Sport with Guns

Patrick White once said ‘Sport has addled the Australian consciousness.’ Now it seems that the same thing might be said of our celebration of the military. The two things are connected. Under John Howard we had become used to a deepening khaki tinge in Australian life. When troops returned from Iraq, the prime minister himself took the salute—effectively edging the Governor-General out of the way. (That post had been militarised, too.) A low-key national service for school leavers was proposed, while Australian troops were committed far and wide. It might have been thought that once Howard went, the interest in things military might slacken. But no. On the ABC news and the 7.30 Report, military stories turn up every few days. Earlier in the year Richard Farmer produced a list of what he saw as a continuation of the Coalition policy of glorifying the past experiences of Australians at war.

Anzac Day is developing as the high point of the military season—an armoured counterpart to the more innocent football season. This year there was the first Anzac Day dawn service on the Western Front, at Villers-Bretonneux. There were also commemorations of the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea and the fortieth of a lesser known battle in Vietnam. In addition, there has been the nearby excavation of another battle (a significant one) that had come very close to being forgotten altogether—at Fromelles. This produced a dividend: the commanding officer was a dastardly Pom. Further events included a celebration of Bomber Command—which involved a fly-over across the National War Memorial in Canberra—and, for its diamond jubilee, an open day at HMAS Albatross near Nowra, the base of the Fleet Air Arm. There was also a memorial service for the sailors killed in the attack by the midget Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour.

The discovery of the wreck of HMAS Sydney, in view of the royal commission set up to establish the circumstances of its sinking, is set to provide a long-running saga. Meanwhile the rarest medals have become even greater objects of desire—the hardest of all currencies. Kerry Stokes was recently awarded an AC, our highest distinction; the television news bite gave the impression that it was really won for donating some Victoria Crosses to the nation. Each represents stories that must always be retold, he said.

Marilyn Lake recently remarked that ‘our history has been militarised and our military heritage grows more weighty by the week’. It has come to eclipse even pioneering (too Anglo? Riding roughshod over Aborigines?). With the possible exception of votes for women, Australia’s trail-blazing in democratic reforms—such as the secret ballot, and payment for members of parliament—has also become entirely eclipsed. John Howard was even able to put a dampener on the 150th anniversary of Eureka, something unthinkable a generation ago. Howard encouraged what seems to have been very much a generational shift. The growing numbers at the Gallipoli dawn service seem to indicate this—even if it is partly just a tribal gathering of Australian backpackers abroad. We are light years away now from Alan Seymour’s 1960 play, The One Day of the Year, in which the rhetoric of Anzac, and its seeming glorification of war, are interrogated by a young student critical of his father using the occasion to have a booze-up with his old mates. Young people now would prefer to have an Anzac booze up of their own.

Their enthusiasm is real, nonetheless. Now that high culture and religion have been marginalised, there are few readily accessible ways of connecting with the past. The military tradition offers both group identification and stirring individual action, tied together by the raw idealism of patriotism. But the distinctive contemporary note is that military activity is coming to be seen as sport with guns.

There has always been a connection between sport and war, based on male fitness and physical prowess. When war broke out in 1914, there were cases of whole sporting teams going down to the recruitment office together to enlist. By 1917, the AIF had set up a special Sportsmen’s Recruiting Committee: it targeted sportsmen, knowing other men would follow their example, and set about raising a unit consisting of them entirely. But when deaths of well-known figures occurred, there was a serious blow to morale. After that it was a long time before sport was used as a rallying point again. Indeed much of a recent Australian War Memorial exhibition on sport and war presented it as an escape from the horrors of battle, rather than as some kind of preparation for it.

In recent years the nexus has crept back—and gave rise to that exhibition. But whereas during the First World War the whole society was charged up, today there is no sense of Australia’s future being directly threatened—whatever disruptions might yet come from terrorism. And instead of sports stars providing an example, it is more a case of the crowd being subject to some consciousness-raising.

Elements of this can be seen in the AFL Grand Final, in the half-time entertainment, but they are strongest in the Anzac Day AFL match between Collingwood and Essendon—described as ‘traditional’, and spoken of as though its origins (1994) are obscured in the mists of time. The fixture has become increasingly popular. Veterans are whisked around the oval in a lap of honour, and there is an RAAF fly-over. A gigantic flag is brought on to the ground; military drill follows, complete with drum-beat and the flag raised to half-mast. Then the customary Anzac recitation, and a minute’s silence. ‘The atmosphere is built up by that one minute’s silence,’ says James Hird; ‘More than the roar of the crowd.’ When I last saw the match on television two years ago, the coaches were represented by cartoon figures in tin hats. Sports field equals battlefield. The army logo was repeated throughout transmission, and there were advertisements for recruitment. In this context the army becomes the personification of Team Australia.

Professional sport itself has moved more towards military patterns. There is more intensive coaching, while the monitoring of behaviour—partly justified by footballers being perceived as role models for the young—may now exceed the degree of scrutiny soldiers experience when they go on leave. Coaches take teams over the Kokoda Trail, and a softballer at the Athens Olympics, when her team was not performing well, told them to think of the Anzacs. ‘It lifted us,’ commented another (in the Army Reserve), ‘it really lifted us.’

