I’ve thought and written a lot, including books, magazine articles and plenty of pieces here, about how Australia commemorates its soldiers of the first world war who are referenced as the most revered acronym in national conversation – Anzacs.
Truth, the old adage goes, is the “first casualty of war”. It might just be a primary fatality of its commemoration, too.
Anzac has long been a secular religion in Australia. Never was this more evident than during the centenary of this country’s involvement in the first world war and the ridiculous money Australia spent – disproportionately compared with other countries that lost far more people – “remembering’’ the dead.
But Anzac occupies a rarefied place in Australian political life. Its commemoration/celebration and purported critical place in national birth is protected by a impenetrable veneer of bipartisanship. To question – let alone challenge – it is akin to some sort of treasonous heresy.
From the shrine to all things “digger’’, the Australian War Memorial, to Anzac Day itself, iconoclastic views on the holy acronym are too often condemned as disrespectful to the war dead.
Historian and novelist Peter Cochrane was spot on, writing: “Drape Anzac over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument becomes sacrosanct.”
So it was that the cloak fell the New South Wales government’s way when it recently extended retail trading restrictions to cover all of Anzac Day “to ensure the service of veterans is recognised and people are able to take part in services throughout the day”.
I’m not going into bat for big retailers or supermarkets and their obscene profits. But who knew that they posed such a threat to Anzac commemoration? Read the press release announcing the extension, and consider so much of the ensuing media coverage associated with it, and you’ll quickly get across the argument that only by shutting supermarkets and big retailers all of 25 April (previously trading was permitted after 1pm on Anzac Day) could veterans and the war dead be afforded appropriate “respect”.
The state minister for veterans said the move would ensure “that the sanctity of remembrance is given the status it deserves’’. Which makes me wonder how some of those who died or who fought and survived (including the very many thousands who refused to ever march or actively take part in commemorations) would feel about such sanctification. We can’t ask them, of course. Though in death we can and do shape them into whoever it suits our nation for them to be.
Mostly, of course, that is the tough-but fair, white-hatted, egalitarian, matey digger who abhorred airs and graces and frowned upon authority ... and ceremony. It’s cliche and a generalisation. But it’s one weirdly at odds with the excessively unctuous, deferential nature of so much war commemoration today. Would they really care that the big supermarkets and retailers were open afternoons on the anniversary of disastrous Australian participation in an imperial invasion and failed occupation of an obscure finger of the Ottoman Empire?
Anyway, this NSW no-trading measure got me wondering even more about when this country’s Anzac commemorations became so pious and ecclesiastical in tone.
It coincided with a book – Lest (as in, “we forget’’) – by another novelist and historian, Mark Dapin.
“Like all traditions, Anzac was invented over time and has to be reinvigorated regularly,” Dapin writes in “The Myths of Anzac Day’’, a chapter revealing early carnival-like Anzac days that would be unrecognisable amid today’s dour earnestness.
As an example, he writes of the 1919 Anzac Day ceremony in Byron Bay, by which time the extent of war casualties (60,000 Australians killed, 156,000 wounded, gassed or imprisoned) was evident, immediate memories of the dead vivid. This was no reason for locals to “put on a glum face’’, so the procession was led by schoolchildren “and trailed by adults in fancy dress’’.
“Charlie Chaplin marched with the comic character ‘Ard Luck and the fictitious bush patriarch Dad Wayback (the mainstay of a Dad and Dave-style movie farce) on a painted horse. Their costumes were judged and ranked. Prizes were awarded for guessing the correct height of a pole and length of a ribbon. A soldiers-versus-civilians tug of war was won by the military team,’’ Dapin writes.
“A similar spectacle took place in Euroa in Victoria, where a procession from the Post Office was led by two flag-bearing soldiers, followed by returned men, the emergency services and [according to local newspaper report] a ‘miscellaneous collections of Indians, stockmen, swagmen, golliwogs, Waybacks, boot-grapplers [and] hair-raisers ... the best fancy-dress procession yet witnessed in the town’.”
The first Anzac Day in Adelaide was on 13 October 1915, when Australian troops were still dying on Gallipoli. It replaced the eight-hour day holiday (a forerunner of Labour Day). Instructively, perhaps, given the recent Anzac Day trading curtailment in NSW, its committee was supported by (according to Dapin) a “motley collection of stakeholders including ... the Shopkeepers Defence League’’.
“Servicemen, tradesmen and minstrels aside, the Adelaide Advertiser judged the highlight of the procession to be the ‘curious tribe’ that came dressed as cavemen and prehistoric animals, and included ‘a chief and his followers, attired in skins, wielding stone and wooden weapons, carrying shields of hide, and looking the very picture of ferocity.”
Anzac Day, it seems, hasn’t always had the status of a holy day. Just as John Simpson Kirkpatrick, as recounted in Lest, may not quite have done all (with his donkey) that he is believed and said by so many for so long to have done.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
