Today we will hear lots about nationhood and heroism but too little about how war renders the living into the dead

Over the past couple of decades each successive Anzac Day has become bigger and louder as our politicians and cultural megaphones have sought to emphasise the supposedly nation-defining significance of the deaths of 8,709 Australians at Gallipoli in 1915.



Gallipoli was a cock-up, a tactical and operational disaster. Britain – and its subservient Australian Imperial Force – got whipped there. There was no redemption in it, no matter how hard Australia’s legion of Anzac mythologisers, starting with official first world war historian Charles W Bean, have sought to spin it.

But spin it they do, year after year.

That’s why you’re likely to hear repeatedly on 25 April that Australian nationhood was forged or even born at Gallipoli because it’s where those traits of sacrifice, courage, mateship and resilience (hardly uniquely Australian characteristics you’d have to say, especially considering how the Turks endured and fought there too) were so starkly showcased.

As next year’s 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings nears, Anzac Day in Australia has been afforded a reverence that rivals the big dates on our religious calendars. It’s become the secular holy day that long ago surpassed in Australian consciousness and sentiment federation in 1901 (without the dramatic cordite and cold steel that marked nationhood elsewhere) and that other rather more divisive landing – or invasion – of the first fleet in 1788.

There is no doubting the profound impact of the first world war on the infant Australian federation, barely 13 when we entered the conflict. Indeed, in the countdown to the commemoration, I believe far too much Australian focus is being given to what happened on the battlefields of the Dardanelles, France and Palestine at the expense of what unfolded at home, to those who returned irreparably damaged, and to those left behind.

We will be given plenty of guts and glory, and endless significant stories about heroism. And tomorrow – and every day for the next five-and-a-half years of the centenary – you’ll hear an awful lot about the “sacrifice” of the “fallen” but, I fear, too little about precisely how war renders the living into the dead, and survivors and their families into the haunted.

We have always had a cultural aversion to such uncomfortable truths.

In his superb book Sacred Places, historian Ken Inglis points out how euphemism about Australian war deaths grew from the earliest monuments to those our governments (and much uncritical media) still insist on calling “the Fallen” who’ve “sacrificed” their lives.

“ ... soldiers of the Queen did not stagger or sink or topple or have bits blown off, but fell, to become not quite simply the dead but the fallen, who cleanly, heroically, sacrificially gave their lives in war. People raised on such high diction were not prepared for squalid actualities.”

Indeed, it’s been a long time now since a political or cultural leader in Australia gave us a warts-and-all Anzac Day speech. Last Anzac Day the new Australian War Memorial director, a former defence minister, Brendan Nelson, gave a rousing speech about bloody sacrifice and national identity.

“They went in our uniform, under our flag in our name. But their lives were finally given up in support of one another,” he said.

(Incidentally, Australians fought under the British flag in the first world war and everywhere else until 1953, not that this would have displeased our wartime PM Billy Hughes who, in the mid-1920s, described Australians as “more British than the British”. So much for Australian nationhood and Gallipoli, then!)

But down in Tasmania last Anzac Day the then state governor, Peter Underwood, evoked terrified soldiers who had “pissed in their own pants” and the appalling smell of death in the trenches as he urged Australia not to glorify war on Anzac Day.

“As we approach the centenary of that fateful event in 1915 and the distance from Gallipoli stretches to 100 years, there is a risk that the myth will overbear the reality, especially in the minds of the younger generation, and that risk imposes on us a duty to speak the truth about what war is really like when we pay tribute to those who died, or were wounded and their families,” Underwood, a military man, said.

From a population of less than 5 million, 417,000 Australian men (about four out of every 10 aged between 18 and 45) volunteered for the first world war. Some 324,000 deployed. About 60,000 died, mostly on the European western front, at Gallipoli and the Middle East. About 155,000 more were wounded.



This figure discounts those deemed “NYD” (not yet diagnosed), afflicted with “shell shock”, the antecedent to what Australian military authorities and successive governments have grudgingly acknowledged as post traumatic stress – a scourge on ex-servicemen that has manifested since 1915 in emotional and psychological paralysis, suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence ... the list goes on.

Despite the scale of Australia’s first world war deployment to Europe (where some 50,000 died, about 20,000 of whom couldn’t be found or identified at death) Australia clings to the military folly of Gallipoli not only as “the” wartime moment – but as “the” national moment. Such historical emphasis defies the fact that Australia was just a bit player in the Gallipoli campaign: Australian troops comprised barely 6% of the forces involved (including enemy) and, proportionately, about 5% of casualties.

But Australia, which is spending a lot more on the centenary celebrations than main protagonists such as Britain and Germany, is tending to see its commemorations in stark isolation from a cataclysmic global event. And so Australia commemorates 100 years of Anzac rather than the war itself.

And in Australia Anzac has come to mean Gallipoli.

I’ll be at an Anzac Day dawn service in the middle of Australia, remembering those killed in our wars. And then, hopefully, I’ll manage to follow the Anzac Day match between my Collingwood and Essendon at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Like the politicians and the megaphones on Anzac Day, the footy commentators go a bit more over the top every year with their metaphors of on-field heroism and sacrifice, upon whom the point is totally missed.

The Collingwood-Essendon match is a wonderful way to commemorate Australia’s 102,000 dead across all conflicts – for the precise reason that football is the abject opposite of war. It is a reminder of what we were like, for all our tribalism and differences before the first world war, and how a young federation stoically rebuilt in the shadow of tragedy to become what we are today.