Letters to the Editor

Frank Devine

SIR: The late Frank Devine fed the Harcourt family for eighteen months. I had resigned from a well-paid, sycophantic PR job. I submitted a story to the Reader’s Digest when Frank was editor.

He called me in. We had a chat. I did a redraft. He wrote me a letter: “Bill, never make a point without an anecdote. Keep quotes short and remember the Digest needs real live people up front constantly.”

The second redraft succeeded.

Frank was a generous man.

Bill Harcourt,

Sydney, NSW.

SIR: Vale journalist Frank Devine: in equal proportions, an “educated and learned” man—when sadly today, so many in the Fourth Estate are so much the former; but so less the latter!

Howard Hutchins,

Wonga Park, Vic.

Anzac Truths, Myths and Legends

SIR: The Australia Defence Association has long used history as an analytical tool to further public debate on how Australia’s future can best be secured. The beauty of objectively analysed military or strategic history is that we usually know who won and generally what worked and what did not. The wider arguments as to why wars occurred, or were deterred, are often less clear but again history provides evidence usually censored from ideological fervour, political expediency, academic fad and bureaucratic nostrum.

One of the chronic obstacles to informed public debate in Australia on defence and strategic issues, at both the community and political levels, is the “myth of the digger”. This mythology, an offshoot from collective memorialisation of the exploits of the original Anzacs, has resulted in the widespread belief that Australians are somehow natural soldiers instinctively, and indeed inherently and automatically better ones than most or all foreigners.

The tragic and recurrent result of this myth is a pervasive but delusional and dangerous complacency that Australia does not need to spend much on defence preparedness or expend effort on prudent forward planning. Instead the myth maintains we can ignore proper consideration of defence issues because a deep national reservoir of natural warriors is instantly and constantly available to rally around the flag when war or crisis threatens.

All any Australian supposedly needs is a khaki (now camouflage) shirt and a rifle and all will then be well. Such myths, and the associated public ignorance and complacency, have long enabled Australian governments of both political persuasions to ignore their defence responsibilities when they think it is safe to do so politically—and to buy votes elsewhere by regularly diverting defence funding to the pet issue of the day. The “myth of the digger” has particularly affected how our Army has been treated. It largely underwrote much of the “militia myth” that split the army into professionally warring reservist and regular fiefdoms for nearly a century and required us, for example, to fight the Second World War with three separate armies legally and organisationally.

The “myth of the digger” also underlies much of why we began both world wars with more defeats and disasters than victories and why, much more recently, we only just coped with the 1999 East Timor crisis. And indeed why, even now, some newspapers regularly publish flawed or ahistoric opinion articles by academics and former bureaucrats declaring that Australia will always be able to pick and choose who, where, how and when we fight and for how long—or claiming dishonestly that our army does not need any tanks or our navy any destroyers or adequately-sized amphibious ships.

Which brings me to the recent Quadrant articles by Dr Mervyn Bendle (June and July-August 2009) and his claims that there is some form of orchestrated campaign by revisionist historians to attack the Anzac tradition for left-wing political purposes. The problem I have with these articles is threefold. First, he misses the main point about the real dangers and consequences of defence mythology. Second, the “myth of the digger” and its Anzac-based natural warrior mutations are as much the result of right-wing ideologies and conservative complacency as left-wing long marches through the institutions. Third, it is simply bizarre that he concentrates his attacks on the very historians with robust professional records of disproving the mythmaking.

As with all history writing, military history includes different approaches by narrative and analytical historians and academic disputes between various schools of historiography. One encouraging trend since the 1980s, however, is a marked resurgence of the “war studies” school (and its operational analysis offshoot), rather than the “war and society” school that often tends to be motivated by ideological approaches based on various political, sociological and gender “isms”.

Professor Jeff Grey of the Australian Defence Force Academy has long been a leading Australian member of the war studies school, as is Professor David Horner (who holds the chair in ADF history at the ANU) and Dr Michael Evans of the Australian Defence College. Dr Peter Stanley, previously of the Australian War Memorial and now the National Museum, perhaps straddles both schools to some extent but would be much better known for his excellent strategy, campaign and battle studies.

