have belonged to another planet, are as real as Gundagai or Jerilderie. In 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army captured this bridge, isolating the nearby city of Peking. Lugou Bridge is now the site of a huge Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese War Museum. The Marco Polo Bridge ‘incident’ recalls an even earlier one: the ‘Mukden Incident’ on 18 September 1931 in which Japanese troops set off some explosives near their own railway line. The Japanese blamed the Chinese for this, and promptly ‘retaliated’. We visited the site of the incident in Shenyang – a city that I hadn’t previously realised was the old Mukden – and the 9.18 Historical Museum, a huge memorial to this event. The Mukden Incident inspired the popular patriotic song ‘Along the Songhua River’. Our travelling companion, Li Yao, knows the words and he sings the song, softly and with feeling. It tells of a hurried departure from a home on the river following the sad events of ‘9.18, 9.18’, the repeated line driving home the date. After the Mukden Incident, the Japanese progressively overtook what was then Manchuria, renaming it Manchukuo with Pu Yi installed as the ‘last emperor’. A trip by rail into Northeast China anytime between April and October makes the attractions of Manchuria to the invading Japanese very apparent: the train glides hour after hour through vast plains of deep, rich, well-watered soil. In far Northeast China, in Mudanjiang (north of Vladivostok), they claim to grow the best rice (and watermelons) in the country. While almost every city or region in China claims to have the best of something desir- able – peaches, apricots, grapes, beer – few dispute the Northeast’s claim to have the best rice. Mudanjiang has its own anti-Japanese war memorial and its stories of brave resistance. A large sculpture commemorates the ‘eight brave girls’ who drowned themselves rather than surrender to Japanese soldiers. As we leave the park, a mighty river of school children – led by their

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teachers – approach the monument to be told the story. They giggle and wave cheekily as we pass. The Japanese invasion took a more sinister turn in Harbin, site of Unit 731. Once again, the experience of visiting the place is so different from anything I had imagined; I’d formed the view that this was a small and rather remote ‘unit’ for experiments with biological warfare. While modern Harbin has certainly expanded, in the late 1930s Unit 731 was still within an hour or so of the city centre. There was nothing obscure about this purpose-built industrial complex designed to torture and kill the Chinese, ostensibly in the name of medical experimentation. These low, solid, sinister buildings have become another museum, carrying a none-too-subtle message about Japanese war crimes on Chinese soil. There are many other reminders of the war against Japan. China’s State Archives Administration released the confessions of Japanese war criminals on a daily basis from 7 July to 15 August 2014. In September, authori- ties began publishing testimonies of one hundred survivors of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre on the website of the massacre’s dedicated memorial. All major decisions relating to Sino–Japanese relations, including the release of archives and victim testimonials, are authorised by the central govern- ment in Beijing. While these memories are certainly ‘managed’, it would be wrong to conclude that they have lost their cultural power in modern China.

THE INJUNCTION TO know and learn from history is not something the Chinese seem in danger of forgetting. It is a lesson we need to learn. In early July 2014, Shinzō Abe was Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s very welcome guest in Australia; Abbott had earlier described Japan as Australia’s ‘best friend’ in Asia. Abe addressed both houses of parliament on 8 July. The text of his speech and Abbott’s reply have been extensively commented upon, not least the Australian prime minister’s reference to the skills and sense of honour of Japanese soldiers in World War II. But I wonder about the timing; was thought given to whether a visit on the anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge incident was appropriate? Was an effort made to avoid 7 July? If so it was not mentioned in the commentary.

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I was struck recently when the Chinese–Australian artist Jiawei Shen mentioned that he had just completed a new, thirty-metre long painting titled ‘China 1936–1937, Years of Change’, one of a series of paintings that will depict the Chinese Revolution and its aftermath. It is emphatically an epic historical painting, and on a scale that an Australian painter would be unlikely to attempt. There may be many reasons for this, but one must be that as a genre, ‘epic history painting’ does not speak to Australian sensibili- ties and art practices in the way that it still does in China. The depth, sweep and scale of that history make for big gestures and big emotions. In the telling of these stories, the dates matter; they are specific historic events. Shen’s work references key historical figures (four hundred and twenty of them) and events. Australians also inhabit a big continent, but one better suited to the smaller scale and emotional ironies of personal histories. Moreover, while the First World War helped kill the heroic mode and ‘elevated diction’ in Australia and the West more generally, as Paul Fussell has argued in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1975), the long battle for sovereignty in China reinvigorated the heroic mode and the epic imaginary. These stories are told and re-told in songs, art, stories, operas, museums and, perhaps above all, in films. It is no easy matter to establish the number of Chinese films and documentaries that take the first and second Sino–Japanese wars as their theme, but it is well over a hundred. There is a sound case to be made for having our history texts record 7 July 1937 as the start of the Second World War. To do so would not mean a weak-kneed capitulation to Asia literacy (or to China). On the contrary, it would help acknowledge that we are an Asia–Pacific nation whose history has been directly influenced by the rise of Asia. Clearly, Japan’s ultimate defeat owed a great deal to its long and brutal war with China. As Rana Mitter notes in his authoritative history, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane, 2013), China’s role in defeating Japan and the Sino–Japanese conflict more broadly has been treated as marginal to the Allied war effort. Where China is noticed at all in accounts of the Second World War it is, Mitter notes, often as ‘a bit-player’.

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Yet twelve million Chinese died and millions more became refugees in an eight-year war that was critical to the defeat of the Axis powers and the making of modern China. To regard the second Sino–Japanese war as marginal to the main conflict is to misunderstand twentieth century history, the geopolitics of East Asia and the making of our world.

The author would like to thank Chengxin Pan, Changwei Chen, Colin Mackerras and Richard Rigby for valuable comments and suggestions.

David Walker is Alfred Deakin professor of Australian Studies at Deakin University and BHP Billiton chair of Australian Studies at Peking University, Beijing. His prize-winning history, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (UQP, 1999) has been translated into Chinese and Hindi. His memoir, Not Dark Yet: a personal history (Giramondo, 2011) has been translated into Chinese by Professor Li Yao and published by the People’s Literature Publishing House, Beijing.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 201 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Dear Mother Songs of the Kamikaze Rosetta Allan

I am the scattered cherry blossom that falls in the spring. I am the snow that feathers the top of your head your shoulders the tip of your nose. I kept my daughter’s doll close pinned to the steel of my cockpit and called your name mother.

I HAVE TO wonder where the women’s voices are. Perhaps buried under all those petals of snow. Surely they didn’t agree with sending their sons on suicide missions toward the end of World War II. But isn’t that what we all did when we sent our sons to war? The only difference was our boys were taught to kill, theirs were taught to die. Historically, suicide to the Japanese was not the abhorrence that western- ers consider it to be. Today, we rally openly against the darkness of suicide, considering it to be the act of a person suffering mental unwellness. However, within Japanese culture lies the deep-seated tradition of the samurai ways and the ritual of seppuku, where life is considered a transient existence and those who die with honour continue to live in the afterlife with the living dead.

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This ideology is quite similar to Christian belief of the afterlife, except that Christianity does not accept suicide as a means of honourable death. In fact it is regarded as a sin because it violates the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – but then, so does warfare. Whether or not we are believers, the dishonour associated with suicide is deeply embedded in Western culture because of the historical impact of Christianity. The samurai way, for the Japanese, was likewise the bricks-and-mortar foundation of a social belief system, from which the honour attributed to being a Kamikaze was based. And yet, 2 per cent of the kamikaze pilots who died after ramming their bodies into American warships were practising Christians. It is a small percentage, but of the five thousand who died one hundred went to their deaths conflicted, Bibles tucked inside their flying suits, not knowing whether their souls would burn in hell or ascend to heaven. For the rest, it was generally accepted that all those who fell valiantly in service to the Empire of Japan would fly back to the Yasukuni Shrine, to be reunited with the nearly two and half million Japanese war heroes – soldiers who have been posthumously deified since the time of the Boshin war of 1868, when the shrine was first founded by Emperor Meiji. Contentiously, the shrine also commemorates fourteen Class-A war criminals.

You are my son but you are not my only son. I have my stick to beat the enemy if they come. Go. Scatter beautifully for our motherland.

INITIALLY, EMPEROR HIROHITO refused Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi’s request for the Special Attack Units. Dismayed by the idea that suicide missions were necessary to defend the homeland from the impending invasion, perhaps the emperor still hoped for the divine winds – the typhoons that twice wrecked the fleet of Kublai Khan’s Mongol fleet when they threat- ened to invade Japan at the end of the thirteenth century. But the winds never came. American and British warships, as well as Russian tanks, drew ever closer toward the end of 1945 and although Emperor Hirohito was struck

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with grief, he signed the order for the first Tokkotai mission to go ahead. Yet he wasn’t the only great leader to object to suicide attacks as a means of defence; ironically, Hitler himself opposed the commission of German suicide pilots on humanitarian grounds.

You leave without a word your eternal parting kept secret. Suddenly my dear son perishes. Unstoppable tears at today’s news. Brave, only believing in victory.

SECOND LIEUTENANT TETSUO Tanifuji was newly wed and deeply in love with his wife Asako when his Special Attack Unit was assigned the location of its deadly target. The newlyweds were photographed together at the time of their wedding. She sits to the side, elegantly adorned in the folds of her traditional kimono with layers of lush textured colour, and shiny silk strands running around her neckline. Her hair is oiled smooth and her pale face is perfect; she is serene, composed, all-accepting. Her husband stands behind her dressed in full army uniform, his hands poised on the top of his rifle. His head tilts slightly forward, his mouth a slit of determination, his eyes set in a steely gaze of unwavering nerve – a stance that epitomises the idealised commitment of the Kamikaze. But somewhere beneath the sweet aesthetics of the Japanese bride, Asako revealed her own steely nerve when she decided to accompany her husband on his final flight. Come take-off, she squeezed into the one-seat cockpit and positioned herself between his legs. Her destiny was entwined with his – she had decided they would end their lives together as husband and wife, an honour he obviously could not deny her.

I have made up my mind to die. Now the world has become completely new – temporal. All sensuality lost. Laughter, anger, happiness and sorrow

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they belong to the other world where people continue to live. I cannot join them in conversation I have no interest in swallowing food. I go soon my back light without a parachute.

NOW EIGHTY-NINE, TADAMASA Itatsu was a nineteen-year-old kamikaze pilot in March 1945. At that time, American and British ships sailed for Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan in the Ryukyu Islands that stretch toward Taiwan. If the Japanese did not successfully defend Okinawa, they risked losing the island to the invaders and having it used as a base for American warplanes to launch attacks on the mainland of Japan. Long-distance attacks had already proven devastating. ‘Operation Meetinghouse’ sent three hundred and thirty-four B-29’s all the way from the islands of Tinian and Saipan to drop 1,665 tonnes of bombs on Tokyo in a single attack. Approximately one hundred thousand civilians died in those forty-eight hours of bombing alone. It was the greatest single firestorm recorded in history, with almost more human carnage than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombings combined. So sickening was the smell that American pilots later described the blood-red mists, thick with the stench of burning flesh, which wafted up and caused them to vomit. ‘It was up to the young people,’ Itatsu says, to defend their homeland. It was the normal thing to do, and when his commander asked him to volun- teer for the Special Attack squadron, he did so willingly. For Itatsu, it was an honour to serve his emperor in this way, and he was filled with shame when the war ended having failed two missions due to engine failure and bad weather. So strong was his disappointment that he considered suicide in the years following the war. ‘He wanted to die with his comrades,’ Itatsu says of himself, and it wasn’t until 1970 that he realised he had survived for a reason. Over the last forty years, Itatsu has collected three-hundred and thirty three items of Kamikaze memorabilia, photographs and letters, pieces left behind by dead pilots, items treasured over the years and kept safe by proud families. These items were submitted to UNESCO by Japan in February

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2014, to be considered for inclusion in the Memory of the World Register and granted World Heritage status – an action that has been lambasted by both China and South Korea.

Blossom pressed between sheets of rice paper you have returned to me without my son. I did not know how you had changed.

Life is brief, we must celebrate each day. You are the clouds that burst forth in spring. My beautiful son, come home to me. That is what I meant to say.

But you told him to bloom in death little flower of the Sakura tree where we picnicked when childhood was sweet and he held my hand as we played sung songs and ate our rice and fish.

Now all is gone, but the blossom pressed between sheets of rice paper. And I sit alone, my bones bending with age under the tree that bears no fruit.

I wait for my own life to pass. Watch the blossoms fall in the breeze. Oh sakura, sakura I whisper to you.

LIKE THE CHERRY blossom, Japan’s memory of its role in creating a world war seems to have had a short life span. The schools of Yokohama, the second largest city in Japan, now have their own national curriculum history textbooks, different from anywhere else in the country. These textbooks cover the entire history of Japan, and deliberately omit numerous

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crimes against humanity, along with certain words normally associated with the aggressive stance of the Japanese military during World War II. When questioned about these omissions by Chinese journalist Haining Liu, Hidetsugu Yagi, the creator of the new textbook, stated that he believed the textbook showed the light and shadow of Japan’s historical perspective, and displayed differing ideologies; however, words such as ‘invasion’, ‘massacre’ and ‘rape’ were simply too negative for schoolchildren.

Just before the crash Your speed is at the maximum The plane tends to lift Push elevator control forward Increase speed Do your best Push forward with all your might You have already lived twenty years or more Exert full might into the last of your life Exert supernatural strength Do your best Every deity and the spirits of your dead watch Do not shut your eyes Do not miss the target Many have crashed into targets with wide-open eyes They will tell you what fun they had

CHINA, HOWEVER, IS quick to remember the atrocities of the Japanese invasion, which began in 1931 when Japan occupied Manchuria in North- ern China. By 1937, the wider war commenced and Japanese forces landed in Shanghai. The war in China continued right up until the Axis powers surrendered in 1945, with almost fourteen million Chinese killed and up to a hundred million left as homeless refugees. The most infamous incident occurred in Nanjing city, the former capital of China. Within six weeks, the episode of mass rape and murder ended with approximately three hundred thousand Chinese dead. Throughout

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the occupation of China, it is estimated that over two hundred thousand Asian women, many of them Korean, were forced to become sex slaves to the Japanese military, or ‘comfort women’ as they were called – a translation from the Japanese word ianfu, which means prostitute. China has not forgotten Japan’s cruelty during this time and fears that if UNESCO memorialises kamikaze pilot items then it could revive the Japanese fighting spirit, which it believes lies dormant, obscured by the mask of victimhood the Japanese acquired by being the only country to suffer from atomic warfare. Initially, Japanese authorities claimed that all comfort women volun- teered for the position. If that is true, then you have to wonder what sort of duress they were under to put their hands up to become prostitutes for the military forces of their oppressors. To counteract the Japanese submissions of Kamikaze memorabilia, China has submitted its own application for consideration into the Memory of the World Register. With eleven sets of documents including diaries, films, photographs and testimonies, China’s desire to list the Nanjing massacre and wartime sex slaves with UNESCO is an act that blatantly denies Japan’s Kamikaze hero worship a platform on the international stage.

My enlightened mind now darkened. Plucked from university before my time. We are the Emperor’s shield though it is not for him I go. I go for the wife I never had for the children I do not leave behind for the old age I will not see. My bravery is saluted on take-off. I break formation circle the commander standing below. Dive as if to ram my body into his. He does not flinch. He salutes my bravery.

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I pull away – continue on the shame would kill my mother.

THERE IS NOTHING new about self-immolation, and the Japanese are not alone in their ideology of suicide missions. In fact, the very first reported incident of an aircraft deliberately ramming into an enemy was committed by the Russian pilot Pyotr Nikolayevich Nesterov in 1914, during a dogfight with a German reconnaissance plane. Nesterov was killed, but fellow Russian pilots hailed his selfless act as a symbol of courage and valour. In 1941, three years before Japan’s suicide strategy was officially launched, Russia’s defence strategy included pilots crash-diving into incom- ing Luftwaffe planes to prevent them reaching major Russian cities with their bombs. Hundreds of Russian pilots lost their lives ramming small aircraft into the sides of German bombers. It was a phenomenon well documented in many major newspapers, and even reached the shores of America with a photo essay featuring one of the Russian pilots in Life magazine. By March 1945, even the Germans were emulating the suicide tactics of the Russians, with three hundred pilots instructed in aircraft-ramming techniques in an attempt to immobilise American and British bombers that continued to deliver severe blows to German cities. American and British flyers faced a similar situation aboard the Anglo- American convoy that sailed the Arctic Ocean to deliver much needed supplies to besieged Russians. When Luftwaffe bombers approached, the only method of defence was to launch Hurricane fighters using rockets to catapult the aircraft into the air. This dangerous means of take-off was neces- sary because merchant ships lacked a flight deck; even worse, it meant there was no way to re-land. The only hope of survival was to ditch the aircraft into the icy seas of the Antarctic and pray for a speedy rescue – a prayer that was commonly accepted as futile but at least provided a semblance of hope, unlike the kamikaze missions, the mantra for which was to die without even the slightest thought of survival. Japanese military code, established at the beginning of its modernisation in the late 1800s, set in place a system of total obedience. Should any military personnel attempt to surrender, escape, or try to save their life in any way

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in the face of defeat, they would be shot immediately and without question. What’s more, such a shameful end could lead to the punishment of the soldier’s family, affecting five generations of both blood and marital relatives, as it did during the Edo period between 1603 and 1868. Such was the responsibility of any soldier or sailor, whether or not they were asked to volunteer to be strapped to a manned torpedo and aimed at an American ship, or wrapped with explosives and ordered to dive in front of a Russian tank, or trained in the art of smashing an aircraft into the deck of an enemy ship.

A man’s life is light and a great mission is heavy. I will not flinch Thank you for my childhood I depart with a glad heart.

MEMENTO MORI: TODAY we live, tomorrow we die; today we succeed, tomorrow we fail. This is life – lest we forget. Yet we all cling to something when faced with death. We grasp at beliefs and good luck charms as though they will keep us from passing over – flotation devices that we hope will save us, though we really don’t know if they will. Japanese kamikaze pilots were supplied with rudimentary supplies for their last journey: headbands with the rising sun emblem, motion-sickness pills, anti-sleep tablets, a candy bar, iron supplements and a small bottle of wine. Some brought their own good luck charms, such the senninbari – a one-metre strip of white fabric with multiple rows of stitches, one thousand red crosses handmade by one thousand young women. One cross each, one kiss, one blessing, one wish for the soul’s safe return. The senninbari was worn either around the waist or draped around the shoulders as an amulet to ward off evil, a charm for luck in war. Some carried the dried bonito, believing it would enable the pilot’s soul to rise from his watery grave and fly across the ocean, back to his mother. And perhaps it worked.

ON THE MORNING of 18 March 1945, Mrs Misato Nishiyama lingered at the edge of wakefulness to remain inside a dreamscape, where her son

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Norio had come to bid her farewell. She describes the comforting embrace of his spirit, the warmth of his hands holding hers, just as they had the night before he left for Kagoshima to enter the Naval Flight Training Program. That night he slept next to his mother, just as he had as a child. Misato’s relentless maternal love wrapped itself around her son for the entirety of that last night, an act reciprocated when her son found his way back to her after death. Fifty years later, she continued to state that the warmth of his hands on hers had never left.

One thousand girls one thousand stitches. A red threaded tiger for good luck. Embroidered crosses tiny kisses tied about your waist. One by one we bless you.

‘You are already gods,’ Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi declared to his kamikaze pilots, ‘without earthly desires’ – suffering vicariously for man. These men did not have to wait to die to be raised to the status of ethereal characters. Because they were willing to die for others, they were professed as gods already. In fact, the word ‘kami’ in kamikaze translates as ‘divine being’ from the Shinto religion. Such an honour was taken seriously and was reflected in the names given to individual squadrons, such as The Thunder Gods, Samurai of the Sky or The Divine Wings. By aligning the pilots with gods, Ōnishi developed the strategy that would feed the core ego of any man – the desire for great destiny, honour and reward. With the rise of suicide bombing as an act of terrorism during the last quarter of a century, it is not hard to draw parallels between the perceived fanaticism of the Japanese Kamikaze and the Islamic extremist suicide bombers. Both offer unblinking sacrifice of material comfort for the promise of immortalisation. Encouraged to believe they will not die, such martyrs anticipate an afterlife of great honour, surrounded by loved ones and gifted the full extent of paradisal pleasures.

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A waterlogged corpse far away from home. No one will cry for me. No one will come to visit my tomb. I am better off buried beside the road where someone could offer flowers. Perhaps camellia. Perhaps a red tulip. But who can run away? Death gets him by the backs of his fleeing knees and jumps him from behind. Sweet and proper it is to die for the honour of your mother.

TADAMASA IWAI WAS another kind of suicide volunteer. Trained as a Kaiten – a human torpedo – his mission was to be strapped to a mini subma- rine and launched off the back of a ship with the aim of slamming both the bomb and himself into the side of the invading enemy warship. Interviewed in his nineties in Tokyo, he stated that the young men did not want to die at all. He and his fellow suicide volunteers wrote the brave and beautiful words found in the kamikaze letters for their family’s sake, to persuade both the families and themselves they were doing something of great importance. The vocabulary they used, he says, were the words ‘hammered into their heads’ during training. Fortunately for Tadamasa, he was overcome with tuberculosis at the time of his mission and never got to deliver his blow to the invading armies. Today he opposes the UNESCO application by Japan because he believes the volunteers were forced to undertake the missions, against their will. It was a time of unquestioned obedience, no one could oppose the official rhetoric of suicide missions publicly; instead, you kept your resentment quiet, to yourself, inside your own heart. According to Kasuga Takeo, the cruel regime of corporal punishment was administered as part of the daily routine during training, and was

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believed to instil the fighting spirit necessary to carry out a suicide sortie without question. Kasuga was responsible for the meals, laundry and room cleaning of drafted kamikaze pilots while on base. He saw firsthand the reluc- tance of the pilots to give up their lives. Kamikaze pilots were supposed to die, they were not supposed to return, or attempt to save themselves in any way. Some of course would return, claiming that they had failed to locate the enemy. One pilot returned nine times – and on his final return he was shot and killed by his superior. Other pilots failed to ram American vessels, hitting the water instead to avoid an explosion, or landing their aircraft on the water as near land as they could. Some returned after take-off and circled their superior’s quarters in a threat- ening manner, as if to dive into them instead of the enemy, but they never did. It was a statement, as much as they could get away with before they buzzed away into the clouds to terminate themselves. Kasuga believes the diaries of the suicide pilots contradict the Japanese military propaganda of the kamikaze letters written on their final night, as well as the worldwide stereotype of the fanatic on a hot-headed, bloody-minded mission. He says that some of the pilots tried to accept the emperor-centric ideology but in all honesty could not, and admitted that their words of dedication were not genuine. They simply reproduced the imperial ideology, he says – their hearts were not in it; they had no choice but to follow their command and go through with the assigned mission. Kasuga is today known for a letter he wrote in 1995 at the age of eighty- six, describing the last night of the Kamikaze before their final mission. The letter describes young men drinking cold sake in extreme sadness, their disillusionment vented in acts of violence against furniture and fittings, light bulbs smashed with swords, chairs thrown through windows and tablecloths ripped by hand. Curses and cries filled the hall as they faced the reality of their impending death. They cried for their parents, their loves, their children. This depiction of the pilot’s utter desperation had hardly been seen or heard of before Kasuga’s letter was made public.

