Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Australia's national day?

I turned the television on at lunch time last Friday and found 
myself looking at a huddled mass of shipwreck survivors. But no, 
what I had at first glance taken to be blankets around their 
shoulders were actually Australian flags.

Their faces were tear-stained, not with shock but with the same 
"emotion of the moment" that grips people at pop concerts. This 
crowd, literally "wrapped in the flag", were apparently awaiting 
dawn on Gallipoli peninsula.

It was a surreal spectacle, like some bizarre One Nation election 
rally. Many of the crowd, apparently feeling that wearing an 
Australian flag like a cloak was not enough, had added smaller 
Aussie flags in their hats or even their hair.

As far as I could tell, there was not a New Zealand flag in 
sight. So much for the meaning of ANZAC.

And while these tourists in Gallipoli were wallowing in 
sentimental patriotism, ABC News (for that's what the program 
turned out to be) was interviewing some academic in front of the 
Anzac Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park. He informed us that "Anzac 
Day has become Australia's national day".

Certainly Australia Day (January 26) has not caught on. 
Celebrating the anniversary of the invasion of the country, the 
theft of the land of the Indigenous people and the subsequent 
genocide by British colonialism is hardly an appropriate 
anniversary.

But Anzac Day? Celebrate the slaughter of thousands of young 
Australians and New Zealanders in a hare-brained scheme to sever 
Turkey from Germany and Austria-Hungary and put Turkey's imperial 
possessions in the Middle East under British control?

The young Anzacs had been suckered into volunteering on a wave of 
jingoistic patriotism that also wrapped the whole undertaking in 
the flag, and appealed on behalf of God and King for good 
measure.

They went full of romantic notions of freeing the Middle East 
from the swarthy hordes of "the Turk" and replacing Turkish rule 
with the enlightened benevolence of the white race.

British imperialism saw them as so much useful cannon fodder. 
Colonial troops were generally taller and better nourished than 
their English counterparts.

English conscripts, as opposed to their upper class officer 
corps, were the undernourished product of smog-ridden industrial 
towns, impoverished mining valleys or the teeming alleyways of 
London.

This contrast was obvious (it was observed, for example, that 
English Tommies tended to address Australian soldiers as "Sir" 
because they physically had to look up to them just as they did 
with the toffee nosed sons of the ruling class). But it did not 
make the British ruling class decide that working class kids 
needed more and better food, clean air and opportunities for 
exercise.

No. The conclusion the British authorities drew was that if they 
had a tough enemy position to attack then the colonials would be 
of more use than their own men.

So they sent the Anzacs to Gallipoli and subsequently to the mud 
and blood of the Western Front. I had an uncle who was one of the 
lucky ones who survived the fighting in France and Flanders.

The British authorities had another reason for sending the Anzacs 
on to the war in France: their own troops were turning mutinous. 
As idiotic order followed idiotic order, and men went over the 
top in senseless and futile assaults on heavily defended 
positions time and again, the British Tommy dug his heels in.

They had had enough. A year or so ago I saw a 106-year old 
veteran on TV recalling how his Australian unit in France was 
unable to move up the road towards the front line because it was 
full of British troops coming away from the front. They had left 
their positions and jacked it in.

Such WW1 mutinies are rarely reported even now, but their growing 
prevalence as the War continued into its third and fourth year, 
combined with the influence of the Russian Revolution (and the 
determination of the Russian soldiers to quit the war), was a 
major factor in convincing the ruling class of Britain, France 
and Germany to end the War with an armistice.

The senseless slaughter of trench warfare on the Western Front 
was duplicated in the Gallipoli campaign. Botched even before the 
British Navy sent the Anzacs ashore in a heavy current that 
carried their lifeboats to the wrong beach, the campaign achieved 
none of its objectives.

After months of futile bloodshed, the troops had to be 
ignominiously withdrawn under cover of dark and "the Turk" was 
left in possession of the peninsula, which was after all part of 
his country.

The anniversary of this disastrous fiasco should be our national 
day? Give us a break.

For working class Australians this country's national day must — 
in my opinion — commemorate the Eureka Stockade, when workers 
from Australia, England, Ireland, Italy (and elsewhere in Europe) 
and the USA, diggers on the Ballarat goldfields, declared their 
independence from the rule of the British Crown.

Indeed, the only question is whether it should be celebrated on 
November 30, when the diggers raised the blue flag with the stars 
of the Southern Cross and erected their stockade, or on December 
3, the anniversary of the courageous but unsuccessful defence of 
the stockade against a sneak attack by a much superior force of 
soldiers.

Which ever date we choose, let's fly a rebel flag (as Henry 
Lawson says) and get rid of Johnny Howard's demeaning jingoism.