The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses,

Transcription

1 Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 64, Number 1, 2018, pp The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses, NICHOLAS BROMFIELD University of Sydney The last quarter of a century has seen an explosion in prime ministerial engagement with Anzac, and in particular, the marking of Anzac Day with a national address. Correspondingly, there has also been enormous interest in Anzac from members of the academy, but there has been little systematic analysis of the breadth and depth of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses. This paper seeks to correct this omission by conducting a critical discourse analysis of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses from 1973 to 2016 in order to sketch their imprecise, but increasingly institutionalised and consistent, genre boundaries. The paper delineates the various thematic and characteristic features of these addresses, including where and when the addresses have been delivered; the fixity and hybridisation of the prime ministerial Anzac speech genre; the thematic and tonal representations of Anzac; the wars and battles prime ministers associate Anzac with; and who Anzac s agents are. As will be shown, whilst Australian prime ministers may closely adhere to the traditions of Anzac with their addresses, they also subtly renovate understandings of Anzac in alignment with their policy agendas. Introduction At dawn on the one hundredth anniversary of Anzac, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott delivered a speech at Anzac Cove. 1 Standing in the emerging blue light, Abbott s speech recalled the actions of those men who had landed at Gallipoli a century earlier, interpreted the values that those servicemen had fought for, and called upon the Australian audience to remember their sacrifice and follow their example. The speech its setting, its form, and its themes would have been familiar to any audience member who had happened to watch previous Australian prime ministerial dawn service addresses at Gallipoli since But was it always so? Since 1990, Australian prime ministers and their governments have increasingly supplanted the Returned and Services League (RSL) as custodians of Anzac. 2 They have consistently given Anzac Day addresses during the last twenty-five years at significant sites of Australian war remembrance and in a form that often closely matched the high rhetoric and nationalism of Abbott s 2015 Anzac Day addresses. But this has not always been the case. Early prime ministerial engagement with Anzac was more sporadic, more suburban, and less spectacular. Further, prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses have not always been about the significance of Anzac in Australia s 1 Tony Abbott, 2015 Dawn Service, Gallipoli, 25 April 2015, PM Transcripts Department of Prime and Cabinet, < 2 Marilyn Lake, How Do Schoolchildren Learn about the Spirit of Anzac?, in Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, with Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi, What s Wrong with ANZAC?: The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney, 2010), p.139; Kenneth Stanley Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton, 2008), pp The Author. Australian Journal of Politics and History 2018 The University of Queensland and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. DOI: /ajph

2 82 Nicholas Bromfield national life and early prime ministerial engagement with Anzac showed a high degree of genre flexibility. Over time, the conventions of these addresses have coagulated, and have begun to demonstrate a significant degree of rhetorical path dependency. 3 Despite this, a systematic analysis of the evolution of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses has not been attempted. 4 This paper seeks to correct this omission by conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses from in order to outline their imprecise, but increasingly institutionalised and consistent, genre boundaries. The paper delineates the various thematic and characteristic features of these addresses, including where and when the addresses have been delivered; the fixity and hybridisation of the prime ministerial Anzac speech genre; the thematic and tonal representations of Anzac; the wars and battles prime ministers associate Anzac with; and finally, who Anzac s agents are. The systematic analysis of these speeches is worthy of study because the prime minister s access to the power resources of the state ensures their profound influence on nationalist discourses. However, this power should not be overstated 5 and prime ministers have also felt the disciplining effects of Anzac. So, whilst this paper does not purport to provide the definitive causal explanation for Anzac s recent resurgence, it does demonstrate how prime ministerial rhetoric has both reflected and engendered this regeneration. 6 3 Dennis Grube, The Gilded Cage: Rhetorical Path Dependency in Australian Politics, in John Uhr and Ryan Walter, eds, Studies in Australian Political Rhetoric (Canberra, 2014), pp In political science, recent generalist works on Australian political rhetoric pay little or no attention to prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses. See: Dennis Grube, Prime Ministers and Rhetorical Governance (Basingstoke, 2013); Uhr and Walter, eds, Studies in Australian Political Rhetoric; Nick Dyrenfurth, Never Hitherto Seen Outside of a Zoo or a Menagerie : The Language of Australian Politics, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 56, 1 (2010), pp.38-54; Judith Brett, The Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard (Cambridge, New York, 2003), pp.196; 204. Historians have been more active in analysis of the role of prime ministers in the resurgence of Anzac, but these works do not offer detailed examination of the linguistic construction of prime ministerial language or exhaustive analysis of the development of prime ministerial Anzac Day engagement. See: Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney, 2014), pp ; Inglis, Sacred Places; James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image (Carlton, 2006); Lake, How Do Schoolchildren, p.139; Mark McKenna, Anzac Day: How Did It Become Australia s National Day?, in Lake, et al., What s Wrong with ANZAC?, pp ; Matthew Graves, Memorial Diplomacy in Franco-Australian Relations, in Shanti Sumartojo and Ben Wellings, eds, Nation Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (Oxford, 2014), pp Joan Beaumont, The Politics of Memory: Commemorating the Centenary of the First World War, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, 3 (2015), p The causal explanation for the recent resurgence of Anzac is a much studied, yet contentious, topic. It has been variously advanced to be due to the increasing temporal distance from the original Anzacs; the emergence of a trauma narrative surrounding service personnel and Anzac during the 1980s; the interest in family genealogy and histories; battlefield tourism and sacred pilgrimage; the engendering role of politicians and the state; or the reconciliation of Vietnam veterans with the Australian body politic. See Inglis, Sacred Places, p.413; Christina Twomey Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: an argument, History Australia, Vol. 10, 3 (2013); Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography; Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge, 2006); Lake, et al., What s Wrong with ANZAC?; Nicholas Bromfield, Welcome home: reconciliation, Vietnam veterans, and Anzac during the Hawke government, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 52, 2, (2017), pp Unfortunately, space does not allow a fuller exploration of these causal mechanisms given the paper s focus on prime ministerial language.