Unable to sleep for loneliness. Thoughts come to my mind as the rain falls outside

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spring rain. Human beings seek beauty I too…love beauty. Exceptional beauty must be accompanied by purity and sorrow. Ordinary beauty lacks the vividness of shedding blood. Purity. Burning incense with a white head bowed down. Smoke – thin and faint – rising upward. Immortality takes on meaning only in terms of life. Socrates praised the beauty of the world after death. Makes me want to live though, not die. How lonely the sound of the clock in the darkness.

LOOKING BACK NOW, many historians believe the Japanese High Command was at fault for continuing the suicide missions against hopeless odds when they knew the war was already lost. The American warships were well armed, and very few Kamikaze managed to hit their targets. In April 1945, during the last Japanese naval operation of the war, one hundred Japanese airplanes were shot out of the sky in one day and six Japanese warships were sunk. Almost the entire Japanese aircraft fleet was destroyed in an attempted suicide attack on the fast-approaching Allied forces. The losses were terrible, and the sinking of the Japanese battleship Yamato caused the greatest blow, because the word yamato carried historic patriotic significance as the poetic embodiment of the magnificence of Japan. The sinking of the great battleship instigated a change in the way the word was to be used – no longer a metaphor for the splendor of Japan, yamato came to represent the end of the Japanese empire. However, the real end came not with the sinking of the Yamato, but with the realisation of the extent to which the Japanese were willing to sacrifice their own in the face of defeat. The devastating suicidal techniques displayed in the last battle of operation Ten-Go cast the Japanese as unstoppable fanatics,

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and it was this behaviour that became a factor in the decision by American forces to employ atomic weapons against them. But who could deny the Japanese the right to defend their home to the last? Obviously patriotism was strong, or the plaza in front of the Imperial Palace would not have been stained red for days with the blood of military and civilian citizens alike, who ended their own lives as an apology for the humiliation of defeat after Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast on 15 August 1945. Even Vice Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi disembowelled himself, an inevitable act as one of the frontline supporters of the Special Attack Units – he knew he could not face the families of the fallen, or the storm of protest that was build- ing over the wisdom of crash-dive tactics. In his last days, he described his initial torment for the squandering of thousands of young lives, but defended the decision as he truly believed there was no alternative in the face of a such a powerful Allied fleet.

A cradlesong he sung to himself splayed on his parent’s bed like the boy he once was. Carrying The Song of Roses the lives of young men in a tuneless passage. No musical sense but a smile as he remembered childhood comforts and forgot the mother’s hearts he was about to break.

We no longer need sophisticated planes build simple ones he ordered.

And in the end he smiled too. His abdomen slashed with a tanto blade entrails pulled free by his own bloodied hands. The slow buzz of death like the Kamikaze circling. His life a trembling flower

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scattered in the winds of the new season a fragrance that could never last.

Knowing all was done he closed his eyes to nap for a million years.

PERHAPS SOME MEMORIES are better hung on private walls rather than displayed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Perhaps the register itself gives the international community a way to acknowledge the worst of human nature, which has never changed and still today is evident in every nightly broadcast of international news. However, the obvious fact remains that despite Kamikaze memorabilia being shrouded in heroism and the rhetoric of the Kamikaze, they are also in places the powerful and beautiful reflection of the reciprocated love between young men and their mothers and wives.

My love for you will last as long as it takes to hand stitch the stars together a thread of red crisscrossing the night sky.

All poems are written by the author, as both unique verse and free-form adaptations of excerpts of Kamikaze memorabilia.

References available at www.griffithreview.com.

Rosetta Allan is a New Zealand-based writer. Her first poetry collection, Little Rock (Boheme), was published in 2007, and her second, Over lunch (Creative Exchange), in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in publications and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia and the US, and in online literary journals. Rosetta’s debut novel, Purgatory (Penguin, 2014), is a historical novel based on the Otahuhu murders of 1865.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 216 13/03/2015 3:59 pm MEMOIR The uses and abuses of humiliation Rabindranath Tagore’s management of deceit Barry Hill

One year I said I didn’t Want to be arrested. Back too frail to be man-handled.

I settled for the dawn peace-vigil: Candles flickering in the police horse’s eyes. War can make cowards of poets.

This year I didn’t want to protest Under anti-SAS banners. Those young blokes might have been sent to Mt Sinjar

To fight their way up To show the way down For the stranded women and children:

Just the kind of war heroes we want. Now, from my retreat near Swan Island I hear that they stood on the hands

Of my friends, stripped them And dragged them along the ground Took a hessian bag

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Put it over their heads Stood on their backs Said they would kick a head If it so much as opened its mouth. Words fail me when I think of that war Let alone try to imagine its peace. ‘Unspeakable Heroes’, 2014

I WROTE THIS poem last October, when the Australian Hornets joined the American bombing raids in northern Iraq, a step back into a war many of us thought had at last been left – well, more or less. It is a fact of our postcolonial Australia that we don’t pull out of such situations without the compliance of our Master in War, any more than we enter them without being under a bowdlerised banner of necessity. The simple truth is that we live with this species of humiliation as a matter of course. The experience of humiliation was most acute when the wars started in 2002–03, when Afghanistan was invaded and Iraq was attacked from the air with all that shock and awe – their humiliation, manifestly. But ours too, as we had to face our political impotence as citizens of a democracy: no amount of protest in the capitals of the West could check the war machine, just as no amount of humiliation at our subsequent defeats can deter us from generating the same mistakes all over again. Defeat, of course, is what barely can be mentioned. The denials of defeat energise fresh jingoism, as we swing into another round with all the dubious precautions against killing civilians, mission creep and so on. Now, as we bear witness to the stagy beheadings, we burn at the stake of our own delusions about what constitutes courage. The round is the thing. Yes, there is light as well as dark to be seen, but the whole experience is a wrecking light, as what counts as ‘complexity’ – worthy of empirical journalism, or a think-piece of judicious ideology – is morally blinding. No one solution seems to offer harmlessness to the innocent, and one of the oldest political observations rings true.

Heaven and Earth are heartless treating creatures like straw dogs

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sages are heartless also they treat people like straw dogs Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

The event that occasioned the poem was a local incident in Queenscliff, the little old fishing town just inside the heads of Port Phillip Bay, Victo- ria. For some years now the place has been visited by the Swan Island Peace Convergence, who come to protest at the gates of ASIS – the Australian Secret Intelligence Service – which has its headquarters on Swan Island. The secret base has long served as an intelligence gathering agency and an outfit for covert operations. It trains SAS soldiers, services ASIO and the AFP, and has been in the forefront of Australia’s efforts on behalf of the Coalition of the Willing. Its presence in sleepy Queenscliff was inconspicuous until 1983, when the SAS bungled a training exercise that took the form of a raid on the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. A sheepish Premier John Cain had to reveal to parliament the whereabouts of the secret base. More recently, in the summer of 2012, three soldiers on leave from the Middle East drowned in the waters of Swan Bay. In the early hours of the morning they left a local pub and drove their car off the road while crossing to the island. I was woken with a sense of flashing lights across the water, and the spot is still alive in my memory every time I sit at the screen in this room overlooking Swan Bay. The loss of those men was a wicked wastage, especially as the wars wound down, when we were still there to save America’s face. The futility of those wars is my line of sight. The poem has a familiar ideological position. You can take it or leave it, but the point is – as I try to indicate – the present moment seems to be beyond ideology, or misconstrued by it.

THAT IS WHY I felt like a squib not turning up at the demonstration last year. The wrecking light held me back, and I stayed home, content to help in other ways. I lent my kayak to the group. I welcomed one of the main organisers, Jessica Morrison, who had a cup of tea in my kitchen, where an advance copy of Peacemongers (UQP, 2014) happened to be on the table. The Peace Convergence features in its last, homecoming chapter: the reader comes

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to them after various journeys to the East, where I travelled in the company of those renowned figures of anti-colonial history, Rabindranath Tagore, the great thinker and poet who called MK Gandhi Mahatma – ‘Great Soul’ (and to whom Gandhi was rejoined by calling Tagore India’s ‘Great Sentinel’). I threw myself into these Eastern journeys after America’s King Kong response to its humiliation from the attacks on New York and Washington. I was pleased to be gone from my home country. I felt like Tagore in 1916: ‘I am not a patriot – I shall ever seek my compatriots all over the world.’ You can’t contemplate the life and work of either figure without wonder- ing at the lack of pacifist resonances in our culture at the present time. Tagore was not, strictly speaking, a pacifist, and Gandhi was not as absolute about non-violence as you might think. But their burning question was how to make something other than war out of powerlessness? Both took this to be a sharply personal question as well as a political one, and while neither ever gave answers that were fully satisfying, I came to feel that their rich domain of thought and feeling was what our legacy lamentably lacked.

WHEN NEWS CAME in of what had happened to the four activists who were taken in by soldiers on Swan Island, several things hit me at once: the captors and the captive were young Australians about the same age, yet they had no relationship other than antithesis. This was especially the case with the soldiers: those they held captive were treated as the enemy. The soldiers took the law into their own hands, or had laws of their own in mind. According to all reports so far, humiliation of the peace activists was their intention. But there was humiliation for both sides, really. The activists were left with an official inquiry that would calibrate the offences committed against them, while at another level the reality for the young soldiers was a psychologi- cal dynamic that was necessarily covert: it involved their inability to accept the humiliating proposition that they were going back to the Middle East, where our forces had experienced a defeat that could not be named. Everything the activists had to say to them (when they were allowed to speak) added up to this: that they, the soldiers, were in denial or ignorant or both, and that their ignorance was historically founded, that they were being, to put it crudely, the mugs of history, which in so many ways most of us are. ‘Man does not

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reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it,’ as a line of Tagore’s poetry goes. In the mirroring waters of Swan Bay, there they were, each side suffering a form of humiliation that seems destined to repeat itself unless it is transfigured. It is probably too much to ask of young soldiers that they know such things clearly. They have too many other things to learn. But of the peace activists, it’s a different matter. Gandhi’s teachings were designed to instruct. His satyagraha, ‘soul-force’, put a faith in a god-fearing ability for courage in the face of defeat, the better to win a moral battle with one’s enemy. Or to put this another way: battles for peace involved a courage and skill in combat against one’s own cowardice, the better to sustain a human respect for one’s enemy, even in the face of death. How far you take this – one’s willingness to die for peace – soon became the guts of the issue for peacemakers. Gandhi could not coherently resolve it: one only has to recall the optimistic letter he wrote to Herr Hitler in 1939, and of how he thought the English should open the doors to the Nazis rather than take the path of violent resistance, and how the Jews should passively walk into the ovens. Gandhi did, however, think that his compatriots should fight the Japanese. For all his universalism, Gandhi was in the end an Indian pacifist. Today, more broadly, the forces against pacifist dissent can have the might and ruthlessness of a Hitler – China has no kind face to present to the Tibetans, for instance. Any wonder that the self-immolation of monks is one pacifist stance. At the time of writing, one hundred and forty monks have perished. Who is going to argue against the logic of their actions? Not the Dalai Lama, who praised the monks on ABC’s 7.30 last year: he said they were expressing their anguish at the suffering of others. Their suicides were an act of altruism. He meant also that they were acts of ‘inner-disarmament’. I can’t help imagining Time’s Arrow in flight over Swan Island. Will the day come when peace activists have to burn themselves to death on the bridge? It is an aberrant thought. But you only have to think of the unspeak- able wars we might continue to be in when such acts might make sense.

AUSTRALIA HAS LONG made a cult of defeat at Gallipoli. The battle was even a side battle, a tactical decoy, so in the grand sweep of things the

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defeat was more humiliating than most. The cult also has its bad objects – the inept British officers, Churchill’s reckless strategic mistake and so on. The depth of humiliation that had to be shrouded has become clearer over the years. It made sense to press humiliation into the bedrock of history, the better to found a legend of warriorship. All of which is the legacy of what our colonised state of mind at the time – our patriotic loyalty to Empire – prede- termined: a predisposition for a dignity forged by martyrdom to Empire, rather than a clear grappling with the experience of defeat. Yet owning up to defeat has the promise of self-respect, if not nobility – spiritually and historically. I was most struck by this when I came upon Tagore’s poem ‘Song of Defeat’. He wrote it in 1916, after his first experience of Japan. As he kept telling his adoring hosts, many of whom received him as the great Poet-Prophet, he arrived as if to a sacred place, given ancient Japan’s Buddhist legacy. Japan had, alas, since lost its way to militarism, including a racist expan- sionism – habits of mind and conduct that it had learned from the nation-states in the West. Eloquently, Tagore held forth to large, distinguished audiences. Before long he had his Japanese critics, the most indignant of whom said that he should be dismissed. Here was a man who ignored Japan’s new progress, a man who had no right to such opinions because he came from a ‘ruined country’. By ruined, they meant poor, colonised, without a nation-state of its own. Tagore could only agree with them. For he could appear weak, he knew that. To think otherwise, the Japanese had to know that a decade earlier he’d been at the forefront of the nationalist struggle in Bengal, and that he had a body of work – several major novels which were profound dissections of nationalist thought and feeling. Tagore had never renounced the Indian cause; rather, he had turned back to his creative work instead of investing his later years in political struggle. He had already renounced the terrorist fringe of India’s nationalist movement. The Japanese experience would heighten Tagore’s conviction that in India hope lay in the educational efforts of the school he had already started, and the university and agricultural college that were to come soon after he came back from Japan. Meanwhile, his country remained ruined, and the

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poem he wrote as a response to the Japanese was a subtle, pacifist rejoinder, which served to turn warrior notions of heroism inside out.

My Master had bid me, while I stand by the roadside, to sing the song of Defeat, for that is the bride whom he woos in secret. She has put on the dark veil, hiding her face from the crowd, but the jewel glows on her breast in the dark. She is forsaken of the day, and God’s night is waiting for her with its lamps lighted and flowers wet with dew. She is silent with her eyes downcast; she has left her home behind her, from her home has come the wailing in the wind. But the stars are singing the love song of the eternal to a face sweet with shame and suffering. The door has been opened in the lonely chamber, the call has sounded, and the heart of darkness throbs with awe because of the coming tryst.

Here, the Poet-Prophet turns to his Muse, the female presence who solicits an open heart. His strength will come from submission, a form of surrender, a wise passivity. Tagore’s grandeur and courage consisted of knowing such things, which he held to – this is also the point – without losing his capacity for acts of resistance to intolerable humiliations. The latter make an impressive list. Thus, in 1921, after the massacre at Amritsar, he renounced his knighthood; in later years he gave strong yet critical support to Gandhi’s strategic fasts; and, as the Second World War began, he supported Subhas Chandra Bose, the Nationalist movement’s strong man, as the next leader of Congress (instead, Bose would go into exile to lead the Indian army on the side of the Japanese). By then, too, Tagore had consolidated his thoughts about the aeroplane as the harbinger of atrocity in war. He first flew in a plane on his way to Persia in 1932, as a guest of its modernising king, Reza Shah Pahlavi. It was an experience with physical, metaphysical and moral implications. His progress in the aeroplane, he felt, was ‘not in harmony with the wind’: the voice of

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the machine was that of ‘a raging beast’, and as it climbed higher it reduced the play of senses so that all the signs that made the earth real were wiped out. Yes, it gave man a ‘seat of divinity in the upper air from which comes light’, but were we up to it? The hold of the earth on the mind and heart was ‘loosened’, and a terrible ‘aloofness’ took its place. Looking down, he asked a question – ‘Who is kin, who stranger?’ – and he thought: ‘It is a travesty of this teaching of the Gita that the flying machine has raised on high.’ Man was not worthy of its powers akin to the air chariot of Lord Indra. His fear was: what ‘if in an evil moment man’s cruel history should spread its black wings’? If that happened, he warned:

…if man’s cruel history should invade the realm of divine dreams with its cannibalistic greed and fratricidal ferocity then God’s curse will certainly descend upon us for that hideous desecration and the last curtain will be rung down upon the world of Man for whom God feels ashamed.

This was his message to the Iraq Air Force in 1932. By this time in his life he could often sound like this – an Old Testament prophet and Gandhi rolled into one. What possessed him? Partly it was the Manichean dimensions of the machine itself, any machine. More particularly, he had palpable news of those black wings. In Baghdad, where the British air force had a base, he reported:

Its Christian chaplain informs me that they are engaged in bombing operations on some Sheikh villages. The men, women and children, there done to death, meet their fate by decree of the upper region of British imperialism – which finds it so easy thus to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims.

‘So dim and insignificant do those unskilled in the modern arts of killing appear to those who glory in such skill,’ Tagore remarked. Tagore knew such things better than most. The Pathans in India’s north-west were bombed in 1915. Four years later, Dacca and Jalalabad were

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bombed by squadron chief Arthur Harris, the man who would have much to do with the destruction of Europe after 1941. Outside India, the British were bombing natives in Egypt in 1916, in Afghanistan in 1919 and in Egypt again in 1920. In Iraq, before the events of 1923, there had been the landmark attempt to ‘control without occupation’ – a brilliant cost-saving device that put attacks by aeroplane in the place of battalions of soldiers on the ground. In principle, houses, animals and soldiers were supposed to be targets, not the elderly, women and children. Alas. In one air raid there was such wild confusion among the people that, as the official report noted, ‘many of them jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns’. Winston Churchill expressed concern about shooting women and children taking refuge in a lake. If such details were published, he thought, ‘it would be regarded as most dishonouring to the air force’. Churchill spoke of court-martials for the officers concerned, but this was no more likely to happen than the bombings of Iraq in 1932, the ones of which Tagore spoke, would not happen. Admittedly, the British did not invent the bombing of civilians from the air. The honours for modernity in war go to Italy, which dropped bombs into an oasis outside Tripoli in 1911 (when NATO forces bombed Libya in 2011, they were marking a centenary that few in the West seemed to notice). Before long, the British bombing of villages was part of a fully fledged colonial strategy, which included the heightened moral sense now possessed by the British – something of which, perhaps, the British chaplain had even shared with Tagore in 1932. For what distressed the British staff officer Lionel Charlton was what he called, in his official report, ‘the nearest thing to wanton slaughter’. Charlton had no sooner expressed this in writing than another troublesome sheikh had to be dealt with. From three thousand feet, bombs were released on a crowded bazaar. More than twenty women and children lost their lives. In 1924, Charlton was relieved of his post on the grounds of his conscience. His own heartfelt words were installed in the draft of his report to parliament, ‘Note on the Method of Employment of the Air Arm in Iraq’. Charlton expressed his horror at the tactic, and also offered a pitiless analysis of what bombing meant for the warriors who were the enemy.

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Where the Arab and the Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing…they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village (vide attached photos of Kushan-al-Ajaza) can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.

These words were erased from the final report: it held to the notion that the aeroplane was a humane means of controlling ungovernable peoples. After Persia, Tagore would often tell this story.

The British air force was destroying from the air a Mahsud village in Afghanistan. One of the bombing planes was damaged and came down. An Afghan girl led the airmen into a neighbouring cave, and to protect them, a Malik remained on guard at the entrance of the cave. Forty men with brandished knives rushed forward to attack them, but the Malik dissuaded them. All the time, bombs were dropping from above and people were crowding in to take shelter in the cave. Some Maliks of the neighbourhood and a Mollah proposed to help the Britishers and some of the women offered to feed them. After some time they at last disguised the airmen as Mahsuds and brought them to a safe place.

Tagore’s implication was that there was something more important than the colonial struggle, conceived in narrow political terms: at stake was the depth of our compassion for each other. Tagore’s sense of common humanity transcended the urgency with which even he opposed imperialism. Struggles there must be, but they were struggles that had a spiritual dimension to which he felt we must attend at our cost. Tagore was anti-imperialist to the core, yet one who could see into, at the worst of times, something other than the mirror of combat.

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LESS THAN TEN years later, during the saturation bombing of German towns, Churchill was suddenly interrupted one evening, letting words out of his mouth with what his witness called a ‘start’. ‘Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?’ The great leader was screening a film about RAF bombers in action over the Ruhr. England had already bombed Hamburg, almost razing it to the ground. Watching it with him was Richard Casey, the Australian diplo- mat who would become the Governor of Bengal, a position in which he maintained good relationships with Gandhi. Casey soothed the conscience of the leader, whose spirit exulted in war. Casey reported: ‘I tell him it wasn’t us who had started all this and that this was what it was about: us or them.’ Casey failed to recognise that the word ‘Armageddon’ had long been on Churchill’s lips: ‘Next time the competition may be to kill women and children, and the civil population generally.’

REGARDING THE AEROPLANE and its inevitable implication in crimes of war, Churchill was, in his own way, as prescient as Tagore. As the Allies began to bomb the German cities, it was the British pacifist, Vera Brittain, who put the most potent arguments against the strategies that were seldom questioned outside England. In her early pamphlet, Humiliation with Honour (1942), Brittain had an epigraph by Tagore from the poem that was included in early editions of Nationalism (1917), the essays that set him against the militarism of all nation states.

