Remembering Gallipoli: Anzac, the Great War and Australian Memory Politics

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1 Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 63, Number 3, 2017, pp Remembering Gallipoli: Anzac, the Great War and Australian Memory Politics MATT MCDONALD University of Queensland Few could have predicted that an ill-fated landing of Allied troops in modern-day Turkey in April 1915 would become the founding moment of the Australian nation. Australians were amongst several nations represented and did not suffer the most casualties, while the battle itself and the campaign of which it was a part was a military failure. Yet the notion that this battle constituted a coming of age for a nascent nation, and that Australian soldiers had exhibited the defining characteristics of a national type, has become a powerful even hegemonic story of Australian identity. Many analysts have pointed to the militaristic, masculine and mono-cultural dimensions of a myth that weds the nation to a colonial past and in the process imposes limits on the ways in which we can imagine the nation and its role in the world. Yet as the Australian government geared up for the 2015 centenary of that landing Anzac Day 1 with an unprecedented commitment of resources for commemorative activities, the shadow cast by the broader Anzac myth over Australian society and politics triggered surprisingly little public debate. This paper explores the key contours of the Anzac myth, examining the politics of Anzac memory and memorialisation in the context of the centenary of the Great War and the landing of Australian troops at Gallipoli. Introduction While a range of countries announced plans to commemorate the centenary of the Great War in the period , few did so with the commitment and ambition of the Australian government. The impending centenary saw the announcement of a Commission and subsequent Advisory Board on commemoration, the appointment of a special Minister, the establishment of a National Centre, and the commitment to a series of events across Australia and internationally, many funded by federal government contributions of over Aus$330 million. 2 Carolyn Holbrook estimates that when combined with funding from states and the private sector, Australia s financial For their insights on an earlier draft of this paper I am particularly grateful to the editor, Brent Steele, along with the anonymous reviewers. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the International Studies Association conference in Atlanta in 2016, and I am grateful to my fellow panelists and audience members for their feedback also. 1 While ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) is an acronym and therefore should formally be capitalized, as this paper usually uses the term to refer to a broader myth rather than specific soldiers it will not usually be capitalized. And while ANZAC clearly also includes New Zealand, and Anzac Day is celebrated in New Zealand, the focus of this analysis is Australia. 2 See Joan Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia: A Memory Orgy?, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, 3 (2015), pp The Author. Australian Journal of Politics and History 2017 The University of Queensland and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. DOI: /ajph

2 Remembering Gallipoli 407 commitment to the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War ultimately exceeds that of the UK, France, Germany, Canada and New Zealand combined. 3 In an immediate sense, the scale of this commitment to commemoration (especially in comparative terms) is puzzling. Unlike some of these countries, Australia did not experience the First World War on its soil, or even in its hemisphere. Following from this, Australia did not participate in the First World War as an independent nation, but rather as part of the British Empire. Certainly, Australia suffered as a result of the conflict, and the loss of over 1 per cent of the Australian population in battle (around 60,000 fatalities) was a higher proportion than several other participant states. Yet this was significantly less than the sacrifices borne by allied partners like the UK and France, both in terms of the proportion of their population killed and the overall numbers of casualties. And of course, it pales in comparison to the millions killed in the former Ottoman Empire, Germany and Austro-Hungary. If Australia s disproportionate commitment to commemoration constitutes something of a puzzle, at least for the dispassionate and lay observer, so too does the date and event around which commemoration in Australia orients. Of First World War dates, other participant countries typically commemorate Armistice Day 11 November. 4 On this date in 1918, the armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany to formally end hostilities in Western Europe, bringing an end to war. In Australia, however, the key date for the centenary and for the annual commemoration of Australian participation in war generally is 25 April: Anzac Day. On this day in 1915, Australian troops took part in an ultimately doomed Allied landing in Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey. The battle with Ottoman forces that ensued represented the single greatest loss of life to that point of Australian troops in war. While the National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary s final report recommended using the centenary of the Great War as an opportunity to remember all those Australians lost in the wars of the twentieth century, 5 the title of the commission and its report, along with its overwhelming focus on Anzac Day commemoration activities, points to the centrality of this event to the way Australia remembers war. And as a range of analysts have argued, Anzac Day goes beyond the commemoration of war, ultimately serving as the key moment of celebration of the Australian nation and national values. 6 It is more than a day, Frank Bongiorno argues, it is an entire culture of military commemoration and war remembrance that links Australian national identity to military endeavour. 7 This paper uses the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War in Australia to reflect on the contours of the Anzac myth in Australia, and in particular explores the politics of Anzac: what this myth omits, what it enables and what work it does 3 Carolyn Holbrook, Consuming Anzac: some thoughts on the Anzac centenary, Monash online, 9 November 2015 < 4 Carolyn Holbrook, Remembering with Advantages: The Memory of the Great War in Australia, Comillas Journal of International Relations, Vol. 2 (2015), p National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary, How Australia may commemorate the ANZAC CENTENARY (Canberra, 2011), p.vii. 6 See, for example, Frank Bongiorno, Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion, in Shanti Sumartojo and Ben Wellings, eds., Nation, Memory and Great War Commemmoration (Berlin, 2014); Mark McKenna, Patriot Act, The Australian, 6 June 2007; Daniel Nourry, Body-Politic (National Imaginary): Lest We Forget: Mateship (Empire) Right or Wrong, Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture Studies, Vol. 19, 3 (2005), pp Bongiorno, Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion, p.81.

