‘A Strange, New Race’: Eugenics and the Australian Soldier in the First World War

Deirdre Gilfedder

p. 93-106


Texte intégral

1When Pierre Nora launched his study of the historical concept of ‘collective memory’ in France in the late 1970s, he emphasised the idea that a group’s identity constantly integrates its sense of the past. When this memory is connoted as ‘national’ what is retained as the past is influenced by shifting politics of identity.1 One hundred years after the participation of a newly federated Commonwealth of Australia in the Great War, the different projects to commemorate the event will necessarily seek to apply a social ‘use’ of memory. Removed in time from the moment when military deeds were seen as essential for national emergence, in Australia the Great War has followed a historiographic trajectory from stories of imperial or colonial heroism, to contestation, controversy, revived national pride, but also shame and sorrow. Nevertheless, the tradition known as Anzac, marked by the annual public holiday Anzac Day, conceived of in 1916 as a future memory for Australians and New Zealanders, has remained central to the calendar. The centenary of the War has seen Australians strive to include some aspects or historical actors of the War ostensibly forgotten by the tradition. One can note a number of press articles and a TV series on the role of women as nurses and political organisers; there has also been sustained media coverage and a major play on Indigenous soldiers, as well as interesting emerging research on the multi-ethnic character of the Australian Imperial Force who fought through the four years of war.2 The official organisers of the centenary planned events to commemorate some of the lesser-known battles where Australians fought, while media debates over what some have perceived as an over use of war memory have abounded. The centenary has also witnessed a renewed fascination with the work and life of Australia’s noted war correspondent and official historian, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean. From the 2010 documentary Bean’s Great War, to the biography by Ross Coulthart published in 2014,3 to a commemorative stamp, Bean’s key role in the Anzac tradition has not been forgotten. The website of the Australian War Memorial updated during the centenary commemorations, has always showcased the historical role played by Charles Bean, named on the site as a ‘founding father’ of this memorial that he himself imagined, an edifice that dominates the urban plan of the nation’s capital. For Bean, the memorial was to be an expression of a new nation peopled by Australians, that he perceived in the inter-war years as representing ‘the best of the British race’.4 Remembering Bean thus entails exposing another aspect of the nationalism that grew out of collective war memory in settler Australia, namely its ethnic connotation. If commemoration is one of the keys to understanding how a group sees itself, the centenary is a moment to discuss the vision of a white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Australia expounded by such influential nationalist figures as Bean, but also by those writing in the press during and following the War. This chapter will link wartime discourses of Australian whiteness found in journalism and writing to the persistence of 19th century ideas of polity and race. It will be argued that pseudo-scientific ideas of environmental determinism influenced a certain image of the Australian soldier and that Bean and others, adhered to an idea of their emerging nation founded on notions of race.

2Following popular commemoration of the Gallipoli landings one year after the event, the Freeman’s Journal of Australia claimed that ‘the newly invented “Anzac Day” of 1916 represented ‘the birth of a nation.’5 The subsequent Anzac tradition functioned for a long time as the expression of a Dominion nationalism centred on a tense and complex relationship between nation and empire. Anzac nationalism in Australia was then challenged and transmuted by the shifting politics of the 20th century – the decolonisation of the British Empire, the development of a multicultural national image, shifting gender relations and the movement toward Reconciliation with indigenous Australia. The postcolonial imagined nation contrasts starkly with some of the ideas that circulated at the inception of the Anzac tradition, around ethnic Britishness but also the emergence of a new so-called ‘national type’, sometimes identified as a new racial category.

Nation, Race, Eugenics and War

3The conception of a nation has varied between notions of ethnic belonging and more political understandings of community. During the 19th century in Europe two principle models of nation developed: on the one hand the romantic idea of kulturnation as expounded by philosopher Johann Fichte, emerged in a 19th century Germany seeking unification. This notion of ethnic nationalism explored the roots of culture in language, and saw the nation as an expression of subjective self-determination, holding also that nationality should be passed down through blood, jus sanguine. On the other hand, the French thinker Ernest Renan rejected the racial idea of nation in his seminal lecture to the Sorbonne in 1882, ‘What is a Nation?’ in which he imagined the nation more as a contractual aggregation than an essentialist formation; ‘a daily plebiscite’ in his words.6 Meanwhile, the vastness of the British Empire elicited paradoxical ideas about race and nation, not only in terms of an invariably assumed European superiority, but also within the very idea of Britishness. Daniel Gorman argues that imperialist thinkers in the late 19th century varied in their ideas between an essentialist international Britishness, and more cosmopolitan and universalist notions of political empire.7 Indeed, the Empire inspired many to support a concept of citizenship or subjecthood, functioning through the principle of jus soli, where subjects were bound together less by ‘blood’ than through a common allegiance to the Monarch. In Australia, while a hegemonic notion of political Britishness influenced the elite, ideas also circulated in Edwardian times around notions of blood, race, Anglo-Saxonism and racial health in the emergence of a colonial nationalism. These ideas had an impact on the representation of Australians at home and abroad during and after the War.