3 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 83 Theory and Method: Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis The paper utilises Critical Discourse Analysis as the methodological basis for the analysis. However, CDA is a theory, as well as a method, and it views discourse in three dimensions: [ ] (i) a language text, spoken or written, (ii) discourse practice (text production and text interpretation), (iii) sociocultural practice. Furthermore, a piece of discourse is embedded within sociocultural practice at a number of levels; in the immediate situation, in the wider institution or organization, and at a societal level [ ]. 7 Importantly, CDA therefore points to the socially embedded nature of language, whilst simultaneously analysing its linguistic construction. The paper thus conducts analysis at these levels. This qualitative approach to CDA is supplemented by quantitative corpus assisted discourse analysis (CADA). CADA explores texts with concordance software in order to examine [ ] lexical frequencies and distributions, regularities and irregularities in collocation patterns and thus patterns of meaning. 8 CADA can be used usefully in conjunction with CDA as it offers an introductory insight into the corpus before conducting qualitative analysis and, further, quantitative verification of qualitative analysis. In addition to CDA, some points about genre need to be made. As Norman Fairclough points out, [ ] genres vary quite considerably in terms of their degree of stabilization, fixity and homogenization. 9 Genres also link together in genre chains, such as media releases tied to set speeches, or hybridise in genre mixing. 10 Further, John Frow points to the structural features of genre its formal textual features, thematic structure, situation of address (or tone), structure of implication (an assumed background knowledge that informs an audience), rhetorical function, and physical setting. 11 Issues like the physical setting of the speeches, the linking of genre types and their hybridity, and the themes, tone and rhetorical purpose of the speeches, will be employed to demonstrate the increasing institutionalisation of a form of prime ministerial Anzac Day rhetoric that is reverential, nationalistic and geared towards partisan policy agendas. The Corpus The corpus consists of thirty-four speeches and eleven media releases, and to the best knowledge of the author, represents the entirety of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses between 1973 and The collation of this corpus is an endeavour that has not been attempted before and it contains speeches and addresses that have received little or no scholarly attention. 13 It has been selected from a range of archival 7 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (New York, 1995), p Paul Bayley, Terror in Political Discourse from the Cold War to the Unipolar World, in Norman Fairclough, Guiseppina Cortese, and Patrizia Ardizzone, eds, Discourse and Contemporary Social Change (Bern, 2007), pp Norman Fairclough, Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (London, 2005), p Ibid., pp.31-2; John Frow, Genre. The New Critical Idiom (London, 2006), pp The corpus has been treated as a population and will thus employ descriptive statistics. 13 This primarily applies to speeches made by Fraser and Hawke prior to 1990.

4 84 Nicholas Bromfield sources 14 and has been cross-checked for coverage with newspaper reports regarding Anzac Day. The necessity of the selection of many sources was clear, as their delivery was on Anzac Day and their subject matter was primarily on Anzac. Others required more judgement those addresses that were directly on Anzac, and were in close proximity to the date of 25 April, were also selected. 15 Speeches and media releases given on Anzac Day, but not directly and substantively on Anzac, have been omitted, as have speeches substantively on Australia s war remembrance delivered on dates other than Anzac Day, such as Remembrance Day or other battle anniversaries. Anzac Day: the Speech Setting and Frequency In his brief parsing of the role of prime ministerial rhetoric on Anzac Day, Dennis Grube asserts: [f]or Australian prime ministers, it has been a consistent duty of the rhetorical prime ministership to speak at a dawn service on ANZAC day [...]. 16 Figure 1 tests this assumption, and reports the frequency of dawn service addresses, Anzac Day addresses falling at a time other than the dawn service, non-anzac Day addresses and one recorded message to the nation. During the period under examination, dawn service addresses were outnumbered by addresses that fell at other times on Anzac Day by more than double. As such, prime ministerial dawn service addresses have not been the most frequently employed platform for making an address on Anzac Day, despite their prominence in public memory due to their publicity and stirring imagery. Figure 1 Anzac Day Address Time Other Anzac Day Ceremony 20 59% Dawn Service Ceremony 9 26% Non-Anzac Day Ceremony 4 12% Recorded Message 1 3% Further, as Figure 2 reports, Anzac Day addresses, at a dawn service or otherwise, have not always been a consistent duty of Australian prime ministers. It is only since 1990 that prime ministers of both parties have begun to regularly address an Anzac Day audience. This is not to say that prime ministers did not engage with Anzac prior to 1990, but that engagement was as a participant, rather than as the focus or the driver of the ceremony. The prime minister s role, then, was frequently to serve as one of the dignitaries of the occasion, lending the endorsement of the state to the proceedings. For example, Gough Whitlam marked Anzac Day 1973 in London, with his only two active Anzac Day duties being a wreath-laying at the Cenotaph at Whitehall and reading one 14 Source material has been located from the PM Transcripts Archive hosted by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the prime ministerial libraries of Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, the prime minister s website at <pm.gov.au>, the PANDORA web archive, the National Archives of Australia, and material hosted at < 15 See Robert Hawke, 24 April 1989, Speech By The Prime Minister Opening Of The Extensions At The Heidelberg Repatriation General Hospital Melbourne, 24 April 1989, < Paul Keating, 23 April 1993, Launch Of The Burma-Thailand Railway, < and Kevin Rudd, 24 April 2009, Address to the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and General Sir John Monash Foundation Leadership Luncheon, Docklands, < 16 Grube, Prime Ministers and Rhetorical Governance, pp.55.

