This Remembrance Day consider a photograph and the story it holds about Australians whose war service has largely been deliberately overlooked or forgotten by the tellers of this country’s martial history.
Held by the Illawarra Museum in Wollongong, the photograph was taken during a parade for May Day (International Workers’ Day) in Sydney in 1944. It has not been previously published.
It depicts a Wollongong steelworker, Jim McNeill, distinctive in a slouch hat and his Second Australian Imperial Force uniform. He stands at the front of a small group of men, all poised and ready to march. While McNeill is distinguished by his Australian Army uniform, the others are all neatly besuited. They wear neckties and some have pocket handkerchiefs and hats.
They are among the 70 or so Australian men and women who joined the International Brigades to fight or serve as nurses or support workers to bolster the Spanish republic’s bitter, bloody – but ultimately failed – military resistance to Franco’s fascist forces from 1936 to 1939. I’ve written previously and at length about them here.
This group of men, marching together back home in New South Wales for what is believed to be the first and only time, had fought Europe fascism on the battlefield when the conservative Menzies government of Australia, like many others internationally, was still wedded to appeasement of fascist leaders such as Hitler and Franco.
What renders this photograph so compelling and important is the consistency that it depicts between the fighting of fascists during the Spanish civil war and, in the case of McNeill, elsewhere in Europe later during the second world war, for which he also volunteered.
The Australian members of the International Brigades travelled and fought under their own steam. Though they came from all walks of life and professions, a good many were communists and dedicated trade unionists like McNeill, and their actions at the time were at odds with – and frowned upon – by their government. Well before they went to Spain some, again McNeill included, were clashing on Sydney’s streets with members of the New Guard, a fiercely pro-monarchist, anti-communist, secretive, pro-fascist organisation. McNeill narrowly missed being shot in one such clash on the streets of harbourside Drummoyne in 1931.
McNeill fought Franco’s fascists, including at the brutal battle of Ebro in 1938 (a turning point in the war), alongside a fellow Wollongong steelworker, Joe Carter, and a storied Sydney dock worker, Jack Franklyn. McNeill was wounded by machine-gun fire at Ebro (his second wounding in Spain).
The year after this rugged trio survived Ebro, their government back home was still appeasing European fascism, with Robert Menzies in July 1939 declaring: “History will label Hitler as one of the really great men of the century.”
Not so much, as it happened. Australia was not alone in choosing to ignore the ominous warning signs of the moment, highlighting perhaps how hindsight, like rigorous history, can sometimes feel onerously prescient.
Regardless, after returning to NSW, McNeill and Franklyn, both Communist party members, later enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force to fight Nazi Germany and its allies in Europe when Australia followed Great Britain into the second world war after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.
The historian Michael Samaras, who has completed a biography of McNeill, Anti-Fascist, writes about that photograph (which includes Franklyn) of the 1944 May Day march. He says the Spanish civil war veterans marched behind McNeill under a banner reading, “International Brigaders. They fought fascism in 1936. They still fight fascism in 1944.”
Samaras references a 1948 booklet, Australians in Spain, which gives insight into the thinking of Australians who fought in Spain and later enlisted in the empire’s war against Nazi Germany and its allies.
“They went to Spain for the same reason as Australians a few years later went to El Alamein and Tobruk, to the battle for Britain, to Syria and Singapore, Timor and Milne Bay and the Kokoda Trail, and so on to Bougainville and Balikpapan – because they saw a fight between freedom and tyranny, and they had to be in it on freedom’s side. All that has happened since has made it clear that Spain was the first stage of an international war into which we would all be drawn sooner or later.”
There is no official memorial in Australia to citizens who fought and died in Spain. One unofficial memorial stands in Canberra’s Lennox Gardens. It acknowledges 70 Australian men and women (the women largely served as nurses and support workers) who fought for the Spanish republic. This week – two days after Remembrance Day – a privately funded memorial will be dedicated in the Melbourne Trades Hall precinct to honour the Australians who served in Spain (about 16 died).
But it is high time, surely, that Australia’s official memory extended to the veterans of Spain. They should be memorialised consistently with the ethos of Remembrance Day to remember all veterans who fought and died.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
