Understanding the invasion myth

I share the desire of these partisans to acknowledge what Australian servicemen and women achieved, and what the war cost them. (I worked for 27 years at the Australian War Memorial, where I was head of Historical Research and then Principal Historian for 20 years. I’ve devoted most of my career as an historian to acknowledging and explaining what Australians have done in war.)

This is important, because my work will be portrayed as “revisionist” (which it isn’t - it reflects a pretty orthodox view of the history of World War II). And I will be represented as having “denigrated our war dead” or “insulted our diggers”.

On the contrary, I argue that Australians ought to be proud of the part they played in World War II. Australia entered the war at the outset, to help to defeat Nazi oppression. From December 1941 it fought against Japan’s attempt to impose a tyrannical rule upon South-East Asia. Some 40,000 Australians died in the war - very few of them in direct defence of Australia itself - but all in defence of the lives and liberties of others, in Europe and in Asia.

I think Australians ought to acknowledge and respect what its men and women did in that war. Defending Australia directly had little to do with the sacrifice and the achievements in that conflict. Imposing a “Battle for Australia” upon a history that was actually more about a battle for humanity in Europe and Asia merely distorts the real history of Australia’s part in that war.

A Battle for Australia does no honour to Australians who died at Alamein, or over Warsaw, or in the North Atlantic. It even has little to do with Australians who died at Kokoda or in Japanese prison camps.

So Invading Australia is not just about an argument about how we should interpret the events of 1942. It is also about the way Australia’s history has been subjected to manipulation and official sanction, about how a nation’s history can so easily be hijacked by partisans and lobby groups. It is about the importance of historical evidence - there is no evidence for Japanese invasion plans, but a widespread popular assumption that invasion plans must have existed.

As Invading Australia shows (drawing upon both primary sources and on the historical literature) the Japanese did not plan to invade Australia, though it also explains why such an idea should have such a tenacious longevity. The invention of the Battle for Australia detracts from the real significance of World War II for Australia, obscuring the importance of the great contribution Australia made to Allied victory far beyond Australia’s shores.

Small minded parochialism for the time being seems to have trumped clear sighted, evidence-based, historical scholarship. The debate continues, as it must.