5 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 85 of two lessons at an Anzac Day service at Westminster Abbey. 17 Similar participatory patterns were revealed by Fraser and Hawke prior to Figure Anzac Day Address Frequency Speech Media Release Finally, prime ministers Anzac Day participation was often more local, rather than national or international, as prime ministers marked Anzac Day in their local electorates, state capital cities, or wherever they may have found themselves on Anzac Day as they conducted the business of government. For instance, Whitlam marked Anzac Day 1974 with a dawn service at the Edmondson VC Memorial Club in Liverpool in his electorate of Werriwa, before laying a wreath at the Sydney Cenotaph, and attending an afternoon Anzac service at the Masonic Club in Parramatta. 19 Fraser tended to commemorate Anzac as he conducted the business of government, and favoured participation in Anzac Day ceremonies around the country as he did so. Fraser thus appeared at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in 1976, Sydney cenotaph in 1977, Alice Springs in 1978, Esperance in 1979 (the site of his only Anzac Day address), and at the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance in 1980, 1981, and Over time, prime ministers have increasingly moved away from local memorialisation and have instead marked Anzac Day at a national or foreign site of Australian war remembrance. Figure 3 demonstrates that Gallipoli has been a frequent site, but only after Hawke s trip there in The Australian War Memorial in the nation s capital Canberra has increasingly replaced the suburban setting of prime ministerial Anzac Day remembrance too, with all six addresses that have been given there occurring after Trips to Second World War sites of remembrance were conducted by Keating to Papua New Guinea in 1992 and by Howard to Thailand in 17 AAP, Still a Strong Aust-British Bond, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1973, p Nicholas Bromfield, The Turn to Anzac: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Prime Ministerial Anzac Entrepreneurship, , PhD thesis, The University of Sydney, 2016, pp.76-77, < 19 Gough Whitlam, Daily Program 24 to 30 April 1974, 24 April 1974, Item [Box 202] and PDF Whitlam Institute E-Collection. < ?func=results-jump-full&set_entry=000010&set_number=000026&base=GEN01-EGW01>; James Cunningham, 22,000 Join Anzac Day Procession, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1974, p Bob Hawke made the first prime ministerial Gallipoli trip in John Howard followed in 2000 and in 2005, Julia Gillard in 2012, and Tony Abbott in Prime ministerial addresses at the Australian War Memorial have been given in 2001, 2003, 2008, 2010, 2014, and 2016.

6 86 Nicholas Bromfield 1998, but notably dropped off after 2000, as Gallipoli and the Australian War Memorial were increasingly preferred. Figure Site of Anzac Day Address Prior to The RSL s local and state-situated remembrance has been largely abandoned by prime ministers. Instead, Anzac Day has been increasingly marked at significant Australian war sites overseas, or at the Australian War Memorial. CDA stresses the socially embedded nature of discourse, which compels us to examine these shifts and the way they reveal the increasing institutionalisation of prime ministerial engagement with Anzac. The physical setting of a genre is therefore relevant because the setting activates a frame that distinguishes it from other genres. 22 The shift from the local to the national or international stage calls upon the audience to note the replacement of the RSL as Anzac s custodian, the growing significance of Anzac in Australian national life, and the central role of the prime minister and the state in its remembrance. Finally, the state s dominating involvement in the site of Anzac s memorialisation supports the limiting of remembrance to certain endorsed activities and locations. 23 Genre Chains and Hybridisation Prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses have linked in chains with other genre forms. Prominently, this has included the media release and the interview. This linking may seem innocuous, but the regular connection of these forms demonstrates the prime ministerial pursuit of media coverage of their Anzac Day activities and their confidence in the media to report this news to their audience. For example, Howard s 2004 Anzac Day trip to visit the troops participating in the Iraq War consisted of two addresses, two media releases regarding Anzac Day itself, two media releases regarding the awarding of medals for service, and finally, interviews on 25 April and on the morning of 26 April. 24 This burst of activity helped ensure the maximum 22 Frow, Genre, pp Shanti Sumartojo, Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail, in Sumartojo and Wellings, eds. Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration, p John Howard, 25 April 2004, Address to Australian Troops Dohar, Iraq,

