Anti-Anzac: The Authorised Biography

Australia is unique among all the nations that fought in the Great War because of the way in which the Anzac legend developed as a central part of its collective memory, national identity, and unifying historical narrative. It is also unique in the way in which its meaning and validity have been subject to continual attack, from the immediate postwar years when the newly-formed Communist Party of Australia tried to appropriate it for propaganda purposes and, having failed, turned violently against it; to the 1960s when the iconoclastic rage of the Vietnam War era was directed against it by the Left and very nearly destroyed it, leaving it to be resurrected a generation later. At present, it is under concerted attack by the intelligentsia, a former prime minister and his acolytes, and academic historians in Australia’s elite institutions, including the Australian National University and (incredibly) the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian War Memorial, as I have detailed in other articles in Quadrant.

The successful ruination of Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations in 1988 is the coup these anti-Anzacs wish to emulate in destroying or derailing the centenaries of the Gallipoli landing and other Australian campaigns. How this is best done was spelt out by a vocal anti-Anzac, Mark McKenna, in “Anzac Day: How Did It Become Australia’s National Day?” in What’s Wrong with Anzac, edited by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (2010). It is to be done by formulating a negative counter-narrative, mobilising victims’ groups, exploiting the media (and now social media), and preying on the fearfulness of politicians. For the Bicentenary, they promoted the notion that the day commemorated a crime against indigenous Australians—the day of celebration was to be turned into a year of mourning. Australia Day became Invasion Day. “The media overflowed with reports of an increasingly polarised debate … Feature articles discussed ‘white guilt’ and ‘national shame’,” McKenna enthused. Ultimately, the Left succeeded in reducing the occasion to farce:

Unable to find a way through the competing voices, the Hawke government refused to support the First Fleet re-enactment, siding instead with the Tall Ships, a multicultural theme which would eventually see so many ships in Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1988 that no one could be sure exactly what was being “celebrated”.

“Protesters marched from Redfern to Circular Quay under ‘Invasion Day’ banners”, while the vast bulk of the Australian population were left with the ashes of what was meant to be a celebration of national achievement and pride. Afterwards, the Sydney Morning Herald was able to revel in the “ideo­logical vacuum” that the debacle allegedly revealed lay at the core of Australia’s national identity.

In a similar fashion the anti-Anzac activists want to construct an ideological vacuum lying at the core of the Anzac legend, or, even better, a “heart of darkness”. They are committed to viewing Anzac within “the broken nation paradigm”, epitomised by Broken Nation: Australia in the Great War (2013), by a leading anti-Anzac, Joan Beaumont, and their aim is to entrench their counter-narrative of Australia as a society riddled with conflict, whose past is “largely the story of violence, exploitation, repression, racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism and a few other isms”, as Geoffrey Blainey put it in Quadrant in 1993 while denouncing the Black Armband view of Australian history that was invoked to destroy the Bicentenary.

Consequently, in terms of military history, they have only one simplistic idea: Australia was dragged by Britain into an imperialist war in which it had no stake; this suffocated a vigorous national radicalism (of which they fancy themselves the heirs); and Anzac is a bogus and reactionary ideology designed to justify and obscure class, gender and racial oppression. Above all, they refuse to validate the massive sacrifices of the Anzacs by placing them in the context of the titanic struggles of the Western democracies against murderous authoritarian and totalitarian regimes over the last century, and instead they breathlessly repeat the same nihilistic refrain: all those deaths and suffering were in vain; these men wasted their lives, the conflict and the costs were pointless, meaningless, tragic, nationalist, imperialist, capitalist, racist, sexist, and the commemoration of Anzac only glorifies war, and so on.

In fact, the centenary redeems a solemn promise. It commemorates the Anzac troops, vast numbers of whom were killed or left totally and permanently incapacitated, to live out their lives on the TPI pension and in the wards of the repatriation hospitals across the country. They had stepped forward when their country called and in return they received the promise that their valour, their sacrifice, and the nobility of their efforts would never be forgotten. Now, a century later, the account is due.