3 408 Matt McDonald politically to define the limits of the Australian nation and indeed citizenship. It suggests that the story of Gallipoli and the broader Anzac myth of which it is a part are both contested and contestable, with many pointing to the militaristic, masculine and mono-cultural dimensions of a myth that weds the nation to a colonial past and in the process imposes limits on the ways in which we can imagine the nation and its role in the world. Yet as the Australian government geared up for Anzac Day 2015 with an unprecedented commitment of resources for commemorative activities, the exclusive and potentially pernicious elements of the Anzac myth triggered little controversy or public debate. This paper proceeds in three parts. The first briefly outlines the story of Gallipoli and the contours of the Anzac myth. While a narrative familiar to regular readers of this journal, such an exercise is necessary to foreground the analysis of the politics of Anzac and commemoration. The second engages with the politics of Anzac directly, pointing to its omissions, as well as its relationship to domestic politics and even foreign policy. The final section focuses more specifically on dynamics of remembrance and the centenary commemoration. While these demonstrate that embrace of the Anzac myth or a particular narrative of Gallipoli is neither universal nor monolithic, they do suggest that this memory orgy 8 has narrowed the scope for feasible critique and dissent from the dominant story presented. In the process, these dynamics of commemoration have important implications for Australian politics, national identity and even what it means to be Australian. Anzac and Gallipoli The Anzac spirit encompasses values that every Australian holds dear and aspires to emulate in their own life: courage, bravery, sacrifice, mateship, loyalty, selflessness and resilience. This spirit has given Australians an ideal to strive for and a history to be proud of, even though it was born out of war, suffering and loss (National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary, 2011, p.vi). On 25 April 1915, Australian troops under the leadership of British officers were part of an Allied landing party at a small cove on the Gallipoli peninsula in modern-day Turkey. The landing was part of an Allied offensive to capture the Dardanelles strait from Ottoman forces, ultimately opening the way for Allied control of the Black Sea. This would constitute a new avenue of attack on the Ottoman Empire, relieving pressure on Russian forces fighting against them in the Caucasus. The landing, the immediate battle and the campaign of which it was to form a part were ultimately all failures. The landing involving Australian troops was in the incorrect location, exposing troops to a difficult climb up a slope with well-protected snipers able to target advancing soldiers from higher ground. Of the landing party, over 100,000 were killed over the course of the eight-month Gallipoli campaign. Ultimately, Allied forces were withdrawn after those eight months, in what constituted a significant military failure for the Allies. For Australia, the landing at Gallipoli and subsequent fighting saw more than 800 Australian soldiers killed within five days and over 8,000 over the course of the campaign. This represented the largest loss of life in battle for Australia up to that point. 9 Initial reports of the campaign and in particular Australia s involvement came from Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a British correspondent with the Allied forces. His was the first 8 Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia. 9 On the strategic and military dimensions of the Gallipoli campaign itself, see Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney, 2009).

