Every nation has a story and every nation has its story tellers. What actually happened matters but so, too, does how it is perceived. A nation, after all, is shaped by its historians and well as by its history.
World War I was the crucible in which the Australian identity was first forged and CEW Bean is the person who first and best told us what it meant.
In 1901, six British colonies had formed the Commonwealth of Australia. We had a parliament and a flag but no real sense of nationhood because our story, up till then, was that of New South Wales, of Victoria, of the other colonies and of the wider British Empire.
In Bean’s words, when our soldiers sailed for war, they left “a nation that did not yet know itself”.
For those who lived through it, the Great War blotted out everything that had come before.
From an Australian population of just under five million, 417,000 enlisted; 332,000 served overseas; 152,000 were wounded; and 61,000 never came home.
Of men aged 18 to 42, almost one in two enlisted and, and of those who served overseas, almost one in five were killed in action. Of the 270,000 who returned, more than half were wounded. We cannot imagine how many were psychologically scarred.
Other countries suffered no less grievously which is why the Great War still casts a long shadow.
But this was our “baptism of fire”. For us, it’s akin to what the War of Independence was to America. It’s when we were first put to the test and not found wanting.
Charles Bean went ashore at Gallipoli on April the 25th 1915. He had complete freedom of the front, reported the war continuously though all four years and carried a Turkish bullet in his thigh for the rest of his life.
He then dedicated the next 30 years to writing and editing the monumental Official History and to establishing the Australian War Memorial dedicated to the memory, and commemorating the character of all who’d served to build up the nation for which they’d given their lives.
The War Memorial is more than a shrine and more than a museum. It is also a priceless archive of letters, diaries and photographs that has enabled later generations of writers and historians to add their insights to those of Bean and his contemporaries.
Bean deeply grasped the heavy responsibility on those providing the “first draft of history”. His rival correspondent, Keith Murdoch, said of him that “no accounts of actions could be more accurate than his – no description of the men’s suffering and gallantry could be more sympathetic. He is always in the place where he can see and help most, however dangerous it may be.”
This is not to suggest that Bean was without fault. He intrigued against General Monash and tried to stymie his appointment as commander of the Australian army corps – but was man enough, subsequently, to revise his judgments.
Over time, Bean became much more than a reporter. Every Anzac Day, it’s his voice that echoes around the dawn services and it’s his lessons that make the Remembrance Day silence so eloquent.
Over four years of war, recording scenes from darkest nightmares, witnessing death upon death upon death, Bean knew the toll taken on his young country. He became the “keeper of the ANZAC flame”, to use Les Carlyon’s words.
Carlyon, of course, is the modern Bean. His magisterial works, Gallipoli and The Great War, are worthy successors to Bean’s Official History in their sympathy and in their scholarship and have helped to renew our nation’s foundation stories.
Carlyon has ensured that we are a country of memory as well as of memorials.
As we move towards the Centenary of Anzac, and through all the anniversaries of the next four years, Bean and Carlyon should be our teachers. We honour this sacrifice by learning from it.
For us, commemorations will begin in September to mark Australia’s first action: the capture of German New Guinea.
Then, there’s the centenary of the sailing of the first ANZAC convoy from Albany in Western Australia, guarded by a Japanese cruiser as well as by the Emden-bound HMAS Sydney and ships of the Royal Navy.
Obviously, April 25th next year will be a pivotal moment but there will be other Gallipoli anniversaries: such as Lone Pine, the Nek, and the only unambiguously successful part of the whole campaign, the evacuation.
Over the next four years, some major war memorials will be upgraded and restored with help from the Anzac Centenary Public Fund that’s being marshalled by Angus Houston and Lindsay Fox.
This includes the shrines in Melbourne and Sydney and the travelling exhibition being overseen by the War Memorial to visit towns across Australia.
There will, of course, be local commemorations funded by the $125,000 that the Commonwealth government is providing to each federal electorate.
It’s my hope that more schoolchildren will research war veterans from their area so that the example of those young Australians might work on the imagination of today’s young Australians: not to glorify war but to promote the ideals of duty and service.
All these commemorations should unflinchingly acknowledge the terrible sacrifice. Over the next four years, we should acknowledge “the good and the bad, the greatness and the smallness” of the entire Anzac story.
For most of the past century, Gallipoli has shaped Australians’ thinking about the Great War. But when all is said and done, Gallipoli was a defeat; a magnificent loss perhaps, but a loss nonetheless.
Then came the carnage of the Western Front, especially the horror of Fromelles, with more than 5000 Australian casualties in a single night.
Under Sir John Monash, undoubtedly one of the very best allied generals, Australians eventually mastered the organisation of infantry and armoured attack behind a creeping artillery barrage in ways that changed the war.
Between March and November 1918, the five divisions of the AIF, operating together for the first time under Monash, bested no fewer than 39 enemy divisions. They took 29,000 prisoners, captured 338 guns, and advanced over more than 40 miles of contested ground.
They comprised less than 10 per cent of total British Empire forces but made almost a quarter of all the gains in the war’s decisive final months.
Gallipoli was a magnificent defeat. The Western Front was a terrible victory.
There may be more lessons in defeat than in victory. Still, we should remember our victories at least as much as our defeats.
Perhaps more than any other time, this was the moment when Australians have most shaped history. In the words of Professor Robin Prior, it’s the only time when our forces have engaged the main enemy on the main battlefront and made an appreciable difference to the outcome.
We should remember the Western Front; and tell that story, as well as the Gallipoli one.
That’s why our commemoration of Anzac won’t just climax on the 25th of April next year.
The government is considering the establishment of an interpretative centre alongside the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux.
This would be a lasting tribute to General Monash and his men, and its opening would be a fitting conclusion to Australia’s commemoration of the war that shaped us.
As Bean put it, it’s “in disaster that human character is most clearly exhibited and, though she had known fire, drought and flood, Australia had never seen the one trial that, despite civilised progress, all humanity still recognises – the test of a great war…
“And then” says Bean, “during four years in which nearly the whole world was so tested, the people of Australia looked on…They saw their own men – those who had dwelt in the same street or been daily travellers in the same trains – flash across the world’s consciousness like a shooting star.
“In the first straight rush up the Anzac hills in the dark; in the easy figures first seen on the ridges in the dawn sky; in the working parties stacking stores on the shelled beach without the turning of a head; in the stretcher bearers walking, pipes in mouths, down a bullet-swept slope to a comrade’s call, unconsciously setting a tradition that may work for centuries; in things seen daily from that first morning until the struggle ended, onlookers had recognised in these men qualities always vital to the human race.
“Australians watched the name of their country rise high in the esteem of the world’s oldest and greatest nations. Every Australian bears that name proudly abroad today and by these daily doings, great and small…the Australian nation came to know itself”.
In no way should the Centenary of Anzac glorify war but it should commemorate what’s best in our human character and acknowledge that the worst of times can bring out the best in us.
As Bean observed, to an unusual extent among British forces, Australian troops “had the habit of reasoning why and not merely of doing and dying”.
Among officers and men alike, the Australian soldier’s “unspoken, unbreakable creed was the miner’s and the bushman’s: stand by your mate”.
Soldiers do indeed sometimes have to do terrible things but they should always remain decent people.
This, I believe, has been the characteristic of Australian Forces from that day to this: in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan as much as in the Great War. Our times deserve a Charles Bean to tell this story too.
At the end of the war, Bean took two weeks’ leave and, characteristically, spent it writing about the future of our country.
He called the tract “In your Hands, Australians”.
“We have to make up our minds”, he said “right here and now…whether we are going to work…for ourselves or for Australia … We have done with the war, God knows – we are only trying to make full and real use of the peace for which our finest Australians fought…and died; and that is a struggle in which we all can join, even those who honestly opposed the war.”
That he could look so clearly to the future, after four years witness to carnage on a daily basis, gives us the measure of the man.
With his optimism and his enthusiasm for what Australia could be; with his desire to learn from the past but not be shackled by it; and with his quest to be helpful, not difficult, he had the true measure of our country.
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