4Race was regularly invoked in representations of Australia’s soldiers that sought to place the White colonial in the ethnic scheme of the British Empire. Much of the early discussion of Anzac heroism was concerned with the question of international Britishness and the need to see colonials as both extensions of – and distinct from – metropolitans. This was a real consequence of the cosmopolitan mix of peoples at war, where uniform, language and other national and ethnic signs marked out fighting battalions. For some writers the content of colonial difference was political and cultural, yet others sought to expound on a vulgarised anthropological understanding of Australian men. Naturally the terms ‘nation’ and ‘race’ held very elastic definitions in the late 19th century. At one end of the spectrum, race could simply imply a cultural construct, at the other eugenicists, following Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, saw races as literal biological typologies whose physical characteristics and social behaviour were determined by the principle of inheritance. Imperialist English journalist Arnold White, for example, upheld ideas of racial purity, natural selection and militarism to ensure what he called the ‘efficiency of Empire’.8

5Thus eugenic thinking contributed to debates on nation, race and Empire. In the late 19th century, Galton’s ideas were spread by scientists in the United States and Britain as well as through popular magazines such as the American Eugenical News and that of the British Eugenics Education Society. Earlier, Walter Bagehot in his journal, The National Review, the first to review Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, sought to apply the precept of natural selection to nations. Bagehot famously expressed the idea that a nation was in a competitive struggle for the survival of the fittest against others in his book Physics and Politics (1872). In the chapter entitled ‘The Use of Conflict’, Bagehot argued that, ‘Conquest improved mankind’, and that colonisation notably was proof of the superiority of the ‘military races’.9 The idea of building a strong and healthy nation was deemed essential as a defence policy, and conversely national fitness was measured by military performance. While Bagehot lauded the admirable stock of English soldiers, even those from the city, later eugenicists were far more pessimistic about the state of the ‘English race’. Eugenicists such as Arnold White saw the humiliating defeat of British troops at Majuba Hill in Natal in South Africa in 1881, as ‘an indication of decadence’.10 The South African War (1899-1902) presented an opportunity to assess the physical health of the male population in Britain, as volunteers were examined and reports compiled. According to one survey in some towns 330 men out of 1000 were rejected as ‘unfit for service’11 and this medical view of physical inferiority in the working classes fed into other notions that British civilisation was in peril. An Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was established in the wake of the South African War, publishing its report in 1904 on the poor urban and rural living conditions throughout the United Kingdom. The report sought to understand the causes of so-called degeneracy in certain classes and led to the introduction of social measures on health and hygiene. The rapid fall in the national birth rate between 1880 and 1901, was also a major source of anxiety, and was viewed as concordant with cultural notions of degeneration in a Britain witnessing industrial decline in the face of mounting competition and rising urban poverty.12

6Imperial self-congratulation and an atmosphere of fear and anxiety about demographics coexisted at the fin de siècle. Rudyard Kipling’s poem Recessional (1897) – that introduced the expression ‘Lest we forget’ to the imperial lexicon – was an indication of the pessimistic mood. While the British Eugenics Society was not a mass movement and the British Medical Society rejected their hard-line hereditary theories, its line of thinking was influential among elites. The international conference on Eugenics in 1912 in London, presided by Darwin’s son, Leonard Darwin, who along with Lord Balfour argued in favour of improved human breeding principles, was attended by the Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. The outbreak of war in 1914 interrupted the activities of the Eugenics Society, but led several members to reflect on the effects of war on populations. The War presented a paradox for Social Darwinists: in light of the idea of progressing toward a perfect race, why should a society kill its fittest and protect the weakest? J. Arthur Thomson delivered the second Galton lecture in February 1915 on the subject ‘Of War and Eugenics’. Thomson followed American scientist David Starr Jordan’s line of thought that war was ‘dysgenic’ and contributed to the downfall of races by eliminating healthy men. ‘The conspicuously brave are particularly liable to be killed’, he wrote; meanwhile the weak that could not fight, would survive. Thomson regretted the effects of war on breeding, ‘Is there any getting past the fact that we are exposing to abnormally great risks enormous bodies of men to whose composition there has gone a high proportion of the adventurous, the chivalrous, the virile, the brave?’13 Thomson did, however, add a note of eugenic optimism in his conclusion. ‘We may look forward to a heightening of the standard of all-round fitness’, he hypothesised, adding that at least war will, ‘reimpress us with the imperativeness of eugenics’.14