4 Remembering Gallipoli 409 report published in Australia, on 8 May. It spoke of the battle itself, but more importantly for Australians it emphasized the efforts of ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) troops. He described the troops as brave and practical in the face of severe adversity, concluding that these raw colonial troops, in those desperate hours, proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of the battles of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and Neuve-Chappelle. 10 This report was significant, coming as it did from a non-australian experienced in war reporting. 11 But it was followed one week later by a more baldly patriotic account of the conduct and commitment of Australian troops provided by Australia s official war correspondent, C.E.W. Bean. Bean s account emphasized Australian troops reckless valour in a good cause, enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat. 12 He argued that the landing constituted a defining moment not only for participants in battle and the broader war effort, but for Australia as a nation. 13 These and other accounts of the Gallipoli campaign pointed simultaneously to the horrors of the Great War and the bravery of Australian troops. As they reached a broader Australian audience, movements were under way almost immediately to commemorate the battle and the date of the landing at Gallipoli: 25 April. By early 1916, the state of Queensland had established an Anzac Day Commemoration Committee, and by 1927 all states had settled on 25 April as a public holiday of commemoration. 14 The recently formed Returned Services League (RSL) an organization representing servicemen returning from war campaigned strongly for this outcome. The RSL also pushed for legal restrictions on the use of the term Anzac, especially for commercial purposes, some of which were enacted within months of the battle itself. 15 For scholars of memory in the social sciences, accounting for Australia s embrace of a day of commemoration at the time may reflect a need to come to terms with the realities of trauma. For the first time, Australia had been exposed to war on a significant scale, and the reality of young soldiers not returning home was arguably 10 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett quoted in Robert Manne and Chris Feik, eds, The Words that Made Australia (Melbourne, 2012), pp See Kasun Ubayasiri, The Anzac myth and the shaping of contemporary Australian war reportage, Media, War and Conflict, Vol. 8, 2 (2015), pp In Ann Curthoys, National Narratives, War Commemoration and Racial Exclusion in a Settler Society, in T.A. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Pope, eds, The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London, 2000), p On the role of Bean in shaping a particular narrative of Gallipoli and the diggers, particularly evidenced in his publication The Anzac Book, see for example D.A. Kent, The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: CEW Bean as Editor and Image-Maker, Historical Studies, Vol. 21 (1985), pp ; Martin Crotty and Christina Spittel, The One Day of the Year and All That: Anzac Between History and Memory, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 58, 1 (2012), pp.124-5; Australian War Memorial, The Anzac Book, 3 rd ed. (Sydney, 2010). 14 See John Moses, The Struggle for Anzac Day and the role of the Brisbane Anzac Day Commemoration Committee, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 88, 1 (2002), pp Martin Crotty, The Anzac Citizen: Towards a History of the RSL, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 53, 2 (2007), pp ; Catherine Bond, Is it time to repeal Australia s centuryold laws on the use of the word Anzac?, The Conversation, 31 October 2016 < Holbrook, Remembering with Advantages, p.20.

5 410 Matt McDonald traumatic for the Australian people, especially families of young victims. 16 Yet in the Australian case the embrace of Anzac Day as the national day of commemoration requires attention to the narrative of the Gallipoli campaign and its participants, and the Anzac myth of which it is a part. This myth held that the Australian nation was founded in its experience at Gallipoli, with a nation s innocence lost as it made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve its key values. Facing overwhelming odds, Australia s soldiers its diggers demonstrated courage and heroism, standing shoulder-toshoulder with their mates on the battlefield. They also did so with humour, frankness and a resistance to discipline and authority. 17 For proponents, and certainly for Bean, the Gallipoli campaign was a coming-of-age for a new nation, in which soldiers demonstrated the ideal qualities of the Australian type and the values of the Australian nation. Australia had become an independent state only in 1901, and the determination to develop a unifying story of the nation and national values arguably drove the embrace of Anzac Day and the narration of a broader Anzac myth. 18 We can also see in this embrace a need to elide elements of Australia s past: the brutal realities of colonization (including genocide of Indigenous populations) as well as White Australia s history as a penal settlement. For McKenna, the shame of the former goes some way to explaining the embrace and even the recent resurgence of Anzac Day. 19 As for Australia s convict heritage, the Anzac myth allowed proponents to define positive qualities of the digger in particular a lack of deference to authority as emerging from an egalitarianism that reflected Australia s convict heritage and the associated sense that one s origins did not determine one s worth. Bean s account of the soldiers themselves had a social Darwinist dimension, with his suggestion that the strength and resilience of diggers was one borne of the demands of a harsh rural environment. 20 The Anzac myth also allowed Australia to navigate the difficult relationship between its Britishness (in which capacity, formally, it was participating in war alongside British soldiers) with its distinct nationhood: the qualities of the diggers and even their resentment of British soldiers and officers. 21 The need to define, narrate and embrace a distinctive image of what it meant to be Australian was, therefore, central to the embrace of Anzac Day, a particular narrative of the Gallipoli campaign, and the broader Anzac myth. Indeed for Richard White, with the landing at Gallipoli in April 1915, the ready-made myth (of Australian identity) was given a name, a time and a place. 22 The Politics of Anzac Of course, any act of commemoration and remembering involves some form of forgetting: of elements of (and participants in) a story or narrative that do not fit the 16 See, for example, Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 1995). See also Matt McDonald, Lest We Forget: The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention, International Political Sociology, Vol. 4 (2010), pp On these points, see, for example, Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (Brisbane, 2004); Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney, 1981), pp Ibid. 19 Mark McKenna, Keeping in Step: The Anzac Resurgence and Military Heritage in Australia and New Zealand, in Sumartojo and Wellings eds., Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration, pp See Holbrook, Remembering with Advantages, p.20; White, Inventing Australia, pp See Adrian Caesar, Kitsch and Imperialism: The Anzac Book Revisited, Westerly, Vol. 40, 4 (1995), pp.76-85; Seal, Inventing Anzac, pp.10-15; McDonald, Lest we Forget, p White, Inventing Australia, p.128.

