Anzac's Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession

Anzac's Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession – review

With exquisite timing, former soldier James Brown cuts down the tall poppy that is the myth of the Anzac digger

Paul Daley

It didn’t take long for James Brown’s critics to start taking pot shots after the publication of his small but very powerful book, Anzac’s Long Shadow. But Brown, a former Australian military officer who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq, would have anticipated that response when he set about challenging our greatest cultural shibboleth on the eve of the centenary of the first world war.

Those who question the disproportionate emphasis on Anzac in Australian cultural life are frequently dismissed by the myth’s custodians as bolshie leftists or unworthy of an opinion because they haven’t served or supposedly don’t understand the military – let alone the meaning of “sacrifice”. (Such beatific language to describe Australian death in war.)

Brown, of course, is not quite so easily categorised or dismissed, which seems to cause his detractors quite some heat and bother. Here you’ll find a broad spray at Brown and the leftists from Mervyn F Bendle. It seems a certain promise of criticism to come over the forthcoming four long years of Anzac centenary although, in fairness, I must point out Brown trains a bead on Bendle in his book and does not miss.

There has never been a more appropriate time to look for alternative Anzac narratives and to question what, precisely, it is that lends the events at Gallipoli a century ago such supposedly nation-defining status. But Brown’s book goes much further by linking the myth surrounding the dead diggers of the first world war to the expectations it imposes on those who serve today.

In 170 lively, well-researched and tightly written pages Brown gives us a portrait of an Australia whose political, military and media elite has become captivated by a largely fallacious archetype of the digger that was forged through Anzac (an acronym which, incidentally, also represents New Zealand – not that Australians often defer to that truth). By the same token, he argues, the politicians and the public know precious little in real terms of what the Australian soldiers on active service today actually do.

Some Afghanistan veterans, he says, find themselves isolated upon homecoming when they realise that friends, families and acquaintances want yarns about the battlefield and killing because they have been preconditioned by the Anzac myth to expect no less. Quite appropriately, in my view, he also questions spending up to $625m (his figure) on the Anzac 100 centenary when support and health services for veterans goes lacking.

(The damaged returned veterans from Gallipoli, the European western front and the Middle East – the innumerable suicides, beaten wives and terrified children, the alcoholism and drug addiction, the men who misspent years on the road and never ventured near the RSL – are negligently lightly drawn in our Anzac narrative. But they resonate, alarmingly, tragically, with the scourge of post-traumatic stress from our recent conflicts.)

“Adapting and innovating for the possibility of a future war relies on the fluid exchange of ideas and the honest and intelligent study of the past – both areas in which the ADF is deficient, and which remain obscured by the military exceptionalism that the digger myth engenders,” Brown writes.

This helps explain, he argues, how the Australian public and its politicians came to see the exceptional quality of Australian soldiers – rather than a combination of good luck and circumstance – as the reason why no diggers died in combat for several years in Afghanistan.

Then in 2007 when diggers did start dying in combat, the public was shocked and support for the war waned. Political leaders attended every funeral. Despite all this, all but the most sanitised media access to Australian operations was largely denied. Australians are left to imagine, based on the myth.

And so profound differences between the mythical digger and today’s soldier are blurred in our cultural consciousness – fatally obscured, perhaps, by Anzac’s long shadow.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/anzacs-long-shadow-the-cost-of-our-national-obsession-review