7As in the United Kingdom, environmental determinists in Australia were above all concerned with the physical and moral degeneration of urban populations – weedy children, unemployed larrikins and prostitutes – were said to be multiplying in the crowded, dirty cities of the colony. On the other hand, the rural labouring classes were regarded with more optimism than they had been by doctors during the Gold Rushes. Warwick Anderson has shown how doctors in the 1850’s theorised numerous pathological dangers for the White Man in the colonies especially the northern tropics.15 The heat and winds were seen as literal ‘shocks to the system’, meanwhile the gold fields were characterised as miasmas of fever, dysentery and disease. On the other hand, Walter Bagehot remarked favourably on the promising health of Australians that he theorised as having been achieved through a Darwinian struggle on the frontier:

In America and in Australia a new modification of what we call Anglo-Saxonism is growing. A sort of type of character arose from the difficulties of colonial life – the difficulty of struggling with the wilderness; and this type has given its shape to the mass of characters because the mass of characters have unconsciously imitated it.16

8By the 1890s the Bush was recast as a place where fresh air and exercise created boys with better chest girths and improved genes, and vigorous women. Writers and poets also celebrated Bushmen and Bush maids, in particular the authors published in J.F. Archibald’s Bulletin. While their main concern was the idea of an egalitarian New World democratic culture, the Bush was also depicted as an environment responsible for producing the regenerative metaphor of the ‘young tree green’ of Henry Lawson’s Song of the Republic.

9Ambivalence towards the environment was also accompanied by a biological anxiety about contact with racialised others. At the end of the 19th century quarantine practices sought to stem the contagion of disease and were racially organised, with a particular discrimination against Asian immigrants. At the same time, some colonials bemoaned an inevitable development of a mixed-race population, where ‘whites’ would soon become ‘brown’, a threat they saw looming in, for example, a North Queensland peopled with indigenous Australians and Pacific Islanders.17 Eugenicist concerns, and not just labour competition concerns, informed the federal Selective Immigration Act of December 1901. During the presentation of the bill, prominent federalist and three-time Prime Minister of Australia between 1903 and 1910 Alfred Deakin, expressed his obsession with skin colour: ‘In another century the probability is that Australia will be a White continent […] other races are to be excluded by legislation if they are tinted to any degree.’18 While on the one hand the White Australia movement followed the line of quarantine and exclusion, some health officials tried to see if there were ways of engineering a progressive, healthier and more environmentally resistant white Australian.

10Those interested in environmental determinism included Harvey Sutton, who, before the Great War, began to measure Australian-born school children, in order to ‘determine at the earliest possible moment what influence the environment of southern land and skies is having on our race’.19 While his views differed from members of the hereditary school, like craniometry enthusiast Richard Berry, both strains of thought were concerned with creating a modern, socially efficient nation where white health would be enhanced.

11Eugenic societies in Australia did not achieve the success of their British counterparts but were nonetheless powerful lobbies after the War. From the 1920s Berry and other scientists at Melbourne University advocated forcibly sterilising sections of society, including Aborigines and homosexuals, and spoke freely of a painless death for ‘mental defectives’.20 Eugenic theory overlapped with a wider medical concern with race that had developed over the 19th century. Phrenology had been popular in colonial Australia as the presence of convicts inspired early practitioners to equate head size with criminal tendencies. It was also a tool in the assessment of indigenous Australians, downgraded by some colonial scientists as a ‘race incapable of improvement’, thereby justifying settler conquest across the continent. By the early 20th century, scientists and so-called Protection authorities were advocating the segregation of Aborigines onto reserves, and ordering the removal of mixed-race children from their Aboriginal families. Concomitant to this ideological framework of conquest, was an anxiety around the fate of the ‘white race’ in warmer climes of Australia. Indeed, the discourse on whiteness seems to have oscillated between utopian discourses of a new Australian type, corresponding often to what Richard White calls the ‘Coming Man’ idea, similar to notions found in the United States, and a pessimistic fear for the degeneration of the British in their transplantation to a hot climate.21 Richard White shows that even before Darwin, there was concern that the Anglo-Saxon race would thin out across the British Empire, with some, quoting the Victorian Review in 1879, feared for the ‘inevitable degeneration of the Anglo-Saxon stock’ in Australia.22

Charles Bean, war journalists and the ‘national type’