6 Remembering Gallipoli 411 dominant meanings associated with it, or of alternative narratives that are less consequential (or even challenging) to a broader myth. Indeed this is a feature of a number of contributions to this special issue. 23 In many ways this is at the heart of the politics of memory: the question of what we choose to remember and venerate, often illustrated most directly by excluded narratives or elements of them. In the context of Anzac, the narrative of the Gallipoli landing involves remembering the bravery and heroism of soldiers in the face of adversity, along with their distinctive humour and larrikinism. And the broader Anzac myth involves fixing that landing as ground zero of the Australian nation, 24 a point at which national innocence was lost even while Australia demonstrated its willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with allies on the battlefield to fight for its values. Both the narrative and the myth entail important exclusions. Firstly, the dominant image of the digger himself a white man forged in a harsh environment involves at least three forms or axes of exclusion. As Robert Hall has documented, it involves the exclusion of other ethnic minorities and in particular Indigenous soldiers who participated in the Gallipoli campaign. 25 While numbers are less than clear, in part because indigenous soldiers did not enjoy Australian citizenship at that point, approximately fifty Indigenous soldiers took part in the Gallipoli campaign, of around Indigenous Australian soldiers in the Great War. 26 Secondly, it involves excluding those who participated in the war effort, but not on the front-lines. Women in Australia were not permitted to participate as soldiers yet served as medical personnel and sacrificed much at home to sustain the war effort, all while being excluded from the dominant narrative of Australian participation, loss and glory in war. This is before we explore the gendered nature of the narrative and the demonstratively masculinist image of the ideal type. 27 Finally, and to the extent that the Anzac myth constitutes the foundation of a dominant narrative of Australian identity, the image of a white man as the ideal Australian type works against much of Australia s contemporary (multicultural) population recognizing themselves in this conception of what it means to be Australian. While the National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary acknowledged the danger that other groups in contemporary society felt excluded and alienated from the Anzac story, recognition of the need to broaden the scope of the Anzac narrative has not increased identification with this narrative among non-white populations in Australia. 28 Indeed, Frank Bongiorno argues that recent gestures of 23 For example, Jeremy Youde, Covering the Cough: Memory, Remembrance and Influenza Amnesia ; Cian O Driscoll, Knowing and Forgetting the Easter 2016 Uprising ; and Mariya Omelicheva, A New Russian Holiday has more behind it than National Unity. 24 Nourry, Body-Politic, p Robert Hall, The Black Diggers (Sydney, 1989). See also Philippa Scarlett, Gallipoli: Aboriginal Men who were there, Indigenous Histories, 29 March 2014 < On the role of race in First World War memories see also, in this issue, Alexander D. Barder, Race War and the Global Imperial Order: The Armenian Genocide of Bongiorno, Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion, p See, for example, Helen Pringle, The Making of an Australian Civic Identity, in Geoffrey Stokes, ed., The Politics of Identity in Australia (Melbourne, 1997), pp ; Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male (Melbourne, 2001); White, Inventing Australia, pp See Danielle Drozdzewski, Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia s Multiculturalism?, Australian Geographer, Vol. 47, 1 (2016), pp.3-10; Danielle Drozdzewski and Emma Waterton, In