7 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 87 positive coverage of Howard s central messages of supporting and thanking the troops for their service, and his reinforcement of the necessity of Australia s Iraq commitment. 25 The linking of these genres reveals how prime ministers have actively engendered the coverage of their Anzac Day activities and messages. Prime minister s Anzac Day addresses also demonstrate a high degree of hybridisation of the various categories of their rhetorical responsibilities, those being world leader, party leader, local member, policy advocate, national representative, and relationship builder. 26 The role of national representative is most obviously present in prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses, but all of these genre forms are evident in the corpus. Further, prime ministers have frequently mixed together two or more genre categories. Hawke in particular combined categories blending national representation, policy advocacy, leadership on the world stage, and attempts to connect with sections of the electorate. For example, on Anzac Day 1986 Hawke spoke in Athens and recalled the sacrifice and comradeship of Greeks and Australians during the Second World War: These shared experiences from the darkest and most bitter days of defeat have, however, left lasting benefits. For the Australians and other allies who fought alongside their Greek comrades it is the staunch friendships which were forged then. These friendships were tested to the utmost limits and have endured. They endure not only among those who fought but have been passed down to the men and women of succeeding generations. 27 Here Hawke took on the role of national leader, speaking on behalf of the nation and imbuing Anzac with meaning for the Australian people friendship between allies. Simultaneously, Hawke was inhabiting the role of world leader, representing Australia to the world and building the relationship with Greece, with the friendship between the nations enduring and being passed down. Finally, Hawke was alluding to his role as a policy advocate and relationship builder to sections of the domestic audience in < Anzac Celebrations, 25 April 2004 < Anzac Day, 25 April 2004 < Australian Service to Iraq and Afghanistan Recognised, 25 April 2004 < Australians in Iraq Honoured, 25 April 2004 < Interview with Peter Cave, AM Programme, ABC Radio, 26 April 2004 < Transcript Of The Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP Address To The Australian Troops, Baghdad, Iraq, 25 April 2004, < Transcript Of The Prime Minister The Hon John Howard Doorstop Interview, Iraq, 25 April 2004, < 25 Michelle Grattan, The Howard Plan Of Attack, The Age, 28 April 2004, p Grube, The Gilded Cage, p Robert Hawke, Speech by Bob Hawke at the Anzac Day Ceremony, Athens, 25 April The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library <

8 88 Nicholas Bromfield Australia, as the Greek diaspora in Australia was an important constituency for the ALP during the 1980s. 28 Such genre hybridity did sometimes attract dissension when overt partisanship intruded. Keating attracted controversy in 1993 when he linked his preference for Asian engagement with Australia s war history by calling the 8 th Division held as Prisoners of War by Japanese forces in the Second World War [ ] the first pioneers of Australia in Asia. The frontiersmen. 29 The RSL and the Opposition both responded by condemning the prime minister for introducing partisanship to Anzac Day. 30 Howard s Iraq trip on Anzac Day 2004 also attracted criticism when it became clear that the visit s purpose was as much about securing support for the contested deployment as it was for thanking the troops. 31 Over time, instances of genre hybridisation that included partisan policy advocacy became less frequent. Howard in particular took an active role in engendering this norm, remarking: I have a golden rule on ANZAC Day I never talk about anything that has any kind of party political [connotation]. 32 This is certainly not uniform across the corpus, 33 but policy advocacy of the type that saw Keating provoke controversy in 1993, or Hawke spruik his government s record on repatriation benefits in and the ALP s Defence White Paper in 1991, 35 has declined in frequency. Instead, prime ministerial speeches have primarily shifted to a format that conforms to the genre category of national leader, with allusions to world leader if the address is being hosted by a foreign government. This change over time reflects the growing coalescing of the genre boundaries of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses and their increasing conformity with the sombre and nationalistic rituals of Anzac. Thematic and Tonal Representations of Anzac The next section will examine the tone and themes evident in prime ministerial representations of Anzac. It tests prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses to see if Graham Seal s assertion that Anzac can be viewed as a spectrum with the digger tradition at one end and the Anzac tradition at the other is evident. 36 Drawing upon the image of national identity expressed in the Australian legend, 37 the digger tradition is characterised by the bottom-up values of the soldiers who fought in the First World 28 James Jupp, The ALP and the Ethnic Communities, in John Warhurst and Andrew Parkin, eds, The Machine: Labor Confronts the Future (St Leonards, 2000), pp Keating, Burma-Thailand Railway, p Jodie Brough, Keating s Tribute Backfires Diggers Sacrifice Used for Political Gain: RSL, The Canberra Times, 24 April 1993, p.1. Keating also provoked controversy on Anzac Day 1992 with similar partisan alignment of Anzac with policy. See Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (North Sydney, 2011), pp Grattan, The Howard Plan of Attack, p John Howard, 25 April 1999, Transcript Of The Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP Radio Interview With John Faine, Radio 3LO, < 33 See Rudd, Address to the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, for a lengthy explication of his government s policy response to the Global Financial Crisis. 34 Hawke, Speech By The Prime Minister Opening Of The Extensions At The Heidelberg Repatriation General Hospital. 35 Robert Hawke, 25 April 1991, Speech By The Prime Minister Opening Of Gymnasium At HMAS Coonawarra Darwin 25 April 1991, < 36 Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (St Lucia, 2004), pp Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne, 199), pp.1-2.