Be not ashamed, my brothers, to stand before the proud and the powerful With your white robe of simpleness. Let your crown be of humility; your freedom the freedom of the soul… And know that what is huge is not great and pride is not everlasting.

Brittain then offers as lucid a definition of pacifist faith as anybody has given.

Pacifism is nothing other than a belief in the ultimate transcen- dence of love over power. This belief comes from inward

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assurance. It is untouched by logic and beyond argument – though there are many arguments both for and against it. And each person’s assurance is individual; his inspiration cannot arise from another’s reasons, nor can its authority be quenched by another’s scepticism.

Brittain was not wanting to echo Gandhi. Nor was she being religious, her ‘spiritual’ insight notwithstanding. Much of her argument in Humiliation with Honour is designed to separate pacifism from sainthood. She grants the whole-hearted Christian’s rights to martyrdom. She appreciates that such suffering can ‘ennoble’ an individual, ‘for its secret is a love that can neither be destroyed nor conquered, whatever penalty it may be called upon to bear’. ‘Not by power, nor by might, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.’ In other words, she is fully in tune with those who would use, ‘like Gandhi in India, only the weapons of the spirit against the powers of darkness, and direct those weapons first against sin in themselves’. But her stress is not on this course, necessarily. It is rather a compulsion to fortify the dissenter in the polis. She wants to give them brave heart. Good heart. The honour she seeks has much more to do with the wherewithal of pacifists who must resist the temptation to fall into ‘permanent resent- ment, ingrowing hatred, antisocial conspiracy’. This requires a special civic courage – an ability to throw away any need to be ‘respectable’, for one thing. Self-discipline, for another. Selflessness also. She says to the pacifist: ‘Your road to salvation lies through pain and dishonour, for which there is no competition.’ This path, obviously, still has a Christian overtone, as it calls on the pacifist to be with the ‘outcasts’, the ‘sorrowful and the oppressed’. But the salvation to which Brittain refers is not ‘spiritually’ Christian. It is the salvation of a citizen’s common humanity. It is the path leading away from ‘hatred and vengeance’. In other words: ‘the humiliation with honour – the honour of self- discipline and of new wisdom wrought out of bitter experience’. Brittain’s Seeds of Chaos (1944) was her tour de force against the war-makers. Nothing as sustained has ever been published here. It articulates the patriotic and internationalist case against ‘obliteration bombing’. Pacifism could no

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longer be a force to defeat Hitler, but it could help men and women ‘to keep their heads’ and possibly avoid another and even worse war in the future. If England were to be defeated, it would be ‘humiliation with honour’. Meanwhile one could seek to ‘enlarge the scope of mercy’. The subtitle of Seeds of Chaos was What Mass Bombing Really Means. ‘So the grim competition goes on, until the mass-murder of civilians becomes part of our policy – a descent into barbarism which we should have contemplated with horror in 1939.’ Brittain hastened to add that most British people did not have firsthand experience of being bombed: if they had they surely would not be party to the leadership’s moral descent. In the bombed parts of London in 1941, a survey showed that 47 per cent of people disapproved of reprisals. The same in Coventry, where British civilians were worst hit. The largest vote in favour of retaliation in kind came from those in the safe areas to the north and west. The United Kingdom had more ‘kindly people’ than the official war effort could afford to admit. ‘Nor do I believe,’ Brittain went on, ‘that the majority of our airmen who are persuaded that mass bombing reduces the period of their peril really want to preserve their own lives by sacrificing German women and babies, any more than our soldiers would want to go into battle using “enemy” mothers and children as a screen.’ But she was not, essentially, addressing those in the heat of battle. She wrote down facts and opinions for citizens struggling to understand the information they had in wartime conditions. They are given in order that you who may read may realise exactly what the citizens of one Christian country are doing to the men, women and children of another. Only when you know these facts are you in a position to say whether or not you approve. If you do not approve, it is for you to make known your objection – remembering always that it is the infliction of suffering, far more than its endurance, which morally damages the soul of the nation.

TAGORE DIED A few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but everything he thought and wrote anticipated how the war in the Far East could end. Not so much with the tower of skulls that Japan was accumulating with its savage war in China, but with the West’s enactment of technological fanaticism in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that there was a peace, trials

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for war crimes, and a refusal by the West to speak of its own crimes even- handedly. Gandhi was, of course, the one who remarked that a peace created by such blood-stained means was hard to imagine. In seeking to make peace, the ends demand consistency with our means.

Barry Hill has been writing full-time since 1976 and has received Premier’s Awards for poetry, essay and nonfiction. He was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2003–05, and poetry editor of the Australian from 1998–2008. His best-known work in history is perhaps Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Knopf, 2002), and his most recent collection of poems is Naked Clay: Drawing from Lucian Freud (Shearsman, 2012). His new book is Peacemongers (UQP, 2014).

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 230 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Terrorism and the Cold War Avoiding false comparisons David McKnight

BEFORE THE WAR on terror, there was the Cold War. When the Austra- lian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was formed in 1949, it was frequently described as Australia’s ‘fourth arm of defence’ after the army, air force and navy. Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley created ASIO because the United States refused to share defence and technology information with Australia. The US said that Australia had been penetrated by Soviet intel- ligence and defence secrets would not be safe until it had created a professional agency for internal security. Chifley did this just before Labor was swept from office in 1949. ASIO bore the hallmarks of World War II as it prepared for the dangers of a third world war. Robert Menzies, the incoming prime minister, appointed the former head of military intelligence, Charles Spry, to run ASIO, entrenching a military ethos in the new body. In 1951, Menzies said he aimed to put Australia on a ‘semi-war footing’ and that democracies had no more than three years to prepare for a new war. Preparations for the outbreak of a third world war saw ASIO officers spend thousand of hours preparing legal briefs that ensured over a thousand leaders and activists of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) would be marched into internment camps were war to eventuate. At several points during the Cold War, police and security carried out raids on the homes

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and offices of communists. For several decades, national politics pivoted on a fear of communism. The Liberal–Country Party coalition won election after election by smearing the Labor Party as having communist influences. There are lessons from the Cold War that are relevant today, but they are not necessarily the lessons that some might imagine. Today, many people see the Cold War as the persecution of a small minority over their views by a secret security agency whose actions were largely dictated by the politi- cal need for an internal enemy around whom all kinds of exaggerated fears could be stoked. Many people see the current issue of terrorism in a similar way: a small religious community is being persecuted by a powerful and secret agency that uses raids and arrests to stoke exaggerated fears of terror- ism, which is politically convenient to the current conservative government. This comparison between the Cold War and the conflict over terrorism is both misleading and superficial. To understand why, it’s necessary to look concretely at the nature of the fears and threats.

DURING THE COLD War, the communist threat to national security was grossly inflated: the Communist Party of Australia never had the capacity to launch a revolution. True, at times it was able to make life difficult for govern- ments and employers through its strength in the trade union movement, but this was far from a realistic threat to overthrow the government in a style akin to the Russian Revolution. Moreover, from the start of the Cold War through the 1960s and 1970s, the CPA’s capacity to exercise political influence shrank continuously. (Paradoxically, while this was occurring ASIO was gaining strength and prominence.) Nor was the CPA a violent organisation that might present some form of threat to the civil order. The fundamental reason for the heavy surveillance of the CPA was its links with the Soviet Union; in turn, this led a small number of party members to commit espionage by leaking a series of secret British documents to the Soviet intelligence service. What of the nature of ASIO during the Cold War? It was a largely unaccountable body whose operations and actions were totally secret. From 1949 until 1972, Liberal prime ministers and attorneys-general frequently used ASIO for unofficial political vetting, as well as encouraging it to target politi- cal movements that were opposed to conservative views. The author of ASIO’s

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recent official history, David Horner, said that this approach ‘had a corrosive effect within ASIO whose officers came to believe that leftist dissent – and the advocacy of what would become relatively mainstream views about feminism, social welfare and indigenous Australians – indicated potential disloyalty’. Little of this bears any resemblance to the contemporary issue of terrorism and security. The Cold War communists bear no resemblance to the modern religious terrorist groups, nor does the ASIO of the Cold War resemble the ASIO of today. The CPA of the Cold War was a radical political group embedded in the labour movement. Although it was allied to the Soviet Union and doggedly followed its political direction (until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), the CPA also represented a local radical tradi- tion that stretched back well before the 1917 Russian Revolution. Whatever illusions it held about the revolutionary potential of Australia, it was a secular, progressive force whose Marxist ideology constituted a continuation of the radical wing of the Enlightenment. This is a long way from the various organ- isations that represent the violent aspect of Islamist fundamentalism. These groups form a new global force in the post-Cold War world. Apart from Syria and Iraq, Islamist terrorism is a major force in Kenya, Mali, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Philippines. Among other things, they bomb schools that educate young women, as well as kill those they perceive as critical of their violent version of Islam. The nature of ASIO, too, has changed markedly since the Cold War. Today, complaints about its actions are regularly investigated by the inspector- general of intelligence and security. It reports to a parliamentary committee, is obliged to produce a public annual report to government and advertises for potential employees openly. Its requests for additional powers are vigorously and freely debated. None of this is perfect, but none of this existed during the Cold War. Perhaps the greatest difference is this: during the Cold War, ASIO spied on the nebulous political force of ‘subversion’. Today, it spies on criminal offences defined by law (such as terrorism and related offences). When ASIO information leads to raids and the arrest of individuals, these actions are tested by the court system. This is light years from the Cold War, where progressive individuals were denied jobs or discriminated against on the basis of unknown information and untested claims.

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IT IS TRUE that fear of terrorism within Australia is politically useful to conservative leaders, who are more than happy to pose as the protector of ordinary people against terrorism. But this does not mean that terrorism is a contrived threat exaggerated largely for political purposes. If people on the left oppose point-blank any changes to anti-terrorism laws, then they play into the hands of such conservatives. After the events in Martin Place on 15–16 December 2014, we cannot imagine (if we ever could) that the threat of terrorism in Australia is negli- gible. Over a hundred Australians have been killed in terrorists attacks in Indonesia since September 2001. Within Australia, two major terrorist attacks were prevented in 2005, largely through the actions of ASIO and the federal police. The planners of these attacks were brought to trial, found guilty and jailed. Most are still in jail, but one of those with a shorter term was released in 2009, and last year went to Syria to fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Around seventy Australians are participating in the Syria–Iraq conflict, mainly with the terrorist organisations Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIL. In 2013, an Australian man drove a truck bomb into a Syrian checkpoint. In July 2014, an eighteen-year-old man from Melbourne killed himself and others in a suicide attack near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad. In September 2014, a Melbourne man was shot dead by counterterrorism police after attack- ing them with a knife, following a call to do this by an Australian jihadist overseas. Also in 2014, the government cancelled the passports of more than seventy people whom ASIO suspected of leaving to join terrorist groups in the Middle East, fearing most that participants in these groups would return to Australia with enhanced skills and a determination to carry out terrorist acts. Critics of stepped-up action against domestic terrorism sometimes point out that the number of Australians who have been killed in terrorist events is miniscule compared to those who die in road accidents or in bushfires, or from excessive tobacco and alcohol consumption. But such comparisons are facile: unlike bushfires or car accidents, terrorist actions are political and involve planning and purpose. By committing terrorist acts, perpetrators aim to attack governments, ferment suspicion and split societies – often on ethnic or religious fault lines. Sometimes they seek to goad governments

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into repression, to take revenge or achieve massive publicity for their cause. Comparing such calculated political acts to road accidents and bushfires is misleading, and trivialises a serious matter. If more terrorist attacks occur in Australia, it could precipitate an upheaval that would change the face of modern Australia by shattering our achievement of multicultural acceptance. Already, terrorism here and overseas has stoked a rise in racist attacks on Australian Muslims. Fear and paranoia is in the air and many Muslims feel unfairly targeted. In this context, it is possible that ASIO and the police might act unjustly, hastily or with preju- dice at some point in exercising their wide powers. But none of this justifies a kneejerk dismissal of the threat of terrorism and the measures needed to prevent it. The lessons of the Cold War are not necessarily straightforward.

4 February 2015

David McKnight is a senior research fellow at the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of NSW. His most recent book is Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power (Allen & Unwin, 2012), published in the UK and US as Murdoch’s Politics. His book on the Cold War in Australia, Australia’s Spies and their Secrets (Allen & Unwin) won the 1994 NSW Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction. He is currently working on a co-authored book, Big Coal, on the power of the coal industry and Australia’s status as a major global exporter of coal.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 235 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Allies in name alone Collapse of a gung-ho alliance Paul Ham

THE VIETNAM WAR lingers in the collective memory like some unspeak- able crime, locked away in the nation’s attic. Contrary to popular belief, America did not compel Australia to join the war in Vietnam. Australia leapt at the chance – an opportunity to find ‘a way in and not a way out’, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies told his Cabinet on 17 December 1964. Australia entered the war hoping its alliance with the United States would deliver real military and economic benefits. Australians dared to dream that the US would replace Britain as their regional protector and financial benefactor. However, when Australia withdrew from Vietnam it was left with less military and financial security, and more isolated in the Asia–Pacific region than ever. In hindsight this was easy to predict, but even at the time there were many warnings of such an outcome. What follows records the unravelling of an alliance between two nations at war. It examines how and why Australia stayed in Vietnam with an ally who was such in name alone. There were four ingredients essential to making that alliance work: trust, shared intelligence, political co-operation and economic support. None existed between Australia and the US during the Vietnam War.

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AUSTRALIA FORGED A defensive pact with America in despera- tion. Despite cries of betrayal from Menzies and Churchill, Prime Minister John Curtin had no choice other than to declare on 26 December 1941 that Australia ‘looks to America’ to help fight Japan, ‘free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’. Curtin took the long view: he saw America as Australia’s natural ally in post-colonial Asia. Twenty years later, the United States had not filled Britain’s shoes and had no intention of doing so. Australians and New Zealanders thus contem- plated a lonely future as the last Anglo-Saxon outposts in the Pacific. Frank Hopkins, then the US consul general in Melbourne, accurately assessed the mood in a cable to Washington in 1962:

After nearly two centuries of economic and psychological depen- dence on Great Britain, Australians are shocked by the thought that they may now have to stand on their own feet and rely primarily on themselves… They feel that Britain is letting them down and that the United States is failing to appreciate their plight… It remains to be seen whether Australians can find the courage, the confidence and the willpower to work out their own destiny under much less favorable conditions.

Australia faced economic hardship as well as military isolation. Tradi- tional buyers in Europe, chiefly Britain, were freezing Australia out. Between 1955 and 1971, the proportion of Australia’s total exports that went to the founding six members of the European Economic Community halved in value, to about 6 per cent. Losing markets in Europe, Australia hoped to find new ones in America and Asia. The coming of the Vietnam War seemed to offer a pivotal opportunity. Politicians rarely acknowledge the economic benefits of war; the motive suggests a tawdry opportunism. And yet, the link is as old as the ancient world. Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz saw warfare, in part, as a commercial relationship. So did the Australian government at the time of the Vietnam War: Alan Renouf, Australia’s chargé d’affaires in Washington in

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the early 1960s, advised Prime Minister Menzies that Vietnam might offer Australia economic leverage with the US, ‘without disproportionate expen- diture’ on military assistance. Menzies agreed; the economic and security benefits of a relationship with America, smoothed by the ANZUS Treaty and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), to which Australia was a joint signatory, exerted a strong hold on his mind. Signed in 1951, ANZUS had been grossly oversold to the Australian public. It merely obliged the signatories to consult each other about regional threats: ‘…to act to meet the common danger in accordance with its consti- tutional processes,’ states the vaguely worded Article IV. That did not oblige Uncle Sam to defend us. The treaty would have no bearing on Vietnam because Australia was not deemed to be under threat, despite claims that falling dominoes and red tides were about to swamp the country. Yet the treaty served Washington in one sense: diplomatic sugar-coating to President Kennedy’s appeal for more flags in Vietnam, in the face of the war being denied a UN mandate. With this in mind, Dean Rusk, the then US secretary of state, attended the ANZUS Council in Canberra in May 1962, hoping to extract an Austra- lian commitment to send military advisers to South Vietnam. In return, Australia’s external affairs minister Garfield Barwick crudely demanded –‘come hell or high water’ – a US pledge to defend South Vietnam (and implicitly Australian interests). At the time, Rusk could promise nothing of the sort, but he did receive a few Australian military advisers. Menzies was under no illusions about the military weakness of ANZUS, yet even he didn’t fathom the cavalier disregard in which Washington held the treaty. On 24 June 1964, the day the Australian leader sat in the White House waiting to meet President Johnson, presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy warned Johnson (known as LBJ) not to offer Menzies any commitments: ‘Once or twice,’ he wrote, ‘Australians have tried to interpret our ANZUS commitment as a blank check, but…the exact shape of our action under the treaty will depend on your judgment as President, at every stage.’ In other words, America would decide when and how the treaty applied: not then, as it turned out, and not much.

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BARWICK’S SUCCESSOR PAUL Hasluck sang America’s tune, and engineered a drastic change in Australia’s perception of the communist threat. Before his appointment, the Defence Department and military chiefs had set the Malay barrier as the forward defence line for Australia against the ‘red tide’ of communism. Hasluck, with Cabinet support and in accordance with Washington’s view of the threat, shifted this line two thousand kilome- tres north, to the seventeenth parallel that divided the Chinese-sponsored Democratic Republic of Vietnam (‘North Vietnam’) from the American- sponsored Republic of Vietnam (‘South Vietnam’). It was a military demarcation rather than a border between two states, and the new front line in Australia’s war with Chinese-sponsored communism. To justify the dispatch of the first Australian combat troops (1RAR) to South Vietnam, Menzies issued a statement on 29 April 1965: ‘The takeover of South Vietnam would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South-East Asia. It must be seen as part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.’ There was no debate. In any case, Air Marshal Sir Frederick Scherger, chairman of the Australian Chiefs of Staff Committee, had already secretly committed a battalion to Vietnam at a meeting of US and allied military strategists in Honolulu on April 1. In doing so, Scherger not only grossly exceeded his brief but also fast-tracked the decision without any recourse to the Australian people. The political left attacked Menzies, who was particularly incensed by the unions’ claim that the troop commitment amounted to a ‘blood for dollars’ or ‘diggers for dollars’ deal. According to the prime minister, this callous charge reflected ‘only the murky recesses of the minds of the people who made it’. If this was the case, then many Australian minds were murky. The people could be forgiven for thinking that Treasurer Harold Holt’s trip to Washing- ton at the same time as the troop decision was hardly a coincidence. Holt had been sent to Washington to press the case of Australian exporters. His easygoing charm won over President Johnson, but failed to secure any new export markets.

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SOON AFTER AUSTRALIA’S first combat troops arrived in Vietnam, it became apparent that the military relationship wouldn’t work. The two armies found they were fighting completely different wars, painfully demon- strated by the failure of their first big joint operation, ‘Iron Triangle’. Where US troops tended to crash through the jungle on ‘search and destroy’ missions that wiped out whole villages, the Australians – many trained in Malaya in counter-insurgency tactics – operated by stealth and infiltration. They cordoned and searched villages, and often went among the people in attempts to ferret out the enemy. It was time-consuming and nerve- shattering work, which US commanders thought slow or even cowardly, and led to the decision in early 1966 to confine the ‘Australian war’ to Phuoc Tuy province, south-east of Saigon. Over the next seven years, the government would dispatch a further fifty thousand military personnel to Vietnam; about a third of the infantry would be national servicemen conscripted at random. Washington applauded Menzies’ decision to conscript nineteen year olds (who couldn’t vote), as it promised a ready supply of soldiers. Dean Rusk was advised to tell Hasluck, when he visited Washington in November 1964, that the United States greatly appreciated ‘this politically courageous decision as an important step forward for Australia and for us’.

IN 1966, RED tides and falling dominoes were quietly removed from the polit- ical rhetoric. When asked why Australia was at war, Harold Holt, the new prime minister, replied, ‘…to help the Government of the Republic of Vietnam…resist the armed aggression of Communist North Vietnam’. The diggers were thus cast as ‘freedom fighters’ in a war in which the national interest now lay in defending small countries that the public knew little about. In fact, the case for staying in Vietnam, after the regional threat of China had dissipated, was to fulfil our treaty obligation to the United States – in return for which Australia anticipated improved regional security and an economic boost. With this uppermost in mind, Holt flew to Washington in June 1966 on a tour that would define his leadership. Holt had always firmly backed the Americans in Vietnam, particularly the bombing of the north, as he assured

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LBJ in a letter on 1 February that year. The president rewarded the Australian prime minister with a spectacular reception on the south lawn of the White House where, on 29 June 1966, Holt uttered his immortal pledge that bound Australia irrevocably to the war in Vietnam: ‘I am here, sir, not asking for anything. You have in us not merely an understanding friend, but one staunch in the belief of the need for our presence with you in Vietnam…an admiring friend, a staunch friend that will be all the way with LBJ.’ They became true friends, but Holt’s visit achieved little else. Johnson rejected all of Australia’s trade requests: he refused to liberalise wool tariffs unless Australia relaxed its barriers to US tobacco; Australian sugar growers would not receive access to the US market under a mooted international sugar agreement; and Australia would not be exempt from the much-hated interest- equalisation tax (despite the fact that Japan already had been). America had no need of Australian zinc and lead. The president agreed only to ‘try’ to prevent new protectionist legislation against our meat and dairy products. In fact, quota legislation put before US Congress that year threatened 60 per cent of Australia’s export earnings. Holt had come ‘asking for nothing from America’, which was just as well, because he got less than nothing. On the other hand, LBJ genuinely liked this tanned, Aussie spear-fisher- man, and accepted Holt’s invitation to visit Australia and New Zealand that October, just before the federal election. Johnson’s political interest in the elections lay in the fact that the Australian Labor Party, should it win, would try to furl America’s most loyal flag in Vietnam. The LBJ factor removed that risk: the press hailed the presidential visit as the ‘dawn of a new era in the Pacific’. A month later the Liberal–Country Party Coalition won the election in the biggest landslide since Federation, in a popular vindication of conscription and the war in Vietnam.