7 412 Matt McDonald inclusivity in formal statements on the contemporary meaning of Anzac (and even the participation of minority groups) actually results in a declining toleration in public culture of critique of Anzac by strengthening its cultural authority. 29 Other uncomfortable dimensions of the Gallipoli landing narrative and the Anzac myth are also excluded. Perhaps understandably, the at times questionable and frequently racist behaviour of Australian troops in the First World War does not feature in accounts of their heroism. 30 Philip Dwyer notes that in the weeks leading up to the Gallipoli landing, some Australian troops had terrorised Cairo residents, ransacking brothels and assaulting locals. 31 There is also the tendency to exclude both opponents and allies from the narrative. This is, of course, most directly relevant to New Zealand soldiers who have always risked being forgotten in dominant Australian accounts of Gallipoli and ANZAC. 32 Both Britain and France suffered more casualties than Australia in the Gallipoli campaign, while around the same number of Ottoman troops were killed as the entire total of Allied losses. Sporadic claims of Australian ownership of Anzac Cove at Gallipoli the landing site for Anzac troops in 1915 have served to minimize recognition of Ottoman losses as well as the importance of the campaign for a nascent nationalist movement central to the foundation of modern-day Turkey. 33 In some senses, the site and the campaign are at least as important for foundational myths of the Turkish nation. 34 Finally, the centrality of the Anzac myth to dominant accounts of Australian identity is also contested and contestable because of its potential celebration of militarism. For critics, establishing the Gallipoli campaign as the founding moment of the Australian nation endorses participation in armed conflict as the ultimate demonstration of citizenship. This concern was central to the edited volume What s Wrong with Anzac, with several contributors questioning the idea that the Australian nation was founded through participation in the Great War and pointing to the implications of endorsing this conception of the origins of the Australian nation in a contemporary context. 35 The danger here, one identified by Mark McKenna in particular, was that tying citizenship remembering Anzac Day, what do we forget?, The Conversation, 20 April 2016 < 29 Bongiorno, Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion, p.81. Joan Beaumont argues that governmentfunded commemoration activities continued to favour traditional forms and dynamics of commemoration, working against the stated move towards inclusivity of ethnic minorities. Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia, pp See, for example, Peter Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Sydney, 2010). 31 Philip Dwyer, Anzacs Behaving Badly, The Conversation, 29 April 2015 < 32 Tamara McLean, Aussies forget the NZ in Anzac, The Age, 22 April See Bart Ziino, Who Owns Gallipoli? Australia s Gallipoli Anxieties, , Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 30, 88 (2006), pp.1-12; idem, We Are Talking about Gallipoli After All: contested narratives, contested ownership and the Gallipoli peninsula, in Martin Gegner and Bart Ziino, eds, The Heritage of War (London, 2012), pp Indeed, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish state, led Ottoman forces against the Allied invasion at Gallipoli. See Erdem Koc, Turkish view remains neglected in our understanding of Gallipoli, The Conversation, 8 April 2015 < 35 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (with Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi), What s Wrong with Anzac: The Militarization of Australian History (Sydney, 2010).

