"War and Australia's national identity"
How Australia, and Canada, were 'enlisted' in WWI.
A partial transcript of an ABC-RN Big Ideas, 28 April 2016 interview with one of Australia’s "best-known historians" Dr. Henry Reynolds, promoting his new book, "Unnecessary Wars" (2016)

Intro:
Much has been said about the role war has played in shaping Australia's national identity. Mateship, sacrifice, courage in the face of adversity: These attributes have become corner-stones of the national narrative -- of the story of what we tell ourselves about who we are and what we value.
So, if it's true that our national mythology was forged by our role in the war, what are the roots of this and how did it occur?

Historian Henry Reynolds believes Australia has been obsessed with war and militarism to an unhealthy extent since before the nation was born in 1901. Federation itself, he says, was redolent with military overtones. So much so, the great achievement of uniting Australia's colonies as one nation was overshadowed by our troups fighting for empire in Africa. Henry Reynolds also argues our inclination to fight "other nation's wars", as he calls them, can be traced back to before Gallipoli, to the Boer War at the turn of the century. Henry Reynolds is one of Australia's best-known historians. He is the author of many books. His new book, "Unnecessary Wars" (2016).
(1:30)

2:05)
The extraordinary thing is that we are spending so much money, more money than any other country, on commemorating the 1st World war. What seems to me to be the height of the folly is the very, very large museum in North France that is going to cost us, the taxpayers, 100 million dollars. Now that was an Abbot decision but apparently, no one dares say it shouldn't happen and one can just imagine what 100 million dollars would do for museums in Australia. I think it is symptomatic of the way in which we have absolutely gone overboard in commemorating the 1st world war. It was this tremendous upsurge of commemoration that led to myself and three other colleagues to produce that book, "What's Wrong with Anzac" because we had grown up and we had learned and taught Australian history of a different era when war played a very small part in the story. And where the basic themes were the development of Australia -- that is the political, social and economic development of Australia. The heroes of that story were all civilians - not soldiers. Now that's been turned on its head. And as we know, the story now repeated endlessly in a multitude of places, that war has been the defining national experience; that the soldier is the exemplar of what it means to be Australian; and that war made us a nation. Now, all of those premises I totally reject. (3:48)

Q. How has it happened and who is responsible for the 'militarisation of our history' if I could use that term? I mean, there's people who have pointed fingers toward the government. I don't know whether our educational institutions are complicit in it. Or is it because Australians of today do seem to see some grander in past wars and sacrifices? (4:10)

A. All of those things, I think. There's no doubt that war is dramatic. Teachers tell me that kids like studying war. It is hard to find something to compete with that drama. But in terms of the commemoration, this – this incredible crescendo of commemoration – it started in the 90s. It started with Paul Keating. But Paul Keating wanted to use war, and to concentrate on the 2nd WW to counter the whole imperial project, including ANZAC, as you know. He said he'd never go to ANZAC, and Kacoda was where he wanted to be. But there was a change of government in 1996, as we all know, and John Howard continued those programs, as every other government has done so, but gave it the twist toward the empire and the monarchy and all those things. Now, there is no doubt that government money has been important in this- millions of dollars have been spent, particularly by the dept. of veterans affairs and the war memorial promoting war. And, the particular version of war. Now, they've sponsored books and documentary films. They've produced vast amounts of good curriculum material which goes to every school in Australia. Even that ridiculous poster that Brendan Nelson did of Simpson and the donkey, went to every school in Australia. There's no end to what they can do and the money keeps coming. All over Australia, old monuments have been done-up. New ones have been built. More and more days are set aside as commemoration days. And I was saying to people last night, there are so many days of commemoration that those people who go to them must never get to put their medals away. The medals must never go back in the safe - they must be ready to be clipped on again. Now, there's no doubt that this push from government has been extremely important, but such programs don't succeed if there's strong resistance in the community. And there hasn't been strong resistance. There hasn't been resistance from anywhere among the politicians that I'm aware of.
(6:23)

Q. This will be a theme I think we'll come back throughout our conversation tonight actually. We will get to the Bore War, but I just wanted to provide a bit of context - overall context before we get there. The conventional wisdom about the defence of Australia over the years seems to have been that we're a large vulnerable country with a small population at the wrong end of the world and that we'd be unable to defend ourselves if anybody wanted to invade us, or the like, and hence, we need great and powerful friends to come to our aid. In the early days of empire, that was Britain, in more recent times that's become America. Is this need for a 'powerful friend' flawed thinking on the nation's behalf?
(7:06)