9 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 89 War mateship, anti-authoritarianism, larrikinism, racism, sentimentality, pity and fear. 38 The Anzac tradition, on the other hand, consists of the top-down values of officialdom and the state, emphasising: [ ] a set of attitudes and values within which notions of honour, duty, bravery, sacrifice and salvation are central, located particularly within a militarist context. Overarching these are the imperatives of commemoration and remembrance linked with an overpowering aura of nationalism, emphasising unity, sameness, heritage, patriotism and loyalty. 39 Also tested for is Christina Twomey s argument that, since the 1980s, [ ] personalised stories of trauma, suffering, loss and pain came to occupy a legitimate space in the public discussion of Anzac, along with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and veterans status as victims. 40 Crucially, the rate at which prime ministers have incorporated these variables into their Anzac Day addresses has an important effect on the rhetorical function and tone of their speeches. Figure 4 Rate of Reference to Anzac Tradition, Digger Tradition, and Trauma, per Anzac Day Variable Anzac Tradition Digger Tradition Prior to 1990 Address Total n Trauma Figure 4 reports the coded frequencies of these variables over time, 41 and confirms Seal s characterisation of the state-driven Anzac tradition. Official representations of Anzac by prime ministers strongly reference the service and sacrifice of servicemen and servicewomen, their bravery, honour and heroism, and lessons for the nation state regarding national unity rather than national diversity. These lessons are reinforced by frequent calls to remember and by the sacralisation of Anzac by reference to its sacredness. Further, after 1990, the high rhetoric of the prime ministerial Anzac Day address genre has increased, and especially during the lead-up to the centenary of Anzac after Notably, prime ministers rhetoric does not substantively include the traumatic themes Twomey has identified with public discussion of Anzac, with some key identifiers of this variable (trauma; PTSD; victim/victimhood) being completely absent from the corpus. Prime ministers employment of the Anzac tradition has an important rhetorical function as it asks the audience to remember the values of service, sacrifice and unity, 38 Seal, Inventing Anzac, p Ibid., p Twomey, Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac, pp.88, These variables have been coded in the corpus. This has created a population of coded mentions, and the rate of mentions of these variables over time, and per speech, have been used to reflect the differing number of speeches given. The Anzac tradition themes n=7: remember; sacrifice; bravery/courage/valour/heroism; duty/service; honour; unity; sacredness/soul. The digger tradition themes n=7: mateship/mates; generalised Australianness; humour; egalitarianism/fair-go; larrikinism; anti-authoritarianism; fear. The trauma themes n=7: trauma; ongoing physical/mental health effects of war; suffering; horror; disturb; PTSD; victim/victimhood.

10 90 Nicholas Bromfield and is frequently employed in conjunction with lessons for the present. These lessons for the present often included an explicit or implicit policy agenda, such as Hawke s hybridisation of Anzac Day and policy speeches in service of his government s policy agenda, Howard s alignment of Anzac with justifications for the deployment of Australian troops to the invasion of Iraq, or Keating s neoliberalism and Asian engagement. The tone of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses reinforces the rhetorical function outlined above, with the employment of the Anzac tradition again playing a crucial role. The digger tradition s informality, laconic humour, and ambivalence towards the heroism of death, serves as a poor foundation for the sombre and reverent tone that Australian prime ministers have employed on Anzac Day to augment their policy agendas. Trauma s emphasis upon the horrifying effects of war also poorly serves prime ministers tonal needs. The Anzac tradition, on the other hand, is replete with signifiers of appropriate tone calls to remember duty, honour, and sacrifice invite reflection and reverence, not light-heartedness regarding the larrikin exploits of diggers or cynicism engendered by the traumatic legacies of war. Whilst the digger tradition and trauma variables are comparatively less emphasised than the Anzac tradition variable, the fashion and meaning of their rarer inclusion is important. Regarding the digger tradition, Australianness and mateship in the contemporary context have more plural meanings than the older racialised and gendered representations of Australianness that this tradition draws upon. Additionally, both parties have employed mateship, which has weakened its connection to the Australian legend. Dyrenfurth has pointed to the ways that Howard s conservative and neoliberal version of mateship [ ] seemed to decouple its meaning from state interventionism in aid of a more egalitarian and equal society. 42 But Fraser s invocation of mateship as one of the great qualities of Anzac in 1979 reveals that conservative engagement with mateship also has a longer history. 43 Twomey s argument that war s ongoing physical and mental health effects are now an evident theme in public discussion of Anzac is also present, as these issues are a prominent sub-theme of Keating s and post-2010 speeches. But the more horrifying effects of war are frequently avoided by other prime ministers or softened by the regular linking of suffering with heroism and sacrifice. The reverent tone invoked by the Anzac tradition is helped by frequent prime ministerial reference to the sacredness of Anzac. Sacredness, pilgrimage and spirituality are regularly employed as themes by prime ministers, ensuring the tonal sanctity of Anzac. These references are primarily secular, though allusions to the Christian faith also sometimes appear. 44 At Lone Pine in 2015, Abbott explicitly drew upon Ecclesiasticus 44:13, reminding the audience of the biblical basis of his parable: On the headstones here, on the graves with no name, are etched the words: their glory shall not be blotted out. It is taken from the Scripture: Their seed shall remain forever. Their glory shall not be blotted out. 42 Nick Dyrenfurth, Mateship: A Very Australian History (Brunswick, 2015), p Fraser, Anzac Day Esperance, 25 April 1979, Box M1263/828, National Archives of Australia, p.5. Fraser s only Anzac Day speech emphasized Australia s alliance relationships and the heroic qualities of service people: They have helped to sweep the seas and conquer the skies from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean. 44 See Graham Seal ANZAC: the Sacred in the Secular, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 31, 91 (2007), pp for discussion of the intersection of secular and Christian religious practices in Anzac.