8 Remembering Gallipoli 413 and the nation to participation in war meant encouraging and validating the use of force. 36 While the politics of memory is therefore evident in choices around which stories, and what parts of those stories, come to be seen as important and constitutive of national identity, it is also evident in processes of commemoration (to be discussed) and in particular dynamics of contestation associated with the political use of these stories. 37 At recent points in Australian history, particularly evident in the so-called culture/history wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Australia s political leaders directly engaged with the story of Gallipoli and the Anzac myth, and in particular its relationship to the nation and national identity. 38 For former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, the veneration of the Gallipoli experience as foundational for Australian identity was problematic, celebrating as it did Australian participation in a war as part of Britain rather than in the service or defence of the Australian nation. This historical interpretation fitted with Keating s call for Australians to embrace a forward-thinking vision of the nation as multicultural, part of the Asian region, and increasingly detached from Britain and the Anglosphere. For his successor, conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it was appropriate not only that Gallipoli was front and centre of attempts to come to terms with the origin of Australia as a nation, but that the Anzacs were recognized as constituting the epitome of what it meant to be Australian. This vision of Gallipoli and the Anzacs coincided with a commitment to the monarchy, a scepticism of multiculturalism, and a rejection of black armband historical accounts of the colonization of Australia and its impact on Indigenous peoples. 39 Ultimately, few would challenge the idea that Howard s identity project was more successful in the longer term than Keating s, particularly when viewed in light of the emergence of a more muscular nationalism under Howard and the resurgence of Anzac Day itself. 40 For some, including Ben Wellings, this reflects a growing disillusionment with Keating s project and the alienating effects of globalization. 41 For others, it reflects Howard s ability to effectively mobilize a traditional and narrow nationalist political project in which Gallipoli and Anzac were central. Here too, the politics of memory and the contemporary implications of forms of remembrance are particularly evident. The resurgence of Anzac day and the Anzac myth under Howard coincided with an exclusive form of nationalism that encouraged a militarized response to the arrival of asylum-seekers and even culminated in race riots in Sydney in And the deference to the military narrative of Anzac and Gallipoli arguably encouraged a more permissive view within Australia of the legitimacy of the use of force. Indeed, Howard 36 Mark McKenna, Patriot Act, The Australian, 6 June On this point, see Anna Clark, Politicians Using History, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 56:1 (2010), pp See, for example, Stuart MacIntyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne, 2003); McKenzie Wark, The Virtual Republic: Australia s Culture Wars of the 1990s (Sydney, 1998); Jim George and Kim Huynh, The Culture Wars (London, 2008). 39 Of a substantial literature on the identity projects and related political visions of Keating and Howard, see for example Carol Johnson, Governing Change: Keating to Howard (Brisbane, 2000); James Curran, The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image (Melbourne, 2000). 40 See McKenna, Keeping in Step. 41 Ben Wellings, Lest You Forget: Memory and Australian Nationalism in a Global Era, in Sumartojo and Wellings ed., Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration, pp See also Johnson, Governing Change.

9 414 Matt McDonald invoked the Anzac tradition and the qualities of the diggers in selling military participation in the war on terror, and in particular military intervention in Iraq. 42 The Politics of Centenary By 2015, John Howard s protégé Tony Abbott was Australia s Prime Minister, and in this sense there was no great surprise that the Prime Minister was in attendance at Gallipoli on Anzac Day, emphasizing its centrality to national identity. Yet many of the plans for the centenary, including the establishment of the National Commission, had been laid under the Labor Government of Julia Gillard. This again serves to underscore the prominent place of the Gallipoli story and the Anzac myth in contemporary Australian politics and culture. But perhaps the issue here is not whether Anzac Day was celebrated, but how it was remembered and what significance was placed on Gallipoli for both Australian experiences in war and broader conceptions of the Australian nation and citizenship. This is consistent with recent claims, by Bruce Scates and others, that the national embrace of Anzac is neither universal nor monolithic in form. 43 How, then, was the centenary commemorated in Australia? Of course, memorial events on Anzac Day took centre stage in commemoration. The central focus here was predictably Anzac Cove at Gallipoli itself, which had become something of a pilgrimage site for Australians. 44 Anticipating significant interest in attendance at Gallipoli for the traditional Anzac Day dawn service in the centenary year, the Department of Veterans Affairs set a cap of 10,500 places for the service, 8000 of which would be allocated to Australians. Some 42,000 Australians applied, with priority given to widows of Gallipoli veterans, then (in descending order) school children, descendants of those involved in the Gallipoli campaign, war veterans and the general public. 45 Prime Minister Abbott attended and spoke at the event, reminding Australians that Gallipoli veterans were the founding heroes of modern Australia [ ] emblematic of the nation we thought we were. He went on to note that the Anzacs represented Australians at our best. 46 Other large-scale commemoration events took place internationally on Anzac Day, particularly at Villers-Bretonneux in France: the site of the Australian War Memorial in Europe. 