12Yet, it was paradoxically in the context of a murderous ‘dysgenic’ war, that a favourable image of the Australian Man was to flourish in the press. War journalists sought to determine the place Australians held in an Empire that, while technically extending British subject status to all its members, imagined them in terms of a racial hierarchy. While anthropological racial typologies differed, a pyramidal colonial hierarchy had developed in the 19th century with Britain at its apex, the settler colonies that gained differing measures of political autonomy at the next level, and then the so-called dependent colonies such as post-1858 India or Nigeria, which were ruled directly or indirectly. Race and political organisation were thus inevitably imbricated. However, the racial order also cut across caste, gender, religious and class lines and could divide ‘whites’ from each other. South Africa’s Viscount Milner considered Boers as inferior to Britons, imperialist Arnold White was anti-Semitic whilst sectarian discrimination against Irish Catholics was widespread. The status of the white colonial was ambiguous in this scheme; on the one hand Australian soldiers were described as ‘Britons across the seas’, bound by what Henry Parkes – the ‘Father of Federation’ – famously called the ‘crimson thread of kinship’, and on the other, colonials could be seen as marginal, mixed and distanced from the source of race and civilisation.

13The Anzac legend, spread by journalists, historians as well as by the soldiers themselves,23 presented the colonial soldier as an emblem of both national character and racial health. This idea was carried through the rhetoric of poets, such as Bulletin regular E.J. Brady. The British Poet Laureate, John Masefield, also succumbed to the idealised picture of the Gallipoli Anzacs when he wrote in 1924, ‘They were the finest body of young men brought together in modern times. For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen’.24 Meanwhile, Scottish writer Compton McKenzie, who had been at Gallipoli, compared Australian physiques to those of ‘Ajax, Hector or Achilles’.25

14The writer who most cultivated their reputation, however, was Australia’s extraordinary war correspondent and official historian, Charles Bean. The Australian Journalists’ Association appointed Bean, a leading journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald before the War, official correspondent for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in 1914. Bean’s background was profoundly imperial. Ken Inglis states that Bean was a ‘schoolboy in love with England and Empire’.26 His father had been born in India where his own father had been a surgeon for the East India Company. Edwin Bean moved to Australia in 1874, where Charles was born and then the family moved back to England. Charles attended Clifton public school in Bristol, and studied law at Oxford. According to the biography by Ross Coulthart, the family were devoted anglophiles in every way: Clifton, the elite Anglican school that Charles cited as one of the most important influences on his life, was known for producing loyal ‘soldier students’.27 Indeed, Field Marshalls Douglas Haig and William Birdwood were both schooled there.

15Yet, setting out from this imperial outlook, Charles Bean would develop in his writings and his actions, a powerful discourse of Australian nationalism and strive, almost obsessively, to distinguish the Australian from his metropolitan counterpart. For Coulthart, this shift was the result of the journalist’s personal journey, as throughout the war and in the post-war years, ‘his own growing sense of Australian self-identity would transform so much of what he and all Australians once so passionately believed’.28 It also stemmed from Bean’s political and anthropological interest in an ideological ‘Anglo-Saxonism’.

16Biographies of Bean pain to recount how the writer apprehended Australia with new eyes on his return from Oxford. His essays ’The impressions of a new chum’, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, described the life, cities and landscapes of Australia drawing from his travels across New South Wales, during his work as a barrister’s assistant. Bean also wrote articles for the Evening News, edited by Banjo Paterson, whose by-now famous literary Bush nationalism was a strong influence, and who had been a correspondent in the South African Wars. Bean used an assignment to report on the wool industry for the Herald as an opportunity to explore the popular 1890s theme, namely the difference between rural and urban Australian men, as a way of defining a new homo nationalis. He wrote how ‘it flashed upon him that the most important product of the wool industry was men; it was responsible for creating some of the outstanding national types’.29

17His experience on the front lines of the Great War was exceptional compared to other war correspondents, and Bean demonstrated considerable bravery. He arrived at Gallipoli on 25 April with the first division of the AIF at 9.30 am and wrote the first Australian dispatch about the landing for the Herald. However, the authorities held up his report until 17 May, and British correspondent Ellis Ashmead Bartlett’s famous ‘Gaba Tepe’ dispatch stole his thunder, causing a sensation around Australia at its publication on 8 May. Bean remained in Gallipoli as officer-correspondent, for the entirety of the campaign After the retreat from Gallipoli, Bean sailed to France and travelled with the AIF to the Western Front, where he again worked close to the front lines witnessing the grave violence of the battles in 1916 and 1917, later writing that Pozières was ‘more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any place on earth’. Bean stated his purpose in his massive multi-volume Official History of the Australia in the War 1914-1918, as being democratic, striving to write an uncensored record of the actions of ordinary soldiers, stating, ‘The only memorial which could be worthy of them was the bare and uncoloured story of their part in the war.’ He then conceived of and supervised the building of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra between the wars. This impressive art-deco building, finally opened in 1941, was to place the memory of Australian soldiers who fought at the centre of the new national capital. World War I sacrifice would literally loom over national life.

