The unknown War Memorial - the politics of remembrance

Nowadays Australians are as likely to be irreligious as religious. Is not the sensibility of unbelievers of goodwill to be recognised and respected also? If a religious component is to be retained in ANZAC Day, cannot Buddhist chants, Hindu mantra and Muslim prayers be offered as we strive to contain the risks of community division arising from fundamentalist zealotry?

If the fossilisation of our cult of remembrance is to be prevented, we must let it develop with our national life and culture, and that requires us to periodically review in a kindly spirit the rites we practice.

The invitation extended to Turkish servicemen to march on ANZAC Day in Adelaide in 2005 is an example of the evolution of our rites of commemoration, a fitting recollection of the humanity of Ataturk towards our fallen, and a reminder of the ever present controversiality of history in regard for example to such issues as the Armenian genocide and the on going Turkish occupation of Cyprus.

What then, above and beyond the circumstances of form, is the essence of ANZAC Day? Surely it is to remind us of the high price of even the most defensible of wars.

It needs to be remembered, as Winter has shown, that the original social function of the Great War cult of remembrance and thus of ANZAC Day was mourning, just as according to Cochrane its original political function was recruiting to fill up the ranks rent by warfare in an industrial age.

It is unlikely that many present in the South Parklands on Wattle Day 1915 objected to the patriotic objectives of officialdom, any more than their predilection of the Southern Cross was a sign of an irreligion few if any would have felt in that still evangelical age. Never the less, only so long as the primary social function of mourning was respected could it include the political and religious functions of remembrance.

The public recognition of the human cost of battle was, from the very first, the enduring bequest of the survivors of the Great War to subsequent generations. This is the context of the now ritual remark that ANZAC Day does not exist to glorify war. We must keep more faith with this concept than the powers-that-be have done lately.