And what do we get? While the vast bulk of the Australian people attempt to honour the promise made a century ago—“Lest We Forget”—we witness endless attacks on the Anzac tradition from disgruntled politicians and junior military officers, pampered academics, and their media camp followers.

And their self-conceit is limitless, as the title of the latest addition to the anti-Anzac campaign reveals. Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (NewSouth, 2014) is by Carolyn Holbrook, a former food-and-wine journalist and policy adviser who is now a research fellow at Monash University. She presents her book as an “unauthorised” effort, taking a daring stand against an imagined tide of Anzac idolatry that is engulfing the Australian people.

This pretence at intellectual courage is bogus, as the book is very clearly authorised by the key people who matter to anyone pursuing a career as an academic historian in Australia. Indeed, it carries on its cover and opening pages hundreds of words of endorsement from six influential historians, making nonsense of Holbrook’s posturing as a valiant dissident, while also making her anti-Anzac agenda very clear. According to the cultural-military historian Jay Winter, the book is “a fine and robust attack on the birth-of-the-nation view of Australia, Gallipoli and the Great War”; while the social-military historian Peter Stanley describes it as “a biography of the bastard son of war and nationalism”.

Even this is misleading, because the book is not only “authorised” by the leftist academic establishment, it is also not primarily a biography of Anzac. Rather, it is a prosaic history of ideas that focuses principally on the enemies and critics of the Anzac legend, featuring Paul Keating and other Labor leaders and leftist luminaries (with John Howard serving as a counterpoint), and the communists, radical nationalists and labour historians who are the other real protagonists of its narrative.

Holbrook approaches her task as a moralistic scold, beginning her account by deploring “the Anzac ascendancy” over popular culture. She is outraged that Sir Peter Cosgrove appeared in television advertisements prior to Anzac Day 2013, encouraging Australians to participate: “Along with raising a glass, we are asking you to attend your local dawn service.” Holbrook recoiled in horror. “I was stunned,” she recalls, “in a nation where drinking is a serious social problem he was making a connection between the Anzac legend and alcohol.” Such a remark reveals immediately that the author has no grasp of the tradition she is seeking to describe: while the connection of Anzac with alcohol might not be politically correct, it is fundamental to the commemorations (as is two-up, a form of gambling, another “serious social problem”).

She goes on to denounce the association of Anzac with sport, especially the annual AFL Anzac match, which begins with a minute’s silence and the playing of the Last Post. She is also affronted that the Anzac Medal is awarded on the day to the player who “best embodies the Anzac spirit”.

Here she is once again oblivious to the origins of the legend and to its spirit, which war correspondents frequently compared to athletics and team sports. Desperately searching for metaphors, however inadequate, that might communicate something of the determination, sacrifice and comradeship that they witnessed on the battlefield, they evoked the demands of competitive sport and the teamwork and desperate risks taken amidst the violent collisions of bodies. Such notions, which have an inevitable “masculinist” dimension, go right past Holbrook.

She also disapproves of the Gallipoli pilgrimages that people take, wondering “what emotional buttons are being pushed to induce such strong feelings about men who died so long ago”, and, presumably, she thinks should now be forgotten. “Patriotism? Jingoism? Perhaps the suffering of the soldiers provides a vicarious outlet for personal distress,” she muses.

This is simply offensive. Innumerable people (myself included) have travelled to Gallipoli (and to the Western Front) as an act of remembrance and to see where their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers and other relatives fought and perhaps died. Nobody is being manipulated. They are paying their respects and seeking insight into the horrors their ancestors experienced. Ultimately, her overblown outrage merely echoes Paul Keating’s snooty declaration: “I have never been to Gallipoli and never will.”