18Back in 1916, both correspondents, Ashmead-Bartlett and Bean, were conscious of the stakes involved in reporting the first battle of the War involving Australian and New Zealand volunteers. The dispatch penned by Ashmead-Bartlett portrayed the Gallipoli landing on the 25 April 1915 as an historic moment, the first time Pacific Dominion troops fought as an Army, though under the command of British general William Birdwood. Ashmead-Bartlett framed his report within the theme of a ‘test’ for colonial troops. The War Precautions Act, passed in Australia in 1914, allowed the government extensive powers to censure news from the front and all reports were put under the ‘blue pencil’ before publication. For the War Office the correspondents’ role was to sanitise the violence, minimise losses and insist on stories of courage on the side of the Allies. The reports were also marked by a cultural context of passion for war stories, and accounts of ‘deeds’ and ‘heroes’, a line particularly encouraged in the teaching of history in British and Australian schools. Ashmead-Bartlett’s report was published in different newspapers under varying titles: The Argus headlined the story ‘Australians face death ‘They rose to the occasion’; the Sydney Morning Herald placed three headlines, ‘Australasians Glorious Entry into War; Historic Charge and Brilliant Feat at Gaba Tepe’. The British journalist made direct reference to this ‘testing’ of troops:

Though many were shot to bits without the hope of recovery, their cheers resounded […] They were happy because they know they had been tried for the first time and had not been found wanting.30

19Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatch also insisted on the physical qualities of the Australian volunteers. According to Christopher Pugsley he had to add ‘Australasians’ later to the report as he initially had somewhat elided the presence of New Zealand troops on 25 April, in the end, opting for the term ‘colonials’.31 His description of Anzac soldiers climbing the vertical cliffs at Anzac Cove became legendary:

Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but those Colonials were practical above all else and went about it in a practical way. They stopped a few minutes to pull themselves together, get rid of their packs, and charge their rifle magazines. Then this race of athletes proceeded to scale the cliff without responding to the enemy’s fire. They lost some men, but didn’t worry [… ]32

20Here we have the first manifestation of the Anzac hero, the ‘Colonial’ as distinct from the metropolitan Briton, and the journalist chose the term ‘race’. The dispatch shows a clear interest in the theme of the Australian ‘type’, both in terms of physique and character. The Anzacs were depicted as ‘athletic’, ‘practical’, ‘cheerful’ and stoic. Ashmead-Bartlett added that he had ‘never seen anything like these colonials in war before’.33 In his diary the journalist sought to dispel fears of degeneration, writing that the Anzacs ‘have shown that, though transplanted to the Southern skies, the breed is still the same as that of the men of Mons and Waterloo, and a hundred other great battles’.34 It was above all this praise from a sophisticated metropolitan that fired the popular, nationalist reaction around Australia in 1915.

21Charles Patrick Smith of the Melbourne Age also contributed to the stereotype of the admirable Australian digger. Smith lauded the role of Bartlett’s description in encouraging Australian nationalism in the Argus on 5 October 1917:

A London journalist discovered that our fighting men were giants, a strange new race that had no fear, and who could face almost certain death as if they sought to die. Only then did we understand what splendid fellows these were, and what a proud thing it was to be Australian.35

22Journalists were enthusiastic for this ‘strange, new race’, one that seemed to defy the pessimistic eugenicists, for the Anzacs were proof that colonial men had not ‘degenerated’, but were regenerated as fearless ‘giants’. Recent scholars have played down the real physical differences between working-class Australians and British men at the time. Joan Beaumont pointed out that the Anzacs were not necessarily tall: indeed, the minimum height for Australian soldiers from the start of the war was five feet six inches (167cms), and went down to five feet (152 cms) by the end of the war.36 Yet like Smith, Bean also gave the impression that Australian soldiers were exceptionally tall. In his booklet In Your Hands, when writing in favour of British immigration, he wrote of London children: ‘… kiddies with whom our men used to play, for whom the Australian was like a giant – a great, genial demi-god’, no less.37 In his Argus article cited above, Smith was at pains to point out, however, that there was some racial confusion concerning Australians circulating in the United Kingdom. ‘We hear little about Australia in England’ he wrote. ‘I am sure there are hundreds and thousands at home who think that all Australians are black’.38

23If most Australians were not black they were nonetheless invariably described as brown. Smith wrote about the Anzacs at the Gallipoli landings, ‘picturing them now, all brown, stumbling ashore on that hazardous enterprise.’39 In Compton McKenzie’s Gallipoli, he reiterated the suntan trope in his portrait of Australians: ‘their tallness and simplicity of line, their rose-brown flesh burnt by the sun’.40 Oliver Hogue, another Australian journalist who wrote articles for the Herald under the name Trooper Bluegum, painted this extravagant description:

In a huge marquee in Rosebery Park were a score of virile young Australians stripped for the fray. Sun-tanned bushmen they were for the most part, lean and wiry, with muscles rippling over their naked shoulders.41

24After the initial fear of the environment noted above had waned, health authorities in Australia began to praise the benefits of sunlight for White Australians, a theme that developed after the war with the craze for sunbathing and beach culture.42 The suntan functioned for these writers as a visible marker of a regenerated Briton, but also as a sign of difference.

