Sacred Places

Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape

By Ken S. Inglis

Melbourne University Press, 1998

522 pp., $49.95 (hb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/20414

On Anzac Day each year, the air hums and whines with a verbal barrage — "sacrifice", "bravery", "duty", "honour", the "birth of Australia as a nation" — every bit as intense as the bullets and bombs that flew at Gallipoli.

And just as the ammunition of war destroyed human flesh, so the incantations of the Anzac tradition do their own ideological damage — at least that is what one can learn from the survey by Ken Inglis of the thousands of war memorials in Australia.

From the Australian War Memorial (the "national temple" of the Anzac religion) in Canberra, to the cenotaphs and shrines of remembrance in the capital cities, to the obelisks, statues, plaques and honour boards in country towns, these war monuments instruct the young and rally the old to the Anzac myths and legends, to nationalism and imperialism.

The first memorials to Australia's long history of military service to imperialism appeared during England's wars in the Sudan with the dispatch of NSW soldiers to Khartoum in 1885, and England's war against the Boers (Dutch settlers) in South Africa at the turn of the century. But these wars were "too complicated, obscure, equivocal and ambiguous" to serve as the "nation-making experience", and too lacking in casualties to initiate the tradition of blood sacrifice that the patriots were after.

Gallipoli and World War I fixed all that. Two thousand ANZAC troops were killed in the first 10 days of the landing at Gallipoli in April 1915. By the end of a doomed campaign in December, 7600 Australian men had been slaughtered.

In all, 60,000 were killed in the slaughterhouses of Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendale and Ypres in a blood-letting that excited apologist English poets like Rupert Brooke to write of "the sweet red wine of youth" being spilled in a noble cause.

Australian patriots caught the blood-lust too. C.E.W. Bean, official war correspondent and historian, wrote of the "great test of Australian manhood and the nation", initiating the cult of the ANZAC soldier. Patriotic war-mongers spoke with dewy-eyed rapture about nobility and sacrifice, honour and duty.

They borrowed the line "Lest we forget" from Rudyard Kipling, poet of imperial England, as their signature Anzac motif. They also went back to the Roman empire and its poet Horace for "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ("It is sweet and noble to die for one's country").

They did not quote the anti-war soldier poet Wilfred Owen, who called the Latin epigram "the old lie". The war's ideological guardians censored from official commemoration any reports, letters or headstone inscriptions that described the dangers, horrors and fear of war, or the resentment by the ranks of officers' privileges, incompetence and callousness.

Above all, they silenced any soldiers who questioned why they were fighting and dying like flies.

The manufacture of the Anzac cult was founded on censorship, lies and linguistic euphemism. The Anzacs, says Inglis, "did not stagger or sink or topple or have bits blown off, but 'fell', to become not simply the dead but the 'fallen' who cleanly, heroically, sacrificially, gave their lives in war".

At the unveiling ceremonies of the memorials in Australia, most of which were built in the decade after World War I, right-wing politicians and the military, and their tame priests, were in their element celebrating the Anzac cause, which was, for them, god, king, country and empire, and, often enough, "white Australia".

The anti-war soldier poet Siegfried Sassoon, on the other hand, was repelled by "the whole enterprise of official commemorations" with their "elevated prose" and the mandatory memorial, which he saw as a "sepulchre of crime".

Dissenters from the Anzac cult continued the opposition. "Outside the Communist Party", (an important exception that requires a more detailed treatment), there was Hugo Throssell, Gallipoli veteran and winner of the Victoria Cross, who at one unveiling in Perth stunned the crowd with a speech explaining how the war had turned him into a socialist. He was not invited back. Irish republicans in Australia, not keen to fight on the side of their oppressor country, kept Moruya, for example, free from an Anzac memorial for many decades.

Activists in the movements against war and fascism in the 1930s leafleted commemorative ceremonies. In 1934, at Victoria's Shrine of Remembrance, they were stopped by police. The leaflet they were handing out reflected the sentiments of Australian novelist Miles Franklin, who wrote, "We build these shrines — temples to Mars — and keep alive the war spirit".

In the contest over the meaning of Anzac Day, the militarism of the conservative establishment won out against the view that Anzac Day observance could "train young minds in the paths of peace". How many generals and RSL leaders did you see during the mass peace and nuclear disarmament movement in the '80s?

Anzac has its approved meaning and its approved dead. Not all victims of war are equal, or of equal usefulness for the ANZAC legend.

There are no memorials to the indigenous Australians killed while defending their land (Aborigines apparently not being Australians) in the colonial land wars. Australian volunteers who fought for the international brigades in Spain against Franco's fascists are not approved memorial material. There is no room for official recognition of the deserters, the suicides, the conscientious objectors, for those who voted down two referenda for conscription in 1916 and 1918.

The Women Against Rape collectives who attempted to commemorate the female sexual victims of war in the 1980s were met by police and RSL hostility; this reality of war would tarnish its image as noble and uniting.

The Anzac cult was used to justify Australian participation in subsequent imperialist wars against Korea, Malaysia, Borneo, Vietnam and Iraq. Ceremonies link the Battle of Long Tan with Gallipoli and Beersheba, Tobruk and Kokoda in an exercise that is about protecting Australia's political and economic interests overseas, not dedication to peace.

Inglis doesn't commit himself to this critical interpretation of Anzac, but he presents the dissenting tradition sympathetically enough to enable the reader to do so.

The critical view that the "secular religion" of Anzac, with its lethal mix of nationalism, patriotism and militarism, is a major prop of Australian capitalism, has, however, to overcome the hurdles created by the look and feel of this book. It is a heavy tome with glossy pages, imposing and quasi-official (it received the endorsement and cooperation of the RSL).

The book's detailed survey of memorials gives it the tone of "authorised" history. As some of Inglis' friends and colleagues feared, its content can define the purpose — to catalogue rather than criticise — and so give a "blessing to militarism" through its subject matter.

Negotiate these hurdles, however, and it's a useful contribution to the necessary work of rejecting Anzac's use of the slain to turn people's private mourning and complex feelings for the dead into "national unity" for war abroad and class peace at home. The socialists and pacifists who opposed the Anzac cult embody the counter-tradition that truly commemorates the victims of capitalist barbarity, and learns from their deaths the way to international peace. n