It is still asserted that Australians do not show triumphalism, except in sport. Perhaps sport consumes so much of the national time that we simply don’t need to. Barracking—a term first applied in Australia—has now generated its loathsome offsider, sledging, which introduces a note of real hostility to the cricket ground. As the number of international matches has increased, so too has this trajectory of chauvinism. Young braves in national-colours war paint, sporting flags and shouting abuse, quickly become the people who turned going to the beach at Cronulla into a riot.

War and sport could scarcely be more different, yet in some respects they are moving towards each other. The injuries in sport seem, if anything, to have got worse in recent years, the result of greater intensity. Paradoxically, casualties and deaths in war have simultaneously become far less numerically, and also much less acceptable—particularly to the politicians. Perhaps it started with Thatcher’s Falklands victory parade, when the visibly wounded were banished from participation. American deaths in Iraq run to just over 4000, yet the Bush administration has done all it can to mute them. Australian soldiers killed in Iraq number one, or two (depending on how you reckon them); by contrast, our war dead in 1914–18 ran to nearly 60,000. Yet as reliance on technology has increased, so too has concern over individual deaths. Soldiers of the two world wars would have found it hard to believe the headline in the Australian reporting the death of the sixth Australian serviceman in Afghanistan: ‘Digger’s death will not deter Australian forces’. As Jean Baudrillard demonstrated in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, there is a hyper-reality about much contemporary conflict. The Coalition’s huge technological superiority, plus the live (and filtered) television coverage of major operations, creates an enormous disjunction. War can seem to be reduced to police action. Recently an officer pointed out, in the Australian Army Journal, that morale among the infantry in Iraq and Afghanistan was low, because the army’s largest fighting units were being left on the sidelines as fighting was generally carried out by special forces units. They were subject to taunts from the soldiers of other countries, who apparently regard the Australian Army as ‘plagued by institutional cowardice’. Unlike the Americans, the British and the Canadians, the Australians have been confined to protection tasks. When combat does occur, says Major Hammett, Australians are required to sign documents declaring that they did not provoke combat. Once we were warriors.

Meanwhile the rhetoric of the Howard years ran vigorously the other way. We were 100 per cent behind the United States. It was a time of war. And Australia reserved the right, if necessary, to launch a pre-emptive strike against any Asian country harbouring terrorists. Embedded in this mindset, as our troops were spread thinly across the world, was the boast that Australia was ‘punching above weight’, as though it was all some kind of sporting contest. This mindlessly sportif approach disguises the fact that our armed forces have become seriously ill-equipped. ‘So many of our notional capabilities’, Greg Sheridan wrote recently, ‘do not work, are insufficiently used in training or are just way below international standards.’ Australia’s F-18s could not be deployed around Baghdad because they lacked the vital electronic warfare self-protection kit. Australia’s Black Hawk helicopters were similarly unable to be deployed in Afghanistan because they were outmoded. ‘There is’, concludes Sheridan, ‘a disturbing hollowness to much of our force.’ It is as though war and its domestic metaphor on suburban ovals have become conflated.

Sport and military action seem to be converging in popular consciousness, which gives a whole new meaning to ‘war games’—and indeed to athletics. So focused was the Australian Olympic Committee on our winning gold at Beijing that there was, for a time, talk of the team foregoing participation in the opening ceremony. The essential meaning of participation in the Games, and that great ceremonial occasion when the whole world is on parade, was rendered secondary to an absurdly single-minded pursuit of gold. ‘Doing the job’, some athletes described it—as if they were Liberal politicians of the last government justifying Australia’s participation in Iraq. The Australian talent for sport, and our recognised prowess in battle, are gradually moving into articulated alignment. If we are not careful, sport and the military could emerge as the prime axis of Australian identity.

Identity is often projected from a nexus deliberately chosen. Louis XIV and his ministers deliberately set about creating a high culture: the Academies, the Comédie Française and French opera all date from this period, as do various workshops for the visual arts. Until then, the princely courts of Italy were the centre of artistic expression. The successful French bid for primacy in cultural production would make Paris the cultural capital of Europe for three hundred years.

So government subsidy for culture, including sport, can have extraordinary long-term consequences. The clamour for more taxpayers’ money to be spent on sport should therefore be carefully considered. One well-known commentator privately remarks that Europe is good at culture, Australia good at sport. It should not be that neat. We do not have to become the Sparta of the South. True, our religion—as the Melbourne Times used to style its football coverage—does seem to be sport, and its influence is becoming more pervasive. This year has seen the establishment of the Basil Sellers prize, for art concerned with sport. With $150,000 in prize money, it is worth twice as much as the Archibald. (Yes, the word ‘sport’ does appear in this paragraph six times. But that’s what it’s like, living in a jockracy.)

Australia’s coming sixth in the medal tally at Beijing could induce a healthy shift in perspective: not bad, when considered in terms of population size. Perhaps in sport, as in international affairs, we need a dose of reality. Otherwise, there is a real risk that the sports obsession could lead to casual belligerence and serious misjudgment. We run the risk of adopting a posture totally out of proportion to our status and capacities. One day this could bring more than we bargained for.