25Charles Bean made frequent references to the scientific debates on race and made it known that he was resolutely on the environment rather than heredity side of the nature/nurture debate. In the Official History of Australia in the War, he developed his ideas on environmental determinism couched in distinctly Australian nationalist discourse. Bean often criticised the British army in terms that distinguished both race and class. According to Bean the British ‘lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was – to put it mildly – inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war’. He continued:

Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.43

26Bean reiterated the appraisal of the South African War pessimists who blamed degeneration on city life:

A large proportion of the new [British] force had come straight from the highly-organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country [… ]44

27By comparison, Bean associated Australian men with the countryside, even though most Australians were living in cities by 1915, and statistical analyses show that while the Light Horse may have been dominated by recruits from rural areas, the infantry was not.45 Yet, the AIF men were for Bean nurtured by the Bush: ‘The Bush had hammered out of the old stock a new man’, he wrote in his History.46 He later wrote in his post-War pamphlet In Your Hands, that ‘The big, healthy strong races are the country races’.47 Like Bagehot before him, Bean depicted pioneering as a Darwinian struggle against the wilderness, and equated life in the outback with War:

The Australian man is always fighting something. In the Bush it is drought, fire, unbroken horses and cattle […] all this fighting with men and with Nature, fierce as any warfare, has made of the Australian as fine a fighting man as exists.48

28He notably elided conflict with indigenous populations, but Bean adhered to the version of history that the colonisation of Australia had been pacific. In his introductory remarks to the Official History he presented the Great War, rather than colonial violence, as the founding conflict:

How did this nation, bred in complete peace, largely undisciplined except for a strongly British tradition and the self-discipline necessary for men who grapple with Nature […] react to what still has to be recognized as the supreme test for fitness to exist?49

29The idea that Australia had been ‘bred in peace’ was recurrent in the Anzac legend as Australians sought to turn the page on the colonial violence of settlement.50 In his 1946 condensed history for the public Anzac to Amiens, Bean wrote that ‘war had never happened here’.51

30For Bean Australians’ ‘fitness’ was not limited to physical aptitude, but also applied to moral character and the political development of egalitarianism. Bean translated some of the amateurism, insubordination and even reprehensible behaviour of Australia’s fighting men into proof of their democratic nature. Unlike British histories, Bean courageously made mention of the mutinies on the Front, for example he referred to the event in September 1918 on the Hindenburg line, when groups of diggers refused to advance and 119 Australians went missing.52 However, he opens his book on the AIF in 1918 with this description of the antiauthoritarian but noble digger:

At heart even the oldest Australian soldier was incorrigibly civilian. However thoroughly he accepted the rigid army methods as conditions temporarily necessary, he never became reconciled to continuous obedience to orders, existence by rule, and lack of privacy. His individualism had been so strongly implanted as to stand out after years of subordination. Even on the Western Front he had exercised his vote in the Australian elections and in the referendums as to conscription [… ]53

31Though there were no doubt significant differences between colonial social relations and the inequalities of the English class system at the time, Bean elevated the rugged individualism and egalitarianism of the Australian soldier to an idealised form. Yet this disregard for social boundaries, and belief in equality knew its limits in race. The Australian soldier, wrote Bean, ‘was bound to his fellows, and to the Old Country and the Allies, by a tense bond of democratic loyalty – a man must “stand by his mates” at all costs; and as he knew only one social horizon, that of race.’54 By this, one imagines that Bean does not mean a eugenic category but an overall loyalty to Empire and Anglo-Saxonism, two ideas that for him, were inextricably bound:

From early childhood the average Australian had regarded himself and everyone around him as masters of their own lives – an outlook which brought him much closer to the Scots and Americans than to most of the English, though English immigrants to the Dominions quickly picked it up.55