Grey and Stanley (and Horner and Evans) have also served as voluntary advisers on the Army’s history advisory committee, a group not normally suspected of being a Marxist hotbed. Jeff Grey is on the editorial board of the ADA’s quarterly journal Defender (in part to balance an academic counterpart of a left-wing bent) and both Jeff and Peter are regular book reviewers for the journal. The ADA and its journal are widely acknowledged as scrupulously non-partisan institutions. Jeff has also taught with distinction at institutions of the US Marine Corps, not normally regarded as a Marxist front group.

Despite Dr Bendle’s apparent fears, the writing of mainstream military, naval and air force history in Australia is generally in safe hands. The last decade or so has seen a renaissance of intellectually rigorous military history written by serving or former ADF members such as John Coates, James Goldrick, Craig Stockings, Gavin Keating, Jean Bou, Peter Pedersen, Tom Frame, David Stevens, Ian Pfennigwerth, Bob Breen, Garth Pratten, Graeme Sligo, John Blaxland, Glenn Wahlert, Maurie Pears and Brett Lodge. It has also seen respected campaign, battle and formation studies by professional and gifted-amateur historians such as Mark Johnston, Peter Brune, Phillip Bradley, Hank Nelson, Peter Edgar, Dayton McCarthy, Craig Wilcox, Stuart Braga, Doug Hurst and John Reeve.

Dr Bendle should take a look at www.ada.asn.au/Book_Review_ Index.htm for the many reviews in Defender that dissect and condemn military or strategic mythmaking of the political, commercially populist or single-issue activist variety. If he wants to criticise historical mythmaking, polemics or shallow and unnecessarily tendentious views about Australian military and related history, may I point him instead in the direction of recent books and cinematic works by David Day, Robin Gerster, Patrick Lindsay, Nick Shimmin, Bob Wurth, John Birmingham, Niall Clugston, Alison Broinowski, Simon Nasht, John Pilger, Ian McPhedran and Mamdouh Habib.

Neil James,

Executive Director,

Australia Defence Association,

Erindale Centre, ACT.

SIR: I read Mervyn Bendle’s articles with great interest. As there are now no living Anzacs, any deepening of our understanding of the events at Gallipoli will depend on the work of historians. Your author has referred to the Anzac legend—but what is the nature of this legend? Legends are the product of a people’s inner consciousness without the help of historians, politicians or poets. Most Australians react to the Anzac story with an acknowledgment of the bravery overlaid by an emotional reaction.

Mythmaking or the granting of heroic status is not the exclusive preserve of Australians. In warfare it does not depend upon strategic initiative, success or even an exact rendering of the truth. Psychologists would probably have an explanation for this. The story of King Leonidas at Thermopylae has sustained Greeks for millennia. Equally, the Charge of the Light Brigade did not “shorten the [Crimean] war by a single day”. It was a futile attack in the wrong direction resulting from muddled orders, killing almost half of the Brigade. Even 154 years later, most of us could complete the coup-let, “Theirs not to reason why.”

Australians, like humanity generally, I suspect, identify, elevate and pay homage to their heroes. These heroes are not always warriors. Don Bradman and Sid Barnes’s record fifth-wicket partnership of 405 at Sydney in the 1946–47 series against England qualifies for legendary status. That our politicians embrace heroes, hoping to bask in their reflected glory, should not surprise us. Otherwise, why would Paul Keating attend a Carlton-versus-Colling-wood match accompanied by a plane load of journalists or Sir Robert Menzies profess a love of cricket almost as abiding as his love for the English royalty?

The Anzac legend probably had its genesis well before 1915 and owes something to the currency lads who evolved into the independently minded high-spirited bushmen described by Banjo Paterson. The currency lads were two inches taller than their convict fathers; it is said due to their diet of boiled mutton and cabbage! The Man from Snowy River was almost a prototype for the bronzed Anzac. He was unassuming, brave and reliable, yet the poem was first published in 1890. These same lads volunteered for the AIF in 1914. They did so in part out of patriotism and in the main out of a spirit of adventure. How else could a lad from Gilgandra get to see the other side of the world?

