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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (January 2005)
Liz Reed. _Bigger than Gallipoli: War, History and Memory in Australia_.
Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2004. xv + 204 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $38.95 (paper),
ISBN 1 920694 19 6.
Reviewed for H-War by Peter Londey, Military History Section, Australian
War Memorial
Managed Memories
On the eve of the celebration around the world of the sixtieth
anniversary of the end of World War II, Liz Reed's book examines how
Australia observed the fiftieth anniversary back in 1995. Though various
institutions, such as the Australian War Memorial, marked the
anniversary, the book concentrates on the Australian government's main
program of commemoration, "Australia Remembers," which was run by the
Department of Veterans' Affairs. The Labor Party Minister for Veterans'
Affairs at the time, Con Sciacca (who at Australia's recent federal
election actually lost his seat for the second time since 1995) is given
consistently favorable treatment by Reed, and obviously charmed her with
his sincerity.
"Australia Remembers" did include major commemorative events in state
and national capitals, but its main focus was to provide support for
local groups running local events; every parliamentary electorate
received the same amount of money. Reed wisely does not attempt to
chronicle all this activity, and her book is not primarily a history of
"Australia Remembers." Rather, she attempts some analysis of meaning and
purpose, focusing in particular on the way a program like "Australia
Remembers" is in the business of creating and massaging communal
"memories," rather than (as it claims) simply recalling them.
In 432, Thucydides's Athenian envoys tried to ensure their Spartan
audience was suitably impressed by Athens's power, "reminding the older
men of what they already knew, and recounting to the younger things of
which they were ignorant" (Thuc. 1.72.1). In 1995 the Australian War
Memorial's commemorative exhibition promised, "If you were there, you'll
remember. If you weren't, you can imagine." Reed is aware that the
apparent neutrality of the "reminding" and the apparent autonomy of the
"remembering" are illusory: during "Australia Remembers," she comments,
"Australians were urged to remember the past, but in reality it often
seemed that the past was being remembered for them.... [A] new narrative
of Australia's recent history and the identity of its people was being
made" (pp. 62-63). Now the thought that government-sponsored historical
commemoration might be mainly about the creation of national myth is
scarcely news. Yet in Australia military commemoration has become
something of a sacred cow, indeed at times it seems in danger of
becoming a new civic religion. The country thinks it needs some sort of
"identity" (Reed comments on this self-conscious need of "new" nations
on p. 121), and the traditional story of European
settlement/colonization/invasion is now too contested to serve as any
basis for shared celebration. As a result, the ritual invocation of
Gallipoli and Kokoda tends to pass without comment, all surviving
soldiers from the World Wars are elevated to "heroes," and practically
nobody stood on the sidelines in 1995 and criticized "Australia
Remembers." (One or two people did raise the then unresolved case of
East Timor, to suggest that Australia's willingness to fight for the
cause of freedom was somewhat partial.) Reed fills the gap, applying an
overdue critical eye to "Australia Remembers." If her tone tends to be
carping rather than sardonic, that is a pity, but at least she is
pointing out the emperor's lack of clothes.
There are many fine historians working in what might broadly be defined
as the field of military historical commemoration in Australia,
historians who know very well the realities of war and are deeply moved
by its human tragedy. But there are also a public, a media, and a
political class who simply want to use this history as a cleansing
national myth, evoking childishly simple "memories" of a golden past
when we knew who the enemies were and all stood and suffered together as
we fought. I fear that the historians, intent on telling stories which
they rightly see as important, can be rather innocent in their bemused
contemplation of the quite bad ways the stories they tell are twisted in
other people's hands.
Reed points out some of the ways this happens. "Australia Remembers" did
not try to stir up animosity towards the Japanese--rather the opposite,
in fact--but ugly emotions were aroused over its choice of the term "VP
Day" rather than "VJ Day"; the government was accused of pandering to
the Japanese by using the more neutral term. (A year later, after a
change of government, new Prime Minister John Howard refused to allow
the dedication of a "Canberra-Nara Peace Park" in the national capital,
given Japan's failure to issue adequate apologies for its wartime
aggression.)
