They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

The last line is probably the reason I always feel guilty that I sleep in and don't get to the dawn service at the War Memorial each year: 'Rather it is about national identity, inter-generational gratitude and deep pity and horror concerning war.'

The war myth that made us
Robert Manne
April 25, 2007

Mystery surrounds Anzac Day. Why have Australians, despite the passage of the years, increasingly come to regard the beginning of one of the most terrible defeats the British Empire suffered in the First World War as their most solemn national day?

One explanation is fanciful. It suggests that something in the national psyche is drawn to stories of audacious exploits that end in disaster - Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, Phar Lap, Gallipoli. Another is more persuasive. It argues that it was only with the news of the landing at Gallipoli that the Australian nation felt it truly had been born. But if so, why?

The historian John Hirst's convincing brief answer goes like this. Despite the creation of vibrant democracies in all the British colonies of Australia, despite the magnificent but sober political achievement of federation, in 1915 the key to the Australian political psychology remained a gnawing sense of colonial inferiority.

The Gallipoli landing was the first action of a solely Australian military unit. The first report to reach our shores came, importantly, not from an Australian but from the British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. The mode was unashamedly heroic. "There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights." Even more significantly, Ashmead-Bartlett wrote the words Australians most yearned to hear. "General Birdwood told the writer that he couldn't sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials (The Australians) were happy because they had been tried for the first time and not found wanting." Ashmead-Bartlett's report was published throughout Australia. The Anzac myth was created.

<snip>

One of the interesting features of the Anzac story is the way politicians seem incapable of leaving it alone. Paul Keating was unhappy that the action took place on the other side of the world, and at a time when Australians loyally served the British Empire. He hoped to replace the story of Gallipoli with the story of Kokoda, where Australians fought in their own region and in national self-defence. On balance, Keating's attempt to relocate the Anzac story has failed. Although there has been some quickening of interest in Kokoda, Gallipoli remains Australia's only sacred soil.

John Howard has attempted something rather different. He has sought to strip from the story of Gallipoli the sense of war's ultimate futility and to graft it on to something he calls "the great Australian military tradition", which stretches, in his opinion, from Gallipoli to Iraq. In our history of loyal military service alongside Britain and America we have made no mistake. This bombast is both new to Australian politics and, as the catastrophe of Iraq reveals, fuelled by a dangerously uncritical self-regard.

Like Keating's initiative, Howard's will most likely also fail. One of the most interesting and unpredicted features of recent times is the way so many young Australians have been drawn to Gallipoli and Anzac. My guess is that they are attracted by the need to feel they belong to something larger than themselves and, living as they do in a hedonistic age, by astonishment at the sacrifices young men in a different time had been willing to make.

For these young people, if I am right, Anzac is not about great military traditions or the supposed glory of even justly fought wars. Rather it is about national identity, inter-generational gratitude and deep pity and horror concerning war.

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/04/24/1177180648069.html

Manne just touches on the Vietnam experience briefly, but for me, that
led to a crucial difference in the way different generations have viewed
war.

I grew up in the post-war era, when we were told a lot about bravery,
and the fight to preserve ideals of freedom that our fathers and
grandfathers had fought on our behalf. We absorbed the tales of heroism
and gallantry along with allegiance to the Empire and loyalty to the
British Crown, never questioning any of it.

But we were to become the Vietnam generation, and that war changed the
picture completely. We were told that we must fight in a country we'd
never heard of, for a cause we didn't comprehend or care about, and for
the first time, young men said "no" when they were told to go and fight.
Dislike of the war and anger against conscription led to a general
contempt of an older generation that believed that if they'd fought, we
should too, and in time a general disgust for war and all it embodied,
including the stories and myths of Anzac Day. Most young people of my
generation wouldn't have been caught dead watching an Anzac Day march.

In time, things have moved to a more centrist position - I think more
people now realise that war isn't glorious, it's horrible and dirty
and ugly, but my generation has also rediscovered respect for the courage
and idealism of those who fought without asking why, even as that earlier
generation has become more likely to admit to feeling fear and anger when
they were sent to fight, and acknowledging the ugliness and futility of
all war. We've all met somewhere in the middle.

I hoped that after Vietnam, no other generation would ever go blindly
into war again; that they would always ask the right questions of the
leaders who never fight but are all too willing to send others to do it,
but sadly it's proved not to be the case. Little Johnny Howard, so
gung-ho about war, who thinks Vietnam was a just war but never offered
his own services, has manipulated us once again into somebody else's
dirty war, and there are still enough bunnies around to buy the old
propaganda.

It seems that we never forget and we never learn.

He falsified his age when he was only 16 so as to enlist at the outbreak of WW2. He never glorified war, and admitted that he was terrified for most of the duration but carried out his duties regardless. He lost the best 6 years of his life which he could never regain. As a legacy of the war, his nerves were badly effected and had to hospitalized intermittently during later years. My Father loved Anzac Day and he always celebrated it each year by attending the Dawn Service, marching in the parade in Sydney and then catching up with old friends well into the night. I lost him in 1988 but my thoughts are well and truly with him today.

RIP Dad

n/t