Things changed on April 25, 1915. The death and danger of a campaign where the Australians and New Zealanders suffered 33,682 casualties served to intensify the need for mateship. All were volunteers who obeyed orders often to the point of almost certain death at places like the Nek. The strength of this ethos survived the war and surfaced as part of Australian culture. The first Anzac Day march was on April 25, 1916, and in 1921 the day become a public holiday celebrated throughout Australia by a march of veterans and a commemorative service. The service is followed by celebrations that have been generously described as “boisterous”.

Sadly, the Aussie character being what it is, some will use it as an excuse for a party, but that does not detract from the significance of the day. April 25 has by popular acclaim supplanted other dates having a claim to national significance. Since the Great War there has been another war with potentially graver consequences for Australia. In both wars there were incidents of bravery and self-sacrifice that might have become a metaphor for what we think of ourselves but it is the Anzac legend that has subsumed them all.

The Military History Society of New South Wales does not wish to take sides in the “history wars”. No one denies the right of historians to prick our consciences or to have their own political agenda (so long as it is stated) but an attempt to dislodge the importance of the Anzac legend from the Australian psyche is swimming against the tide.

John Twyford,

President,

Military History Society of NSW.

SIR: It’s difficult not to be moved by Ataturk’s memorial notice above Suvla Bay dedicated to “those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours …” And it’s odd to see that the Australian intelligentsia are urging revisionism of the Anzac tradition. Robert Rhodes James’s Gallipoli, probably the best disinterested account of the campaign, concludes that whilst the strategic failure owed much to Churchill’s support for the idea, the tactical responsibility rested largely on Ian Hamilton. What is beyond doubt is the courage of all the troops in a desperate battle where the outcome was largely determined by major misjudgments on both sides.

Any reservation about Churchill’s strategic grasp at Gallipoli, or later in Greece, Singapore and elsewhere might be confirmed by H.P. Wilmott’s Grave of a Dozen Schemes. To the dwindling band of those who saw service between 1939 and 1945 however, Churchill’s personal and political bravery was without question fundamental to the UK’s survival in 1940–41 and to the Allied success which followed it. The only two broadcasters who could command silence on the mess decks of HM ships were Churchill and Vera Lynn.

Mervyn Bendle over-eggs his argument—a successful Dardanelles campaign would certainly have led to more active support for Russia, but where would armaments have come from and where would they go? The course of European politics would surely have been altered by victory in the Dardanelles, but to infer that it would affect the rise of Nazism, communism and fascism is a “what-if” too far. Nonetheless, he is absolutely right to condemn suggestions that success would not have shortened the war by a single day, for this is to fly in the face of history and to deny military reality. Had the Dardanelles been taken, Turkey would have surrendered, the Balkan states would have remained neutral, Germany/Austria would have been correspondingly over-extended, and the balance on the Western Front would have tilted in favour of the Allies.

“Victors’ justice” is the pejorative phrase usually applied to victors by their political opponents, and the left-wing comment on the historical treatment of Gallipoli and other campaigns smacks of the same bias. Viewed from the UK, therefore, the political attack on the remembrance of Gallipoli seems to have been inspired by the successors to those who not many years ago seriously described Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a rape manual and advocated a feminist algebra because mathematics was portrayed as a woman whose nature desired to be the Conquered Other. Are these people dead, or do their ideas still live on in Australian academe ?

Mike Rathbone,

Holt, Norfolk, UK.

Lake Pedder

SIR: There is much to like about Giles Auty’s review of Pedder: The Story. The Paintings by Max Angus (June 2009). However I find unrealistic his insistence on contrasting the “gentle and dignified” and “reasonable” figure of Max Angus with subsequent generations of green activists.

The flooding of Lake Pedder was, in large part, resisted by gentle and dignified people writing reasonable letters, organising slide nights, conducting vigils and so on. Unfortunately, Tasmania’s political leaders refused to listen to these prescient folk. As well as flooding Lake Pedder, the tragedy they caused to unfold destroyed the consensus of Tasmanian society and politics and created divisions that continue to deepen.

Subsequent victories by conservationists in Tasmania have been won by increasingly well organised green activists. Where exploitation of the island’s natural capital continues in the face of green opposition, it is because the resource exploiters are equally well organised.

