URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/pup/49878
Anzac, Race and Empire
Memorialising Soldiers and Warriors in Australia
Shanti Sumartojo et Ben Wellings
p. 169-186
Texte intégral
Introduction
1In 2015, a new memorial was unveiled in Sydney’s Hyde Park, the formal green rectangle in the city’s centre. In a creative and vibrant city like Sydney, the launch of a new public artwork was not remarkable, but this event differed because it was a new war memorial, and even more unusually, it commemorated the military service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians. Designed by Indigenous artist Tony Albert, Yininmadyemi, Thou Didst Let Fall took the form of four standing outsized bullets and three fallen shells that represented the casualties of war. As a public artwork, reviews were mixed – one critic described it as ‘too heavy-handed, too obvious’1 – but as a moment of public recognition it was rare in contemporary Australia. This is because, in a country arguably obsessed with the memory of the First World War, the participation of Indigenous servicepeople in the conflict is seldom recognised in the state-sponsored memorial landscape.

Figure 1: Yininmadyemi, Thou Didst Let Fall, Tony Albert, 2015. Hyde Park in City of Sydney. Image: Silverfig,
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
2The memory of the First World War has a central place in Australia’s national consciousness. Despite its mainstream appeal, however, it masks an ambiguous relationship with the history of empire and its racial and cultural inequalities. In this chapter we use the example of the memorialisation of Australian Indigenous military service people, or ‘black Diggers’, to unpack the complex cultural politics of Empire and race in the Anzac centenary. We argue that the treatment of race in the Anzac narrative, and the strong mainstream association of Anzac with Australian national identity, shapes not only how Indigenous war service is remembered, but also defines the scope for Australians to come to grips with their settler-colonial history. By examining the tensions involved in commemorating and memorialising Indigenous Australians and warfare, this chapter traces the way that Anzac competes with and obscures unsettling Indigenous memories of conflict in the narrative of Australian nationhood whilst simultaneously prescribing the acceptable bounds of Indigenous memory of national conflict. However it notes that a more subtle account of Australia’s pasts emerges at different scales, in particular at the city, rather than federal, level of government.
3This argument rests on primary research on contemporary forms of Australian memorialisation supported by the public record of political debate surrounding this issue. Conceptually, this chapter builds on Mark McKenna’s argument that Anzac obscures the uncomfortable memory of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples carried out in the original invasion and colonisation of the Australian continent.2 It develops the distinction between ‘soldiers’, ‘warriors’ and ‘fighters’ advanced by Elizabeth Rechniewski who notes that in ‘colonized countries where armed conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples took place, the question of what constitutes a “war” and the problematic distinction between “fighter” and “soldier” are only recently being posed’.3 It engages with Frank Bongiorno’s insight that paradoxically contemporary Anzac commemoration has become so inclusive that to step outside its ideational boundaries is to be ‘un-Australian’. Bongiorno argues that ‘an ostensible historical pluralism might have been complicit in a conservative cultural politics that has progressively closed off possibilities both for interpreting Australian pasts, and imagining Australian futures’. Importantly, he suggests that ‘the cultivated ambiguity of Indigenous war remembrance may offer a more radical challenge to Anzac, through an expansive understanding of the identity of Aboriginal warrior, and an inclusive notion of what has constituted defence of country’.4 These arguments and ideas provide the analytical framework for this chapter.
4This chapter suggests that when Indigenous commemoration and memory acts step outside the Anzac narrative they transgress boundaries of nationhood that still rest implicitly upon race and empire as their foundational concepts. This chapter will build on McKenna’s argument that Anzac obscures a deeper and older discomfort with frontier conflict and dispossession. However, it will show that, although this form of conflict and dispossession operates at different scales of political organisation, in Australia, city rather than national government has recently taken the lead in commemorating frontier conflict. Such commemoration at the scale of the nation-state remains difficult because government at this level is concerned with the legitimacy of the nation in a way that city-level government is not. This political leeway allows space for the expression of alternative narratives in the public urban realm.
Anzac, Race and Empire: the shifting foundations of Australian war memory
5One of the important and fundamental assumptions about war commemoration in Australia is that it is and should remain ‘above politics’ and not be ‘overtly politically correct’. This view came through strongly in the community research exercises carried out by the social research company Colmar Brunton that underpinned the Anzac centenary Advisory Board’s Report to Government.5 Despite the strength of this desire, commemorations are inherently political, because decisions about what gets remembered, by whom, when and how, inform the prominence in the annual commemorative calendar, the degree of official support and the content and reception of events. Thus, as Ashplant, Dawson and Roper have established, ‘the power of dominant memories depends not simply on their public visibility, but also on their capacity to connect with and articulate particular popular conceptions, whilst actively silencing or marginalizing others’.6 Although commemorative practices might appear as the product of community demand endorsed by political consensus, the boundaries of acceptable commemoration are the product of power, negotiation and contestation at scales ranging from the individual to the international.