32As Marilyn Lake has demonstrated in her essay ‘British World or New World’, notions of Anglo-Saxonism in early 20th century Australia often turned to the United States as a model of progress.56 Indeed Federated Australia shared many racial concerns with American society. For Bean, still an imperialist, Britons could be improved in the new world. In his book, In Your Hands, Australians, he advocated British immigration to the Dominion and elaborated on this idea of a great and improved trans-Pacific Anglo-Saxon sphere. When discussing Australia’s relations with the USA, Canada and New Zealand, Bean wrote that ‘We have identically the same problem […] We want to be free to mould our nation ourselves and make it grow and develop as an Anglo-Saxon nation by any method that seems the best’.57 He also wrote of the large cities of Australia and the USA as ‘Anglo-Saxon cities, living an Anglo-Saxon life in Anglo-Saxon ways’.58 Bean was concerned that Australia would be vulnerable without a larger population, and predicted it would become an ‘Anglo-Saxon state of 60 or 70 million people’, even suggesting that Australia might become the new ‘centre of the British Empire’.59 Hence Bean’s vision, while demanding civic devotion of Australians, was nonetheless an ethnic nationalism.

33While not a hereditary eugenicist, he made an urgent plea for his ideals of racial progress just after the Second World War: ‘This Nationalism is the soul of our race and the greatest spur to its progress.’60 Bean further elaborated on race consciousness in his book Anzac to Amiens where he stressed what he saw as the importance of the White Australia Policy defining it as, ‘a vehement effort to maintain a high Western standard of economy, society and culture, necessitating certainly at that stage, however it may be camouflaged, the rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples.’61 However, Ross Coulthart notes that later in his life, Bean came to regret the ideas of white supremacy that had influenced him in his earlier writings, and saw progress in acceptance: ‘We have to be taught, if necessary at school, that our past attitude to foreigners and strangers is a sign of old-world ignorance’.62

34War journalists thus saw the Anzacs as a symbol of an emerging and regenerated white race. Though their concepts were often confused, the new homo nationalis, was marked physically as ‘tall’ or ‘brown’, but also culturally as freedom-loving democrats. While soldiers in the Anzac corps came from everywhere (including Ireland, Syria, Poland, Russia), the Anglo stereotype was encouraged by an Edwardian cult of Anglo-Saxonism, spanning Britain and Australia, with some nods to New World racial notions from across the Pacific.

Conclusion

35At its foundational moment, the Anzac tradition was thus inflected with ideas of race, eugenics and environmental determinism. The Australian War Memorial honours its founder Charles Bean, but now distances itself from his ideas on race and nation, preferring to represent diversity in the commemoration of Australia’s serving personnel. Anzac ceremonies no longer eulogise World War One heroes as those who mythically ‘brought the nation into being’, but speak of sacrifice, service and peace.

36As influential as Charles Bean’s history and work was on the Anzac tradition, his vision was certainly not the sole motor of the nationalism that aggregated around Anzac commemoration. One could point to the civic ideas of the Anzac Day Commemoration Committees who sought to unite Australians across ecumenical lines. Figures such as Anglican Canon David Garland in Brisbane, Queensland Premier and anti-conscriptionist T.J. Ryan, as well as General John Monash were more interested in instituting a simultaneous commemoration that Australians from all confessions could participate in on Anzac Day. The popular movement of women and men around Anzac commemoration was little interested in intellectual ideas of Anglo-Saxonism, and many saw it on the contrary as an opportunity to overcome religious sectarianism, a true obstacle to unity in early 20th century Australia.

37If the Great War is seen as a crucial moment in Australia’s collective memory, we must confront the use that some were to make of this memory by projecting an image of White Australia. This chapter has attempted to show how a project to remember the Anzacs was intertwined with ideas of race that simultaneously linked the Australian nation with other peoples across the Empire as well as allowing a language of difference to emerge.

Notes de bas de page

1 Pierre Nora, ‘La mémoire collective’, in Jacques Le Goff, ed., La Nouvelle histoire (Paris: Retz, 1978), 398.

2 Elena Govor, Russian Anzacs in Australian History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005). Also Peter Stanley, ‘ “He Was Black, He Was a White Man, and a Dinkum Aussie”’, in Santanu Das, ed., Race and Empire in First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

3 Ross Coulthart, Charles Bean (Sydney: Harper and Collins, 2014).

4 Australian War Memorial, ‘Charles Bean’, <https://www.awm.gov.au/about/organisation/ history/charles-bean> accessed 18 November 2016.

5 Anon, ‘The Birth of a Nation’, Freeman’s Journal (26 April 1916).

6 Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ in Philippe Forest, ed., Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Littérature et identité nationale de 1871 à 1914 (Paris: Pierre Bordas et fils, 1991), 12-48.

7 Gorman, Daniel, Imperial Citizenship, Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) 17-18.

8 Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 123.

9 Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, Thoughts on the Application of Natural Selection to Politics and Society. (London: Henry S. King, 1872), 49.

