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Anzac: Endurance, Truth, Courage and Mythology

Paul Daley October 04

Anzac Day has come to represent many things over recent years, but arguably the strongest narrative is still one of national pride, celebration and courage. Yet does this vision truly make room for all the complexities of war and the experiences of its survivors? In the latest CAL/Meanjin essay Paul Daley reveals some darker truths about the Anzac Day tradition, and tries to find space for both strength and vulnerability, bravery and guilt. A brief extract is below, and you can now read the full essay on our editions page.



Since the Second World War, Anzac Day’s focus has evolved to focus national memory on all Australians who served and died in any conflict. But in the late 1980s, seven decades after the first Anzac Day, our political leaders suddenly became mindful of the flimsiness of the mortal thread that held Gallipoli to modern Australian fabric. The political allure of commemoration was a strong inducement to turn Anzac Day, as the last Gallipoli veterans passed, into a national celebration of a later, much different Australia that somehow encapsulated their ‘spirit’. The Australian War Memorial articulates this evolution succinctly:

ANZAC Day goes beyond the anniversary of the landing on Gallipoli in 1915. It is the day we remember all Australians who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations. The spirit of ANZAC, with its human qualities of courage, mateship, and sacrifice, continues to have meaning and relevance for our sense of national identity.[*]

Many Australian soldiers on Gallipoli were responsible for extraordinary acts of courage. Nine of them won the Victoria Cross, the highest Commonwealth award for gallantry, for actions marked by a selflessness—an utter disregard of death—that defies normal human reaction to fear. The nine—among them labourers and farmers, a newspaper manager, a butcher, a travelling salesman and a businessman—were, before deployment, all considered relatively ordinary men. Extreme circumstance gave rise to their extraordinary valour. And then, just as Lifeboat Number 5 resumed its former peacetime function after the war, Australia’s VC heroes (and 262,500 other Australian returned servicemen, including 156,000 who had been wounded, gassed or imprisoned) were expected to resume their lives in the society they had left.

Many struggled. Just how dreadfully or in what number has never formally become part of the Anzac narrative we’ve embraced. Victoria Cross winners from Albert Jacka (who, as the first Australian to win a VC at Gallipoli, was awarded £500 and a gold watch by the notorious Melbourne businessman John Wren) to Mark Donaldson (the most recent recipient of the cross, for gallantry in Afghanistan) have insisted they were just ordinary blokes. Perhaps, then, it is the capacity of ordinary men to do extraordinary things in extreme circumstance—to fight harder, to march longer, to dig deeper, to care for wounded mates no matter the personal imposition—that our politicians are referring to when they talk of ‘the Anzac spirit’. They are noble human traits, for sure, worthy of celebration and ripe for adaptation into sporting metaphor. But they are not uniquely Australian traits.



* See http://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac/.


 

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