6As such, attempts to depoliticise Anzac are part of a persistent project to maintain and sustain its status beyond public critique. As Elizabeth Rechniewski observes when considering the possible effects of recuperating the service of colonized peoples in national war memories, there is a risk that ‘a kind of “soft reconciliation” that downplays the reality of Indigenous experience before, during and after the war’.7 On the one hand this allows Aboriginal communities to share in the narrative of nation-building based on war service; but on the other it also leaves that narrative relatively untouched and uncomplicated by colonised peoples’ experience of conflict. Insulated from criticism by including only an incomplete version of Indigenous experience, Anzac commemoration appears to incorporate a range of Australian stories, whilst actually aiding the forgetting of those stories. The memorialisation of Indigenous soldiers – as opposed to fighters or warriors – shows how race and empire remain difficult, disturbing and contested terrain the First World War Centenary commemorations in Australia.
7Race and empire were crucial governing structures at Australia’s moment of national self-formation from the 1890s until the end of the First World War.8 Yet the British Empire as it was in 1914-18 is no longer part of contemporary Australian consciousness, and explicit memory of the British Empire is largely absent in contemporary commemorations. This is because the concept of empire itself was delegitimised during the global era of decolonisation from the Second World War until the collapse of apartheid South Africa in the 1990s. The Australian version of formalised racism, the ‘White Australia Policy’, was superseded in the 1960s and 1970s. Most significantly, the British Empire itself has gone, meaning that explicit Empire Loyalty is anachronistic despite it playing an important part in the formative years of the Anzac tradition. Empire and race, however, were prominent socio-political organising principles when Australia went to war in 1914, and Australia’s national moment at Gallipoli was therefore also an imperial one. The link between war and nationhood in national narratives is frequently presented as one of liberation from imperial powers leading to national unification; a teleology stressed in the colonial revolts against British and Spanish rule in the Americas, in the ‘springtime of nations’ in nineteenth-century Europe and the anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia in the twentieth century. Australia’s national unification preceded the war linked most closely with its nationhood, which was fought with an imperial power rather than against it.
8This merging of the national and the imperial still has an echo in Anzac narratives today. Carolyn Holbrook has argued that the Edwardian and imperial origins of the Anzac legend are still implicit in contemporary forms of remembrance even if race and Empire have been consciously forgotten since the 1980s.9 Furthermore, Australia emerged from the War as a sub-imperial power, holding a League of Nations Mandate over the former German colony of New Guinea although little memory of this sub-imperial role remains today. Such memories that exist are predominantly a vector for Australian political claims to be ‘present’ in the contemporary world. Illustrative of this ‘presentee-ism’ was the Melbourne Herald Sun’s headline on the centenary of the outbreak of war on 5 August 2014. Above an archival photograph of Australian soldiers packing the deck of a steamship it simply read ‘Here We Come’.10 The Herald Sun further staked a claim for Australia’s place in world history by stating that Australia fired the first shot of the entire war at a German merchant ship then leaving Port Melbourne when it received news of the outbreak of war.11
9Race differs from empire by being present in Anzac commemoration in more explicit and contentious ways. The ascendency of multiculturalism pushed formative links between race, Empire and Anzac out of public discourse.12 The shift from ‘old’ to ‘new’ racism in the 1960s and 1970s saw the transformation of racism based on a taxonomical system of strict hierarchies related to phenotypical features in groups and individuals. This racial system was underpinned by what was understood at the time as scientific knowledge and was closely related to imperial and colonial social and political order, as well as informing governmental opinions about hierarchies amongst white peoples in Europe and the Americas. The ‘new’ racism that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century was much more diffuse, emphasising ‘cultural’ difference and incompatibility rather than hierarchy.13 This might be better labelled ‘xenophobia’, because although the project of organising humans into scales of value is now less obviously present, xenophobic outbursts attempting to subordinate the groups and individuals against which they are directed are still common.
