Our national identity is becoming increasingly militarised. Today I’m thinking of a mother’s words – not the veneration of war dished out by politicians
Countless are the times politicians have spoken for the Australian military personnel whose names appear on the roll of honour at the Australian War Memorial because they were killed in service.
Remembrance Day, like Anzac Day on 25 April, is an opportunity for our political leaders to reaffirm, with bipartisan assurance, words to the effect that none of the 103,000 people named on that roll died in vain.
It’s nonsense of course.
The sad fact is the vast majority of them died in the imperial wars of others – most notably Britain and the United States – and Australia’s current decision-makers, those who get to send young men and women to their deaths, have learned too little from the experience.
Australia is astonishingly big on martial history for such a young nation whose technical foundation story (in our case federation at 1901) was not – like so many others – forged in cordite and cold steel. And yet our national identity has become increasingly militarised to the point where these two days of commemoration are imbued with a type of unquestionable sacred/religious grandeur (and marked with Christian prayer) notwithstanding that less than half of our population (including, presumably, military personnel) identify with that faith.
Go into any bookshop in an Australian airport and there it is: the wall of military machismo – shelf after shelf of books dedicated to Australia’s mythical sporting-like performance on the battlefield.
Just about any challenge to the reverence afforded to military history in Australia is shielded by what historian and novelist Peter Cochrane labels the “magic cloak” of Anzac, such is its political potency.
This was starkly illustrated again this week when the federal government abandoned plans to sell off Sydney’s Victoria Barracks and three other military sites due to their historic significance.
Former prime minister John Howard even accused the Albanese government of (gasp!) “indifference to our proud national and military history”.
Hardly! But can there be any greater Australian political heresy?
As Cochrane said: “Drape Anzac over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument becomes sacrosanct.”
This goes for any meaningful discussion on 11 November about why so many on the roll of honour had to die in the wars of others.
And so it is that while Australia culturally embraces exclusive aspects of its military history (though not so much the frontier wars of colonial violent dispossession from which the white Australian nation grew), our leaders have been woefully inept or blithely unwilling to learn much from it.
This Remembrance Day you’ll hear all of the cliched political shibboleths again – about the “fallen” and their “sacrifice” supposedly for the freedom Australians enjoy today. Freedom? Strategically that is just fanciful, as Australia continues to hock any future military autonomy it has on its $500bn (including management and storage of nuclear waste) Aukus security “deal” with a country still headed by arguably the century’s most strategically dangerous, unstable and corrupt world leader.
Just a week before US voters delivered an unambiguous rebuke to the Trump administration, a nuclear-powered US submarine docked in Perth under Aukus – the “worst, riskiest and most costly” Australian defence decision, according to a public inquiry that both the federal government and opposition have assiduously ignored. Aukus is here and happening, its multiple dangers and compromises to Australian military sovereignty clear and present.
As the world awaits the next move by the US administration headed by a cornered and dangerous president with more than two years yet to serve, Australia is synonymously becoming increasingly militarily dependant on and interoperable with (therefore potentially perilously strategically hitched to) America.
What new American imperial folly – what action that will add yet more names to that roll of honour – might Australia be locked into next? A potential US conflict with China? Not so fanciful, according to former Australian prime minister Paul Keating (also assiduously ignored by the contemporary federal Labor leadership).
As Australia ingloriously scuttled out of its longest war in Afghanistan in 2021 on the coat-tails of the US (follow them in, then follow them out), the then prime minister Scott Morrison claimed that, “No Australian who has ever fallen in our uniform has ever died in vain – ever.”
Audacity aside, try telling that to some of the loved ones of the 41 Australian personnel who died there and the hundreds more who were maimed.
As Hugh Poate, the father of one (Robert Poate, killed by a rogue member of the Afghan army in 2012) told me in 2021, this was “bullshit … political spin”. Quite. Bullseye.
Australian parents and other relatives of the dead (not “the fallen”) from the follies of Gallipoli and Fromelles on the European western front, and from Vietnam to Afghanistan, have been expressing such sentiments for more than a century.
An Australian mother’s words on the tombstone of her son in a lonely European war cemetery say it all: “My only darling son; Another life lost hearts broken for what.”
I’ll think of that mother – and all our war dead – when the politicians are talking today.
It’s time they learned the true lessons of history.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
