Anzac has hijacked our history

DVA’s work with school children, the upcoming centenaries, army leaders warning against cuts to the military budget (despite the fact that we are already the second-largest importer of military hardware in the world), the denigration of doubters by accusing them of not supporting “our boys overseas”, all of these things “normalise” military adventurism in our culture and provide fertile ground for future expeditionary forces to be sent away to Fiji, Iran, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Syria or wherever the call next arises.

Commemoration of war also drives out commemoration of other subjects. The more we Australians commemorate war, the more it looks as if we define ourselves according to our experience of war. There are lots of other things and people we should be affirming and reaffirming as the things that define us, our scientists and their discoveries, our artists and their works, our inventors and their inventions, our doctors and nurses, our writers and their books and poems, our great public servants, our business people even, our ordinary Australians. There is nothing wrong with commemoration in itself, provided it reflects the diverse strands of our history and is not skewed in a particular direction, as it is now.

Even some forms of war commemoration are supportable. Uneasiness about commemorative circuses should not preclude private remembrance of loved ones who did not return. Some traditional ceremonies, like the Anzac Day dawn service at the Australian War Memorial, have a dignity that contributes in appropriate proportion to our national story; the commemorative splurge promoted by DVA threatens to sink these worthy occasions in a sludge of banal “remembrance”.

The twenty-first century should also see different ways of commemorating. Memorials do not have to be bricks and mortar and commemoration does not have to be Fosters on the beach at Anzac Cove. Consider, for example, the impact in Timor-Leste of a generous donation in memory of the 40 000 Timorese who were killed by the Japanese for helping Australian soldiers during World War II. Or of donations to Vietnam to lessen the effects, still evident today, of the American (and Australian) War 1961-75, where up to three million civilians died. Or donations to the families of service people, sent to Afghanistan and Iraq and coming home maimed in mind and body, the hidden toll behind the relatively small body count.

Why has the urging of Prime Ministers, DVA and the retired military officers spruiking for the Canberra memorials struck such a resounding chord with some of us? Michael McGirr, a former Jesuit priest, used the term “creeping Anzacism” to describe

the way in which the remembrance of war is moving from the personal to the public sphere and, with that, from a description of something unspeakable to something about which you can never say enough. As fewer and fewer Australians actually know somebody who fought in World War I or World War II, the commemoration of war has changed from a quiet remembrance of other people to an unrestrained endorsement of ourselves. As ideology comes to replace history, there are fewer and fewer faces to go with the stories. They have been replaced by a lather of clichés, most of which are as much about filling a void in the narcissistic present as lending dignity to the past. People now seem to believe that in looking at the Anzacs they are looking at themselves. They aren’t. The dead deserve more respect than to be used to make ourselves feel larger. (Bypass, 2001)