11 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 91 A century on, we re-affirm this truth. Our nation has grown from their seed. Australia thrives and prospers, nourished by their example. 45 A similar biblical parable is given by Rudd in 2010 regarding the lessons of Anzac, as he drew upon Matthew 5:9: ANZAC has taught us anew the wisdom of old blessed are the peacemakers. 46 Such references, in combination with more frequent secular references to the nation s soul, pilgrimage to the sacred site of Gallipoli, or the spirituality of the day, all echo the reverent and authoritative tone of the sermon. Further, the reference to the Christian faith reinforces the Anglo-Celtic hegemony that characterises prime minister s Anzac Day speeches. On rarer occasions, the tone is patriotic and celebratory, not reverential. In particular, Mark McKenna has noted calls by Howard after 2001 to not only commemorate Anzac, but to also celebrate it. 47 Such rhetoric invokes nationalist sentiment, calling upon the audience to revel in Anzac s expression of Australianness. This call to celebrate Anzac is certainly evident in Howard s language after 2001, with his 2003 address for instance arguing that Anzac: [ ] is about the celebration of some wonderful values, of courage, of valour, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost. 48 But calls to celebrate Anzac also have a broader history. They are evident in the language of Hawke in 1989 ( Next year, we will be celebrating the 75th anniversary of [Anzac] 49 ), Keating in 1992 ( This visit today [to Kokoda] is a celebration of our freedom and our friendship [with PNG] [ ] 50 ) and Rudd in 2010 ( [ ] perhaps it is also time for a further national conversation as to how we commemorate and celebrate ANZAC in ). The call to celebrate Anzac is thus more than a feature of Howard s Anzac Day addresses, but is instead part of the patriotic sentiment that prime ministers ask audiences to embrace. These thematic and tonal characteristics have served particular political purposes. The more frequent employment of the Anzac tradition by prime ministers has aided the subtle (and occasionally not so subtle) renovation of Australian identity in line with their government s policy priorities. Such endeavours have been aided by the reverential, sanctified, and patriotic themes and tones of the Anzac tradition that make challenges to their representation of Anzac difficult, if not blasphemous. 52 The Wars and Battles of Anzac The next section examines which wars and battles prime ministers associate Anzac with and their conservative interpretation of Australia s war history. Prime ministers have focused upon the two World Wars and their associated battles, and upon 45 Tony Abbott, 25 April 2015, Lone Pine Address, Gallipoli, < 46 Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister Speech at the ANZAC Day National Ceremony Australian War Memorial, Canberra On the Commemoration of the Centenary of ANZAC 25 April 2010, < 47 McKenna, Australia s National Day, pp John Howard, 25 April 2003, Transcript Of The Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP Address At Anzac Day Parade, Canberra, < 49 Hawke, Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. 50 Paul Keating, Paul Keating Prime Minister: Major Speeches of the First Year (Barton, 1993). 51 Rudd, Prime Minister Speech at the ANZAC Day National Ceremony. 52 See Bromfield, Welcome Home for discussion of the depoliticisation of Anzac by Prime Ministers.

12 92 Nicholas Bromfield honouring the participants of contemporary Australian Defence Force deployments. Gallipoli has dominated prime ministers interpretation of Australia s war history. The representation of wars and battles is significant because they profoundly influence the success or failure of the addresses rhetorical function. Figure 5 Rate of Reference to Named War per Anzac Day Address War Prior to Total n WWI WWII Iraq Afghanistan Vietnam Korea East Timor Solomon Islands Peace Keeping Gulf War Malaya War On Terror Frontier Wars Figure 5 reports the named frequency of the war or conflict that prime ministers see Anzac being associated with. The First World War, the war that established Australia s contemporary pattern of remembrance, is mentioned most frequently, followed by the Second World War and the Iraq War. Second World War mentions predominate during the 1990s, the decade that saw the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, the Australia Remembers program of commemoration, and an attempt by Keating to relocate the meaning of Anzac to Kokoda. Prime ministers have also prominently honoured the service of the present-day Australian Defence Force in their speeches, have linked them to the Anzacs of the past, and have sought to use Anzac as a platform to legitimise Australian participation in contemporary conflicts. 53 Notably, prime ministers have not used Anzac Day as a platform to acknowledge and commemorate the frontier wars between Indigenous Australians and white settlers that established the modern Australian state, reflecting their general reluctance to incorporate Indigenous Australians into their interpretation of Anzac identified in the next section Matt McDonald, and Matt Merefield, How Was Howard s War Possible? Winning the War of Position over Iraq, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 64, 2 (2010), pp See, for instance, Inglis, Sacred Places, pp for Howard s refusal to include the frontier conflicts between Indigenous peoples and white settlers in the Australian War Memorial.