A RISING MINORITY of anti-war protestors dissented: Holt’s ‘all the way’ commitment meant Australia was in for a long, ugly war with no exit strategy. Conservatives privately questioned the war for a different reason: Vietnam placed a huge financial burden on the Australian budget, with no apparent advantages. Defence expenditure had grown by an average of 22 per

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cent a year in the four years to 1967, and Treasurer Billy McMahon warned it would soon seriously damage the economy. Under pressure to deliver a war dividend, the Australian prime minister returned to Washington. On 4 June 1967, in advance of his visit, Holt wrote to Johnson to complain about high US tariffs on Australian wool, sales of which were needed to help pay for the ‘imports essential for our development and defence’. He complained that New Zealand exported 67.4 per cent of its wool to the US duty free, while Australia’s duty-free total was 0.1 per cent. Johnson promised to look at the problem but did nothing. As much as he liked his Aussie deputy, LBJ did not wish to upset American farmers. Holt’s visit also proved fruitless. Once again, the president ever so nicely rebuffed him. This time, however, Holt went public: Australia had got a ‘raw deal’ on wool in the Kennedy Round of Trade Talks, he told the American Australian Association on 13 June 1967. America had made no concessions on sugar, dairy products, meat, lead or zinc: ‘Australians import $68 per head from the United States, and the United States imports less than $2 per head from Australia.’ Holt reasonably sought a balance in trade opportunities. None was forthcoming. Later that year, an influential American went in to bat for Australia. Stressing the severe economic pressure on Australia following harsher European trade restrictions, Ed Clark, the US ambassador in Canberra, wrote to the White House on 13 December 1967:

…our continued unwillingness to grant [Australia] even a fraction of the relief which has been granted to Japan…is a constant source of irritation and embitterment to our Australian friends who have consistently supported us right down the line. They are our stron- gest supporters in Viet Nam and they are paying their own way there at considerable cost to their own balance of payments. The cost of the new weapons which they are purchasing from us is almost staggering for a country with fewer than twelve million people… It has been extremely disappointing to me personally not to have been able to secure some assistance for a good friend in need of it…

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Clark’s letter had no effect. In 1967, Australia won a single war-related contract: to supply sugar to US troops in Vietnam, worth a mere US$6.5 million a year. It also became a preferred R&R destination for US service- men: in October that year, 2,085 visited Sydney and the Gold Coast. They spent US$628,500, mostly on booze and prostitutes.

BY 1967, THE Chinese and Soviet regional threat had withdrawn, for political and domestic reasons largely unrelated to the Vietnam War. With the American market closed to Australian exports, and no future security deal in sight, Australia’s national interest in Vietnam seemed non-existent. Yet Holt defended the commitment because ‘communist inspired aggression’ was ‘a threat to free people and small nations – small nations in particular – everywhere.’ He even pledged again, in a speech to the Far East American Council, to ‘go all the way with LBJ’. ‘All the way’ would not, in fact, prove very far. The Americans were in the market for more troops, and on 30 July Johnson’s chief procurers – presidential advisers Clark Clifford and General Maxwell Taylor – swooped on Canberra. A bigger effort from America’s allies, they said, would help the president sell the war, now costing US$25 billion a year, to US taxpay- ers. ‘One additional New Zealand soldier might produce fifty Americans,’ Clifford had told his NZ hosts. Taylor and Clifford aimed to extract at least one more Australian battal- ion, but ideally three. The threat to South Vietnam, Taylor stressed, was far greater than the danger to Malaysia or Indonesia (with or without the British). Holt dithered and then capitulated. On 6 September, the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee agreed in principle to offer a third infantry battalion of 1,200 troops, at the low end of US demands. Holt secretly confirmed the offer on 6 October and informed Parliament and the people nearly two weeks later, on 17 October. There was no debate. Pravda, the Soviet news daily, scorned Australia’s troop increase as ‘cannon meat for Vietnam in exchange for mutton for the USA’. Except that the USA would buy no more Aussie mutton in exchange for these diggers. McMahon and Hasluck, then in Washington to negotiate the fine print,

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failed to extract any economic or defence concessions. Washington refused to help plug the security gap left by the departing British in Malaysia; or to reduce tariffs on Australian beef, mutton and other commodities. McMahon succeeded only in delaying payments on the F-111 fighter aircraft.

AUSTRALIA CONTINUED TO be frozen out of the US intelligence loop at a diplomatic and operational level. The sacking of US Defense Secretary Bob McNamara took Canberra utterly by surprise and suggested fresh troops were being sent to a doomed enterprise. McNamara, once the biggest cheer- leader for the war, now declared, ‘It must be stopped.’ In a secret memo to the president on 19 May 1967, he wrote: ‘The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring a thousand non-combatants each week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.’ His apostasy had little impact on the Australian government: the reinforcements would proceed to South Vietnam, as planned, in early 1968. At an operational level, too, the Australians were fighting blind. In May 1968, for example, US military intelligence detected eight North Vietnamese regiments and as many ‘infiltration groups’ of battalion size in an area north of Saigon, into which the Australians were about to be airlifted. Had Austra- lian commanders seen this intelligence, they might have avoided the loss of 124 men – dead and wounded – at fire support bases ‘Coral’ and ‘Balmoral’, in the bloodiest confrontation of the Australians in Vietnam. Afterward, no Australian government minister demanded, as a condi- tion of ongoing commitment to the war, that the US share vital intelligence during joint operations. Its denial had a real impact on whether soldiers lived or died, yet most politicians showed little interest in the operational war – sparked only when they sought to limit body bags at election times.

JOHN GORTON, AUSTRALIA’S next prime minister, may have been viewed as outlandish in Washington, but he had the prescience to see that there was no further national interest in the war. His first act on entering office, in February 1968, was to freeze the numbers of troops in Vietnam.

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Yet the battalions already deployed would fight on, as a gesture of support for America, under a prime minister who no longer believed in why they were fighting (a lament Gorton drunkenly shared with the nineteen-year-old journalist Geraldine Willesee at a party that year). Gorton’s troubled relationship with Johnson got off to a bad start in March 1968 and promptly seized up. President Johnson gave Australia no warning of his decision not to seek re-election after the debacle of the Tet Offensive. During wartime such courtesies might be expected between allies, yet Gorton first heard about it through the press: ‘This is no way to treat an ally!’ he thundered, and severely reprimanded Australia’s Washington Ambas- sador, Sir Keith Waller, for failing to alert Canberra. In May, Gorton joined the carousel to the White House as guest of honour. Days before he arrived, secretary of state Dean Rusk warned Johnson not to make any military commitment to Australian security in light of the recent British announcement to withdraw its troops from Malaysia and Singapore by 1971. Nor would the USA give Australia ‘a blanket guarantee of protection under ANZUS’, Rusk reminded Johnson, in an echo of McGeorge Bundy’s neutering of ANZUS before Menzies’ visit in 1964: ‘…suggest you tell Gorton, as we have said before, there is no question of our “filling the gap”.’ Gorton would enjoy a warmer relationship with the Nixon administra- tion. And he meant to show it off: on 1 May 1969, with an election looming, he set forth on another pilgrimage to the White House in what he hoped would be a statesmanlike visit. It was a shambles. Gorton demanded assurances of continued US involvement in Asian security post-Vietnam, particularly in relation to the Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean. Nixon offered none. Gorton thanked his hosts anyway: ‘Sir,’ he told Nixon, at the end of a long, windy speech, ‘we will go Waltzing Matilda with you.’ Echoes of ‘all the way with LBJ’ resonated with newspaper editors, who piled on the mockery. The wheels fell off the relationship in the last year of the war. Neither the next prime minister, Billy McMahon, nor Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam were forewarned of Nixon’s announcement, on 15 July 1971, to seek ‘peace in our time’ with Beijing – just three days after McMahon had publicly referred to China as ‘our enemy’. Nixon’s announcement inflicted

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the added, if unintended, wound of making the coincidence of Whitlam’s trip to China on 12 July seem politically prescient – when in reality Washington had treated Australia with complete indifference, as if it were just any other non-aligned country rather than an ally of ten years’ fighting. Why Australia stayed in Vietnam, even when it became apparent there was nothing to gain, is a story of disillusionment, humiliation and misplaced faith, culminating in the abject image of Whitlam urging President Richard Nixon to end the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, to which the prime minister received no reply. After a decade of war, Washington chose simply to ignore its largest ally.

IN THE END, Australia found itself harnessed not to an American policy or strategy in Vietnam, but to American pride. The US stayed in Vietnam chiefly to avoid the humiliation of defeat and to deter other ‘rogue’ states. As early as January 1966, the US Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaugh- ton could write: ‘The present US objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation. The reasons why we went into Vietnam…are largely academic.’ America needed Australia’s flag, but that was as far as the relationship went: all one-way. From 1966 on, Australian soldiers were risking their lives to fulfil a political gesture to America. That gesture won nothing tangible for the nation, in terms of enhanced security or economic support. Nor did the alliance entail any sharing of useful intelligence, at a diplo- matic or operational level. Time after time our government was caught outside the US loop. In something of an own goal, Malcolm Fraser, who was a defence minister during the Vietnam War, admitted decades later that ‘the Americans kept us in the dark’. Australia should, of course, have withdrawn from Vietnam. If the ratio- nale for involvement seemed credible in the late 1950s, it had lost traction by 1966. In 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive and My Lai Massacre, the media got behind the gathering anti-war movement for the first time and transformed the public’s perception of Vietnam: the narrative of a war where democracy’s heroes had hitherto been defending the West from the evil of communism was recast as a general crime against humanity, with America as the chief

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perpetrator. Australian troops were deemed complicit in the massacre of children, the burning of villages and the poisoning of a nation, their presence in Vietnam bundled up with US atrocities in which they had no hand. But instead of finding an exit strategy, a conga-line of Australian leaders went cap in hand to Washington, imagining they could extract security or commercial advantages from a doomed enterprise. Repeatedly rebuffed, they failed even to insist on fair treatment as America’s most important ally. By 1972, our relationship with the world’s greatest superpower had broken down, at diplomatic, commercial and military levels. An ironic footnote – of little consolation – is that the Australian troops achieved what they were sent to do in Vietnam. As ordered, they bravely secured a Vietnamese province, despite being virtually abandoned by their own country and frozen out of US intelligence, which contributed to the unnecessary loss of many young lives.

Paul Ham is the author of Vietnam: The Australian War (HarperCollins, 2007), winner of the 2008 NSW Premier’s Prize for History, as well as four other books on twentieth- century conflicts.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 247 13/03/2015 3:59 pm MEMOIR Set it down! Full disclosure and Vietnam veterans Gerard Windsor

WAR IS A particularly slippery subject for any cold eye to fasten on. In May 2014 I was walking through the départements of Lozère, Aveyron, Lot and Tarn-et-Garonne in southern France, and the village war memorials caught my attention. Apart from the horrifying numbers listed, there were various other, quite incendiary, additions: a family of five shot in the village of Grealou, and the ages of the children given; a man ‘assassine par les allemands’. Germans were walking through these villages every day, and I talked to them and to the French people. The Germans grimaced and shook their heads and were hurt to hear themselves still being referred to as les Boches. The French said the Germans wouldn’t talk about it – and that they had started it after all. Yet both parties said relations between France and Germany were now friendly, bordering on exuberant. This manoeuvring around European war memories prodded me to acknowledge my own manoeuvres, albeit ones of a very different kind. Of all forms of historical writing, military history is likely to be the least comprehensive, least nuanced and most prone to distortive bias. The health of the national psyche, for a start, is presumed to depend on an upbeat military story. Anything less than a glorious record is going to be unsettling and, in the worst case, treacherous. Accounts of the ups and downs of the wool trade

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in Australia, or of the battles between free-traders and protectionists, are not going to gut their readers or make them ashamed to be Australian. However, accounts of inglorious defeats or rampaging, murderous soldiery will have such a demoralising effect. The problem here is more complicated than making historiography subservient to national pride. There are two temporal universes for this historical art: the more-or-less contemporary one where there are living witnesses and evidence may still be extracted; and that of the dead, where no more will be said or written by its participants. Vietnam is still the former, whereas World War I is now irrevocably the latter. In an acute form, military history faces both problems and advantages in that first universe. Between 2009 and 2011, I researched and wrote an account of an Austra- lian infantry company in Vietnam in 1967–68, All Day Long the Noise of Battle: An Australian attack in Vietnam (Pier 9, 2011), which proved to be a lesson on the in-built constraints on contemporary military history. Of course, whenever we write about the living we’re constrained by libel laws; within those boundaries, anyone from politicians and magnates to cardinals are fair game for exposure and criticism. But war veterans aren’t. The consequence is that accounts of the wars in which they served will almost certainly not be the whole truth. Ideally, the evidence will be gathered, but occasionally it can’t be discussed. It will have to go into storage, and in the fullness of time, when those soldiers have been gathered to their fathers, it can be used – might be used – and the more complete accounts can be written.

MY BOOK RELIED on interviews with sixty-two veterans. Contrary to popular lore about the reticence of returned soldiers, only two men refused to speak to me. I was invited into the veterans’ homes and to their battalion reunion, given diaries, letters and photos. I felt awed and privileged by this generosity, not least because I myself had never been near military combat. Furthermore, on meeting these men it became clear to me that none of them could be regarded as, let’s say, happier human beings as a result of going to war. As they entrusted me with their stories, often with shaky hands, I noticed in them a range of delicate and combustible emotions: they could be scrupu- lous, angry, resentful and proud. They might be tense with the desire to get

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something off their chests, determined to set a record straight, open about their own psychological troubles, distressed about a comrade’s lack of recognition, or smarting about their treatment by a superior officer forty years ago. In time, once my project was finished and I had a book, the sense of responsibility I felt had doubled. I not only felt some sort of duty of care, but also – partly because people said so, and because I came to believe them – it was that I had constructed a memorial to the men and had delivered them some degree of public recognition. But I had not started writing the book for that purpose; nor was the book the unambiguous salute of a carved memorial. As I was writing it, I was trying to steer between the two evils of intel- lectual disreputability and hurtfulness to my subjects. For all the tensions that emerged, veterans had a strong sense of comradely solidarity, and early on I came across the often-explicit presumption that nobody should be hurt by what I wrote. I subscribed to this principle as readily as anyone. Of course, it was naive – people were certain to be hurt. If I had, for example, two or more conflicting accounts of an incident (which was frequently the case) and decided that one was less reliable and less accurate, or even implied as much, then one of my informants would feel slighted. But some winnowing and balancing of accounts was inevitable. And the veterans themselves saw that there had to be exceptions to the principle of spared feelings when they found themselves saying things to me such as, ‘You have to be frank about X’s behaviour, or you bring other men into disrepute.’ Besides, for all their comradeship, I found a lot of antagonisms and bitterness floating in the soup of memory. Men who were seen as harsh or malingering – now or forty years ago – or as braggarts or monopolisers of the company’s story, aroused angry resentment. One quality, however, that was never attributed to anyone was coward- ice. Not orally, not directly to me. Cowardice is a blunt, ugly word that I never used in the book, not least because the veterans themselves never used it. They spoke freely enough about men breaking down, but generally they didn’t speak about them censoriously. Only twice did I hear any exceptions to this, and the noteworthy fact was that the men criticised in each case were officers; there was an explicit assumption that what was understandable and excusable in an enlisted man was unpardonable in an officer. All the extra

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training you were given at the officers’ schools – at Scheyville or Portsea or at the Royal Military College Duntroon – should have made you invulner- able to such breakdowns. Furthermore, any breakdown that occurred was a besmirching of that alma mater’s reputation. To me, this seemed harsh and unreasonable, but it appeared to be a principle of soldierly thinking. Nervous collapse was the most sensitive issue the veterans told me about; it occurred frequently in different forms, and the stories ranged widely. There were those about non-commissioned officers whose nerves gradually deteriorated to the point where they no longer went on operations. Or an officer who was regularly brought in prematurely from operations because of eye trouble, but was eventually seen by one of his subordinates smearing his eyes with mosquito repellent. Or men who were taken out as casualties when harm was more likely done to their nervous system than their flesh. Or men who collapsed, weeping and hysterical, in the midst of battle. Even now, when we speak and read of shellshock or battle fatigue, we tend to think of it as a disability that comes on after battle and makes a return to the field impossible. But there are those confronting cases of a man’s nervous system collapsing during combat. We have long been conditioned towards harsh judgments on any form of throwing in the towel, running away, shrinking from the fight; yet it is common in battle.

WHAT WAS I to do with such facts about Australian soldiers, most of them still living? Some were marginal enough to my story; some I was told about without being given a name. I didn’t pursue these men. Others, however, were more central. I knew their names and I interviewed them. In retrospect, the principle that evolved was that I myself shouldn’t bring up the matter of collapse. If the veteran did, I would follow it up as delicately as possible. In one case the veteran made no mention of any collapse, but made passing refer- ence to a superior brand of toughness that some of his comrades demonstrated. His chronological memory was completely skew-whiff, however, with whole days missing – including a crucial day of battle – and it’s quite possible that he had no recollection at all of what had happened to him. I wasn’t going to press him any further; he seemed to me a truthful witness and a fine man, and there I was accepting his warm hospitality. I would have to find a way to tell the story without spotlighting his problems.

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Of another man, I was told that he’d collapsed when his platoon came under heavy machine gun fire; he’d been crying and shouting out ‘No more, no more!’ and had been quite impervious to orders or appeals. I met this man at the reunion and asked if I could ring him – you don’t try and talk intimately to veterans late at night in a vast dining room or even when they’re wandering around during the day bumping into and greeting one another. He gave me his card and some weeks later I rang. I had barely begun to explain who I was when he interrupted and said, ‘I lost it on Coburg [the operation I was most concerned with] and I had to be taken out and I don’t remember anything.’ I was pulled up short and moved by this man’s ready, courageous admission. I included the fact of the breakdown in my account of the action, but I didn’t reveal the man’s identity. In one instance, however, I did name a soldier. In October 1967 his platoon had come across a group of three Vietcong, apparently resting conviv- ially. The Australians crept forward and fired a machine gun on the three enemy soldiers, killing them all. Several men in the platoon told me that the machine gunner was very badly affected; he had been crying and pleading for the dead to be buried properly, and not just thrown into their trench. Again, I later spoke to the machine gunner himself and he very quickly confirmed the incident: ‘We went forward and I broke down when I saw the mess I’d made.’ When I was writing I wanted this man to remain anonymous as well, so I referred to him as ‘the machine gunner’. But I also detailed how he’d never gone on another major operation, but had held another important function in the company (managing the canteen, which I couldn’t reveal). In this context, the repeated use of the label ‘the machine gunner’ came to seem inappropriate, even ridiculous. So I rang the man and asked him if he’d prefer to remain anonymous or have his name used. Without hesitation he said he wanted his name, Peter Stapleton, to be used. I was relieved, even delighted. But months later, when I had the book ready to go to the publishers, I still keenly felt the rawness of this story – something I felt beyond anything else in the book. And, as it happened, there was one other story in the book about Peter Stapleton. It was raw too, but in a completely different kind of way: it concerned his friendship, not sexual relationship, with a Vietnamese bar girl. Did he realise, I asked myself, how he was exposing himself? So I

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sent him the relevant passages and asked, ‘This is what it looks like on the page. How do you feel?’ And he wrote back saying he’d looked at it, and his wife too had looked at it, and they thought it was fine. And later, even after publication, he thought it was fine and wrote to me saying, ‘Thank you for writing this part of history… Another part of my life has now been put at ease, again thank you. I will read it again.’ Such responses have been immensely moving, but I don’t kid myself into thinking I’ve caught more than just tiny fragments of these men’s war experiences, nor that I’ve avoided all hurt. Late in writing the book, I was shown Janet McCalman’s 1997 essay ‘Writing the Living’, about books that are based largely on interviews. This is a cogent and disturbing essay, and its logic seems to come close to affirming that writer and interviewee are co-authors, and that the interviewee should always be shown the proposed text, if not actually given some power of veto over it. The argument seems to imply that the originating authors should be ready to deprive themselves of any ultimate control over the books that are to appear under their name. This essay certainly put extra pressure on me to read my text as the soldiers, its subjects, might read it. Yet McCalman’s own books dealt with numerous individuals, few of whom would have heard of any of the others. My book, on the other hand, was partly about conflicting memories and my research had revealed, and sometimes brought to the surface, tensions, rivalries and antipathies within a group of men who had lived and fought in intimate proximity for several years. It would have been totally unfeasible to submit my proposed manuscript to all its contributors and participants. Had I done so the result would have been anarchy, and a dead stop to the project. So McCalman’s best practice was closed to me. The sifting and the final judgment had to be mine. But I knew that even so, my account of this company of soldiers would be limited. My interview notes bear the evidence to take the account forward, but not in the lifetime of my informants and subjects. Without extraordinary permission, you can’t write of a man still living that he lay down on the battlefield and cried – not least when he has no memory of that behaviour. Yet such abject breakdown is the reality of Austra- lian military history, time and again, even if CEW Bean doesn’t mention one case. Nor Gavin Long, nor the official historians of Vietnam.

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MEETING THESE VETERANS was, inevitably, an introduction to their lives post-Vietnam. I had no intention of writing past Vietnam and 1968, but I found one small, brilliant flare going up over the postwar period that gave me a moment of illumination. It was a story told to me by Peter Dowling, a National Serviceman from Werribee, a house painter in civilian life, a popular man and a good soldier, wearing a lance corporal’s stripe before he left Vietnam. His story consisted of a yarn and a tiny coda, and I decided to end the book with them. His yarn concerned the night he was flown back to Australia from Saigon; he and his comrades of the fourth National Service intake were put in a room at Sydney airport, given tea and biscuits and told they would be leaving for their home states around 6 am the following morning. Dowling and his friend from Perth, Peter Curley, took a taxi to Kings Cross. Dowling wanted a drink of milk more than anything, but the Cross wasn’t offering it. Then, on their way back to the airport, they sighted a milk van on its early morning run. They stopped and Dowling asked the milko if he could buy a couple of bottles. ‘Give us your empties,’ said the milko. ‘I haven’t got any empties,’ said Dowling. ‘No empties, no milk,’ said the milko. Dowling exploded. ‘I’ve just got off the fucking plane from Vietnam! Where would I get empties!’ The milko shrugged and turned his back and drove on. Dowling got back in the taxi. But then the van stopped, the milko jumped out, ran across the road and left two bottles on a doorstep and drove on. Dowling nipped over and swiped them. As a master of narrative, Dowling immediately cut from this story to a low-key coda. ‘When I got home to Werribee,’ he said, ‘I went into my old room and threw down my kit and sat on the bed and burst into tears. My mother came in and said, “That’s enough of that. You’re home now.”’ For someone like myself, educated to be aware of literary tropes, this story was a gem. To move from the man’s childlike craving for milk to his mother’s refusal to succour him, is the delicate, nuanced metaphor that writers dream of. Immediately, I knew this was where I would end my book. After it was published, another man rang me, Jim Feeney – a fine man, a brave soldier and a selfless medic. He ruminated on the book for about twenty minutes and then suddenly said, ‘I didn’t like Peter Dowling’s story.’ I was rocked.

