Anzac's Dirty Dozen (36 page)

One of the most striking tables in the
Historical Statistics
volume of
Australians: A Historical Library
is devoted to infant mortality. It shows that, over the years of the two world wars respectively, no fewer than 33 000 and 30 000 infants died in
Australia. Certainly that is fewer than died as young men in battle, but in the five years following each war a further 42 000 and 25 000 died respectively, and they went on dying, year after year, regardless of whether the nation was at war.
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Naturally the numbers and the proportion that died declined as hygiene and medical science improved (from annual figures of 10 000 in 1901 to just 2500 in 1979) but the total of deaths – about 600 000 in the course of the century – surely dwarfs the sum of misery inflicted by war. This everyday suffering is of course part of the human condition: but what makes it less worthy of notice? What memorial should it justify?

Similar cases could be made for remembering deaths from, say, tuberculosis, from various cancers, or from the quaintly named statistical category ‘mental and nervous diseases'. Among such causes we might count suicide. Although nowhere as deadly in absolute numbers, suicide continues to take a shocking toll, especially among teenagers, and accounting for about a quarter of the deaths of all men in their early 20s. Just as deaths from suicide are distributed unevenly by age, so are they also disproportionately found geographically. In 1998, there were 1589 suicides in capital cities, 511 in other urban areas and 557 in rural areas. Given how urbanised is contemporary Australia, this 557 represents a much greater impact among young men in the country. The Bureau of Statistics explains these grossly disproportionate deaths by pointing to such factors as greater access to firearms, rapid technological changes and living in a climate of economic uncertainty.
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In such figures are written the history of modern Australian rural life, its pressures and challenges – and its tragedies. It seems peculiar at best and grotesque at worst that a country should valorise on memorials in country towns the sacrifice of its young countrymen at places like the Nek and Beersheba, but ignore the experience of their counterparts a couple of generations away. To what
degree are the Nek and suicide among rural young men two sides of a coin?

Suicide might be compared to the loss of life through drug use. Bureau of Statistics figures suggest that some 13 304 Australians died of ‘drug-induced deaths' between 1991 and 2001. Calculating ‘years of potential life lost' in 2001 alone gave a staggering total of 37 386 for, like soldiers, most of those dying were teenagers or young adults.
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Again, these deaths are widely distributed and regarded as a private tragedy rather than a cause for public commemoration; and yet the loss to both families and the community must surely be as severe.

Then there are other causes of death that might seem worthy of remembrance. Taking the statistics for disasters or accidents resulting in more than ten deaths, we get the following indicative figures from 1788 to the present:

•  Shipwrecks – at least 3000 deaths

•  Heat waves – at least 2500 deaths

•  Cyclones and storms – at least 1800 deaths

•  Bushfires – over 800 deaths

•  Industrial (mostly mine) accidents – 450 deaths

•  Air accidents – at least 340 deaths

•  Floods – at least 285 death

•  Rail accidents – at least 230 deaths.
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These figures suggest the price that the continent exacts from those who live here: over 5000 people have died from cyclones, storms, bushfire and extreme temperatures. Several thousand people have died in ships bringing them to this country – including, recently, 50 asylum-seekers who are not included in the figure. As the response to the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria demonstrated, Australians care deeply about those affected by such natural disasters. Speaking of the work of fire services,
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described fire-fighters as Anzacs: but perhaps it would be more fitting to devote greater attention to those affected by such events in their own terms. Why does Australia as a nation accord greater privilege to a person in a khaki uniform than to someone in a yellow or orange overalls? Why should deaths in shipwrecks not be remembered as heroic and tragic? Why should the victims of mine disasters be forgotten when the victims of what might be called obscure and pointless imperial adventures of wars of diplomacy in south-east Asian jungles are valorised in perpetuity?

Such questions might seem impertinent; the answers may seem obvious. I think they are worth pondering. Realistically, however shocking these figures might be, it is unlikely that those who died from these non-warlike causes will be commemorated, for several reasons. Car accident deaths are horrific but rarely heroic. They are diffuse, spread across the nation. In the last decade about 20 000 Australians died on the roads, representing a death toll equal to that in the Vietnam War every three months. But because they occur in small numbers throughout the decade, and attract only local media attention unless the crashes are large or especially lethal, the effect is diminished. However tragic, deaths on the roads differ from death in war because deaths in war come in the service of the nation, and it is the nation that decides that they will be made a fuss of, whether that means a state funeral on return from Afghanistan, a huge and impressive national memorial or official commemoration. We tend to regard such commemoration as natural or organic or justifiable because Australia has always done it. But as a nation we can decide what we commemorate and how. We could as a nation choose to commemorate these losses as well as (not instead of ) those who have died in war.

The point about deaths due to drug use, suicide or motor vehicle trauma is that they do not occur only when uniformed
forces enter combat in battles overseas: they happen every day, in communities and homes and on roads in every part of Australia. They must surely have affected every single family in the country, in one form or another. Again, this is not to decry or diminish the deaths of those who have served and died in war. But it is important to consider them in perspective. We might ask: why would we as a nation especially remember those who die in one situation – in uniform often in battle – while so persistently ignoring other forms of death that also bring suffering and grief to families and loved ones? Are deaths in war different to deaths in peace-time? Of course they are. First, Australians who have died in war have usually (with two significant exceptions) placed themselves in danger of death voluntarily.
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Second, and more significantly, those who have died in war have generally served formally as members of uniformed services. It is significant that the few exceptions – merchant seamen and civilians killed in bombing – are largely denied formal commemoration. At the Australian War Memorial, merchant seamen do not appear on the Roll of Honour but are consigned to panels on a memorial outside the building, while the civilian dead of Darwin, although buried in a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery at Adelaide River, are not actually recorded in the Roll of Honour at all. This reminds us forcibly that commemoration in war in Australia is very firmly reserved for uniformed members of the armed services. In Australia, death in uniform (not in battle, mind, but in uniform) is accorded a privileged status.