Holbrook pays little attention to the initial formation of the legend, beyond wondering (pointlessly) why it didn’t begin with the Boer War, and noting the massive influence of Ernest Scott and his discussion of Gallipoli and the war in A Short History of Australia (which went through seven editions between 1916 and 1947), before dismissing his “Boy’s Own-style description of Australian soldiers”, his “rhetoric about Australian race pride”, and his “grand theme of the triumphant unfurling of British civilisation in Australia” as self-evidently ridiculous. She also virtually ignores the war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, although he was the first to enunciate the essential elements of the Anzac legend in his immortal dispatch from Gallipoli, which appeared in Australian newspapers on May 8, 1915, an agonising fortnight after the landings. Indeed, it appears that Holbrook doesn’t even know his surname, judging by her dismissive comments on his “extravagant phrases”, where she omits the hyphen, and by the index, which identifies him as “Bartlett, Ellis Ashmead”.

Holbrook does recognise the crucial role played in the formulation of the Anzac legend by Charles Bean, the official Australian war correspondent, military historian, and driving force behind the establishment of the Australian War Memorial. Bean was the editor of the twelve-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1921–1941) writing Volumes I to VI himself, dealing with the activities of the Australian Imperial Force at Gallipoli and in France and Belgium, and publishing the first volume, The Story of Anzac (1921), before any other official histories appeared. He also edited the best-selling Anzac Book (1916), compiling stories, poems, illustrations and cartoons produced by soldiers in the trenches, and wrote Anzac to Amiens (1946), a popular one-volume history of the war. In addition, he wrote several tracts concerning the national ideals to which postwar Australia should devote itself, ideals which articulated the hopes of those who saw the value of the Anzac spirit.

This was a phenomenal achievement, which dwarfs the efforts of any comparable war correspondent or historian of the Great War from any country, but Holbrook is quite ambivalent about Bean. With feminist condescension she remarks that with Bean, “the Australian male gained his greatest advocate”, and while she can’t deny his accomplishments she is uncomfortable with the attachment to Britain and the notions of nationalism, imperialism and racial hierarchy that she ascribes to him. She cites Lloyd Robson’s efforts to disprove Bean’s thesis that the Australian bush ethos played a prominent role in the military performance of the Anzacs, and also the petty attacks on Bean by “the historians of the baby boomer generation who had been radicalised by the Vietnam War”. On the other hand, she approves of his refusal to exploit his nominal rank of captain and his tentativeness about conscription. Basically, she tolerates Bean when his views conform to hers.

Crucially, Holbrook describes as “one of the more fanciful passages in The Story of Anzac”, Bean’s pivotal assertion about the war:

So completely did it absorb the people’s energies, so completely concentrate and unify their effort, that it is possible for those who lived among the events to say that in those days Australia became fully conscious of itself as a nation.

This claim transgresses the broken-nation paradigm and so Holbrook rejects it, insisting instead that there was no sense of unity or common national vision and that Australia was split down the middle by industrial unrest, class antagonism and the conscription issue. Referring to the efforts of Bean to help Scott complete Australia During the War (Volume XI of the Official History; 1936), she declares that these divisions ensured the work would fail, but that it might “have succeeded as a piece of narrative history if it could be told from a radically nationalist, anti-British perspective”, that is, if the authors had betrayed the Anzacs and delivered to the Left a victory in “creative non-fiction” that they could not gain in reality.

Holbrook returns to this theme when she explores the depiction of the Great War in postwar Australian literature, twice asking the question: Why did Australian soldiers “produce no equivalent of European modernist classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front?” This is an odd question because Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel is not a modernist work. And the most obvious answer is that modernism gave expression to the disintegration of aesthetic, cultural and social conventions that overwhelmed European society in the early twentieth century and Australia didn’t produce “modernist classics” about the war because it didn’t undergo this traumatic experience. The reason that Holbrook resists such an obvious conclusion is that she is wedded to the broken-nation paradigm and rejects Bean’s insight into the unifying effects on Australian society of the war experience, of which Anzac was a powerful expression.

In prosecuting her case Holbrook cites local novels published to cash in on the success of anti-war novels like All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929). These included Hell’s Bells and Mademoiselles (1932) by Joseph Maxwell VC, in which Holbrook finds “no concept … of Charles Bean’s national initiation at Gallipoli”, but only memories of depression, desperation, horror, disillusionment and wreckage, along with a recognition of “the futility of 1914–18; the insane folly that cost millions of lives and disorganised the whole world”. She also cites the supreme anti-Anzac war novel, Leonard Mann’s award-winning (but poor-selling) Flesh in Armour (1932), which offers a dismal tale of Frank Jeffreys, a soldier whose overwhelming sense of martial and sexual inadequacy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads him to a grotesque suicide on the field of battle.

Holbrook makes much of the success in Australia (as elsewhere) of All Quiet on the Western Front—both the novel and Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film adaptation—insisting that veterans and other “conservatives” attacked them because they failed to give proper prominence to their “traditional categories of remembrance—race, empire, and nation”, which she herself decries. Although she is writing of a time when the Comintern used front organisations like the Movement Against War and Fascism (chaired by the CPA founding member Katharine Susannah Prichard) to depict Western democracies as war-mongering imperialists, Holbrook cites approvingly and at length a “correspondent to the Sydney Morning Herald” who claimed the critics were “military men” who refused to face “the prospect of a world without any armies”. And she similarly invokes the verdict about the book provided by the socialist and anti-conscriptionist Prime Minister, James Scullin (who didn’t serve in the war) that “every word in it is true”. In this fashion Holbrook finds confirmation in Remarque’s novel of a key element of the anti-Anzac narrative: our enemies are not actual military forces driven by murderous ideologies, but an abstract “political system that had led men of all nations to awful, meaningless deaths”, from which only socialism can save us.

And so Holbrook arrives at the central chapter of her book, which explores Marxism and the memory of the war. Proceeding uncritically from her premise that “laissez-faire capitalism … produced the ‘war to end wars’” she explores the attitude towards Anzac exhibited by the communist and radical nationalist historians, all of whom accepted the broken-nation paradigm and ransacked Australian history “for the evidence to build their case for proletarian revolution”.

She begins with Brian Fitzpatrick, who is presented as a fellow brave outsider who rejected the view of Scott and other established historians that “liberal British values and institutions had been grafted successfully onto local stock”, and whose books British Imperialism and Australia (1939) and The British Empire in Australia (1941) channelled J.A. Hobson and Lenin to depict Britain as “a manipulative and self-serving colonial master”.

They were very influential on the Left and, as the communist historian Ian Turner observed, they taught “my generation to see Australia as a semi-colony, controlled and exploited by British imperial power”. There was no room for the idealism of Anzac or any discussion of the war in Fitzpatrick’s analysis, which, in accordance with the broken-nation paradigm, “promoted a rebellious, working-class nationalism, fattened on a sense of injustice and mistreatment at the hands of Britain and Australian loyalists”, and “laid the foundation upon which a radical historiography of Australia would be built”.

One of the most influential edifices built on that foundation was Russel Ward’s pioneering study The Australian Legend (1958). It has long been recognised that there is a strong continuity between the Anzac legend and the tradition of the Australian bushman which flourished in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and was explored by Ward. Indeed, “Ward nominated … Bean as one of the chief protagonists of the noble bushman, and anointed the digger as heir to the bushman legacy”. Both archetypes were associated with physical fitness, courage, independence, ingenuity, audacity, stoicism and mateship, mixed with irreverence, humour and larrikinism. They also shared a natural democratic spirit and egalitarianism that made them impatient and disdainful of military hierarchies and the British class system.

Ward’s positive view of both legends changed under the impact of the comprehensive iconoclasm of the 1960s and the Whitlam debacle. In A Nation for a Continent (1977) he adopted the broken-nation paradigm, portraying the war as a tragedy that split the nation and destroyed any prospect of shaping Australia into “the ideal democratic state of the common man”. He also cited crucial differences between the bushman and the digger. Suddenly, as Holbrook paraphrases Ward, “the bushman was a political radical and an anti-British Australian nationalist, while the returned soldier was a conservative, Australian-British imperialist”, more likely to salute the Union Jack than man the barricades.

The barricades were where Ian Turner wanted to be as a committed revolutionary after the Second World War, and it was only when he was expelled from the CPA for questioning the Soviet Union’s brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956 and found that he couldn’t relate to actual workers that he became an academic historian. Inspired by his teacher, Manning Clark, to divide “Australian society into an Anglo-centric and greedy bourgeoisie, and a virtuous and radical proletariat”, he became a leading figure in the labour history boom prompted by the work of British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson.

Although Turner’s major work, Industrial Labour and Politics (1965), covered the period of the war, he saw it only in terms of its impact on workers and the unions, and he dismissed the Anzac legend. Ultimately, and again in accordance with the broken-nation paradigm, he concluded that the war divided “capital against labour, government against the unions, ex-servicemen against civilians, the war generation against their children [and] the traditional modes of behaviour against the new”, and left only the pre-conditions for class warfare.

Geoffrey Serle was in a different league to these primitive Marxists and was capable of actually comprehending the values, interests and aspirations of ordinary Australians outside an ideological straitjacket. He avoided obsessing about unions and labour history, writing classics like The Golden Age (1963) and The Rush to be Rich (1971); a major work of Australian cultural history, From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973); and the magisterial John Monash: A Biography (1982). He came to grips with the Anzac legend and saw its continuity with the Australian legend, while conceding that both had been appropriated by the middle class and conservative elements of the working class, who retained an attachment to nationalism and the imperial idea. But once again the broken-nation paradigm was applied to show that “the idealism of the diggers had been dampened by class division, depression and the connivances of cynical conservative politicians”, as Holbrook summarises his view.

Noel McLachlan is omitted from Holbrook’s account of the radical nationalist critics of Anzac. Author of Waiting for the Revolution: A History of Australian Nationalism (1989), he saw Anzac as a divisive force that created a “cult of heroes”.

Overall, the general conclusion of this group was that the Australian working class had positive values encapsulated in the conjoined legends, and it would have been revolutionary and progressive if it had not been ideologically disabled by the conservative exploitation of Anzac. They were shortly eclipsed on the far Left but, as Holbrook observes, “this characterisation of the Great War as the wrecking ball of progressive sentiment in Australia would be controversially revived by the former Prime Minister Paul Keating and a group of academic historians in the early twenty-first century”.

Meanwhile, the 1960s generation that eclipsed the radical nationalists developed a very jaundiced view of Anzac that remains current on the Left today. It was announced by Hughie, the ideologically and oedipally deranged university student in Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year (1960). “Do you know what that Gallipoli campaign meant?” he yells at his returned-serviceman father. “Bugger all … An expensive shambles. The biggest fiasco of the war”, while Anzac Day, he exclaims, is celebrated only by a “screaming tribe of great, stupid, drunken, vicious, bigoted no-hopers”.

Ultimately, after many more years of anti-war agitation, the New Left historian Humphrey McQueen published A New Britannia (1970), the broken-nation polemic par excellence. This declared that the bushman, the Anzac, and the working class in general were intrinsically racist, imperialist and militarist reactionaries, even proto-fascists; while another communist, and nouveau feminist, Miriam Dixson, published The Real Matilda (1976) to prove that they were also irredeemable misogynists who oppressed their womenfolk.

Many similar works appeared, and feminists organised anti-Anzac Day collectives and paraded, cloaked in black and daubed in blood-red paint, insisting that the legend was used to justify the rape of women in war. They rejected the suggestion that they should respect Anzac Day’s commemorative aspect and establish their own day of remembrance. Their aim was to either transform it into a universal day of mourning for women who suffered in war, or abolish it altogether.

After such a denouement the Anzac ideal was left in tatters, according to Holbrook. “A martial nationalist ideology, anchored in ideas of racial supremacy, [sexism] and empire” had collapsed and “anybody who professed an interest in studying war was likely to be perceived as militaristic”—at the very least—while the study of Anzac was virtually taboo and was pursued only “outside the academy by military historians and enthusiastic amateurs”.

And then along came Ken Inglis, Bill Gammage and Patsy Adam-Smith, three historians who pioneered the present concern with the social and cultural history of the war. Inglis is an outlier in Holbrook’s anti-Anzac narrative, not receiving the attention he deserves because he didn’t treat Anzac as an ideology of manipulation or oppression. Rather, he realised that it is a civil religion, a form of collective remembrance that lives within the culture and collective consciousness of society. This meant that any true biography of Anzac would need to attend to such artefacts as the testimony of soldiers and their families, the millions of letters exchanged with the front, the ceremonies and marches, the memorials and avenues of honour, and the development of a unique and evocative symbolism and mythology. He made progress on this monumental task with a series of important essays, published over thirty years and collected as Anzac Remembered (1998), and in the pioneering Sacred Places (1998). It is very revealing that when Inglis attempted to publish “The Anzac Tradition” in 1965 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landings he was rebuffed by Historical Studies, the principal academic history journal in Australia, and he had to go elsewhere.

The Broken Years (1974) by Gammage and The Anzacs (1978) by Adam-Smith also tackled the task of remembering, rescuing the letters, diaries, memoirs, reminiscences, memories and reflections of the Anzacs from oblivion as they passed away and their legend became marginalised and even demonised. They also promoted family history studies related to the war and popularised a major new genre concerned with the wartime experiences of individual soldiers. Moreover, Gammage re-established contact between academic historians and Charles Bean, resisting the received view that Bean was a militaristic conservative and re-affirming instead the positive link between the Australian and Anzac legends, emphasising the democratic, egalitarian ethos as well as the other qualities Ward and Bean had earlier discerned.

Adam-Smith (who was derided by the feminists as “male-identified”) chose to emphasise the hellishness of war and claimed that the bond formed between the Anzacs was rooted not in mateship but in something far darker: “tattooed on the folk-memory of these men was an urgent drive as old as pre-history, the blood-sacrifice of a nation”. “To a man, the belief had been drilled in them by tradition, legend, lore, verse, story and song that nationhood is forged in battle.”

This notion illuminated Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981), for which Gammage served as historical adviser, as did Adam-Smith for the television mini-series Anzacs (1985), and these, together with their books, played a major role in re-kindling interest in the Anzac legend at a time when Australia’s national identity was being assaulted from all sides as the Bicentenary approached. However, Gallipoli promoted the radical nationalist line that the Anzacs were betrayed by British incompetence, while Holbrook cites the feminist film critic Sylvia Lawson, who condemned it as a rehash of the “demi-official State religion” of Anzac, a new “Life of Jesus” before which “reverence is assumed”.

Politicians came to realise the truth of this observation, as Holbrook details in her last chapter. The government had previously resisted calls to sponsor the return of veterans to Gallipoli, but in 1990, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the landing and when only a few hundred original Anzacs remained, the Hawke government finally agreed, with the Prime Minister to attend in person. This was meant to undo the damage caused by the Bicentenary debacle, when Hawke’s speeches “had failed to resonate” with a nation “paralysed … by Aboriginal resentment and the desire to avoid offending non-British Australians”, as Hawke’s speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, observed.

The trip was also designed to appropriate the Anzac legend for the ALP, as Hawke called upon each new generation to breathe “new life into the old story [and to] realise its relevance to the nation”. To accommodate multiculturalism, the emphasis was placed on the Anzacs’ “commitment to Australia, which … alone defines what it is to be Australian”. As the Sydney Morning Herald observed, the Anzac spirit suddenly had “more to do with mateship and sacrifice than conquest and power”. The discredited Australia Day was shunted aside and Anzac Day took on new life. The most recent resurgence of the legend had begun.

Paul Keating intended to put a stop to that. Immediately after he took the prime ministership from Hawke in December 1991 he set out to dethrone Gallipoli in favour of Kokoda as the focus of national commemoration. Keating plays a major role in Holbrook’s book as a leading contemporary proponent of the anti-legend, and front man for the present elitist onslaught against Anzac, which Holbrook only touches on but I have explored in other Quadrant articles. This is a role for which he is well equipped, as he consistently promulgated his anti-Anzac views throughout his political career, from his maiden speech in Parliament in 1970, through his speeches at Port Moresby on Anzac Day 1992, and at the interment of the Unknown Soldier at the AWM in 1993, to his denunciation of Gallipoli in Sydney in 2008, and his nihilistic attack upon the legend in his commemorative speech at the AWM on Remembrance Day 2013.

Holbrook was able to interview Keating, and she makes clear that he rejects virtually every notion associated with the tradition, beginning with the idea that it serves as a “national foundation myth”. All this was “deeply flawed and wrong”. Australians were “dragged into service by the imperial government … we were cut to ribbons [and yet] we still go on as though the nation was born again, or even was redeemed there”. It is all, he insists, “an utter and complete nonsense”. People who embraced the legend were contemptible “hat-doffers”, “lickspittles”, “crawlers”, “snivellers”, and “tin-tookies”, many of whom populated the Liberal Party, which served only as “the custodian of a derivative, imperial nationalism”, beholden to Britain, for whom Keating has nothing but contempt.

As Holbrook reveals, aside from ideological and sectarian issues, there were personal reasons for the violence of Keating’s attitude. These stem from his childhood experiences within “an upwardly mobile, working-class Catholic family of Irish descent in western Sydney” that had no familial connection to the Great War, and she highlights the view of Keating’s speechwriter, Don Watson, that Keating had a particular “need to find purpose for [an] uncle’s death” on the infamous Sandakan–Ranau death marches in Borneo in 1945.

This appears to be the crux of the matter. Unable to establish a connection to Gallipoli and the Great War through ideology or family sacrifice, Keating fastened instead on the war against Japan and set about constructing a new narrative of martial valour for Australia, centred on the Pacific conflict and represented by Kokoda, in which he and his family could find a place of honour because of his uncle’s death. Consequently, Keating disinherited the original Anzacs and their families and descendants by contemptuously discounting Gallipoli, while elevating Kokoda to become the new sacred site, literally sealing this commemorative coup with a pontifical kiss of the newly consecrated soil. “For Keating, Kokoda [became] the place at which Australia had proved its mettle as an independent nation. Kokoda, not Gallipoli, was the sacred site of Australian nationalism.”  Keating was effectively kissing his own sanctification.

John Howard serves as a mainstream counterpoint to Keating in Holbrook’s account:

While the seeds of Keating’s contempt for Gallipoli lay in the death of his uncle in Borneo during the Second World War, the origins of Howard’s determination to restore whatever damage his predecessor had done to the traditional Anzac legend lay in his father and grandfather’s service in the Great War.

Howard believed that Keating had miscalculated, leaving mainstream opinion behind: “he focused too heavily on the guilt side”, he told Holbrook, titillating the intelligentsia but alienating the broader Australian electorate. Howard had a less ideological view, and while Keating portrayed Australia’s involvement in the war as evidence of the shackles that bound the country to its imperial master, Howard emphasised the “feeling of separate identity” that Australia gained from the wartime performance of its soldiers. It was the event that set Australia free, bequeathing “a lasting sense of national identity, [sharpening] our democratic temper and our questioning eye towards authority”, as he pointed out in his speech at Gallipoli in 2005.

Holbrook will have none of this. Adhering to the broken-nation paradigm right to the end, she rejects the idea that Anzac could inform our national identity or play a unifying and integrative role, except in the “benign form” mandated by Hawke. She condemns Howard for suggesting that historians and history teachers should be able to provide a coherent narrative account of their nation’s past, including the positive role played by Anzac. She has no time for “perpetuating the fairytale that Australia was born at Gallipoli” and insists that historians are better occupied “detailing the experience of the disempowered and disadvantaged than with describing the triumphant sowing of British civilisation in Australian soil”. Endless self-flagellation is preferred over pride in liberal democratic institutions.

Ultimately, the anti-Anzacs are mired in the superannuated radical certitudes of the 1960s. Convinced that they are promoting some progressive cause, and anxious to assert their moral superiority, they see themselves as intellectual heroes saving the nation from some absurd caricature of militarism. Confronted with a once-in-a-century challenge, Holbrook and her anti-Anzac predecessors, mentors and ideological fellow travellers have nothing to offer the Australian people but the ashes to which they reduced the Bicentenary.