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‘Why not?’ I asked him, as mildly as I could. ‘I didn’t like it’ turned out to mean ‘I didn’t believe it’. He was a fourth National Service intake soldier too, Feeney said, and was on the same flight home as Dowling, and yes they had been put into a room at Sydney Airport. But…the room was then locked. Military Police were stationed beside the door inside and airport security personnel outside it. No one could have got out. Oh dear! I was mightily pleased the book was already in print. Through- out it I had argued the merits of differing memories, but I hadn’t questioned Peter Dowling’s wonderful quest for milk. Even now I still don’t want to query it. I tell myself there’s probably a way of reconciling the stories of two good men. Under fire, Dowling had held a dead comrade in his arms; under fire, Jim Feeney had rushed to the aid of wounded comrades. You don’t want to shine any torches on the stories of these men. After all, on Jim Feeney’s side, it would make sense that the Army didn’t want to risk any accidents with these young National Servicemen, not during these last few hours that they were in the Army’s care. So yes, it might make a perverse kind of sense to lock them up. But, on Peter Dowling’s side, maybe the lockup wasn’t entirely effective? Maybe there was a moment of inattention before everybody got into the room. Maybe the authorities somehow discriminated? Or maybe there was some lapse of time, very early in the morning, between them being let out of this detention and catching their flights home, and it was then that Dowling made his bid for the Cross and met his milko? One day, some researcher might do a micro-study of the last twenty-four hours in uniform of Australian National Servicemen of the Vietnam era. They might manhandle my story and set it right, if badly mutilated. For the present it stands as a tale I want to be true, possibly as another brick in the rickety edifice of the Australian digger. So that Australian military history sails on, incomplete, not just because there are some stories you can’t tell, but also because there are other stories that are just too good not to tell.

Gerard Windsor is an essayist, reviewer, memoirist, novelist and former Jesuit. He is the author of eleven books, including I Have Kissed Your Lips (UQP, 2004), Ned Kelly and the Odd Rellie (UQP, 2007), Angels Before Me: The Road to Santiago (privately printed limited edition of three hundred, 2014).

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 255 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY Barrier thinking The monument and the minefield Greg Lockhart

IN VIETNAM, MINES accounted for half of the Second Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2RAR) soldiers killed in action. Two of those killed on mines were among the nine South Australian members of the Battalion who died on active service, and who are listed on the memorial in Adelaide that was dedicated to them in April 2014. The invitation, which Tom Young extended to me on behalf of the Battalion Association, was to speak at the dedication on why I wrote my book, The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam (Allen & Unwin, 2007). It was indeed an honour, and I became all the more mindful of that tribute when Tom, who worked for some three years on the memorial project, sadly died a few weeks before he could see it realised. In Australian culture, memorials have long tended to have a dual function. They are sites of remembrance for everyone; but for the families of the fallen and members of the wider unit family, they are also sites of sorrow. Grieving for loved ones and mates may be eased over time, but will never end. People reserve a special kind of pride in, and sorrow for, those whose lives are tragically cut short by war. The fact that their names are embossed on metal and set in stone shows that their lives and deaths were special. Tom Young believed this. And so it makes sense to imagine that those who pass this monument a hundred years from now will still read the names and imagine

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that they must have belonged to special people – or ordinary people who did special things. In that sense, I can now answer Tom’s question by saying that I wrote The Minefield in order to make a memorial for Vietnam veterans. Not one set in stone, although I hope that the weight of the research might make it as durable. The memorial I had in mind was a story that would give Australian Vietnam veterans, and others interested in their war, an independent context in which readers could judge for themselves what happened.

TO DO THAT, I chose to write about the minefield. At the time I began my research, ‘mining’ was still thought to be a subsidiary form of warfare and was, without doubt, a darkly unglamorous one. In the Second World War, land mines had been used in a defensive role. Large ‘barrier’ and ‘defensive’ minefields were laid to channel, block or impede armour and infantry assaults. In Vietnam, the Australian approach to mine warfare had not significantly changed. Yet the small-scale, irregular dimension to the war in Vietnam would have unforseen consequences for a large ‘barrier’ minefield laid there by First Australian Task Force (1ATF) in mid 1967, consequences that, though increasingly perceived by members of the force as calamitous, were still not clearly understood twenty years after the war. Beginning in the late 1990s, The Vietnam Veterans’ Federation – led by Tim McCombe, who was seriously wounded on a mine with 2RAR in 1967 – had been dealing with veterans who had been similarly wounded and asking questions about ‘the minefield’. These questions, which revolved around the fact that the enemy had been able to enter the minefield, lift the mines and use them against 1ATF, remained unanswered. As I looked into the issue, I became convinced of the need to bring ‘the minefield’ out of the historical shadows. Far from being a secondary form of warfare, it became clear that the mine battle associated with that minefield epitomised Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. The minefield was a projection onto the battlefield of the barrier mentality that established Australia’s strategic settings in relation to Asia in the 1960s. The 1ATF was deployed to Vietnam to help establish a strategic barrier against the perceived downward thrust of communism in the region.

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In Vietnam, the Nui Dat base was established in central Phuoc Tuy Province as a barrier to protect the main population centres in the south-west of the province from the regular Communist Main Force units entering it from the north-east. The eleven-kilometre barrier minefield, containing twenty thousand powerful M16 mines, was designed as an extension of the barrier base into the south to further protect those population centres, mainly the village of Dat Do. The minefield immediately revealed the fatal flaw in that barrier think- ing: the commander who ordered the laying of the minefield, and those superiors who concurred with his plans prior to the mining, had not suffi- ciently realised that the people he was trying to shield in those villages were also potential enemies. Indeed, village people – initially young women from Dat Do – entered the minefield from the west, from within the villages the minefield was meant to protect. Once in the minefield, these villagers lifted between three and five thousand mines and turned them back against 1ATF. Arming otherwise lightly armed irregular peasant fighters with power- ful ordnance caused heavy Australian and allied casualties. The disastrous oversight in the plan could not be clearer: the enemy proved to be on both sides of the intended ‘barrier’. One can criticise the decision to lay the minefield from many angles, but the overriding point is that the Australian commanders of the day did not know who or where their enemy was.

IN THE SECOND half of the book I attempt to clarify the disaster: the mine incidents, casualties and tactical problems stemming from that astonish- ing, high-level battlefield ignorance. A total of 521 Australians were killed in action in Vietnam. The battle encounters that killed most of those Australians were mine and booby trap incidents, including those on M16s. All up, mines and booby traps claimed 121 lives. Of those, M16 mines lifted by irregular enemy fighters from the minefield killed at least fifty-five members of 1ATF, just under half of the total Australian mine and booby trap fatalities – almost certainly including Lance Corporal RM Woodford, and possibly Private JC Rivett, who are listed on the Adelaide memorial. The fifty-five soldiers (at least) killed by ‘our own’ M16 mines compares with the seventy-seven

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Australians killed in bunker fighting. ‘Our own’ M16s also killed a further forty-two allied soldiers and civilians – mostly Vietnamese, and a small number of Americans. In sum, M16 mines from the Australian barrier minefield killed at least ninety-seven Australian and allied soldiers, while another four hundred and twenty were wounded – most seriously, and many dismembered as a result of the exploding mines. Those casualties meant the mine battle was central to 1ATF history. In failing to realise that his enemy included peasants in the villages, and by unwittingly arming them with thousands of M16 mines, the 1ATF commander did something else he had never imagined: facilitate the irregular enemy’s radical transformation of mine warfare. By taking advantage of their extensive surveillance network, the irregu- lar peasant forces were able to move the mines around the battlefield. Through laying and re-laying the mines in the paths of 1ATF patrols, that enemy had transformed the inherently defensive nature of mine warfare – as Australians understood it – into an essentially offensive strategy. The remarkable fact was that the irregular peasant forces were able to target 1ATF patrols using high explosive mines lifted from the Australian minefield with much the same effect as they would have had if they had been firing artillery. Thus, for example, in the so-called Battle for the Box between 8 May and 15 August 1969, 1ATF’s battalions were engaged in something unheard of: a ‘deliberate mine battle’, in which patrols were under attack with pilfered M16 mines. That attack resulted in 54 per cent of the total thirty-five killed and 141 wounded in 1ATF during the fifteen-week period. Overall, the rate of M16 mine casualties fluctuated according to many variables, especially time and location. When 1ATF’s battalions operated outside Phuoc Tuy Province or in its lightly populated northern area, M16 mine casualties were low, beneath 5 per cent. But when they operated around the main population centres in the province, which the minefield had been laid to protect because they constituted the vital strategic areas, or around vital enemy base areas the M16 mine casualties rose vertiginously – to over half of the total and could, for short two or three week periods, spike at around 80 per cent. That was what happened in the Battle for the Box. Something

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similar also happened in the period from 22 February to 28 April 1970, when 1ATF casualties resulting from M16 mines were comparable. The point is that the laying of the minefield had turned the areas of strategic importance in the Australian province into a vast explosive trap. This meant that the prospect of even higher casualties restricted 1ATF’s tacti- cal movement and skewed its operations in those vital areas. The progress of infantry patrolling was in some cases reduced to twenty metres an hour to allow for careful ‘prodding’ and checking for mines. ‘No-go areas’ were identified; one of the most important was in and around the Long Hai Hills – a key enemy base area, defended with M16 mines lifted from the Australian minefield. When, belatedly, the problem was officially acknowledged, a major allocation of men and engineer resources was also necessary to clear the remaining mines from the field between mid-1969 and mid-1970.

I IMAGINED THE minefield as a metaphor for the incongruity of the Australian barrier strategy in Vietnam, which has never been well understood. The regular big-unit warfare passed down to Australians through Anzac folklore from the world wars did not jell with the requirements of counter- revolutionary warfare in Vietnam. There, as indicated, the revolutionary strategy involved a complex combination of interacting regular big-unit and irregular small-unit wars, which varied according to circumstances. In Phuoc Tuy, the Australian decisions to construct the barrier base and barrier minefield arose from strategic assumptions geared for big-unit war against regular enemy main force units. Such big-units sometimes entered Phuoc Tuy, but the Australian barrier assumptions were still unworkable in a province where support for those big-units was widespread in the villages, and irregular small-unit war stemming from them was by far the most common form. The 1ATF was heavily armed and well trained and, for those reasons, able to fight whatever was in front of it. Operations adapted to small-scale enemy action were the norm; relentless, silent patrolling typically went on in a war without fronts and flanks. Occasionally, the silence was broken by thirty-second contacts. Ambushing was a common 1ATF tactic. More protracted skirmishes, bunker contacts and even larger battles sometimes

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developed with indecisive outcomes. Meanwhile, for long periods between mid-1967 and mid-1970, the M16 mines kept exploding during 1ATF opera- tions in the vital areas of Phuoc Tuy Province. Like a ribbon of death, that long chain of detonations reminds us that successful tactical adaptation did not necessarily mean strategic comprehension. In the face of a complex and dangerous no-win situation, the staying power of 1ATF became the obvious silver lining in the story. It remained a disciplined and coherent fighting force until it was withdrawn. Its units continued to fight with tactical prowess and function in the face of the mine terror, each operating for the notably protracted period of a year. There is no doubt that 1ATF’s general resolve was aligned with the inspiring aspects of the Anzac tradition. Although partly conscripted, Australian servicemen in Vietnam were still imbued with the independent egalitarianism and mateship of the Anzacs and its values: loyalty, courage and persistence in the face of adversity. The Minefield is a story of strategic self-destruction. My intention was not to mythologise that painful reality; it was rather to carry the story of those who perished and suffered on the minefield and mines generally into the future. Because their suffering went to the heart of the 1ATF’s presence and experience in Vietnam, I wanted my book to give them a stake in their own history. In relation to this, the existence in Adelaide of a uniquely South Australian memorial reminds us of the strong communal feeling that the dead should rest among the living.

This essay was originally delivered as an address at the dedication of the memorial to the South Australian members of The Second Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, who died on active service.

Greg Lockhart is author of The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam (Allen & Unwin, 2007), which was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Prize. His essay on the barrier mentality in Australian historiography, ‘Absenting Asia’, was published in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (UWA Publishing, 2012). He is also the author of the essay ‘Race fear, dangerous denial’, in Griffith Review 32: Wicked Problems, Exquisite Dilemmas.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 261 13/03/2015 3:59 pm ESSAY A hundred in a million Obsession with the Victoria Cross Peter Stanley

MARTIN O’MEARA, A Tipperary man who had enlisted in Perth, was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC) for carrying both wounded comrades and ammunition under shellfire at Pozières in August 1916. In 1919, he returned to Perth with three wounds and sergeant’s stripes. The 1963 reference work They Dared Mightily coyly notes that soon after the war ‘his health broke down completely’. What it did not reveal was that O’Meara also returned with ‘delusional insanity, with hallucinations…extremely homicidal and suicidal’. Committed to the insane ward at Claremont repatriation hospital, where he was usually held ‘in restraint’, he died in 1935, his sanity destroyed by the war. By then, another Western Australian VC, Hugo Throssell, had taken his own life in 1933. ‘My old war head is going phut,’ he confided to friends. Curiously, neither O’Meara’s nor Throssell’s trauma seem to attract much attention in the slew of books extolling VC heroes that have appeared in increasing numbers in recent years. During the Crimean War (1854–56), Queen Victoria expressed a desire to recognise exceptional deeds in some tangible form. Previously, bravery had been recognised, if at all, inconsistently – by promotion, monetary reward or mere praise. Instituting a reward ‘For Valour’ – as the medal was inscribed – standardised the record of heroism: a classic Victorian device combining high notions of heroism with bureaucratic documentation.

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The VC has always attracted attention. When it was first introduced it soon became a standard benchmark of valour, the attainment of which conferred useful advantages on a man’s career. During the Indian mutiny- cum-rebellion in 1857–58, young British officers all wanted to gain a VC, and an astonishing twenty-four were awarded for actions performed in one day – 16 November 1857. The awards, though open to all ranks (all European ranks, anyway), mostly went to lieutenants in their twenties in massively disproportionate terms and gaining a VC became a career-defining distinc- tion. (Those who care about them tend to deprecate the idea that VCs are ‘won’: they murmur ‘it’s not a raffle, you know…’) Through the second half of the nineteenth century the VC became the apogee of the Victorian soldier’s dreams of glory. Awarded after clashes with mutineers, Afridis, Sudanese fuzzy-wuzzies, Asantes, Zulus and Pathans, by the end of the reign of its namesake it had become firmly fixed as the ultimate military decoration. About 1,357 VCs have been awarded, a hundred of them to Australians, in five wars: six in the South African war, sixty-six in the Great War, twenty in the Second World War, four in Vietnam and four in Afghanistan. To put that in perspective, that is one hundred men among the million or so Austra- lians who have seen action in wartime since 1900. Statistically, we are looking at a group that is exceptional in every sense.

THE VC IS not just a relic of Australia’s colonial standing. It was re-invented as the VC for Australia in 1991 and during the intervention in Afghanistan four members of the Australian Army received VCs. While proponents of the Anzac legend stress its continuities, there seems to be a world of difference between the volunteer citizen soldier VCs of the Somme and the regular soldiers of the ADF in Uruzgan province. What connects them is, of course, acts of bravery performed at great cost. Indeed, with the enormous veneration that the VC attracts it is important to make clear at the outset that every single one of those awarded the VC has performed a deed worthy of the highest regard. (It’s always a ‘deed’: archaic language comes easily when talking about the VC.) There is no question that these men all did things that were heroic, in some cases displaying extraor- dinary ‘valour’ – more archaic language. The point is not that they did not

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individually deserve recognition, or even that others arguably deserved recognition for comparable deeds and did not receive it. The point is that Australians now seem so fascinated by the VC that such attention has begun to get in the way of a balanced perspective on its place in military history. The commemoration of VCs is highly visible. In Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, their headstones are marked not by the badge of their regiment (for British soldiers) or of their national force (for dominion troops) but by a representation of the VC itself. Cemeteries in which VCs lie are always identified, by signs and explanatory panels or in guidebooks and websites. The home towns of many VCs commemorate their own VCs, with statues and memorials, such as to John Bernard (Jack) Mackey in the main street of Portland, NSW; Edgar Towner in Blackall, Victoria; Harry Murray in Evandale, Tasmania; and no fewer than three VCs in Euroa, Victoria. And VCs are becoming the focus of local remembrance. The local Council in Tumut, NSW, is proposing to change the name of a local park to Ryan Park, after John Ryan, a Tumut man awarded the VC in the attacks on the Hindenburg Line in 1918, who is already commemorated in the park. Tumut’s example exemplifies exactly how adulation of the VC is skewing the traditional Australian egalitarian emphasis on service and sacrifice.

VCs INCREASINGLY POPULATE Australian military history, which has enjoyed an unending boom since the early 1980s. There is a minor cottage industry in writing about VCs, with books ranging from expert and schol- arly studies to illustrated compilations recycling summaries of VC deeds and privately published works by enthusiasts. More books on individual VCs have appeared in the past decade than at any period: ten between 1930 and 2000, but seventeen since then, with several general books: Victoria Cross: Australia’s Finest and the Battles They Fought (Hardie Grant, 2005) by the country’s premier VC expert, Anthony Staunton; Bravest: Australia’s Greatest War Heroes and How They Won Their Medals (Allen & Unwin, 2008) by Robert Macklin; and for children, Australia’s Victoria Cross Recipients (Echidna Books, 2003) by Nicholas Brasch. VCs also figure inevitably in campaign studies, though their deeds are rarely of any significance to the broader story. For example, the six VCs awarded at Lone Pine figure prominently in every account of the action, even

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though they were all awarded to men of battalions sent into the fight later: and whose officers therefore survived to submit the ‘recommendations’ with which the process begins. The VCs do not reflect the nature of the fight, but are unavoidably associated with accounts of it. Australia venerates the VC arguably more than before the ‘war on terror’ brought us perpetual conflict. Since the 1980s, the Australian War Memorial has strongly promoted the VC, which has done much to enhance the medal’s stature. Indeed, it can be argued this promotion has the effect of inclining the Memorial’s visitors (both in person and online) to take an unduly positive view not only towards these few heroes, but also to the uncritical view that the Memorial promotes towards Australia’s military history. The Memorial’s VC collection went from being negligible fifty-odd years ago to occupying the large gallery now at its heart. Significantly, VCs had no strong presence in the Memorial as conceived by Charles Bean, but its collection, and the space devoted to it, grew after his death. It was first displayed in a telephone-box-sized showcase holding a few medals, quaintly called ‘VC Corner’. A ‘Hall of Valour’ opened in 1981, and has been enlarged twice, most recently in 2011. It now displays sixty-seven Australian VCs (and three British VCs with Australian associations) and comparable decorations such as the George Cross. While the Memorial does not buy VCs on the open market, it accepts medals donated by supporters, notably the entrepre- neur Kerry Stokes who has purchased at least seven VCs for it. This reflects the more elevated stature accorded the medal in recent years. The Memorial promotes VC recipients as the highest exponents of the ‘Anzac spirit’. It publishes books about them and articles in its magazine, Wartime, invites VC recipients to participate in ceremonies and public programs, and VCs are prominent in its new café, opened by the Prime Minister in 2014. The Memorial has adopted Ben Roberts-Smith, VC, in particular as its mascot (if a powerful man over two metres tall and correspondingly broad can be so described). He has officiated at exhibition openings and book launches, has led the Anzac Day march and spoken at and for the Memorial – in person, in print and on film, most recently writing a foreword to the Memorial’s book, Anzac Treasures (Murdoch Books, 2014). Far from fostering a neutral or critical attitude to war and Australia, the Memorial arguably promotes rather than

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merely documents, at the expense of the awareness of the experience of the anonymous majority of soldiers.

THERE IS A curious naivety to accounts of what are often described as ‘VC Battles’. A man performs a ‘deed’; his ‘valour’ is recognised by the award of a VC; the accompanying ‘citation’ describes what he did, usually in creaky, passive prose. But the effect is miraculous. The citations are couched as truth- ful statements without authors but also without ambiguity, and accepted seemingly without question. The mystical process is validated by the award being made not just in the name but often by the hand of the sovereign. Adulation of VC heroes is now at odds with a more open, critical under- standing of Australia’s attitude to conflict. It is now possible to show that Australians deserted or caught VDs, to argue that respected commanders were actually fools or knaves; that the Anzac legend was tarnished as well as burnished. But the greater regard for VCs acts to neutralise critical attention. It will undoubtedly be regarded as poor taste to criticise what is perhaps Australian military history’s last remaining sacred cow. And yet, as the scrutiny of the awards made in the Great War to Austra- lians suggests, this was not a process untouched by suggestions of pragmatism and political opportunism. The timing of awards, recommendations rejected, the language of the citations, the circumstances of their award, subjectiv- ity and serendipity all suggest that the process was very much a human and indeed a political process. Gaining one decoration attracted others: ‘I always got first go at the bucket,’ Harry Murray admitted cheerfully to explain later decorations. As the pioneering research of Victoria D’Alton shows, VCs were not simply awarded because a few soldiers performed brave deeds. Rather, they were very much the product of an imperial system under stress. For example, it is surely significant that half of the VCs awarded to men of the AIF on the Western Front were awarded in 1918, the year when the Austra- lian Corps was under the most severe strain, when losses were proportionally greater than even 1916 and when volunteers in Australia had almost entirely dried up. Like the timing of Monash’s knighthood and Melba’s damehood, it can be suggested that awards were intended to bolster Australia’s faltering commitment to the war. Arguments within the chain of command over the

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nature of ‘deeds’ to be rewarded – aggressive actions became preferred over rescuing wounded comrades – show the process to be all too political.