10 Harold Laski, ‘The Scope of Eugenics’, Westminster Review 174 (1910), 193.

11 Cited in Martine Spensky, ‘Défendre et peupler l’Empire: les femmes britanniques objets et sujets de discours nataliste et eugéniste’, in Cahiers d’Histoire Culturelle 37 (2016), 3.

12 George Robb, ‘The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6,4 (1996), 589-603.

13 J. Arthur Thomson, ‘Eugenics and War’, Eugenics Review 7 (1915), 1-14.

14 Thomson, ‘Eugenics and War’, 14. Thomson proposed to put ‘mental defectives’ in the ranks.

15 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness. Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 73.

16 Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 36.

17 Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 78.

18 Quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 90.

19 Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 169.

20 Ross L. Jones, ‘Eugenics in Australia: the secret of Melbourne’s elite’, The Conversation (20 September 2011) <http://theconversation.com/eugenics-in-australia-the-secret-of-melbournes-elite-3350> accessed 18 November 2016.

21 Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 45.

22 Cited in White, Inventing Australia, 71.

23 See Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: the Digger and National Mythology (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004).

24 Cited in Carmel Shute, ‘Heroines and Heroes, Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914-1918’, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, eds., Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38.

25 Compton McKenzie cited in Les Carlyon, Gallipoli (Pan Macmillan: Melbourne, 2001), 135.

26 Ken Inglis, ‘Bean, Charles Edwin Woodrow (1879-1968)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: Australian National University, 1979).

27 Coulthart, Charles Bean, 58.

28 Coulthart, Charles Bean, 57.

29 Cited in K.S. Inglis, The Official History of Australia in the War 1914-1918 Vol. 1, <https://www. awm.gov.au/histories/first_world_war/volI_introduction/> accessed 18 November 2016.

30 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, ‘Australasians Glorious Entry into War; Historic Charge; Brilliant Feat at Gaba Tepe’, Sydney Morning Herald (8 May 1915).

31 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, ‘Australasians Glorious Entry into War; Historic Charge; Brilliant Feat at Gaba Tepe’, Sydney Morning Herald (8 May 1915).

32 Ashmead-Bartlett, ‘Australasians Glorious Entry into War’, 8 May 1915.

33 Ibid.

34 F.K. Crowley, Modern Australian Documents, 1900-1939 (Melbourne: Wren Publishers, 1973), 190.

35 Cited in Crowley, Modern Australian Documents, 1900-1939, 195.

36 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), ‘Fact or Fiction: 5 Common Anzac myths put to the test’ (23 April 2015) <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-25/five-anzac-myths-put-to-the- test/539375> accessed 2 December 2016.

37 C.E.W. Bean, In Your Hands Australians (London: Cassell, 1919), 20.

38 Cited in Crowley, Modern Australian Documents, 1900-1939, 195.

39 Ibid.

40 Cited in Jenny McLeod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 162.

41 Oliver Hogue, Trooper Bluegum at the Dardanelles (Pickle and Partner Publishers, 2016), 5.

42 Isobel Crombie, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture 1919-1939 (Canberra: National Gallery of Victoria, 2004).

43 C.E.W. Bean, ‘Chunuk Bair’, Official History of Australia in the War, vol. I, 716.

44 Ibid.

45 John McQuilton, Journal of the Australian War Memorial 33 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 2000).

46 Bean, ‘The Diggers’, Official History of Australia in the War 1914-1918, vol. VI, 6.

47 Bean, In Your Hands Australians, 18.

48 Cited in White, Inventing Australia, 126.

49 Bean, Official History of Australia in the War, vol. I, 13.

50 Mark McKenna, ‘Keeping in Step: the Anzac “Resurgence” and “Military Heritage” in Australia and New Zealand’, in Shanti Sumartojo and Ben Wellings, eds., Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration. Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), 167.

51 C.E.W. Bean, Anzac to Amiens (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1946), 3.

52 Bean, ‘The AIF in France’, Official History of Australia in the War, vol. III, 965.

53 Bean, ‘The Diggers’, Official History of Australian in the War, vol. VI, 5.

54 Bean, Official History of the Australians in the First World War, vol. VI, 6.

55 Bean, Official History of the Australians in the First World War, vol. VI, 5-6.

56 Marilyn Lake, ‘British World or New World?: Anglosaxonism and Australian engagement with America’, History Australia 10/3 (2013).

57 Bean, In Your Hands Australians, 47.

58 Bean, In Your Hands Australians, 46.

59 Bean, Anzac to Amiens, 10.

60 Bean, In Your Hands Australians, 8.

61 Bean Anzac to Amiens, 5.

62 Cited in Coulthart, Charles Bean (Sydney: Harper and Collins, 2014), 102.


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