13 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 93 Figure 6 Rate of Reference to Named Battle Site per Anzac Day Address Battle Prior to Total n Gallipoli Lone Pine France Western Front Kokoda WWI Middle East Burma Railway PNG Flanders Tobruk Crete Greece Singapore Kapyong Long Tan Villers- Bretonneux Figure 6 reports the named frequency of the battles associated with Anzac for battle sites with four or more mentions in the corpus. Gallipoli dwarfs mentions of other battles and has become increasingly emphasised in recent years. The most significant battle sites of Anzac are also strongly associated with the two World Wars, with the Battle of Kapyong during the Korean War and the Battle of Long Tan during the Vietnam War being the only named exceptions. Qualitative analysis of the appearance of the mid-century wars of Korea and Vietnam and their associated battles in the corpus reveals that they received little substantive attention from prime ministers. Instead, they mostly feature briefly in a list of wars and battles to be commemorated, rather than as the focus of commemoration. There are exceptions, like Gillard s 2011 honouring of the troops who had fought in the Battle of Kapyong 55 or Hawke s 1989 recollection of the controversy of Vietnam and Vietnam veterans difficulties when they returned from that failed war. 56 However, remembrance of these wars and battles does not predominate in the corpus. Only two prime ministers have attempted to alter the close association between the meanings ascribed to Anzac and the physical location of Gallipoli. Keating attempted to relocate Australians understanding of their war history from Gallipoli and the First World War to the Pacific and the Second World War. 57 This shift was intimately connected to his political agenda an Australian republic, the outlook to Asia, and a rejection of the deferential conservatism that he argued characterised the Coalition s embrace of Empire and remembrance of war. Abbott was the other, arguing in 2014 that Australians should do more to honour Australia s contribution on the Western 55 Julia Gillard, 25 April 2011, We Remember Them with Our Silence, Speech at the ANZAC Day Service, < 56 Hawke, Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. 57 Curran, Power of Speech, pp ; Holbrook, Anzac Unauthorised Biography, pp

14 94 Nicholas Bromfield Front, placing it hierarchically above Gallipoli in a list of First World War campaigns: Above all else, we should remember the Western Front [ ] When all is said and done, Gallipoli was a defeat; but the Western Front a victory. Victories, even terrible ones, should be no less iconic than heroic defeats. 58 Abbott s attempted alteration of Anzac s emphasis did not appear to have had the same partisan inflection that Keating imbued his relocation with and has not attracted the controversy that Keating provoked. 59 The wars and battles of Anzac are crucial elements in the rhetorical function of prime minister s Anzac Day addresses. If, as this paper argues, prime ministers speeches on Anzac Day serve a policy function, as well as a commemorative one, then the structure of implication of an address becomes crucial to the speech s rhetorical role. In other words, if prime ministers wish to employ Anzac for policy ends by associating those policy ends with the positively perceived traditions of Anzac, then they must focus upon those aspects that invoke positively perceived background knowledge; the good wars and battles of the world wars, and especially upon Gallipoli where the nation was born. It comes as little surprise that the conflicts where Australia is interpreted by large enough numbers to have committed wrongs (the wars of settlement and Vietnam) are ignored or marginalised, as their inclusion would hinder this rhetorical function. The fact that Keating ran into such controversy for a relatively conservative reinterpretation of the location of Anzac, let alone engaging with the highly partisan debates surrounding white settlement, demonstrates how crucial adherence to the traditions of Anzac is if rhetorical success is to be ensured. Anzac s Agents Who have been the historical agents who enacted Australia s war history in prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses? Such an analysis is linked to CDA s concern to analyse and reveal the structural relations that produce and reinforce discourses and texts. 60 A number of factors will be explored here, including the gender of Anzac s agents, instances of named ethnicity, and the general level of incorporation and acknowledgement of diversity in the addresses. It will be shown that prime ministers continue to predominantly speak of Anzac in terms that reinforce notions of national unity and are negligent of difference, despite considerable community activism and academic criticism of the hegemony of masculine and Anglo-Celtic identities in Anzac. 61 Beginning with gender, Figure 7 shows the frequency of representations of Anzac agents gender per Anzac Day address. Strikingly, women are never identified as an Anzac agent with a singular gendered noun woman or women in prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses and media releases. The phrase men and women is used frequently, but men are the only singular agents identified by prime ministers. 58 Abbott, Anzac Day National Ceremony. 59 Abbott s short and turbulent term as prime minister may have also been a contributing factor that curtailed his ambitions in this regard. 60 Fairclough, Analysing Discourse, pp See, for instance, James Bennett, Lest We Forget Black Diggers: Recovering Aboriginal Anzacs on Television, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol.38, 4 (2014), pp ; Frank Bongionro, Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion, in Sumartojo and Wellings, eds, Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration, pp