WHETHER THE ATTENTION VCs now attract would impress Great War VCs is problematic. Many played down their awards, as VCs tend to do. Joe Maxwell, the second most highly decorated Australian soldier of the Great War (a boilermaker superbly suited to leadership in war but with little aptitude for peace), reflected modestly that ‘if I was the bravest man that day, then God help the man who was most afraid’. Harry Murray, accepted as the most decorated Australian of the Great War, rarely wore his medals, attended just two Anzac Day services after 1919 and declined to take part in formal occasions, such as the dedication in 1941 of the Australian War Memorial, and refused the chance to return to France in 1956 for fear of ‘raking up very sad memories’. He found, as did many VCs, that receiving the award changes everything. ‘Try not to let it go to your head,’ Ted Kenna (a 1945 VC) counselled Mark Donaldson in 2009. Donaldson’s reflective autobiography, The Crossroad (Macmillan, 2013), suggests that he possesses an unusual, and useful, degree of commonsense and modesty. As it becomes more valorised the VC arouses extremes of passion, with individuals advocating the claims of those arguably ‘denied’ recogni- tion, who have been known to lobby for years to gain redress. In 2013, an Inquiry into Unresolved Recognition for Past Acts of Naval and Military Gallantry and Valour reported, after an extensive two-year inquiry involving dozens of written submissions and public hearings, into the claims of thirteen individuals supposedly denied recognition. They included John Simpson Kirkpatrick (arguably the most famous Australian soldier of the Great War), Edward Sheean (who died heroically on HMAS Armidale in 1942) and ten other sailors – no member of the RAN has been awarded the VC. The very existence of the inquiry – the product of determined pressure over many years – aroused further claims and it examined another 140 cases. In a detailed and well-justified report, the tribunal made the ‘courageous’ recommendation that no ‘retrospective’ VCs should be awarded. Interestingly, while professional historians generally argued against retrospective awards, some popular writers urged that they were justified.

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The number of books on VCs now available means that they are overwhelmingly the best documented and most celebrated members of Australia’s military forces. Some of these books reflect their authors’ exper- tise (notably Anthony Staunton or Andrew Faulkner). Writing about VCs is entirely legitimate and some are works of quality. Such books, however, invariably celebrate heroic ‘deeds’, but are rarely portraits of what war does to men as well as what men do in war. Still, it is incontrovertible that these men did perform acts of individual bravery meriting recognition. Even if other men performed brave deeds that were not recognised, or resulted in anomalies of recognition, surely there is no harm done? Actually, there is.

MUCH HAS BEEN made in recent years of the ‘militarisation’ of Australian history. The argument, first advanced by Professor Marilyn Lake and her co-authors in What’s Wrong with Anzac? (NewSouth, 2010), has been largely dismissed by those who value military history as a field of study and endeav- our. It has also been derided by those who venerate VCs, such as Dr Mervyn Bendle, whose articles in Quadrant denigrate all those who present the Anzac legend as anything other than the premier article of faith and shibboleth of belief in Australia. While some of the arguments of Lake and others have been well founded (such as in their identification of the elevation of Anzac into a founding myth and the undue promotion of military history through the deployment of government funding), they have been advanced by scholars who generally do not identify as military historians and who do not actually know the field from within. Writing as a historian familiar with the history of the Australian Defence Force and its precursors and the operational history of Australian forces in several wars, generally before 1945, I would argue that the recent concen- tration on Victoria Cross heroes as major ‘carriers’ of the Anzac legend has had the effect of skewing the presentation and perception of Australian military history. Focusing on and invariably celebrating the heroism and success so often a part of the VCs’ stories has the effect of distracting attention from the horror and futility that is also part of the broader story. The Australian VCs awarded

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on the Western Front – just over half of the total – celebrate individual valour in ways that counter the mass, industrial-scale, indiscriminate slaughter of that war: perhaps that partly explains their popularity. The story of Arthur Blackburn, South Australia’s celebrated VC at Pozières, for example, helps to soften the anonymous, violent, degrading death that was for six thousand-odd Australians the essence of the Somme. The recent intensification of interest in the VC suggest that war is about heroic individual endeavour, not assaults by infantry killed en masse or the deployment of high-technology weapons. Veneration of VCs challenges Australia’s tradition of democratic commemoration. Robert Macklin, in his book Bravest (Allen & Unwin, 2008), which deals with a selected few VCs, claims that ‘the VC has a particular appeal to the egalitarian streak in the Australian character’. But even he concedes that as the VC became ever more prized, its story became ‘ever more gloriously arrayed with myth and legend’. I would argue that the VC story actually denies the egalitarian streak in Australian military history because it valorises the few rather than empathising with the many. Writing on the Somme in 1916, the Australian official correspondent and later historian Charles Bean reflected on the AIF’s part in the great offensive. He praised its men but emphasised that ‘they are not heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do.’ While his official history duly notes each Australian VC, he surely knew that those decorated were not the only heroes. It is significant that the Roll of Honour in the memorial he founded records the names but not the decorations of the dead. A century on, Bean’s admiration for the egali- tarian, volunteer citizen force he documented, celebrated and mourned seems less accepted than once it was. The emphasis on ‘Anzac VC heroes’ ensures that Australia sees glory in its war history rather than the horrific reality.

Professor Peter Stanley of UNSW Canberra was formerly the principal historian at the Australian War Memorial and is the author of twenty-seven books, mainly on Australian military history. His recent books include Lost Boys of Anzac (NewSouth, 2014) and Bad Characters (Pier 9, 2010), which jointly won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011.

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Laura Jan Shore

When I look upon the suffering

In Afghanistan, a widow receives my monthly stipend, a small apology as I monitor my intake of news, post a cheque but can’t stomach the photos.

My widow’s daughters, swathed in black, don’t attend school, they’re shadowed even in the marketplace by the insistent drone –

a Reaper, navigated by a pilot in the desert of Nevada, who watches and with a joystick, eliminates.

At five pm, she clocks out, roars off in her SUV, picks up her kids at day care, fixes supper, tucks them into bed and crumples undercover of her own darkness.

I lounge at the beach in full view of a cloudless sky, fluke of providence –

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yet impressed into sand, my bones, shrouded by the weight of war,

cry out to the Heavens – Fix this!

Can it be we’re not broken but whole, not drowning but safe?

Did Mary suffer, knowing as she did, each wound her child would bear? And yet –

she said yes, to the angel, yes, to all of it.

Laura Jan Shore is the author of Breathworks (Dangerously Poetic Press, 2002) and Water over Stone (Interactive Press), winner of IP Picks Best Poetry 2011. She won the 2012 Martha Richardson Poetry Prize, the 2009 FAW John Shaw Nielson Award and the 2006 CJ Dennis Open Poetry Award.

GriffithREVIEW48.indb 271 13/03/2015 3:59 pm 263 412380 ESSAY Anzac instincts The missing modern military voice James Brown

IT IS A curious thing, perhaps unique to Australia, that someone appraising the phenomenon of Anzac – that shared national oath to remember military sacrifice and honour wartime service – must first present genealogical military credentials. It’s a defensive move; it declares you share the Anzac spirit, and have a claim to it – an inoculation of sorts against the charge of being unqualified to speak to a topic of such secular sacredness. In a country where the Anzac spirit stirs passions it can also carve empti- ness. How to connect with Anzac if you’ve never donned a uniform? How to feel martial pride when you are martially barren, missing a military link? Family ties help. So when respected journalists pen an analysis of Anzac they often append a notation of a family member’s military service in World War II, or better still World War I. Those addendums declare, ‘I am a part of this, not just a disinterested observer, my family story allows me to have a say in what this Anzac thing means.’ Some Australians apologetically cringe about their lack of military service. Prime Minister Tony Abbott is one. On the two occasions that he has visited the army’s First Brigade in Darwin and participated in morning physical training sessions, he has told soldiers ‘if I can’t fight with you at least I can sweat with you’. Prime Minister Abbott further lamented his lack of

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military service both at the opening of an Afghanistan war exhibition and at a Victoria Cross investiture ceremony by quoting Samuel Johnson, ‘every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier’. It is a curious situation when the leader of a country, a man who has been in public life for more than thirty years and part of the Cabinet for more than a decade, should express such discomfort when face to face with members of the Australian Defence Force. He clearly admires the military as an institution, and has an obvious and deep regard for its leaders. Two of the first four Australians knighted by the Prime Minister under a revised Order of Australia have been former defence chiefs, one of whom is now the Governor-General. Prime Minister Abbott’s relationship with the military is typical of his colleagues in the Australian parliament: the Australian Defence Force is something to be regarded reverently, but rarely. It is the lucky legacy of a peaceful continent that as few as 8 per cent of Australian parliamentarians have ever grappled with military issues prior to entering parliament – nearly half of those in brief student stints at university Army Reserve regiments. Only a few have had significant military careers or exposure to the Defence Department. The last parliament’s veterans included MP Graham Edwards, severely wounded during his service in Vietnam, and Mike Kelly, a former military lawyer with experience in the Middle East. Thirty thousand Australians have served in Afghanistan in the past fourteen years, and tens of thousands more in conflicts in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and Iraq. Despite this, there is only one veteran of these conflicts – Andrew Nikolic AM, the Member for Bass – in the federal parliament. He, along with the Member for Cowan Luke Simpkins (a former military police- man) and South Australian Senator David Fawcett (an army aviation officer) are the only members of parliament with experience in the Australian Defence Force since the attacks of 9/11. Though the current Assistant Minister for Defence Stuart Robert is a former army officer and the Shadow Parliamen- tary Secretary for Defence Gai Brodtmann once worked within the Defence Materiel Organisation, it has been a generation since Australia last had a defence minister with a background of military service. Of course, simply serving in the Australian Defence Force does not mean that a parliamentarian is automatically better equipped to deal with military policy issues, but it

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does at least equip them with the language necessary to grapple with an area of public policy that employs two out of five Commonwealth government employees and accounts for nearly $30 billion of funding each year, including some of the federal government’s most expensive projects. The $50 billion project to build up to twelve new submarines for the Royal Australian Navy, for example, is one of the largest single purchases any Australian government will make. The intricacies of defence policy have largely remained off the radar as a federal electoral issue, with only 6 per cent of voters rating it a vote-deciding issue in a Morgan poll prior to the 2013 election. Reform of Veterans Affairs and policies on military personnel have only become political issues recently because of the polarising interventions of Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie, herself a former member of the Australian Army. It is all too obvious that Australian politicians are not on familiar ground when appraising the military. ‘How good are our generals?’ I asked a group of federal MPs and senators a year or so ago, and the consensus was that they are very good indeed. ‘How do you know, and how could you prove it?’ was my follow-up question. It was answered with an uncomfortable silence. As Australians have fought and died in operations overseas in recent years, many of our political leaders have reached for the annals of Anzac to inform their awed rhetoric and heartfelt platitudes to military service. Yet in most cases a deeper understanding of what it means to go to war in the modern age is missing. Instead of the forensic examination of policy and performance manda- tory in other portfolios, political leaders feel most comfortable when commemorating soldiers rather than addressing them – and their issues.

AND SO WE come to the Centenary of Anzac: conceived by consultants, succoured by civilians, and with its own government-endorsed merchan- dising plan. In these next four years, Australians are paying hundreds of millions to pay respects to those who shall not grow old. All up, more than $300 million – drawn from state and federal taxpayers as well as corporate donations – will be spent on a cacophony of centenary commemoration. Already the forecourt of the Australian War Memorial has grown heavy with

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openings of new historical galleries and a succession of activities designed to make sure that Australians remember the actions of one hundred years ago. On television there is an epic seven-part series, Gallipoli, in which every Australian seems a boy-soldier of fifteen and every British general sports a waxed moustache, barely hiding lips curled with disdain. Another television program, themed as one of the Anzac Centenary initiatives, will travel the country on a sort of Anzac Antiques Roadshow – allowing relatives to display and discuss family military talismans. Explaining the endurance of Anzac several years ago, Inga Clendin- nen wrote in The Monthly: ‘Anzac Day holds and is increasing its hold over “the Australian imagination” because it has the plasticity – the openness to personal readings and elaborations – to be, like the Spring God, constantly renewed. Anzac Day is for me, as I think it is for many Australians, a personal possession… That is how ritual works, as a portmanteau of past experience and of present emotion.’ The emotional outpouring that Anzac and the Anzac Centenary evinces is genuine, but there is much that this sentiment occludes. Among all this calorific commemoration, the retelling of retreaded Gallipoli stories, there is an uncanny void. The voice of the modern military is missing. In some ways this is unsurprising. So much of Anzac has been and is for civilians. Philip Salom’s excellent poem ‘Seeing Gallipoli from the Sky’ reminds us that for most of the past century Anzac Day marches were usually civilian affairs:

Or consider the days of Anzac in the streets not only those in suits come back on duty but the ghosts among their ritual ranks always in uniform.

A decade ago, joining the throng for Sydney’s Anzac Day marches, I would see battle-exposed soldiers in their early twenties choose dark suits over uniforms – self-conscious of too proudly displaying their newly earned campaign medals. While military re-enactors wore uniforms spruced to pay tribute to a martial way of life they had never known or been a part of, some

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of those Australians who had been closest to the recent war felt ashamed of folding themselves into the towering myths of the original Anzacs. Ironically on Anzac Day, first gazetted as a rest day for those who had served, it is the military that now work hardest – fanning out across small towns and big cities to support dawn services and catafalque parties. The legend of Anzac is of civilians reluctantly called to arms, volunteering to stand and face the ultimate test, equipped with little more than their innate personal characteristics and their togetherness. As Jane Ross distils in The Myth of the Digger (Hale and Ironmonger, 1985), he is a soldier rather than an officer, an amateur rather than a professional. In the Anzac legend war is seasonal, like bushfire. A nation can be quickly called to arms – each cricketer shown a grenade, each jackaroo issued a horse. Just as quickly, the ranks can be retired. It seems veterans of military service can be viewed in much the same way. Something to be taken out of the box on Anzac Day, then packed away far from sight for another year. As a nation, Australia is not comfortable in thinking about soldiering as a profession or the military as a professional institution. Romantic notions of soldiering are painted thickly, through so many of the stories retold in government-sponsored school Anzac materials year after year, and the morning incantations on 25 April. Even today, I suspect that most Australians have only seen a soldier directly during Anzac ceremonies. To many Australians, war is Anzac Day and Anzac Day is war. It may not be too much of a stretch to think that Australians have best connected with the war in Afghanistan through the funereal Anzac-like ramp ceremonies, lachrymose Gallipoli speeches or the elegiac Afghanistan paintings of Ben Quilty, one of which is featured on the cover of Enduring Legacies. In Australia, war is emotional – all art and little science. This is a shame, because the modern Australian Defence Force and its veterans could use a better public appreciation of military science. The immense power of the Centenary of Anzac could be better harvested for the living rather than the dead.

IN AFGHANISTAN, I would explain to American military colleagues that despite the pomp and uniforms of Anzac Day and the pervasiveness

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of ‘the digger’, the veteran does not hold the same position in Australia as in the United States or the United Kingdom. In both countries I have seen innovative programs designed to help returning veterans reconnect with their communities, to bridge the gulf between the civil and military after returning from operational service. Yet for decades in Australia, until only very recently, the veterans’ community has been moribund. The Department of Veterans Affairs has largely contented itself with the necessary task of cashing out veterans in need of compensation and support, and caring for the aged pensioners of previous wars. This is vital work, but not what the tens of thousands of veterans of more recent wars need. Today’s returning soldiers are vastly more likely than not to return from conflict with no visible injuries. What they need more than anything else is status in a society that understands what they have done and can demonstrate that it is valued. Australian political leaders have struggled to explain Afghanistan and Iraq, and why there is a need for Australian involvement, and as a result these wars have not been popular. Private veterans organisations like the RSL have lacked inspiration, relevance and accountability for all the hundreds of millions they have received over the years. Australians are overwhelmed by the personal stories of past wartime sacrifice, and this has left them largely blind to the creaking, decrepit infra- structure barely supporting veterans returning from the wars of the Middle East. It was with some trepidation that I wrote Anzac’s Long Shadow (Black Inc., 2014), and concluded that Australia’s national obsession with Anzac teeters on the superficial, that the Centenary commemorations have become a four-year lugubrious festival for the dead, that our modern military are being occluded, and that as a nation we have neither the head nor heart to think about the possibility of future war. As is expected, I established my credentials and recounted my personal connection to the Anzac story. My grandfather’s service at Kokoda, the Gallipoli-era bayonet he carried across the Owen Stanleys and that I lugged through the highways of Iraq and the highroads of Afghanistan. It was my

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intention to critically analyse Anzac, but in doing so I did not want to injure the memory or the institution. For several years I had pondered a paradox: How could a country that so worships warriors know so little about war? My personal response to Anzac is positive – there is much that is good about it. But it is hard to hold the good and the bad simultaneously: difficult to point out the awkward wrapped inside the sacred.

ONLY A FEW months after Anzac’s Long Shadow was published, I was in Paris for talks on strategic defence issues with representatives from the French government and various other military experts. Given it was late April, our genial French hosts thought my colleagues and I might like to attend the Anzac Day service at Villers-Bretonneux. With thousands of others we made our way along hedge-trimmed country roads to a cold paddock on the side of a hill, flanked by white stone monuments. I was touched that so many people would come so early to such a remote place to commemorate soldiers, but torn by the recognition that the blood red carpet laid to guide the public to their seats had been thoughtlessly trailed over the first set of graves. Soldiers spend much of their lives intricately handling the Australian national flag, folding it, raising it, lowering it in meticulous ceremonies in which it must never touch the ground. Seeing Australians at Villers-Breton- neux carelessly wearing our national ensign as a cape jarred the soldier in me, but then Anzac Day is laden with complexities. In the many official speeches of the morning there was that reverence again and tales of personal loss, and for me a sense of hollowness. Two things were missing from the morning’s serious discussions. The first, a sense of why Australians had been there to fight: what strategic currents had dragged our men and women to northern France and what cause had our then-government thought important enough to lay down lives for? The second, the hard military science of what Australians had actually achieved in the fight at Villers-Bretonneux. There are different stories to tell about Australia’s Fourth Brigade that fought at Villers-Bretonneux, stories that don’t emphasise where its slain soldiers hailed from or how many family members they left behind.

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They are stories of a military unit that was dashed against the sands of Gallipoli and slaughtered because it had scant training. A unit that then spent another three years patiently learning the science of war, and refining techniques, tactics and procedures. A brigade that learnt, among other things, that its most important soldiers were not the furious trench-clearers, but the radio operators who needed the closest instruction and the best care. The Fourth Brigade developed well-trained leaders who understood military staff work as much as weapons handling. When the battle of Villers-Bretonneux came they were able to handle the complex machinations of a night-time advance into the small town, using innovative techniques to co-ordinate their progress with flanking units. The Fourth Brigade at Villers-Bretonneux was as much a professional military unit as any Australian unit since. But that is a difficult story to tell on a monument or memorial. In my discussions back in Paris we spoke little of physical courage and mateship. Instead, we spoke of an uncertain strategic environment, space- based systems, Russian-supported proxies in Ukraine and the renewed nationalism behind assertive maritime territorialism in the South China Sea.

IN THE 1930S, the famous American General George Patton Jr. (then a Lieutenant Colonel) was dispatched to Anzac Cove to analyse the fight that had happened there in 1915 between Turkish and Australian soldiers. He found that the Australians were ‘entirely inexperienced’ whereas the Turks were ‘carefully trained’. He concluded: ‘Undisciplined valor accomplishes little but to insure [sic] losses.’ His report from Gallipoli was closely analysed by the US Marine Corps in the late 1930s, and with further detailed tacti- cal experimentation formed the basis for the successful amphibious landing doctrine that helped America win the war in the Pacific and saved thousands of soldier’s lives. Even today, the US Marine Corps still scientifically teaches Gallipoli to its junior officers as an example of poor military preparation. Australia’s junior military officers, however, only touch Gallipoli through the prism of Anzac Day and its ceremonies. Perhaps the true paradox of Anzac is that even now, a century later, Australians have not yet truly owned responsibility for the defeat at Anzac

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Cove. Some fail to acknowledge it was a defeat at all: Alan Bond at the 1983 America’s Cup, for example, declared the win as ‘Australia’s greatest victory since Gallipoli’. Defeat and tragedy have traditionally been among the most power- ful motivations for militaries to reform, but Gallipoli did not seem to spur tremendous innovation in Australia. Perhaps that is why so little of the widespread concern for Australian soldiers needlessly slain at Anzac Cove, or the ingrained (and mostly false) history that says Australians were poorly commanded at Gallipoli, has converted into detailed efforts to ensure that today’s military leaders are up to the task of leading an amphibious operation, let alone winning a war. Which is ironic, because the Australian Defence Force is currently building a large amphibious force once again. I’ve been lucky enough to receive hundreds of emails responding to Anzac’s Long Shadow, and interacted with plenty more people in the past year’s engagements. The responses that have most warmed me have come from the veterans’ community, expressing thanks for articulating the disconnec- tion they feel from this Anzac we have created in 2015 and for flagging the awkwardness of Afghan veterans who are returning home to a community that doesn’t understand their service, but is furiously engaged in creating more memories of Gallipoli. The most important responses though have been from those who previ- ously felt that Anzac, and the intricacies of military service, were not theirs to discuss. Anzac is too significant a thing to only belong to the scions of those who served, or to the institutions that husband it today. The military is too important a national institution to be neglected by those who otherwise take an interest in public policy. And the military is trying to better understand its place in contemporary society. The Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison, who warmly endorsed Anzac’s Long Shadow the week it was released, has spoken often of the perniciousness of the Anzac myth for the military:

…the Anzac legend – as admirable as it is – has become something of a double-edged sword. For the army, the most pervasive distor- tion about what really happened in Turkey in 1915 is that many

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Australians now have an idealised image of the Australian soldier as a rough-hewn country lad – hair gold, skin white – a larrikin who fights best with a hangover and who never salutes officers, especially the Poms. In the Australian psyche every soldier is Mel Gibson in Gallipoli.

