Gallipoli Versus Kokoda: Did Australians Fight Other People’s Wars? – Neville Meaney

Dr Neville Meaney, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, has a long standing research interest in international history, especially concerning the way in which ideology, culture and geopolitics have interacted to shape the changing character of Australia’s relations with the world. Neville Meaney’s books include Towards a New Vision: Australia and Japan Across Time (2007) and his most recent book, Australia and World Crisis. On Tuesday 11 May 2010 Neville Meaney addressed The Sydney Institute on to discuss Australia’s involvement in international conflicts over a century.

GALLIPOLI VERSUS KOKODA

DID AUSTRALIANS FIGHT OTHER PEOPLE’S WARS?

NEVILLE MEANEY

I am setting my talk in the context of the problem of nationalism and the question of Australian identity which have for some time been a central concern of mine, and which provide one of the contexts for my latest work, Australia and World Crisis.

I have not myself fought in any wars, not even in what has been called “the history wars”. As far as conventional wars are concerned, I grew up at a fortunate time. In my adult years Australians did not have to face a conflict which threatened their survival. As a result, unlike my father who served in the Great War on the Western front, I was never called upon, as so many Australians were in the First and Second World Wars, to give up my peacetime occupation and enlist in the army for the purpose of defending my country.

And as for the so-called “history wars” I myself am not averse to historical argument as anyone reading Australia and World Crisis will see. The main reason I have not directly engaged myself in the “history wars”, if I may put it rather arrogantly, is that I find that these wars are fought in a crudely presentist and polemical way. I believe that understanding informed by knowledge about the past is at the core of the historical discipline and since so much of what I read from the frontline of this battle is superficial and unreflective I find it difficult to take sides or engage openly with the combatants. As a result I have contented myself with writing about the problem of nationalism, in particular about the problem of nationalism in Australia and leaving it to others to find for themselves whether what I have to say is of any value for their quarrels.

The question of whether Australians fought other people’s war is one of the main battlefields for the “history wars”, and it is epitomised in the dispute over whether the origin of Australian identity was to be found at Gallipoli or Kokoda, over whether the nation’s identity arose out of Australian’s involvement in the European or the Pacific wars. This issue, which came to the fore in the Howard/Keating years, is a spurious one. And that it is spurious is made evident by the confusions and evasions which mark the positions taken by both sides, that is by both those who see Australians being duped into participating in World War I and waiting until World War II to realise their national identity and those who have fastened onto and reshaped the tradition of Anzac in an endeavour to make it the source of Australian national identity in a post British Empire world.

To look first at the arguments of those who might be called “radical nationalists” and who either explicitly or implicitly claim that, with the exception of the Pacific part of World War II, Australians fought in other people’s wars. Focussing especially on World War l, the Anzac war, the war in which Australians suffered the greatest losses, those claiming that Australians fought in other people’s wars assert that Australians had no reasonable justification for taking part in this conflict on the other side of the world. In taking this stand they assume that Australian concerns about defence should be limited to its territorial boundaries and they believe that if, like Switzerland, Australia declared itself neutral in the wars of the great powers then it would be left alone. They offer no explanation for ignoring the experiences of small powers in previous wars and indeed that of Belgium’s fate at the outbreak of World War I itself. Why it should be thought that if Germany won the war, a real possibility until late 1918, that a Pax Germania would not have serious consequences for Australia’s independence and security in the Pacific is not touched upon.

Because the evidence for Australians’ belief that they were a British people whose fate was bound up with that of Greater Britain is so overwhelming, those espousing this view are compelled to explain why this should be so. Thus we are told that these naïve, innocent colonials were manipulated by sinister alien influences, most notably British authorities in London and their agents in Australia, into joining in this foreign war. No attempt is made to show how these shadowy forces behind the scenes managed such a triumph.

For those supposedly proud of being true Australians who represent true Australian values it is remarkable that they have such a poor opinion of their fellow Australians who so foolishly and easily were trapped into selling their country out. Behind this lies the assumption that the critics of Australia’s role in the European war know better than the Australians of the time what it meant to be an Australian, what Australia’s proper interests were and how best they should be protected. This amounts to imposing on the past in the most facile and presumptuous way the prejudices of the present. This kind of history has a faint whiff of the Marxist doctrine of false consciousness about it.