So, many argue, should it be. They will remind us that Australia's war dead ‘gave their lives'. They will remind us that many of those deaths came in horrific ways: cut to pieces by shrapnel on the Somme; succumbing to gas gangrene at Ypres; starving and ill on the Burma–Thailand railway; in lonely jungle clearings anywhere from Ambon to Bougainville. They will remind us that many died
heroically: facing death in seemingly futile attacks on Gallipoli or at Fromelles; standing to their guns as ships sank; withstanding attacks by superior numbers at Isurava; and in actions from Pink Hill in South Africa in 1900 to nameless fire-fights in Afghan villages this very year. They will remind us that about a third of these deaths have left no trace, in that thousands were posted ‘missing'. They will remind us that every one of those deaths left grieving families. All this is true. The 102 000 Australians who have died in war have often died in horrible ways, sometimes heroically but too often to no clear purpose, very often without trace and all leaving behind grieving loved ones. Yet it still does not adequately explain why war should be accorded such a privileged place in Australian history.

If Anzac Day is, as its proponents aver, a day devoted to remembrance (and not to the celebration of a bombastic national identity), then surely it could readily accommodate the remembrance of those Australians who have died other than in wartime? It could, but realistically it probably never will. Deaths in war are sanctioned, indeed, sanctified, by the nation. Remembrance is orchestrated by organised bodies such as ex-service organisations. No such large organisations speak for the victims of car accidents, suicide or drug use. The overall effect of this, however, is to skew our understanding of the experience of Australian history.

Surely many deaths – in a bush fire, by suicide, from an overdose – can be regarded as just as horrible as deaths in war? Surely deaths due to suicide or drugs, or to a speeding teenage driver, can be seen as equally futile? Surely every death leaves a family distraught, asking unanswerable questions about why a young man or woman has died? They do: but deaths other than war are not remembered publicly because war occupies a privileged place in the way we as a nation think of our history. In this Marilyn Lake is right. No other aspect of Australian history has anything
remotely as powerful as its own agents whose task is to lobby to ensure that that aspect is accorded such prominence. Indeed, so much do we take for granted this privileging of military history that to point it out is at first sight either ludicrous or sacrilegious, like asking why we wear trousers and skirts or, say, why we accord everyone the vote. It is so intimately a part of the texture of our society that to question it is to contest a fundamental assumption. Of all comparable Western democracies, however, only Australia accords war service and sacrifice a ministry of government (in the Department of Veterans' Affairs) that enjoys such influence. This is not to mention its own national museum in the Australian War Memorial – indeed, the most handsomely funded and largest museum in the country. What other aspect of Australian history is accorded its own national day? Why should that be?

The answer is only partly that war, and specifically the world wars, were events of such profound effect on Australian society that they justified a response in keeping with the magnitude of the effects. After all, other countries, ones even more profoundly affected by one or both of the wars, did not do all or most of these things. But the Australia of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 recognised the magnitude of sacrifice by creating enduring ways of remembering. Among other things they created a vast administrative edifice of ‘repatriation' to care for those affected by war, erected memorials in every state capital, town and suburb, built national memorials in Canberra, at Villers Bretonneux and Gallipoli, supported the creation of war cemeteries and commissioned series of official histories and the archival collections that sustained them. (And note that except for the construction of state and local memorials, this huge effort was almost all undertaken by agencies of the national government.) All this was understandable (even if it was actually rather more than comparable countries did). It was arguably a fitting response by those actually affected by war.

Nowadays, however, with the increasing commoditisation of the Anzac ‘brand', war is being promoted as central to the Australian historical experience. This process has been occurring for over a decade, regardless of political party in power and more as a response to bureaucratic enterprise and the centralising imperatives of media and ‘event management' than by conscious manipulation. In 2003 the then prime minister, John Howard, proclaimed – at the opening of the Australian War Memorial in London – that ‘Anzac Day remains more evocative of the Australian spirit than any other day in our calendar'.
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The effect of this argument and perception is to diminish other manifestations of ‘the Australian spirit'. There are, perhaps, many contenders for ways of evoking the Australian spirit – whatever that may be. A cursory list could encompass qualities such as the stamina of convicts; the mateship of bushmen; the endurance of colonial pioneers; the boldness of settlers; the enterprise of gold-seekers; the initiative of migrants (of any period); the attachment to fairness by those who strove for justice; the egalitarianism of members of the labour movement; the resilience of Indigenous people; and so on. Each of us could find historical models representing ‘Australian values'. Each of these archetypes, and the qualities they could represent, has been celebrated in songs, stories, literature, art, history and fiction. None, however, has gained anything like the popular attention and regard as has the archetype of the ‘digger', partly at least because government has sedulously cultivated no other aspect of Australian history. Clearly, the labour movement has a sectional appeal, as do Indigenous heroes: the digger, however, can be represented as apolitical, and able to encompass all military endeavour, adapting from the classic citizen soldier of the world wars to the regular ethos of the Australian Defence Force as it has developed over the decades after 1945.

As we have seen, the periodic trauma of the two world wars was – thankfully – not repeated in the succeeding half century or later. Korea and Vietnam brought suffering to families, but had no major impact on the nation as a whole. Yet involvement in further wars was incorporated into the rhetoric of Anzac, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes with some stretching, but all bolstered, especially in the past decade, by a concerted effort by government to maintain the privileged position that war exerts over the national historical understanding. The result is that it has been possible to assert that military history's archetypal digger remains ‘more evocative of the Australian spirit' than any other figure.