In other areas, "Australia Remembers" was rather more culpable. There
was a deliberate effort to avoid highlighting what Con Sciacca called
"the bad parts of what happened." Suggestions by the Minister for
Foreign Affairs and Trade Gareth Evans that Hiroshima and Nagasaki
should be remembered appear to have been rejected. As Reed comments,
"Australia seemed divorced from the task of engaging with the moral
concerns arising from the war" (p. 165). To a large extent, the program
reduced the universal cataclysm of World War II to an event which only
affected Australians (a photo of prisoners at Changi was carefully
cropped for a poster to cut out any non-Europeans). Australians do, of
course, know something of the war history of allies such as Britain,
America, New Zealand, and (to a lesser extent) countries of Europe. But,
despite Prime Minister Paul Keating's eagerness to reorient Australia
towards Asia, "Australia Remembers" was never used as a platform to
begin educating a largely ignorant public about East and South-East
Asian experience of the war.
In other ways, the "Australia Remembers" distortion of history was more
insidious. Overall, the program had less to do with history than with
nostalgia: nostalgia for some imagined golden, sun-tanned past, which
people could re-live by dressing up and listening to wartime music. This
attempt to delve deep into "memory with the pain removed" (quoted, p.
99). led to bizarre passages, such as the attempt to identify a man who
had been photographed dancing in the street on VP Day. As several rival
claimants pop up, the reader is left wondering why on earth it matters.
The Dancing Man is a memory, like all real memories shadowy and elusive.
The attempt to turn him into some concrete, modern, 80-year-old reality
would be farcical if it were not part of a more sinister agenda of
attempting to fix the past so that it can never change again.
Reed's book captures much of this. She is quite good, for example, in
deconstructing the "Australia Remembers" logo. Like many Australian good
ideas, "Australia Remembers" was copied from the Canadians; but whereas
the logo for "Canada Remembers" was brisk and business-like with a maple
leaf, poppies, and text, Australia opted for more emotion, with a logo
based around a photo of a soldier and his family reuniting at the end of
the war. The logo by itself told the audience half of what they were
supposed to think about the war. As with the Dancing Man, the real-life
people behind the photo were located, and in this case interrogated as
to whether the image was "genuine" or staged (in truth, careful
selection is quite as effective as outright concoction).
Unfortunately, Reed's account is also vitiated by a relatively thin
analysis of the issues regarding memory, remembrance, and propaganda,
and above all by a heavy overdose of political correctness. She writes
on every issue as though she has a checklist to mark off, and at the
head of it is gender. Reed would, indeed, be well served by a publisher
who refused to allow her to use the word "gendered" at all. The minister
responsible for World War II commemoration in New Zealand said the
program would focus on the armed forces: thus he "appeared to privilege
the paradigm of warfare as the (gendered) site for the most important
meanings of war and its remembrance" (p. 39). Well, yes. "The familiar
trope of male warfare" is familiar because in fact men do most of the
fighting in wars (p. 74). The persistent mutterings about gender in the
end simply come across as whingeing.
This obtrusive focus on a single issue blinds Reed to insights which are
very nearly in her grasp. Her "gendered" reading of the "Australia
Remembers" logo (pp. 18-19) seems to me to pay insufficient attention to
the way the eye is drawn back, away from the returning soldier and onto
the son watching his parents kiss, the younger generation whose
consumption and digestion of this piece of history was to be the whole
_raison d'etre_ for the program of commemoration. When she complains
that, in attempting to recognize the importance of women's home-front
contribution, the "extension of a heroic status to women simply added
another layer through which their voices struggled to be heard," she is
really speaking for all those--female or male--whose experiences have
been appropriated and transformed for the purposes of public
story-making (p. 75).
A stark example of this is the little modern morality play (Reed
describes an audience applauding "this poignant segment" of a Gala
Concert in Melbourne, p. 92), in which a soldier's story and that of his
relationship with his loved ones is told through his and their letters;
at the end, of course, it is imperative that the soldier must die, to
provide the right dramatic close and to leave the audience struck with
the sadness of war but also with its beauty, that it produces such
perfect rounded tales. Reed's book is about a new generation making a
plaything of history, as indeed every generation in the history of the
world has done--but doing so with a rather distasteful air of moral
virtue. There is a fair amount of value here, even if Reed's reading of
the issues can seem formulaic and lacking incision. Whatever the book's
faults, it reminds us of the need for historians to go on maximum alert
whenever governments start commemorating the past.
Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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