This is a pantomime caricature, and frankly it undermines our recruit- ment from some segments of society and breeds a dangerous complacency about how professional and sophisticated soldiering really is. His last point about the sophistication of modern professional military services is critical. In the century since the Anzac landings Australian soldiers have largely prided themselves, and been regarded by society, for their tacti- cal skills and individual attributes. But now the problems of the Australian military are much more strategic – and its capabilities and systems take decades of patient nurturing to develop. A society schooled in the language of Gallipoli is not well placed to understand or help guide the development of the Australian military as it contemplates an uncertain future in which war is still a small but very real possibility. More politicians, of all stripes, are now taking an interest in the future of the Australian military rather than just its past. But more voices from among the military are needed in this national conversation. And in time I hope they will emerge.

James Brown is the author of Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (Black Inc., 2014) and a former army officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Solomon Islands. He now directs the Alliance 21 program at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney, is vice-president of the North Bondi RSL, and is an ambassador for Soldier On, a charity for wounded soldiers.

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RECESSIONAL

CRAIG CLIFF

The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart… Rudyard Kipling, ‘Recessional’

SAM COMES UP to her at work. He’s wearing his favourite shirt, the grey one with the Portofino cuffs he says make him feel like a secret agent. People in the office talk about this shirt: how often he wears it, whether he washes it every time. People in the office are dickheads. ‘Ames,’ he says. Anyone else calling her ‘Ames’ would have set her to thinking up excuses. ‘I’m having a barbeque for Anzac Day. We do it every year. Have some beers, listen to music. It’s really chill, though it may ramp up ’cause it’s a Friday night this year. I’ll cook whatever vego nonsense you want to bring, so long as it goes on the barbie.’ ‘I eat meat,’ she says, ‘sometimes.’ ‘Right. Well, there’ll be plenty of meat. Get your iron levels up.’ She touches the puffiness beneath her right eye. Wonders if she looks anaemic. ‘It’s your duty as a Kiwi,’ he continues, ‘as a fellow Anzac. Without you, it’d just be an A’AC barbie, which sounds awful. C’mon.’

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‘Will I get to meet your famous underage girlfriend?’ ‘She’s nineteen, Amelia. Don’t listen to what those other knuckle- draggers say.’ ‘Still, that’s quite an age difference,’ she says, her eyebrows raised. She’s thirty-two; Sam is a jokey, wayward thirty-one – the kind of colleague you half expect to have a teenage girlfriend. She’s been in Perth two years, after working rail and dam projects in Queensland and, before that, a government job in Wellington. She’s managed to stay ahead of the westward wave of the recession. Each new project has another zero at the end of the price tag. It can’t last. People talk about making hay while the sun shines, people who’ve never been on a farm in their lives. Right now they’re working on another desalination plant – her and Sam and the dickheads – though no one is sure if the deal will reach financial close. ‘Yes, Liddy’ll be there,’ he says. ‘She’s really looking forward to it.’ ‘Will you have the recast cashflow ready by Thursday?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘Then I’ll come. And I’ll bring my famous guacamole.’ ‘Excellent.’ He places his hand on her shoulder and smiles. She tries not to sniff the scent of his Portofino cuff.

COLD CHISEL, MEN at Work, Grinspoon and then Sam hits pause. ‘Just got a message from Eddie,’ he announces. Conversations stop. Guests look at their host. ‘He’s not still coming, is he?’ asks Sam’s friend, the one who has made holes in his earlobes the size of Alka-Seltzers – the one with the slippery name that Amelia can’t remember. This is her second time among Sam’s friends. The first time was for a work do, and the evening had stretched into one of those glorious, unplannable nights – though she’d forgotten how it had pained her to see Sam outside work. To see he was the same sociable lunk with everyone. Sam nods at his phone. ‘On his way.’ ‘He’s got a nerve.’

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‘Why?’ Amelia asks. Twelve faces turn to her. It’s the first thing she’s said since arriving and finding a beer. ‘He slept in,’ says the earlobe-stretcher, making air-quotes. ‘Didn’t make the dawn service,’ Sam adds. ‘He was hungover,’ Nikhil says. ‘Lousy cunt,’ says the earlobe-stretcher. ‘Easy now,’ says Liddy, who has just emerged through the sliding door carrying a platter of soft cheeses, crackers and preserves in little white ramekins. So small and eager, she wouldn’t look out of place in a Girl Guide uniform. Sam says, ‘We’re talking about Eddie, babe.’ ‘Oh,’ she says and tuts. This is the final word on the subject. Sam unpauses his iPod: piano intro. Tourism ad schmaltz. It’s time for a cool change, apparently. Amelia can’t help but screw up her face. ‘You all right?’ the earlobe-stretcher asks Amelia. ‘It just hits me, you know, right here,’ she says, knocking her breastbone with her knuckles. ‘I hear you,’ he says and sips his beer. She looks up at his face, sees for the first time that he is on the make, that he is impervious to her sarcasm. She feels flattered and tired all at once. ‘Which dawn service did you go to this morning?’ he asks. ‘There’s more than one?’ ‘Yeah. There’s Kings Park.’ He starts a tally on his fingers. ‘Then there’s one in Claremont, which is where you live, isn’t it?’ Oh God, she thinks, he’s been grilling Sam about me. ‘And there are services in Subiaco and Freo–’ ‘You know what,’ she says, hoping the truth will douse him, ‘I didn’t go to any of them.’ ‘Daniel bothering you, Ames?’ Sam appears over her shoulder and clinks the neck of Daniel’s beer with his own. Daniel, Amelia says in her head. Daniel Daniel Daniel. ‘We were just talking about dawn services,’ Daniel says. She narrows her eyes and he mirrors her expression.

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‘Ah,’ Sam says and checks his phone. ‘Are they the same in New Zealand as here?’ ‘Pretty much,’ she says, remembering the first and last service she attended, back when she was a prefect at high school and attendance was mandatory. ‘I mean, dawn is dawn, right. We get it back home before you do, so–’ ‘Right,’ says Daniel. Sam smiles and slides away to pull the hem of another friend’s T-shirt. Amelia raises her empty bottle to Daniel. ‘Bathroom,’ she says and escapes.

SHE SURVEYS THE spread on the plastic patio table. Caprese salad, potato salad, a bowl of kalamata olives, two french sticks and her offering: Turkish bread and homemade beetroot dip. Sam has finally fired up the barbeque but the meat will be a while. She wonders if it’s bad manners to take a finger of her bread now – no one else seems to be eating – and if it’s doubly bad to choose the thing she brought. ‘Sam said you were bringing guacamole?’ She looks up and sees Sally, one of Sam’s few married friends. They’ve spoken about me, she thinks. Sally’s hands rest on her belly; she’s reached that stage of pregnancy where she must have an overnight bag with her at all times. ‘I mean, I can’t eat it anyway,’ Sally continues, ‘but I love guaca- mole. I dream about it. Guacamole and runny egg yolks.’ ‘I’m pretty sure you can eat guacamole,’ Amelia says. ‘If it’s freshly made.’ ‘Really?’ ‘I’ve never been pregnant, so I’m no expert.’ ‘Fuck. I’ll have to Google it again,’ Sally reaches across the table for her phone. ‘My brain, among other things, is not what it used to be.’ ‘You can probably eat this,’ Amelia says and seizes the opportunity

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to dab a piece of bread in the violent pink of her dip. ‘I decided to go Turkish instead.’ ‘Turkish?’ ‘Yeah, you know,’ she says, swallowing her mouthful and waving the remaining nib of bread. ‘Gallipoli. Anzac Cove. Little Mehmet. It seemed more appropriate than Mexican.’ Sally moves her hands up and down her belly. ‘But we fought the Turks,’ she says slowly. ‘The Ottoman Empire, yes. Have you been to Turkey?’ ‘No. When Greg and I went to Europe it wasn’t the right time.’ ‘Protests?’ ‘No, I mean, we weren’t there in April, so…’ ‘I went in June.’ ‘Oh, really. Hey Greg, Amelia and I were just talking about Galli- poli. She says she went there in June.’ With his light blue shorts rolled up high on his thighs and his canvas shoes without socks, Sally’s husband looks boyish and faintly nautical. ‘What was it like?’ he asks. ‘Beautiful, sad, bustling, quiet…’ She can feel the adjectives bubbling up inside her. ‘Surprising.’ Greg nods and leans into Sally. ‘Hey babe, I thought you said someone was bringing the rum?’ ‘That someone was Eddie.’ ‘Fuck. Guess I’ll stick to beer.’ ‘He’s still coming, supposedly.’ Greg grunts. ‘It’s actually quite nice of the Turks,’ Amelia says, ‘to let us take over Anzac Cove today, or tonight, or whenever the dawn is over there. I can’t imagine us being so accepting of the grandchildren of a thwarted invading force coming to, say, Cape York or the Coromandel every year to get drunk and make a mess.’ ‘Beer,’ Greg repeats. ‘You want something, babe?’ ‘I’ll come have a look myself.’

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ALONE, SHE THINKS about Turkey. The red flags the size of tennis courts. The minarets. Gemma and Simon bickering in the backseat of the rental car. The Turkish woman in the blue and white headscarf, which reminded her of Royal Doulton china. How that woman ran her fingers over the names of the fallen at the New Zealand memorial on Chunuk Bair. How, when she came to a wreath that looked as if it had been in the sun for many days, she stooped to straighten it. How her honey-coloured handbag slipped off her shoul- der and she placed it gently beside her feet. How she remained crouched over the wreath for seconds, minutes, years. And how afterwards, as the sun was setting, Amelia, Baker, Gemma and Simon passed a pier a short drive south of Anzac Cove. Children were swimming there. Locals. The four of them had their togs in the car and so they swam too, in the honey-coloured twilight, in the warm Aegean water, as if nothing had ever happened.

HOODOO GURUS. PAUL Kelly. The Go-Betweens. Anzac shman- zac, Amelia thinks. She starts compiling a mental playlist of songs both countries can claim. ‘Counting the Beat.’ Anything by Dragon. Gotye featuring Kimbra. Over at the barbeque, Sam is showing Greg a video on his phone. Daniel and Sally talk about the morality of bringing another life into the world. Nikhil says to anyone who’ll listen, ‘I knew Eddie’d chicken out.’ ‘You eat sausages, hey Nikhil?’ Liddy shouts. ‘Yeah I eat sausages,’ he says, ‘so long as there’s no beef or pork in them.’ Liddy’s mouth withers to a pink asterisk. ‘Oh, well,’ she begins. ‘Only kidding, Lid. I eat ’em.’ ‘We have lamb rissoles, too,’ Liddy says and winces. Amelia knows that expression. She has winced that wince: My God! I sound like my mother. ‘Don’t worry about me, Lid.’ ‘And you, Amelia? Sam said something–’

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‘I eat everything.’ She pushes off the railing and steps closer to Liddy. ‘Great,’ Liddy says, uncertainly. ‘Great.’ ‘I don’t like the look or feel of raw meat,’ she says, unable to stop herself, ‘so I don’t cook it at home.’ ‘Ah, I thought it was some complex moral code.’ ‘Moral-free zone right here,’ she says holding her arms aloft, then worries Daniel may be lurking behind her. She lowers her arms and coughs into her fist. Nikhil is still standing there with the two of them, looking at his phone and biting his bottom lip. ‘So, Liddy,’ Amelia says, ‘you’re studying to be a vet?’ ‘Vet nurse.’ ‘Right. Sorry. No, not “sorry”, there’s nothing wrong with…’ ‘That’s okay. I wouldn’t want to be a vet even if I was smart enough. All you do is cut.’ ‘You like animals, then,’ Amelia says, wanting to keep the conver- sation going, not wanting to seem like a bitch or a knuckle-dragger. ‘I’m working in a city practice while I finish my diploma,’ Liddy says. ‘It’s all cats and dogs and the occasional ferret, but I want to do bigger animals.’ Nikhil snorts and moves away. ‘Like horses?’ Amelia asks. ‘No, not horses. They tend to have their own specialised vets. I’m writing a paper at the moment about deer. I like deer. And goats, alpaca, ostrich. There are more and more hobby farmers, especially in the Swan Valley, with small herds who need a lot of help.’ ‘Do you eat meat?’ ‘Of course. Venison is beautiful. If I didn’t eat meat, it’d be kind of hypocritical to help farmers with the animals they’re raising for the table.’ Amelia looks at Sam, tending the barbeque. He could turn around at any moment and see her playing nice with Liddy. ‘What about kangaroo?’ she asks.

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Liddy shakes her head. ‘That’s different.’ ‘Different how? Because of Skippy?’ ‘They don’t farm kangaroos,’ Liddy says. It’s her turn to look over at Sam. ‘Everything in the supermarket – remember, most roo meat still ends up in pet food – comes from wild populations.’ She’s read this on the internet, Amelia thinks. She braces for a wave of outraged naivety, but it doesn’t come. ‘So possum’s off the menu?’ she asks. Liddy’s eyes widen. Amelia can’t help thinking the expression is possum-like. ‘People eat possum?’ Liddy asks. ‘Back home they’re a pest. We mostly just poison them, though every so often someone tries to put one in a pie.’ ‘Gosh,’ Liddy says. She picks up a pair of tongs and clicks them together twice. ‘I was supposed to take these to Sam,’ she says, excusing herself.

THE SKY IS dark when Eddie arrives through the sliding door like the final guest on a celebrity talk show. He holds aloft a bottle of Bundaberg Red. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ Daniel says. ‘Good to bloody see you too, mate.’ Amelia remembers him from that night in town. His black rimmed glasses and tugboat captain’s beard. Sam slides between Eddie and Daniel. He says something softly that’s swallowed by the music. Amelia steps forward, wishing Diesel would find the words on the tip of his tongue and quiet down already. ‘You’re joking, right?’ Eddie says. ‘You’re the joke,’ Daniel says, reaching around Sam to thrust a finger into his friend’s chest. Nikhil says, ‘I think you should just go, Edward.’ ‘No way, man.’ Amelia looks at the bottle in Eddie’s hand, notices the swaying liquid, the three fingers of rum already consumed.

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‘Let me be the voice of reason,’ Sam says. ‘We’re all here celebrat- ing the end of a great day, but the reason we have the day off – you know this – is the diggers.’ ‘Lest we forget,’ Daniel says, barely opening his mouth. ‘It’s a contract,’ Sam continues. ‘Pay your respects, keep the memory alive, then have a holiday. You weren’t there at sunrise, we don’t think you should be here now. Maybe next year, hey?’ Eddie rises onto his toes so that he’s almost eye-to-eye with Sam. ‘Fuck next year,’ he says. Sam turns to the side. Whether it’s planned or not, he’s facing Liddy now. Something passes between them. He steps back and strikes Eddie’s cheek with his swinging right hand. ‘Sam!’ Liddy shouts. Amelia isn’t sure if it’s disapproval or appro- bation – a pacifist’s scorn or some cavegirlish blurt of arousal. ‘Ah,’ Eddie says, crouched and holding the side of his face. Sam fans his hand as if he’s tried to pick up a plate that’s piping hot. Amelia wants to step forward and say something. Use her powers as the token New Zealander. Grant him diplomatic immunity. Sober things the fuck out. All this because Eddie slept through the dawn service? It’s ludicrous. A John Howard wet dream. Eddie stands and is much smaller this time. He places his bottle of rum on the table, turns and re-enters the house. Liddy’s beside her now, leaning against the railing. ‘That was seriously fucked,’ Amelia says. ‘I know, right? Like, why would he think he could come here?’ ‘That’s not what I mean. Those guys were like the Stasi or something. I’ve never seen Sam… I mean, it’s a fucking barbeque.’ Liddy pulls her possum face again. ‘I need to get some air,’ Amelia says. ‘But we’re outside. And the meat’s ready.’ ‘I’ve just… Excuse me,’ she says and walks away.

SHE FINDS EDDIE sitting on the kerb. ‘Mind if I join you?’ ‘Emily, right?’

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‘Amelia.’ ‘Ah. Bet you get that a lot.’ ‘Not that often.’ ‘Eddie,’ he says and offers his hand. ‘Yeah, I know.’ She leaves his hand dangling, but waggles the bottle of rum she plucked from the table as she left the party. He rubs his cheek. ‘Quite a scene back there.’ ‘I was going to say the exact same thing.’ She unscrews the red cap and takes a slug. ‘I don’t think you should have given up so easily.’ ‘I was punched.’ ‘He barely connected.’ ‘So I should have gone a couple of rounds with him?’ He takes the bottle. ‘Was the party that dull?’ ‘Well, there was a Delta Goodrem song on earlier…’ ‘Liddy’s doing.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘What do you think of her?’ ‘Why do you care what I think of Sam’s girlfriend?’ ‘Just making conversation.’ He leans back and looks up at the canopy of the neighbour’s fig tree. ‘Did Sam say something?’ she asks. ‘I think she’s good for him.’ ‘She probably is. Certainly good for his testosterone levels.’ She takes another drink. ‘Bah,’ she says and wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist, ‘I just work with him. And I only met her for the first time this afternoon.’ There’s a slight breeze. Amelia crosses her arms, waiting for the rum to take effect. ‘Is it a hangover from high school?’ she asks. ‘What?’ ‘The way that lot talk about Anzac Day. The bullshit Sam was spouting about it being a contract.’ Eddie shrugs. ‘I guess it started somewhere.’ ‘I didn’t go to a dawn service either, if it’s any consolation.’ ‘Is that why you’re out here?’

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‘I’m here by choice. I think different rules apply.’ ‘Because you’re a girl?’ ‘And a Kiwi. And because I managed to avoid Daniel since he interrogated me about it.’ ‘You think being a Kiwi gives you special privileges?’ ‘Without me, it’s just an A’AC party.’ Eddie looks at her, his brow furrowed. ‘Take the NZ out of Anzac and what do you get? Sorry, it’s Sam’s joke.’ ‘Figures.’ He takes another drink and rests the bottle on the ground between them. ‘The music in there isn’t right,’ she says. ‘For Anzac Day. I think maybe Sam’s playing his Australia Day playlist by mistake.’ Eddie scratches his beard. There’s something awkward about the action, like a dog scratching its ear with a hind leg. ‘You mean, there’s no New Zealand music?’ ‘That’d be a start. But shouldn’t an Anzac Day playlist trumpet the things Australians and New Zealanders have done together.’ ‘What, like Crowded House?’ ‘You’re not a fan?’ ‘Uh, no. They sound like,’ he pauses, searching for a simile, ‘like Christians too scared to sing about God.’ ‘My ex used to say Neil Finn should be our poet laureate. We stayed in a hostel called Crowded House when we went to Galli- poli. I thought Crowded House was a pretty good name for a hostel, especially in that part of the world.’ ‘I’d rather sleep under the stars. What was it like? Gallipoli?’ ‘We only spent an afternoon visiting the battlefields and memori- als. Just a few hours. It was so different to everything else on that trip.’ ‘And your ex, you dumped him because of his taste in music?’ ‘Let’s just say I left his iPod in a better state than when I met him.’ There’s a pause as they both appreciate the joke without laughing. ‘Actually, we both broke up with each other. I’ve never been just the dumper or the dumpee. Does that even happen?’

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‘It happens to me.’ ‘Oh diddums.’ She hands him the rum. ‘Do you think if I went to Gallipoli, did my pilgrimage, I’d be allowed to go to next year’s barbeque?’ ‘It’s not the fucking hajj.’ ‘I was joking.’ ‘Were you?’ Eddie presses the bottle to his chest. She leans forward to hug her knees. ‘We were there in June,’ she says, ‘and there were, like, no Kiwis or Aussies except us. But the peninsula was humming. The parking lot up Chunuk Bair was full of tour buses from other parts of Turkey. On the summit you’re surrounded by these huge stone tablets with descrip- tions of battles in Turkish. They stand upright, like drive-in movie screens or something. Between the tablets you can see the peninsula stretching out. It’s so beautiful, that place. So cruel.’ Her stomach rumbles. She could go back into the barbeque for a piece of blackened steak, pretend nothing’s happened. ‘Down from the summit,’ she continues, ‘is the New Zealand memorial. The Turks filed past the wall of names. It meant something to them, you could tell. Back then, I couldn’t say what it meant to me.’ ‘And now?’ ‘It’s too early in the evening for all this. I’ve only had two beers and two sips of rum, albeit on an empty stomach.’ Eddie offers the rum again, but she shakes her head. ‘Do you want to get some food? My car’s just over there.’ ‘I don’t think you should drive with that Dutch courage in your veins.’ ‘I’m fine.’ ‘Even so.’ ‘Ames,’ Sam calls from behind them. ‘There you are.’ ‘Okay, well, nice chat, Amelia.’ Eddie says her name with care and resignation. ‘Wait here a minute.’ She stands.