47 While the memorial pre-dated centenary planning, the Australian 42 Matt McDonald, Lest we Forget ; 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 also McKenna, Patriot Act. 43 Bruce Scates et al., Anzac Day at Home and Abroad, History Compass, Vol. 10, 7 (2012), pp ; Bruce Scates, A Place to Remember: A History of the Shrine of Remembrance (Melbourne, 2009). See also Crotty and Spittel, The One Day of the Year and All That, p See Mark McKenna and Stuart Ward, It Was Really Moving, Mate: The Gallipoli Pilgrimage and Sentimental Nationalism in Australia, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 38, 129 (2007), pp ; Graham Seal, Anzac: The Sacred in the Secular, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 31, 91 (2007), pp On the role of sites and remembrance see also, in this issue, Jelena Subotić, Terrorists are other people: Contested memory of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination. 45 See Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia, pp Tony Abbott, They Did Their Duty, Now Let us do ours, Speech at Anzac Cove, 25 April, 2015, reprinted in The Australian, 27 April In 1918, Australian troops were part of an Allied campaign to retake the town from German forces to prevent their advance West. Coincidentally, the major battle over the town took place from April, with most Australian casualties (2,400) occurring on 25 April. A combination of the significance of Australia s involvement, the extent of Australian casualties and the coincidence with Anzac Day helps explain the decision to locate the war memorial here, and also its central role in Australian war commemoration in Europe. See Romain Fathi, A Piece of Australia in France :

10 Remembering Gallipoli 415 government announced plans to refurbish and expand the memorial, linked to a 2009 commitment to fund an Australian Remembrance Trail across France and Belgium. This would establish new sites of commemoration (and upgrade others) across the Western Front to acknowledge Australian contributions to those campaigns, to be completed by the centenary. 48 An Anzac Centenary Advisory Board, established after the completion of the National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Century in 2011, endorsed these plans while calling on increased funds to facilitate this and other commemoration events. An additional $83 million to facilitate remembrance activities was ultimately forthcoming in the budget. 49 These commitments were oriented partly towards the centenary, but were also longer-term commitments to commemoration that fed off momentum around the Anzac centenary. While international events on Anzac Day 2015 gained particular attention, especially the dawn service at Anzac Cove, a large number of events involving a greater number of participants took place across Australia, many enabled through the federal government s funds for commemoration activities. As Joan Beaumont notes, over 1,000 centenary grants had been allocated for activities such as upgrading local war memorials and renewing avenues of honour, while some 275,000 people across Australia took part in dawn services on Anzac Day itself. 50 While these were record numbers for the service, Beaumont points out that this constituted a fraction more than 1 per cent of the Australian population, suggesting less than universal embrace of the key rituals and commemoration activities of Anzac Day among the broader Australian population. 51 There was also contestation and controversy over the Anzac centenary, though the key controversies were telling for what they revealed about the power and cultural authority of the Anzac myth in Australia. Certainly, some voices sought to remind Australians of the partial, selective and exclusive nature of the meaning given to the Gallipoli campaign and Australia s First World War participation, while others pointed to the scale of taxpayer investment in commemoration activities. Others still expressed concern that the veneration of Anzac as the foundation of the Australian nation was inconsistent with contemporary realities of multiculturalism, and risked endorsing militarism. 52 Many of these criticisms echoed the broader criticisms of the Anzac myth noted earlier. Yet in terms of public debate and outcry, key controversies centred on the commercial exploitation of the centenary by a number of companies, and in particular the supermarket chain, Woolworths. Australian authorities and the commemoration of Anzac Day at Villers-Bretonneux in the last decade, in Sumartojo and Wellings, eds, Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration. 48 See Anzac Centenary Advisory Board, Report to Government, 1 March 2013, pp.36-39, available at < See also Shanti Sumartojo, Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail, in Sumartojo and Wellings eds, Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration, pp Marty Harris, Funding the Centenary of Anzac, Parliament of Australia, 2012, available at < s/rp/budgetreview201213/anzac>. 50 Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia, p Ibid., p On these points, see for example Peter Cochrane, The Past is not Sacred: The History Wars over Anzac, The Conversation, 25 April 2015 < Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia, pp ; James Brown, Excess in the Anzac Centenary overlooks other military endeavours, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 2014.

11 416 Matt McDonald While substantial legal restrictions exist to prevent the use of the term Anzac for commercial purposes, 53 a number of companies attempted to leverage associated terms and the broader centenary for commercial ends. In the lead-up to the centenary, supermarket chain Woolworths released a marketing campaign in which customers were invited to contribute photographs of war veterans to an online platform. These images would then appear on a virtual poster with the header Lest we Forget ANZAC and accompanied by the slogan Fresh in our Memories, the latter a clear reference to the supermarket s brand: The Fresh Food People (see image one below). This created an outcry, with significant public and media condemnation (especially through social media) and eventual intervention by the Minister for Veterans Affairs. 54 Woolworths subsequently ended the campaign and apologized. Other criticisms were directed at beer-producer Carlton United Breweries and its Raise a Glass appeal and Camp Gallipoli, both of which received permission to employ terminology 53 See Bond, Is it time to repeal Australia s century-old laws on the use of the word Anzac?. 54 Sue Mitchell, Woolworths chastised after Anzac campaign triggered social media backlash, The Sydney Morning Herald, April See also Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia, p.539; Holbrook, Consuming Anzac.