A. Well, I think it is. But in a way, one of the themes in this book is that there was a quite different tradition. Particularly in the late 19c, leading up to the Boer War, among people -- often very prominent people in all the colonial parliaments, in many of the significant journals and magazines, particularly the Sydney Bulletin, there was a very strong tradition which took exactly the opposite viewpoint. So let's just make this clear: Where are those who said we must have 'great and powerful friends" - "large, vulnerable, defenceless"? They said "NO." No one. Firstly, he said, Australia has no natural enemies. There is no reason for anyone to want to attack Australia. If we have enemies, it is that we will inherit the enemies of our great and powerful friends. In fact, rather than making us safe, a close tie with one of the imperial powers makes us more vulnerable and puts us in danger. And, they said, with great prescience, eventually Britain will get involved in a major European war and we will be pulled into it. So, that was the view. And they said, Look, this continent is so large and it's surrounded by water, that that, rather than a source of danger, is a source of great security because we can't be attacked. We can't be invaded. Who would be able to do it? Who would have the vast resources to land a huge army on the continent?
(8:50)

Q. It's a view that never took hold though, in any substantial way. I was going to ask you this, I mean, why the argument about Australia remaining neutral -- perhaps a direction of armed neutrality -- why that has never really taken hold in Australia.
(9:06)

A. Well, one of the problems was that during the whole lead-up to and commitment to the war in South Africa, those ideas - I mean what happened was that increasingly, and certainly after the first world war, how could you question a cause in which we'd suffered so much? How could you say that 62 thousand young men who'd died for Britain, that the cause was bad? How could you say we shouldn't have done it? I mean the commemoration makes it almost impossible to seriously examine yourself. The more we commemorate war, the less we can seriously analyse it. (9:49)

Q. Let's go back then to the period your book mostly covers. In fact, let's go back to the 1880s when the colony of NSW sent groups to fight in Egypt, in the Sudan, to support the British. There was a debate about this at the time. Was there much debate though, or did we simply go because the colonists of the time still saw themselves as basically British or at least mostly loyal to the Brits?
(10:15)

A. They were many, many people who said we are Britons. That is our proudest 'possession' if you like. That is our identity and any attack on Britain anywhere is an attack on us. Now, in a sense, that is the most dangerous idea. That this country, isolated in its own world, yet has to be involved with Britain's enemies. So, there's certainly that sense that we were British. There's also always been that idea that if we help them now they will feel obliged to help us in the future. And, equally, there was that sense that, in a way, the empire was a family, which it wasn't. And, let's not forget…

Q. A dysfunctional family, perhaps.
A. Well lets not forget how important the monarchy has been. I mean the idea that the monarch is just up there and is nice and gentle -- the monarchy has been used, always, as an instrument of British foreign policy-- as you would expect it to be used. And that has always been the case. I mean, when the -- in all the parliaments the premiers got up and said, we must go to war in South Africa, they did so, they started off by saying, "It is the Queen!" You know -- she's the old grandmother of the world. It is the Queen! The Queen's subjects. We must be loyal to the Queen. And if you criticised the war, you were disloyal to the Queen. You know the monarchy plays that extremely important part, and then it is so easy - it is so easy, in the colonial office, to write a telegram out and they's ay it was the Queen and they'd send it out to the colonies, Oh! The Queen sent us a telegram!" And the poor soldiers in SA - the thing that won so many of them over - the Queen sent them each a little tin of chocolate. (12:13)

Q. What's interesting though, is that the decision to send the NSW colonies' groups to the Sudan, and then a decade or two later, the decision to send groups to the Boer War occurred at a time when the colonies were coming together -- they were federating -- they were discussions about nationhood and naturalism. And what's striking about this is it didn't stir any strong sense of greater independence from the UK, or any questioning of whether we should be, as a consequence, fighting these foreign wars at all. There were pockets of descent, which you talk about, but not considerable enough to make a dent.
(12:52)

A. No. That's true. But, I mean, nonetheless, there were powerful arguments - very cogent arguments, which remain important. Because, in a way, this was the alternative view and these people were right. They were right. The empire - I mean Australia, in 1901, could so easily have become independent. And with more than most countries who've become independent either before or after 1901, was more able to look after itself and manage it's own affairs. And this is something the British realised. The most significant colonial office official, a man called Sir Charles Lucas, and almost the only one who'd ever been to Australia - the others wouldn't want to go to Australia for god's sake! He said, in 1910 or 11, in a book, "We have to accept, although we can't let this be known, that we need the dominions, Australia and Canada, in particular, more than they need us. And I think that was right. We didn't need Britain any longer, and yet we remained tied to Britain until the middle of the 20th century. You know, it was a great burden. It was a terrible thing. You know. 60 thousand people lost their lives in the first WW: 16,000 prisoners in Singapore; 5,000 prisoners captured in Greece and Crete -- all because we were part of the empire.
(14:14)

Q. Yet the Americans did separate from the Brits, and our patriotism never morphed into separatism from the mother country. Why was that?
(14:24) - >>> continued . . .

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