15 The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses 95 Figure 7 Rate of Reference to Gendered Nouns per Anzac Day Address Gender Prior to Total n Men Men and women Women Service type can also serve as an imperfect proxy for gender, as nursing is historically associated with women and frontline engagement in battle with men. Such gendered roles have of course evolved over time, and prime ministers have generally reflected the contemporary circumstance with the conjoined gendered nouns of men and women. However, given the historical focus of many prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses, service type can still demonstrate the gendered nature of prime ministerial representations of Anzac s agents. Thus, Figure 8 reports the frequency per speech of coded instances of service type in the corpus. Figure 8 Rate of Reference to Service Type per Anzac Day Addresses Service Prior to Total n Infantry Air force Navy Nurses The only mention of the contribution of nurses (and by extension, allusion to women) to Anzac comes from Abbott in his 2014 Anzac Day address 62 and his 2015 dawn service address. 63 As such, representations of the gender of Anzac s agents in prime minister s Anzac Day addresses have changed little since feminist activists and academics began to challenge the gendered nature of Anzac in the 1980s. 64 Prime ministers representations of Anzac remain predominantly male. Indigenous Australians also rarely feature in prime ministers Anzac Day addresses, featuring in only three named mentions of ethnicity, one by Hawke in 1991, 65 one by Gillard in 2012, 66 and the only Anzac Day acknowledgement of country by a prime minister with Turnbull in In contrast, Howard tended to emphasise unity over 62 Tony Abbott, 25 April 2014, Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra, < 63 TonyAbbott, 2015 Dawn Service, < 64 See Marilyn Lake, Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts, Gender and History, Vol. 4, 3 (1992), pp ; Twomey, Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac, pp Hawke, Speech Gymnasium Opening. 66 Julia Gillard, 25 April 2012, Dawn Service, Gallipoli, < 67 Malcolm Turnbull, 25 April 2016, Anzac Day National Ceremony Commemorative Address, <

16 96 Nicholas Bromfield diversity, repeatedly utilising the refrain that Anzac represented national unity and common purpose. 68 The emphasis upon unity is not uniform across the corpus. Keating argued that the prisoners of war of the Second World War [ ] found in all sorts of circumstances that they shared common human ground with people they had, for cultural and historical reasons, been inclined to patronise or despise and that there was a lesson in that for Australians as they engaged with Asia. 69 Gillard saw Anzac as reflective of her migrant experience, and linked that to the meaning of Anzac for Indigenous and Turkish Australians: This is the legend of Anzac, and it belongs to every Australian. Not just those who trace their origins to the early settlers but those like me who are migrants and who freely embrace the whole of the Australian story as their own. For Indigenous Australians, whose own wartime valour was a profound expression of the love they felt for the ancient land. And for Turkish-Australians who have not one but two heroic stories to tell their children. 70 Conservative leader Abbott grappled with diversity in 2015, when he said at the dawn service: The first Anzacs were tradesmen, clerks, labourers, farmers and professionals; they were from every conceivable occupation, from every rung in the ladder of society, and from every point under the Southern Cross, 71 a characterisation that did not specifically name structural identities like class, ethnicity or gender, but nodded to their importance. These examples demonstrate the nuance evident in prime ministerial representations of identity and Anzac. Whilst Anzac has largely remained a nationalist discourse associated with the hegemony of Anglo-Celtic and masculine identities, it has not remained exclusively so. However, the extent to which prime ministers represent diversity has largely continued to be dependent on outsider groups conforming to the hegemonic strictures demanded by Anzac, and the attendant compliance with its values of service, sacrifice and duty to the state. As Gillard said, Anzac belongs to those who embrace it, rather than Anzac embracing them. However, we might also question how much agency prime ministers have over Anzac, given its historical association with Anglo-Celtic and masculine identities. 72 The Anzac resurgence so evident in the last quarter of a century has ensured that those prime ministers who do conform to Anzac s genre boundaries have a powerful rhetorical tool if they are only talented enough to work within its limits and exploit its authoritative themes and sanctified tone. Failure to conform to these boundaries risks 68 See, for instance, Anzac Day 2002: It [Anzac] has remained relevant not to glorify war or to paint some romantic picture of our history but to draw upon a great example of unity and common purpose or Anzac Day 2000: We come to draw upon their stirring example of unity and common purpose. John Howard, 25 April 2002, Anzac Day 2002, < Transcript Of The Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP At The Dawn Service, Gallipoli, Turkey, 25 April 2000 < 69 Keating, Burma-Thailand Railway. 70 Gillard, Dawn Service Gallipoli. 71 Abbott, Dawn Service Gallipoli. 72 I am in debt to the anonymous reviewer who made this point. I have gratefully incorporated their criticism and thank them for their suggestion.