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Sam is leaning on the wooden gate. ‘How’s your hand?’ ‘Fine.’ He looks at his knuckles. ‘You coming back in?’ ‘That an open invitation?’ He sighs. ‘If it has to be.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘It means I’d really like it if you came back in and ate something.’ ‘See, I’m confused, Sam. Are you just worried about my iron levels, or is it something more?’ She says the last five words slowly, as if they were individually wrapped confections. This, she realises, is the point of the evening. He smiles and it’s exactly what she’s needed. It’s worse than him striking his friend, that fucking smile. She turns to check on Eddie, but he’s gone. ‘He didn’t get in his car, did he?’ she asks. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You’re a helluva friend, you know that Sam? He’s been drinking. He had to preload just to have the balls to show up tonight.’ He sighs and raises himself to his full height. ‘Should we look for him?’ ‘You go back to your precious barbie.’ She returns to the footpath. The streetlights are sparse. Parked cars line the kerb. ‘Ames,’ Sam says. ‘See you at work. And if I don’t have that recast cashflow by close of play Monday, so help me God.’ She walks down the middle of the street, looking inside each car for Eddie. Maybe he’s waiting to continue their conversation. She wants this, if only to prevent him from wrapping himself around a lamppost. No, she wants go back to the kerb and tell him more about Turkey. How Gemma cried when they first made it to Anzac Cove. How Baker walked off to be by himself and it was left to her to explain everything to Simon. The further she gets, the less likely it is she’ll find Eddie. She thinks about his car ploughing into someone’s living room. She

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thinks about him crouched on Sam’s deck holding his face. About the woman in the Royal Doulton headscarf crouched over the tired- looking wreath. She comes to the end of Sam’s street, one dusty continent and one cantankerous sea between her and her parents, her and Baker. She will never see Eddie again, even if he gets home unscathed. Even if the plug doesn’t get pulled on the desalination plant and Sam doesn’t get squeezed out of the project team, she will never be among his friends again. She doesn’t know where she’ll be, but she won’t be in Perth by Christmas. All of this seems clear to her. And right now there’s nothing she can do about Eddie, or for Eddie. She reaches Princess Road and hails a taxi.

Craig Cliff is the author of the novel The Mannequin Makers (Vintage, 2013), and the story collection A Man Melting (Vintage, 2010), which won Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His stories have featured in Griffith Review 34 and 44. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand, with his wife and daughter.

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I FORGOT THE ‘great pogrom’, as my grandmother Edith Bonyhady called Kristallnacht with the voice of experience. I was booking a flight to Vienna where Good Living Street (Allen & Unwin, 2011), my book about my great- grandmother Hermine Gallia, grandmother Gretl and mother Anne, was to appear in German in August 2013. The publisher, Zsolnay, had arranged for me to give a series of talks that November, so I chose to arrive a few days before the first and to return the day after the last, without thinking these dates might be of any special significance. Ten days before my departure, as I began to prepare these talks, I jogged up Mount Ainslie, one of the best places to think in Canberra, and it struck me: I was scheduled to leave Vienna on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht. I was not sure what to do. I assumed that, had Zsolnay thought about the anniversary, one of its staff would have told me. When I got home, I considered letting things be but then emailed Zsolnay: ‘It was only today, while working on what I wanted to say when I present the book, that I realised that, when I am talking in Vienna and Salzburg, it will be almost exactly seventy-five years since my grandmother, great-aunt and mother fled to Switzerland; that I am due to return to Australia on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht; and that the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gretl’s

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and Anne’s departure is, of course, just three days later. While I am not much of a one for anniversaries, that does seem quite momentous to me. I was wondering if, perhaps, you might want to make more of this.’ As I awaited a reply, I wondered how Vienna was marking this anniver- sary, close to the edge of living memory. I assumed commemoration would start on the evening of 9 November, the anniversary of the night in 1938 when Joseph Goebbels ordered the pogrom in ostensible retribution for the killing of a German diplomat by a Jewish boy in Paris. More commemoration would follow on 10 November, when most of the violence and destruction occurred across the Reich. I was annoyed with myself, disappointed that I would be unable to participate because I was flying out on the night of 9 November. How could I have forgotten its significance? Especially as Kristallnacht loomed large in my book. Especially since the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Anschluss – the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 – had been personalised for me by Helga Luhan, a Viennese relative of my Australian publisher, whose family was fractured by the Nazis. An enthusiast for Good Living Street, Helga had sent me a flurry of emails, with extracts from the official program, links to websites and photographs, all imbued with her deep upset, especially when she attended a commemorative evening at Vienna’s Burgtheater and the young man seated next to her spent much of the night asleep, resulting in a ‘bad argument’. Through German Google, with my usual slowness, not sure of the best search terms, I found ‘Gedenken – 75 Jahre November Pogrom’ on the site of the Austrian Parliament. Far from the commemorations being confined to a day or two, there had been some events already in September and October. There were more from 1 November, when I was set to arrive, so I began looking to see which I might attend. On 6 November, the program thickened. I scrolled down. At the bottom was: Tim Bonyhady, Die Geschichte meiner Wiener Familie – my talk that evening for the University of Salzburg. And on the next day: Tim Bonyhady, Die Geschichte meiner Wiener Familie, at the Kreisky Forum, in the house of the former Chancellor, in Vienna. I was not just presenting my book in Austria, I was part of the official commemorations of Kristallnacht.

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Perhaps Zsolnay – a publisher intent on giving new life to Austria’s Jewish past, with a deep commitment to books such as mine – had thought I would realise what was happening. Perhaps they simply forgot to tell me, having so much else to plan and organise. Within an hour of my initial email, I had a reply from Zsolnay’s second-in-charge, Bettina Wörgöt- ter: ‘Thank you for mentioning all these remarkable anniversaries, and of course we will consider them in our preparations. I am sure this will be by all means an intense week for you. But we will do our best to support you.’ Just before I flew to Vienna, Zsolnay’s director, Herbert Ohrlinger, wrote more: ‘Concerning the 75th anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht, we have been in touch with the responsible persons of the Austrian Parliament and have worked together since we started to promote your visit in Vienna. We are looking forward to seeing you soon.’

I HAD SPOKEN in Vienna once before at the invitation of Wolfgang Kos, the director of the Wien Museum, who visited Melbourne in June 2011 for the Vienna Art and Design exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. At the exhibition opening, Kos explained how the international appetite for the art of Vienna 1900 meant he was inundated with requests for the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. If Buenos Aires or Houston did not want material, it was Tokyo or Paris. Letters would arrive, directors and curators would come to the museum on the Karlsplatz to beg and importune. Kos had to refuse most of these requests, and expected to do the same when he heard that Melbourne wanted a show. How could the NGV have a stronger claim? Why send such precious paintings and objects so far? Then Kos heard of the Gallia collection: assembled in Vienna over twenty years by my maternal great-grandfather and great-grandmother; brought in large part to Sydney by my grandmother and great-aunt after Kristallnacht; out of public view for over thirty years in a small flat in Cremorne; then, from 1976, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. At the opening of Vienna Art and Design, Kos revealed how he felt an obligation after learning that the Gallia collection was in the NGV, along with the Langer collection brought to Australia by cousins of my family who also fled Vienna after Kristallnacht. He should assist the NGV to show these

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works in the Viennese context from which they had been ejected and banished by lending fabulous material, including his Museum’s most prized painting – Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Emilie Flöge. Kos considered this contribution an act of ‘cultural reparation’. This response was all the more striking because of the contrast with the National Gallery in London, which owned Klimt’s portrait of my great- grandmother Hermine – a picture nothing like as desirable as the his canvas of Emilie Flöge, but also in great international demand and vital to the Melbourne show. When the NGV asked for the portrait of Hermine, the National Gallery was initially reluctant because it had only recently retrieved the painting from long-term loan to the Tate and wanted to display the paint- ing itself. The NGV had also borrowed the portrait once before, weakening its claim; the Belvedere in Vienna wanted the painting too for a second time, and it had the great advantage of having pictures that the National Gallery wanted to borrow in return, which the NGV did not. While the National Gallery ultimately lent the portrait of Hermine to the NGV, in an inversion of old blood feuds and ties, Vienna was happier to help Melbourne than was London. This sense of cultural obligation went further. At the dinner following the opening of the NGV exhibition, having read my catalogue essay about the Gallias, Wolfgang Kos decided that Vienna needed to hear my family’s story. He offered to bring me to his museum. I was thrilled yet sceptical, knowing that attractive offers often do not come good. But before the evening was out, Kos’s deputy, Ursula Storch, also knew I would be coming to Vienna. The cultural exchange, part of the legacy of 1938, would continue. In 2012, while Good Living Street was still available only in English, I talked at the Wien Museum in a crammed theatre. To speak about the book in 2013 was very different: it was out in German and the title had reverted to the original street name, Wohllebengasse; it could be seen not just in shops but in shop windows in Vienna. I wanted to be there to witness the book’s reception in the place where, in many ways, it originated. I wanted to represent my family in the city that they had thought of as theirs. I wanted to remind Vienna of them, of what it had lost and what it had destroyed. My first public appearance was in the old Gallia apartment in the Wohllebengasse, in what remained of the Josef Hoffmann dining

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room. There, before print journalists, radio and television, a bigger audience of media than I had ever drawn, I spoke about my family regaining a voice in Vienna after seventy-five years.

KRISTALLNACHT CONFRONTED ME most sharply just before I left on 9 November when, early that evening, I went to the Café Amacord – my favourite Viennese restaurant opposite my usual hotel, in the street where my great-grandfather Moriz began making his fortune in the early 1890s. With my public speaking over and interviews done, I looked forward to a quiet dinner before I headed for the airport. After ordering, I picked up Vienna’s daily newspapers, curious to see how they portrayed Kristallnacht. Die Presse paid it most attention, filling its front pages with stories, including one by Frederic Morton, whose house in Vienna’s Thelemanngasse I had talked at the night before and whom I knew best as the author of A Nervous Splen- dour (Little, Brown, 1979), about Vienna in 1888–89, and Thunder at Twilight (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), about the city a quarter-century later. Morton’s piece was based on one published first by the New York Times in 1978, to mark the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, when the pogrom began to be commemorated on an unprecedented scale in West Germany. Like nearly all writing about Kristallnacht, Morton dwelled on what happened on 10 November 1938. For Morton, who was fourteen at the time, that meant the seizure of his father. But he also included his father’s return, which occurred as the Nazis gradually released most of the ‘November Jews’ taken on Kristallnacht, on condition they relinquish almost all they owned and leave Greater Germany. Morton wrote: ‘Four months later he rang our doorbell twice, skull shaven, skeletal, released from Dachau.’ I had read such accounts before, and have revisited them recently, along with many others. They suggest that the shaving of heads was the norm in German prisons in the 1930s, which extended to the inmates of the first Nazi concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, including the November Jews. Occasionally the heads of these men were shaved before they were sent to the camps, but usually it occurred on arrival, at the hands of prisoners already in the camps. While hygiene was one motivation, the Nazis also wanted to brand these men, humiliate them and strip them of

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their individuality. Their shaving was also the precursor, at least in Dachau, to the inmates being recorded in their new criminal guise, systematically photographed from the right side, the left side and front on. The appearance of these men on release has received less attention, but there are several accounts of it from their sons and daughters, such as Morton’s article written long after the event. In a piece in the New York Times marking the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988, Edward Engelberg, who was ten years old in Munich in 1938, recalled: ‘After three weeks, my father arrived in a taxi. He had been nearly bald but his totally shaved head was a shock.’ In Good Neighbours, Bad Times (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), Mimi Schwartz’s book about Jews from the German village where her family lived, the daughter of one November Jew described her father as having returned from Dachau ‘so thin, his head shaved’. A common theme for these sons and daughters was that their fathers were terribly transformed, aged profoundly, returning as old men and shadows of their former selves. The released also had to bear the stigma of their shaved heads until their hair grew back. While most ‘tried to blend into the background’, their ‘heads made them instantly recognisable’, wrote Bruno Bettelheim’s biographer, Nina Sutton. The obvious response was to wear a hat, which also had the advantage of providing protection against the winter cold, but one Nuremberg man refused. His daughter recalled: ‘He would not wear his hat, as he normally did. He wanted them to be ashamed, since he had nothing to be ashamed of, yet had been imprisoned.’ Some other accounts from inmates of the camps were very different, recording that their hair was ‘cropped short’. In The Emigrants (Harvill Press, 1996), the first of WG Sebald’s fictional narratives to be translated into English, the artist Max Ferber recalls: ‘After the Kristallnacht, Father was interned in Dachau. Six weeks later, he came home distinctly thinner with his hair cropped short.’ Yet many November Jews wrote otherwise, including Karl Schwabe of Hanau, east of Frankfurt-am-Main. He described how, after a few days in Buchenwald, the Nazis ‘stopped shearing off hair and beards’, but when he and a group of others were about to be released, their ‘hair and beards were shorn off’, so they were ‘of course, very notice- able’ as they returned through Kassel ‘but no one said anything’. That

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changed when Schwabe finally got home, put his key in the lock and entered: ‘Papa, how funny you look. People would think you were fifty-three years old,’ Schwabe’s daughter declared. ‘I didn’t look the same man,’ Schwabe confirmed.

ALL THIS WAS personalised for me by my father’s father, Eduard Bonyhady, a member of the Jewish community in Graz, capital of the Austrian province of Styria – a city particularly enthusiastic in its embrace of Nazism and destructiveness on Kristallnacht. As some historians have recognised, the pogrom started on 7 Novem- ber 1938 when the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was shot in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan. Over the next two days, the synagogues in Kassel, Rotenburg, Abterode, Felsberg and Dessau were all attacked. Munich followed, after the leading Nazis met there on 9 November to commemorate the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, and the Gestapo instructed all police headquarters at 11.55 pm to take action against ‘synagogues, throughout Germany, at the earliest possible moment’. At two minutes past midnight, one of Munich’s synagogues was ablaze. Graz was seemingly next, its synagogue torched at 12.30 am. A local newspaper crowed: ‘For Graz the problem of the provocative presence of a Jewish temple has now been unequivocally solved by the will of the people.’ Yet Graz was also a city where – as was not always the case – local officials followed the directive of Reinhard Heydrich, the second-in-charge of the SS, to arrest ‘only healthy male Jews of not too advanced age’ on 10 November. Compliance with this directive in Graz spared my great-grandfa- ther Salomon, aged seventy-eight. Having been interrogated and humiliated in a police prison for a fortnight following the Anschluss that March, he was let be on Kristallnacht. But Heydrich’s order offered no protection to my fifty-year-old grandfather, Eduard. On 10 November, two men came to the family apartment on the Grieskai, just a few blocks from the destroyed synagogue, and took him away. He was one of more than three hundred Jewish men in Graz arrested on 10 November and put in a police prison, where a doctor inspected them to see if they were sufficiently ‘healthy’ for transportation to Dachau.

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The next day, while Edith waited in the family apartment with my fourteen-year-old father Erich and his ten-year-old brother Fritz, a letter arrived from the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, which acted as a helpmate of the Commonwealth government in the selection and reception of European Jews seeking refuge. The letter was for Eduard, who had applied for Austra- lian visas for the family in June after the Bonyhadys’ small leather business in Graz was ‘Aryanised’. The application required Eduard to document that neither he, nor any other member of the family, had ‘ever been in prison’. A few weeks before, the Commonwealth government had secretly imposed a quota of three hundred visas a month for Jews such as the Bonyhadys, who were able to arrive with at least £200 so they would not become a financial burden on the Australian taxpayer. In a memo that August, the Assistant Minister Viktor Thompson advised that ‘only about one in ten applications’ was being approved because of this quota. The government’s preference was for men and women under forty. Because Edith was forty-four and Eduard was fifty, the odds were particularly stacked against them. But in October the government issued them landing permits, which the Jewish Welfare Society sent to the newly imprisoned Eduard. Erich and Fritz probably had no idea. What point was there in Edith telling her two boys that they almost had a licence to escape when their father was in custody and they had no way of knowing when or if he would be released? My father cannot remember if or how the family celebrated his fifteenth birthday on 19 November, a week after the men sent from Graz arrived in Dachau and Eduard became prisoner 23,486, incarcerated in block twenty-three, room four, with other November Jews from around Graz.

I KNEW NOTHING of this on my only visits to Dachau in 1971. My ignorance was part of knowing next to nothing of Eduard, who played almost no part in my childhood. My brother Bruce and I saw him only occasionally as small children before our parents separated in 1962, around the time I turned five. Over the next five years, while we lived in Melbourne and then Armidale with our mother, Anne, Eduard was in Sydney and we did not see him. Our relationship was by correspondence. In a letter from Melbourne in 1965, I wrote: ‘Thank you for your nice present. Are you well? We are well.

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Bruce’s exams are near. At school we have a boy that comes from Japan.’ In a letter from Armidale two years later, I almost echoed myself: ‘I am sorry that I was so long telling you what I want for my birthday. I would like a small good typewriter from you. I hope you are well. We are well. Thank you for your card.’ Eduard’s death in 1967 left me with no memories of him. Bruce and I went to Dachau when Anne returned to Europe for the first time since fleeing Vienna in 1938. After landing in Frankfurt-am-Main at the end of December 1970, we travelled to Munich where high culture was typically Anne’s priority. In just under a fortnight in January 1971, we went to the Deutsches Museum (three times), Stadtmuseum (twice), Nationalmuseum (twice), Theatermuseum, Neue Pinakothek, Alte Pinakothek and Schatzkam- mer, as well as churches and palaces, opera and theatre. But Anne did not just want to introduce Bruce and me to the glories of Europe and experience them herself for the first time as an adult; she also wanted to educate us about Europe’s horrors, especially those of the Third Reich. With three days to go, we went to Dachau. While over three hundred thousand people a year were visiting the camp where a new museum had been opened in 1965, Bruce and I remember that, after we took a local train from Munich, signage was poor at the Dachau railway station and the camp was not easy to find. Perhaps because it was the depths of winter, there were few other visitors that Monday afternoon. But as Anne’s diary reveals, it provided her with an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the Holocaust and to discover how it was being memorialised. The same was true for Bruce and me, aged seventeen and thirteen. On our last day in Munich, we returned for the entire morning. How many others in 1971 went to Dachau twice in three days? While some other visitors were highly critical, even contemptuous of the displays – as Harold Marcuse recorded in his book Legacies of Dachau (Cambridge University Press, 2001) – we were deeply affected. Our first visit was rendered personal by a clergyman, incarcerated in Dachau from 1941 until the camp was freed in 1945, whom Bruce encoun- tered while exploring Dachau by himself. A short man, the clergyman looked up at Bruce’s six foot two, put a hand on his shoulder, and told him he would not have survived. He was too tall. The rations would not have sustained

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him. Unaware that Eduard had been in the camp, Bruce was in no position to wonder what it was like for Eduard at six foot one. Two days later, we encountered the same clergyman who made the same observation about Bruce’s height and also suggested, as Anne recorded, ‘that we could photograph him and show him to friends as one who survived’. My mother was not one for taking photographs while we travelled, preferring to buy postcards. Four weeks into our eight-month journey around Europe, Dachau seems to have been the first place we photographed, recording several of the buildings and memorials. But we declined the clergyman’s offer. Again, Bruce and I were in no position to respond that our late grandfather had been in Dachau too, albeit much more briefly.

FOR ALL THE focus on the events of 9 and 10 November, those arrested generally suffered much worse during their incarceration than on Kristall- nacht itself. Most of Eduard’s experience can now only be constructed from the accounts of others, though he sent one letter to Edith, as the Nazis allowed limited correspondence in and out of the camps. The inmates’ letters were almost all on issued paper which carried a long list of instructions for the recipients, governing how they could respond: ‘Letters to prisoners must be clearly legible, written in ink and may have no more than fifteen lines to a side… Parcels may not be sent since prisoners are able to buy everything in the camp. Petitions for release from imprisonment addressed to the prison administration are pointless. Permission to speak or to visit prisoners in the concentration camp is absolutely not granted.’ The envelopes provided to the prisoners at Dachau repeated these rules. The contents were highly constrained by censorship. ‘I am well’, ‘I am healthy’, was the inmates’ chorus. At least the recipients knew their loved ones were alive and where they were. When the Bonyhadys escaped from Graz to Sydney in 1939, Eduard’s letter to Edith came with them and, in 1943, gained new utility when the family wanted to buy a small farm on Sydney’s outskirts. Because the Austra- lian government had declared all refugees from Germany and Austria to be ‘enemy aliens’, Eduard and Edith needed special permission, which turned on them showing they were not enemies of Australia but enemies of the Nazis.

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Where Eduard’s incarceration might once have stopped them getting visas, it became part of their case. As evidence of Eduard’s time in the concentration camp, they provided the Attorney-General’s Department with Eduard’s letter from Dachau in its original envelope. While the envelope was returned and survives in one of my father’s boxes, I have not found the letter. The family’s Australian landing permits – if Edith succeeded in getting word to Eduard or the Nazi authorities about them – might have accelerated his release. On 16 November, Reinhard Heydrich instructed that Jews already in possession of emigration papers should be let out of concentration camps so they might leave Germany as soon as possible. Eduard’s age could also have helped; on 2 December, Heydrich ordered the release of prisoners over fifty. But Eduard’s treatment in Dachau was against him. He was badly bashed and the Nazis remained concerned about their public image, and only released men whom they had beaten when their injuries had at least partly healed. While thirty-four men had already returned from Dachau to Graz on 22 November and many others followed during the next couple of weeks, others returned only in the New Year. Eduard was released, in between, on 12 December. My father recalls Eduard’s arrest, but most of his memories are of Eduard’s return. When I asked him about these events while writing Good Living Street, he recalled that the men released from Dachau typically arrived on an early morning train, having travelled overnight. When Edith got word that the Nazis might free Eduard, my father began going to the Graz railway station early every morning so there would be someone to meet him. Erich went in vain day, after day, until, one morning, Eduard alighted. My father said nothing about Eduard’s appearance. He did not talk about the terrible transformation, symbolised by a shaved head, remembered by Frederic Morton and other sons and daughters of returnees. Sitting in the Café Amacord on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, reading Frederic Morton’s piece in Die Presse, I realised why: Eduard had gone bald as a young man. His head was a hairless dome, except for his moustache. When my father met his father early on the morning of 13 December 1938 at the Graz railway station, Eduard was in this respect unchanged. If my forgetting of Kristallnacht in Canberra in 2013 underscores my enduring distance from Vienna – for all my attempts to close this gap across

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a decade, since I began writing Good Living Street – my new understanding of my grandfather’s return from Dachau, and my father’s response to it, exempli- fies how one may slowly make sense of the most personal of pasts. A family’s story, however striking, is not enough. Context is vital. Anniversaries can be more than occasions for remembrance; they may transform our understanding of what is being commemorated. That has never happened to me in Australia but in Vienna it did, when I least expected it, seventy-five years after the fact.

Tim Bonyhady is director of the Australian Centre for Environmental Law at the Australian National University. He was one of the curators of the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Vienna Art and Design. His books include The Colonial Earth (MUP, 1998), which won both the NSW and Queensland Premier’s History Prize.

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