12 Remembering Gallipoli 417 associated with Anzac contingent on donating money to veterans but were still viewed as coming close to exploiting the Anzac commemoration for commercial purposes. 55 Ultimately, it is significant that the central controversies around Australia s commemoration of the Great War were not around the continued dominance of Anzac in the national imaginary, its potentially problematic implications or the exclusions of the Gallipoli narrative and the broader Anzac myth. Indeed as noted, for some the government s relatively piecemeal attempts to acknowledge Indigenous participation in war and engage with multiculturalism through the Anzac myth changed little substantively except to strengthen social consensus on Anzac and render criticism more difficult. 56 The religious nature of remembrance events its role as the sacred in a secular society, in Graham Seal s terms 57 and the merging of private memories and public memory, 58 also served to make it hard for critics to craft a socially sustainable criticism of Australian commemoration of the Great War through Anzac Day. Indeed for Mark McKenna, its dominance is such that [ ] no politician would dare question (Anzac Day s) centrality to national identity. 59 Conclusion There are always tensions and dilemmas in the way societies remember, and Australia s experience with the Anzac centenary, the Gallipoli narrative and the Anzac myth more broadly is certainly no exception. For critics, a key dilemma here is whether to attempt to escape or to engage with what is a powerful, even hegemonic, story about the origin of the Australian nation and the meaning we give to the events at Gallipoli in Put another way, is the problem really the story of Gallipoli and the actions of the Anzac troops themselves, or is it the particular meaning given to these? The recent tendency, particularly under the Howard Government, to employ Anzac in the service of military intervention (with dubious legitimacy), or alongside an exclusionary form of nationalism, has encouraged some to call for alternative foundational narratives and even the rejection of commemoration. 60 For others, the lesson here is less the need to reject a role in the national story for Gallipoli and Anzac, and more the need to ensure this story is inclusive or that its exclusions are at least noted, that it sits alongside alternative narratives of nation and reminds us first and foremost of the tragic sacrifice made by those who fought and died in war. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra one of Australia s most visited attractions raises similar tensions about the way we remember and give meaning to the past and in particular to war. While at times its exhibits constitute a poignant illustration of the unnecessary tragedy of war, other exhibits point to the contribution Australians made to victory in the defence of core values, telling us that war is worthwhile, necessary and even glorious. This latter message may serve to help give meaning to death and even deal with trauma of families whose loved ones were lost, 61 but embracing this meaning at a national level means potentially endorsing a 55 See Holbrook, Consuming Anzac ; Beaumont, Commemoration in Australia, p Bongiorno, Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion, pp Seal, Anzac: The Sacred in the Secular. 58 Sumartojo, Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail. 59 McKenna, Keeping in Step, p See, for example, Marilyn Lake, We must fight free of Anzac, lest we forget our other stories, The Sydney Morning Herald, April It is far more difficult to justify the ability to purchase toy tanks, planes and weapons in the War Memorial s gift shop, however.

13 418 Matt McDonald problematic view of the legitimacy of violence and the heightened citizenship of (usually white, male) soldiers while eliding the dubious circumstances in which we engage in conflict in the first place. For scholars of politics and international relations, no less than for scholars of history, these things matter. Coming to terms with the meaning given to Gallipoli, to Anzac, to the Great War, and the processes through which those meanings have become dominant is crucial. It allows us key insights into the contours of national identity, conditions of political possibility and even the dynamics of policy debate and political practice regarding issues as disparate as Australia s commitment to the ANZUS alliance, the trajectory of multiculturalism, and Australia s treatment of asylum-seekers. And while we should recognise that the Gallipoli story and the Anzac myth are neither monolithic nor universally embraced, and that even those remembering this event in Australia take away different meanings, 62 we should be particularly aware of the ways in which selected meanings are employed for political ends, potentially making us in Manning Clark s terms a prisoner of (the) past rather than the architect of a new future [ ] See Scates et al., Anzac Day at Home and Abroad ; Crotty and Spittel, The One Day of the Year and All That. 63 Manning Clark, A History of Australia, Volume 5 (Melbourne, 1981), p.426.