In such a chronically adversarial environment, conservationists, including those of Max Angus’s generation, have learnt the validity of the words of the Canadian environmentalist Wayne Sawchuk: “None of those guys are going to stop until you make them stop.”

Max Angus’s conviction that Lake Pedder could and should be restored is shared by many. Some of the most committed, including Max and myself, work through the Lake Pedder Restoration Committee (www.lakepedder.org). We are convinced that a restored Lake Pedder is practical, possible, and once realised, will amaze and delight most Australians.

Peter Fagan,

Little Bay, NSW.

The Population Problem

SIR: Australia’s population is now growing at about 2 per cent a year, a rate which, if continued, would see it doubling every thirty-five years. This might produce 21 million more Australians in 2047 than are predicted in the Treasurer’s Intergenerational Report (2007) on which much planning is based, and a daunting 100 million before the end of the century. Considering how little notice Australia’s politicians and media take of such issues, William Lines and I expected strong resistance to our book Overloading Australia: How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population. We were gloriously surprised as the reviews came in—then a little uneasy. Was no one prepared to stand up for the status quo (if constant growth can be called a status) and contest our logic?

Robert Murray in the June Quadrant has done so. He states our views carefully, recognises the importance of Australia’s choices on population, offers some useful criticisms, then finds a major hole in our position. He says we are wrong to dismiss the old view of Australia as a vast fertile continent that can feed and supply a vast population. He refers us to David F. Smith’s article “Green Myths about Australian Farming” (Quadrant, April 2009), which appeared some time after our book. Granted the importance of the population issue and the summary nature of Murray’s claims, I hope we may offer a brief rejoinder.

Having sat through one too many presentations from naive zealots convinced that hunter-gathering is in every way nicer than farming, I rather enjoyed Smith’s defence of Australian farmers. Yet it should be obvious that he has let his irritation provoke him into an equally extreme position. There are surprisingly few facts or statistics in his piece; and, most of the known facts do not support him. For instance, as we point out, Australia’s main crop is wheat. Yet even of this, our continent averages only about 20 million tonnes a year, which is roughly 5 per cent of the world’s production. France produces far more wheat, as well as far more of just about every other temperate crop. This is not because Australia’s farmers lack ingenuity. As Dr Chris Watson’s maps on pages 15 and 97 of our book make clear, it is because we are short of good soils in areas of reliable rainfall.

As to Smith’s argument that poor soils aren’t really poor because you can always add fertiliser, once again the answer is in our book. First, poor soils aren’t simply those lacking in macronutrients. Second, fertiliser use is set to decrease. We note on page 42 that, “Not only do nitrogen fertilisers incorporate vast amounts of fuel energy (as terrorists know) but they are actually made from the molecules in the oil or natural gas. The end of cheap fuel means no cheap fertilisers.” It was no accident that as oil passed $100 a barrel, food riots broke out. We also point out that peak oil will produce a whole series of “copycat peaks” in other oil-related commodities, including phosphates. Ask any practical farmer what difference it has made to what they can grow, when a bag of superphosphate that cost $400 to $500 a decade ago now costs three times as much.

It seems unfair to suggest that we have not covered the agricultural/ cornucopian argument simply because there are still some who uphold it.

Robert Murray’s other criticism is that we spend too much space refuting opposing views rather than advancing our own. Here he misses a point that we thought we had set out clearly. The main aim of our book is not to prove that Australia should act urgently to curb its population growth. That job, we think, has been well done by the Australian Academy of Science, the CSIRO and the many other authorities whose arguments and judgments we collect and re-state. But eminent scientists are often not good at ideology. Our real subject is the meta- debate—the debate about the sort of public debate Australians are having, or not having, on this issue.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, Robert Murray implies that some of our views place us on the (left-wing) “fringes”. A visit to our book’s webpage at www.australianpoet.com/overloading.html would suggest otherwise. As we point out, the ideologies of extreme Left and extreme Right are equally unwilling to count the costs of population growth. In my experience, those most likely to look at the logistics are pragmatic thinkers towards the middle of the political spectrum.

Mark O’Connor,

O’Connor, ACT.