The Guardian, UK
Nov 11 2018
Australia has reached peak Anzac. And not before time
by Paul Daley
It’s time to focus on events beyond the Anzacs that have played a much more seminal role in defining Australian nationhood
The $500m Australian War Memorial expansion has been presented as a fait accompli. The memorial director, Brendan Nelson, and the German defence minister, Ursula von der Leyen, look at a field of handmade poppies commemorating world war one. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
Thank goodness it’s over. I’m talking about the $600m festival built around the centenary of world war one, that drew to a close on Sunday after forcing all things Anzac on the national consciousness for four long years.
Perhaps now that it’s finished we can get back to – or at least make a genuine start on – seriously delving into the experiences of individuals and events beyond the Anzacs and the first world war that have played a much more seminal role in determining and defining Australian nationhood.
That is my hope. And for once I hold a modicum of optimism that Australia really is ready to escape the militarism that our politicians have trowelled, never with greater efficiency than during the centenary, over Australian consciousness, culture and history.
Why the optimism? Two things this month – the confirmation of a $500m expansion of the Australian War Memorial and an ill-conceived thought bubble whereby Australian service personnel would be honoured and given priority boarding on Virgin Australia aircraft – prompted, I think, a collective national gasp.
Then came the weary, perhaps even angry, public exclamation: “Enough already!” Yep. Australia has reached peak Anzac. And not before time.
That $500m war memorial spend has been presented by the federal government and the institution’s director as a fait accompli. The “process” (I use the term loosely in a governance sense) preceding it remains murky and the federal opposition would do well to question and challenge it, if not now (when if it did so it would almost certainly cop a government accusation of being – horror! – “anti-Anzac”) then in government.
Apparently the expanded memorial will illuminate the experiences of currently deployed personnel, including on peace-keeping/-making and relief operations. While this would appear to be inconsistent with the memorial’s mandate to “remember, interpret and understand” the Australian war experience (this demands hindsight, serious consideration and, most of all, time), it remains to be seen how the institution can deal with any perspective on the present when it is so negligent with elements of the past.
I’m referring to the Australian first world war experience of the Armenian Genocide (denied by the Turkish government and unacknowledged as “genocide” by its allies including the Commonwealth of Australia) and the frontier wars that raged across the Australian continent between British red coats, pioneers, raiding parties, militias and Indigenous people.
Australian soldiers fighting in the Middle East in the first world war were eyewitnesses to what was then the Ottoman Empire’s systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenian people. Indeed, Australian soldiers participated in what many historians regard as newly federated Australia’s first military relief effort – the rescue on the Syria/Palestine front in 1918 of survivors of the Armenian Genocide.
In recent years the war memorial has received numerous overtures from the Armenian National Committee of Australia and other community leaders, and military historians, to reflect in its first world war galleries the genocide and the witness to it by Australian service personnel.
The memorial does not currently do so. Neither has there, to the best of my knowledge, been any official mention during the four-year carnival of Anzac commemoration any mention of Australia’s witness to the Armenian genocide.
Earlier this year, as the war memorial developed plans to expand, the Armenian-Australian writer and historian, Vicken Babkenian, wrote to the institution about how the Anzac experience “was not just defined by military heroism but of humanitarianism”. He urged institution to reflect the Armenian genocide in its galleries.
“In early 1918, Anzac Light Horsemen and Cameleers helped rescue thousands of destitute refugees when they captured Palestine. In a touching display of humanity amid the horrors of war, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur J Mills of the 4th (Anzac) Battalion, Imperial Camel Corps, carried a four-year-old Armenian girl sleeping in his arms, on his camel, to safety,” Babkenian wrote.
“Another spectacular rescue effort was spearheaded by Australian Colonel Stanley G Savige. As a member of the élite Dunsterforce, Savige and his colleagues defended a column of some 80,000 Armenian & Assyrian refugees fleeing the invading Ottoman Army in Mesopotamia during the summer of 1918. Savige was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his role in the rescue effort. Savige became a founder of Legacy Australia which continues to support Australian veterans.”
The memorial director, Brendan Nelson, did not rule out Babkenian’s proposal, responding: “Australia’s long history of peacekeeping and humanitarian operations is proposed to be covered in an extensive new gallery. It is of course far too early to speak to specific exhibition displays or items but should the Memorial’s proposal be funded our curators will take undoubtedly consider the role of Savige and his troops when considering how best to educate the Australian public with regard to our history of peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.”
But will they mention the “Armenian genocide”? That remains to be seen.
Five years ago, the military historian, Peter Stanley, who worked at the memorial for three decades, wrote to Nelson at a time the institution was re-doing its first world war galleries ahead of the Anzac centenary.
Stanley – who co-authored with Babkenian the book, Armenia, Australia & The Great War – wrote: “If the memorial declines to acknowledge the fact of the genocide it will effectively be aligning itself with a partial, extreme or minority view of the Great War, one that will diminish its standing as an impartial historical institution and, indeed, make it a focus for inter-communal strife between the Turkish and Armenian communities once the new galleries are open.”
The upgrade did not include reference to the Australian witness to the Armenian genocide. Just as it refuses, under Nelson’s leadership anyway, to tell of the frontier wars – which by credible estimate killed many more Indigenous people than the 60,000 Australian fatalities of world war one.
Australia urgently needs to reclaim its national memory and narrative from the purveyors of a largely mono-dimensional Anzac story that comes at the expense of so much else – not least this continent’s precious Indigenous antiquity and the frontier wars upon which the white Australian federation was established.
The centenary is over. Let’s get on with it.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist