Leaning on Anzac Day

Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our
National Obsession
by James Brown
Redback/Black Inc, 2014, 184 pages, $19.99

This sharply written little book is not another sanctimonious demand from an ivory tower for Anzac Day to be diminished or dropped, along with Australia Day and even perhaps Christmas. Instead James Brown wants a better Anzac Day, a more “contemplative” one devoted to examining the Australian defence project as a whole, past and present.

He points to unattractive political and commercial excesses under way for the centenary year, with alarming similarity to Santa Claus in stores in November and hot cross buns in February. The title summarises his argument that the emphasis on Anzac Day covers up mediocrity that could result in feeble defence if war actually did come to our shores. “We have Disneyfied the terrors of war,” he says. And:

We should cease to feel anxiety about passing on the story of Anzac to new generations. The government does not need to besiege schoolchildren and schoolteachers with new pictorial histories each year, nor to mount vast displays. Our memory of war will not fade. But our memory of recent wars might.

We would serve the Anzac legacy well by commissioning new official histories of our campaigns in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, Iraq, Afghanistan and our two-decades long operations in the Indian Ocean.

The legend of the lean, laconic but vanquishing Anzac or Digger is all very well, Brown suggests, as is the flag-waving and political grandstanding over not only Anzac but the Middle East war as well. But it is glitzy icing on the doughy cake of a defence effort characterised by a stodgy, overly defensive and secretive bureaucracy in Canberra, and politicians, media and academia that prefer lip service to serious discussion of defence issues.

The proud egalitarianism originating with the Anzac landing on Gallipoli a century ago detracts from the authority and performance of officers and encourages an atmosphere favouring “doers” at the expense of “thinkers”.

Brown does not call defence headquarters in Canberra “Fort Fumble” as some critics do, but he lists many weaknesses, generally those of a stolid bureaucracy, lacking initiative, discouraging even constructive criticism and politicised in the institutional sense. Discussing deficiencies in performance reported by one of its own officers from the Afghan front, for instance, “is difficult in a defence force trying to live up to the image of the exceptional digger and woefully oversensitive to criticism”.

One of the defining traits of the Australian Defence Force, he says, is a lack of professional debate:

This is dangerous in a society that does not take much of a sustained or political or academic interest in studying the art and science of war. For a start, the ADF is not very good at sharing its experiences. Very few officers or soldiers are permitted to write professionally; even fewer choose to do so.

He says partly because of Canberra timidity, Australians have been told too little of the ADF part in the Afghan war:

Besides finding it hard to explain why Australians were fighting in Afghanistan, the government and the ADF were also making a hash of telling the story of what Australians were doing there. Most of the Australian war was being fought in a media vacuum, and deaths were the only event that the media could fix on. Australian soldiers became angry that the story of their hard work was not getting back to family and friends.

There is so much Australians don’t know about the war in Afghanistan that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Brown says that where once it was possible to neglect Anzac Day,

it is now possible to over-correct and create a cycle of jingoistic commemoration that does little to help the way we think about war or to stitch veterans back into the fabric of the society from which they came.

The more contemplative Anzac Day should be:

clear of the clutter and detritus that have accumulated over the decades. Clear them away for those who have made the choice to offer up their lives in the service of their country … Political debate on defence is characterised by a lack of critical analysis of soldiering operations and military campaigns. Politicians do not seem comfortable discussing military detail or analysing operations. Australian generals in Afghanistan speak privately of their surprise at VIP visitors’ lack of interest in the details of the war. Platitudes are spread thickly. The focus is on the working conditions of soldiers, not assessing the strategy and performance.

Brown is critical of the veterans’ charities, especially of the growing divide between RSL clubs, the RSL and newer generation ex-service people: “We need to police more strictly those who would cash in on Anzac Day. The promise of donations to charities should not be reason for compromise.”

He says many military charities are largely geared towards helping veterans qualify for compensation from the federal government. In part this is because the Department of Veterans’ Affairs funds a network of non-professional advocates to lobby for entitlements for their “clients”:

Peering through the veil of Anzac, both the government and the public need to examine ex-service organisations and the privileged place they hold in our society, and assess their performance, critically if needs be.

James Brown is a former army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a fellow of the Lowy Institute. He is a son-in-law of federal minister Malcolm Turnbull.