Those on the other side, whom for convenience I will dub Anglo conservative nostalgics, once they lost their claim to be the true guardians of Australia’s identity and loyalty with Britain’s decision to abandon Greater Britain and enter the EEC, have sought to hold on to the British connection by making it over to suit Australia’s new circumstances and to do this through privileging Anzac. Thus even as the last of the diggers from the First World War were dying and the numbers of those from the Second World War were rapidly declining – that is those who were the icons of Anzac – there was a move to make Gallipoli central to the new national identity.

Anzac Day thus has become a flag day, a celebration of the flag inherited from the days of the Empire. A regiment of large flags precedes the march of the veterans and smaller flags are freely distributed to the onlookers. Present day members of the armed forces march in their units in uniform. Descendants of the WWI diggers now also have joined the parade behind their own banner. There is at work a desire to establish continuity between that British past out of which the Anzac myth arose and the post imperial Australia. That this is privileging a British past can be seen by looking at those Australians who make pilgrimages to Gallipoli and Flanders Fields. How many Australians of non-Anglo descent are to be found among those who attend these ceremonies?

I do not want to suggest that the RSL which has the responsibility for organising the march is not a worthwhile and honourable organisation. It properly looks after the interests of old comrades and no one can reasonably say it should not have a special occasion to commemorate the sacrifice of those who died, were wounded or otherwise suffered from Australia’s engagement in war. But should it be, as is suggested in the rejuvenated Anzac marches and stated in official speeches on the day, that Anzac should serve a larger purpose and the Anzac “spirit” be placed at the core of Australian values, that it should be the myth that binds Australians together and makes us one?

There are problems with accepting that this is so, that Anzac should be the story which gives meaning to contemporary Australia in a post-Britishness multi-cultural era. Let us briefly look at some of these difficulties. The major wars in which Australia has participated were fought by Australians who proudly identified themselves as Britons, even if, like the Scots, Welsh or Geordies, as a distinct part of the British race. This was particularly true of the First World War whence the Anzac tradition takes its source, and it explains why the RSL has been of all organizations the most committed to the British tradition.

As Anzac was understood at the time the Australians had proved themselves at Gallipoli to be true Britons, even in some minds better Britons. When in earlier times Anzac was spoken of as a rite of passage for Australians, it was understood not as a rite of passage from British domination to Australian independence but rather as Australia’s elevation from the status of a colony to that of an equal partner in shaping the destiny of the worldwide British race. And in this way at that time the NZ in the acronym made sense.

In more recent times some Australian wars have become matters of controversy. The country has been divided about the wisdom and justice of Australian involvement in the Vietnam and Iraq wars. How in such circumstances can a tradition which is extrapolated from Anzac to include all Australian wars attract a consensus in the community and be accepted as the unifying symbol of the community? It has to be asked how the list of values which are drawn upon from the Anzac tradition, those most frequently mentioned being duty, courage, loyalty and “mateship”, can serve the wider purpose. It is right, regardless of whether the wars themselves were divisive, that those who at the direction of the elected government of the day fought for Australia should be honoured for being true to these soldierly virtues. But these values are not peculiar to or specially distinctive of Australia and Australians. They are shared with the armed forces of nearly all modern nations, most notably the greatest enemies against whom Australians have fought, namely the Germans and the Japanese.

There is a need to link the British past to Australia’s present but it seems anachronistic to do it through that element of the past which is so closely related to exclusive ideas of ethnic unity and British race loyalty. The way a people defines itself has an important role in creating and giving legitimacy to a society. It therefore behoves us to think more carefully about nationalism and national identity.

In my most recent book, which tells the story of Australia’s response to the World Crisis of 1914-23, I have tried to re-imagine that time in its own terms and in doing so have developed a number of interwoven themes which are central to the above issues, particularly Britishness and national identity, and Japan and racial geopolitics. I thought that by saying a few words about these themes I might be able throw a little more light on the charge that Australians have been fighting other people’s wars.

Britishness and Australian identity

During the late nineteenth century, that is at the beginning of the nationalist era in the Western world, Australians enthusiastically embraced Britishness to give meaning to their cultural community. Thus Australian Britons at the outbreak of the First World War were nearly unanimous in supporting the Mother Country. When, at the end of July 1914, news of the possibility of a great European War reached Australia its leaders responded immediately with promises of aid for Australia’s kith and kin.

Immediately after the news of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany reached Australia there was a great outpouring of public emotion across the land. Thousands marched through the streets of the main cities singing British patriotic songs, such as God Save the King, Rule Britannia and Soldiers of the Queen. At an overflow public meeting in the Melbourne Town Hall the Premier of the state addressed the audience as “My fellow Britishers” and the Labor leader of the opposition declared that his cry was everyone’s cry – “my country right or wrong”… If they faltered they would be less than Britishers.

To give this idea of identity and loyalty a more formal expression the South Australian Labor government in 1916 required all public school pupils to recite an oath of allegiance which read, “I love my country the British Empire, I salute her flag the Union Jack, I honour her king, King George V and promise cheerfully to obey her laws.” And other states followed South Australia’s lead. Four out of ten of all eligible Australians volunteered to join the AIF and fight for King and Empire in Europe. It was a remarkable social phenomenon.

When in the middle of the war the question of whether Australia should follow Britain’s lead and adopt conscription arose, some anti-conscriptionist unionist leaders justified their stand by citing anti-conscription resolution of the British Trade Union Congress and appealing to the British tradition of liberty. That is, they did not see themselves as being anti-British. Indeed, when Labor split over the question the leaders of the new anti-conscription party proclaimed that their policy was that which had been adopted at the beginning of the war and affirmed their continued support for voluntary enlistments. Although at the end of the war it adopted a radical economic program, this new Labor Party never called for separation from the Empire or for the establishment of an Australian republic.

In 1920, when the Prince of Wales visited Australia, there was some doubt in official quarters whether he should be allowed to go to Queensland where John Fihelly, who had in 1916 opposed conscription and denounced the British government for the treatment of Irish rebels, was the acting premier. For self-described “loyal” conservatives, “Fihellism’’ had become synonymous with disloyalty to Crown and Empire. Yet, in the event, when the Prince did travel to Queensland Fihelly made speeches which were quite similar to those given by the “loyalists” in the other states. Welcoming the Prince to a state banquet, he declared that “The Prince has endeared himself to all who came in contact with him… The traditions of our race and his race will live and be inspired by him”. And he added that though Queensland was only “an outpost of Empire it was a very loyal one”.

At the end of the war Billy Hughes, who had openly criticised the British Prime Minister over the armistice terms and the failure of Lloyd George to protect Australian interests, proudly proclaimed on his return home that Australians were “more British than the people of Great Britain”. When he became Prime Minister in World War II John Curtin, who had been one of the leaders of the movement against conscription in World War I, bore out the truth of this statement.

Curtin’s speech at the end of 1941, in which he said that Australia was turning to America “free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”, has often been taken as a marker of Australian national independence. But it was only a brief moment of crisis when Japan was at Australia’s door that caused the Labor leader to use such language. Throughout his whole career, Curtin spoke as loyally of Australia’s Britishness as any of his predecessors. Speaking of Australia’s role in the war, Curtin averred that because Australians were over ninety per cent British stock, they were “numerically… and in every other aspect a replica of Britain” and they would “carry on a British community as trustees for a British way of life in a part of the world where it is of utmost significance to the British race.”

Likewise on the occasion of the Queen Elizabeth’s first royal tour of Australia, New South Wales Premier J.J. Cahill, an Irish Catholic who had also been an anti-conscripionist in World War I, greeted this very symbol of the worldwide British race with words of loyalty that R.G. Menzies could not have improved upon. In his welcoming address he compared the Queen’s arrival at Farm Cove with Captain Phillip’s arrival in 1788. “It was,” he said, “from that very point that our British civilisation spread out to encompass a continent.” And Premier Cahill continued, giving full vent to Australia’s British identity, “Our origin is British, our soul is British. We think British. We act British.” There was no alternative, no uniquely Australian myth that could rival this loyalty to Britishness.

Japan and racial geopolitics

These British Australians went to war not only out of a sense of loyalty to fellow Britishers but also for reasons of self interest. They were very aware that they had only been able to invade, occupy and develop their island continent because Britain had ruled the waves. They recognised that if Germany defeated Britain, they would have a very uncertain future. At the same time, they knew that they had a set of geopolitical interests which were different from and at times even at odds with that of the Mother Country. Whereas the British were preoccupied with their own security in Europe, Australians saw immediate threats to their survival emanating from the Pacific. This made them very jealous of their right to self-government. Thus while Britain might declare war on behalf of the Empire, Australia would decide for itself whether it wished to help the British cause or to what extent it would provide aid for the Mother Country. Australian leaders did not mindlessly follow the British. They were not the puppets of Whitehall. They made their own decisions in the light of their own assessment of the strategic problem posed for Australia by the war.

With the onset of the European war, this Anglo-Australian difference over geopolitics intensified even as the Australians recognised that their security was integrally bound up with Britain achieving victory in the European struggle. Shortly after the Australian colonies had gained the right of self-government, they had perceived that they faced direct threats from the Asia Pacific region. After Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 and its emergence as the great power in the Western Pacific, the Commonwealth government came to see Japan as a threat which might lead to an invasion. Britain had withdrawn all its modern capital ships from the region to meet the German challenge in Europe and relied on an alliance with Japan for protection of its interests in the region. Australians had no confidence in this alliance. They could not see that it was based on common interests and so, in defiance of all British authorities, Australia acquired a navy of its own and introduced compulsory military training for an army whose responsibilities were restricted to defending Australia’s own territory.

When the war came the Australians were not reassured by Japan’s entry into the conflict on Britain’s side. Japan sent no troops to the European war. It was the dominant power in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean and, in addition to seizing all German territories in the North Pacific, it tried to make China a dependent protectorate and pressed Australia to enter into a commercial treaty which would weaken the White Australia policy. During the world crisis, Australia was in a sense engaged in two wars, a hot war in Europe on behalf of the British Empire and a cold war in the Pacific against Japan. Andrew Fisher became Prime Minister a few weeks after the outbreak of the European conflict.

When war seemed imminent, Fisher responded first by declaring that Australia should support the Mother Country “to the last man and the last shilling”, but within a week was affirming the Australian strategic doctrine which he had developed in response to the fear of Japan in the pre-war years, namely that patriotism was first to provide for Australia’s defence, and only if there was anything to spare, offer support for the Mother Country. After observing how Japan was taking advantage of the European war to expand its empire and influence in the Pacific region, Australians became alarmed. They sought authoritative news and intelligence about Japan’s intentions and the Defence Department arranged the appointment of a lecturer in Japanese at Sydney University who was to spend two days a week teaching students at the university and three days teaching the cadet officers at Duntroon Military College in Canberra. This was the beginning of Asian Studies in Australia.

This complex perception of Australia’s strategic circumstances came to the fore in the dispute over conscription for the AIF. From the outset Fisher, alarmed by Japan’s imperial expansion in the first months of the war, had not actively encouraged recruitment. He knew that Japan might easily swap sides or exert pressure for concessions. He hoped, while supporting a modest contribution to the British cause, to be able to continue building up Australia’s own defences against the Japanese menace which had brought with it a regional crisis for which there was, as he put it, “no parallel in our history”.

By the time Billy Hughes succeeded Fisher in 1915, it was clear that Britain and its allies were not going to achieve a quick victory. Hughes supported conscription in order to give the greatest possible aid to the Mother Country and so hasten on the time when the British navy would be free to protect Australian in the Pacific. In the ensuing debates, these two strategic arguments confronted one another. In explaining to the British commander of the AIF in France why the troops under his command had voted against conscription, Keith Murdoch said, “Australia and Australians do not and cannot feel the same towards the war as Englishmen…. They have nearly all been away from home now for two years or more, striving against an enemy who is not to them nearly as great an object of enmity and dread as the Japanese.”

This Australian fear and dread of the Japanese was expressed most often in a mixture of racial and geopolitical terms. Fisher’s anxiety was predominantly a prudential response to an imperial expansionist power which dominated the whole of the Western Pacific. For Hughes, his profound distrust of Japan was more influenced by ideas of the inevitable conflict of the races. From before the outbreak of the war Japan, Hughes saw Japan as a racial enemy, the embodiment of the “teeming, sweating” millions of Asia who were bent on destroying White Australia. He exhorted his fellow Australians to be ready to guard the flag of White Australia which they had raised to the topmost mast. Across Australia, it was this view of Japan as the great enemy of White Australia that tended to prevail.

Thus Australia’s world crisis did not end with victory in Europe. At the Paris Peace Conference, Hughes’ demand for annexation of the German South Pacific islands and his opposition to Japan’s attempt to incorporate a racial equality principle in the League of Nations covenant was based on these very fears. Even after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations, Australians were still apprehensive about Japan and began to plan fortress Australia. Indeed Hughes, when shortly after returning from the Peace Conference, heard that the Japanese fleet had left Yokohama on an exercise, in panic cabled the British Prime Minister to express his “great uneasiness” about what this might mean. He asked the British to send a squadron of their most advanced battleships to the Pacific.

The British tried to reassure Hughes but he was unmoved and sent a further, even more frantic, appeal for help, complaining that London did not understand Australia’s peril. “It’s a long way,” he wrote “from Tokio to Whitehall, but we are within a stone[sic] throw.” And he continued, setting out a list of reasons for Australia’s anxiety. “I desire again to emphasise that our fleet is practically without fuel, and in any case quite unequal to meet Japanese with any hope of success; that there are no British squadrons in eastern waters fit to do so; that we profoundly distrust Japan; that experience of Port Arthur shows she strikes first and declares war afterwards; … and as you doubtless know, her strong animosity has been roused by our opposition to her desire for an equal treatment of their … [nationals] and their entry into Australia.”

It was not until the Washington Conference of 1921-22, at which the Japanese agreed to limitations on naval armaments and to respect the sovereignty of the Pacific and China, that Australians finally came to accept that the post war Japan was peaceful and that they could without great risk abandon their comprehensive and expensive defence plans.

Despite these differences with the British, Australia (unlike Canada and South Africa) never sought to establish itself primarily as an independent nation in the world of nations. Australians’ identification with Britishness was a powerful emotional force in their lives, expressing itself on occasions in the most bizarre ways. For example, at the end of 1921 the then member for the seat of Wentworth entering the House of Representatives declared that the Bible had revealed that the battle of Armageddon accompanied by the Second Coming of Christ was to happen in 1934. In addition, “the British nation from the start had been ordained to take the main role” leading the forces of light in this great battle which marked these “latter days” and “the time of the end.” As a result, he assured his listeners that “nothing can ever undermine the British Empire to our utter destruction”. A few weeks later he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary for External Affairs. While Hughes would not have shared this heavenly vision, he nevertheless shared the hope that, despite the British government’s rebuffs and betrayals, a way could be found to realise more fully the meaning of the Australian idea of Britishness so that all parts of the British diaspora could participate with the Mother Country in the making of Imperial foreign policy and through that process enable the whole Empire to face the world as one.

This is the Australia in which the Anzac legend was created. Australia after the end of Empire is a very different place. All societies need shared myths or values to give meaning to the common life and hold them together and Australia needs a new story for this purpose. Neither Gallipoli nor Kokoda will fill the void left by the disappearance of the British race loyalty and identity. Both sides of the argument, however, have a point.. Those favouring Gallipoli believe that the British past must in some way be connected to the present and those in the Kokoda camp quite properly want a myth that is distinctively Australian.

For myself I would think that the problem might be solved by creating this new story around the idea which those Australians who created our political community adopted for that community, namely the idea of a “commonwealth”. Sir Henry Parkes, the father of federation, in choosing this sixteenth century English term was asserting that Australia was an inheritor of the English Civil War tradition of freedom under parliamentary government which subsequent generations had “purified in the  light of human progress”. He expected change.

Parkes believed that it was inevitable and right that Australia’s Commonwealth should adapt to changing times and circumstances. Indeed he could have well claimed that while the key principles inherent in this tradition – parliamentary democracy, liberty under law, the public good, social justice and human rights – were derived from England, Australians had embraced them from the beginning of self-government more enthusiastically and fully than the British and had adapted this heritage to serve their needs and mores and thereby made these Commonwealth principles their own.

White British Australia was only tangentially associated with this commonwealth heritage. Racial and ethnic nationalism was a historically contingent, even if powerful, idea of identity arising out of emergent modernisation in the Western world. Freed as we now are from such cramping and confining images of self, all sections of the country, regardless of class or colour or culture, give their allegiance to these commonwealth principles.

Finally, it should be borne in mind that the Commonwealth is not simply defined by political principles. It requires also a spirit of sociability and fellow-feeling among the people. In The Tempest, Shakespeare satirised the Commonwealth as a fanciful utopia that was not the nature of the Commonwealth tradition that Australians had made for themselves. Australia’s vision has been more in accord with Richard Brome’s lines in praise of the commonwealth which he wrote in 1640 for his play, The Antipodes. Brome, in celebrating this legendary place and imaginary people at the other end of the world, penned the following lines:

Come Wit, come Love, come Wine, come Health,

Maintainers of my commonwealth,

‘Tis you make Harmony complete,

And from the Spheres, her proper seat,

You give her power to reign on earth

Where discord claims a right by birth,

Then let us revel while we are here

And keep possession of this hemisphere.