10The Australian context for this shift from racism as hierarchy to xenophobia as prejudice was the introduction of ‘multiculturalism’ as official policy in the 1970s. Although Australian nationhood in its ‘civilising’ guise had been formed against the Indigenous peoples displaced by colonial settlement, and although some minority groups, notably the Chinese, contained a presence both inside and outside Australia, the immigration of non-British and non-white peoples from Europe, Asia and Africa after the Second World War required a reworking of narratives of nationhood to provide a basis for common belonging. In this situation, race could only been seen as a source of division rather than unity, and it was dropped as a foundational concept for Australian nationhood from official claims to citizenship and from government rhetoric.14
11One of the great tensions in multicultural expressions of nationhood is between unity and diversity. As a unifying narrative, Anzac has been deployed in both official and unofficial ways to transcend potential sources of social and political division within the Australian nation. The values carried and transmitted by Anzac during contemporary commemorations – fortitude, endurance, courage, inventiveness and above all, mateship15 – are presented as capacious; values which all Australians are now encouraged to emulate or endorse, and that appear ideally suited to a multicultural and civic conceptualisation of the Australian nation. An emphasis on inclusive and accessible values rather than exclusive forms of racial belonging dominant in 1914 help categorise Anzac as a form of ‘civic nationalism’, an integrating political myth that combines historic continuity with open ideational borders. However, a contrary tendency is also present that suggests that Anzac is a form of kinship rather than – or perhaps within – nationhood.16 The emphasis on family connections as a key trope in the contemporary telling of the Anzac narrative has the effect of questioning the link between Anzac and those Australians whose forebears cannot show a direct, familial relationship with a history of service. The concomitant emphasis on inter-generational transmission of Anzac’s values and sentiments also means that, in a time of the professionalisation of the military, the transmission of such values also inheres within a ‘core’ group with links to military service in the twentieth century. Indeed, Donoghue and Tranter found that immigrants to Australia are less likely to prioritise Anzac as an important part of national identity than those respondents who were Australia-born.17
12It is for such reasons that questions remain about the link between race, and specifically ‘whiteness’, and Anzac. In examining the link between Anzac and military intervention McDonald argues that ‘the Anzac myth is most readily tied to essentialist images of a white, colonial past. This is less in keeping with a post-colonial, multicultural or civic conception of Australia and Australian identity’.18 Yet for many Australians these are cultural antecedents that are just not relevant to their family histories. Indeed, Danielle Drozdzewski asks ‘how Anzac functions in multicultural Australia, how it resonates with the population born overseas and the implications of thinking through the inclusiveness of the Anzac narrative across the full spectrum of ethnically diverse Australian citizenry.’19
13Yet such observations are not easy to make in public. Perceived criticism of the Anzac narrative can be politically difficult for individuals and is virtually impossible for political parties. This is because the Anzac narrative has been overlaid with a more recent attempt to explain Australia in broad inclusive terms that had an unintended consequence of further placing the narrative beyond criticism. As Frank Bongiorno argued:
There is a long history of contention over the significance and meaning of the Anzac legend. But once a tradition is defined in more inclusive terms, those who refuse to participate can readily be represented as beyond the pale. To question, to criticise – to doubt – can become un-Australian… Anzac’s inclusiveness has been achieved at the price of a dangerous chauvinism that increasingly equates national history with military history, and national belonging with a willingness to accept the Anzac legend as Australian patriotism’s very essence.20
14Even the inclusive version of Anzac carries dangers for those who seek to step outside its boundaries of behaviour or commemorative tropes. This has been particularly true of the commemoration of Indigenous people within and outside memorialisation and dominant commemorative practices. It is this point of tension within the Anzac tradition that reveals the lingering place of race and empire in contemporary Australian memory.
Warriors and Soldiers: Adam Goodes and the boundaries of Australian war memory
15The commemoration of Indigenous Great War servicemen (and to a far lesser degree, women) helps demonstrate the ongoing tensions in contemporary Australian society and politics surrounding settler-Indigenous relations and, by extension, an unresolved tension around race and Empire that undergirds Australian nationhood. As we have noted, histories of many different groups surfaced during the re-working of the Anzac narrative in the multicultural era, including those of the so-called ‘black Diggers’, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men who served in the First World War and subsequent conflicts. In addition to the dangers of such accommodation of Indigenous service into broader national narratives, Mark McKenna insists that Anzac actually helps the forgetting of more troubling aspects of Australia’s past thereby hindering reconciliation. He argues that the ‘resurgence’ of Anzac Day can be explained as a political displacement activity for an enduring sense of unease created by the continuing dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands in Australia. For McKenna, comprehending the means by which Anzac Day became Australia’s de facto national day must be grounded in an understanding of the re-working of Australian nationalism in the final third of the twentieth century. It was in this period that new narratives explained Australians to themselves and to the world without reference to older race and Empire-based foundations of loyalty and community.21
16This argument was built on earlier understandings of the place of memory and forgetting outlined in McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas Point (2002) which detailed the historical erasure that occurred in the south east of New South Wales but was brought out by the political ramifications of the ‘Stolen Generations’ report of 1997.22 This sense of ‘forgetting’ or not knowing of the painful aspects of historical and contemporary relations between black and white people at the local level was also recorded in Henry Reynolds’Why Weren’t We Told? (1999).23 Both McKenna and Reynolds extended this analysis to the national level; an approach reflected in Robert Manne’s In Denial (2001), which documented an active political project to supress anew the most disturbing elements Australia’s past that had gained political salience since the 1980s.24
17To illustrate his point, McKenna contrasted the popularity of Anzac Day with the ambivalence surrounding Australia Day (26 January). In locating the renewed popularity and official support given to Anzac, he pinpointed the Australian Bicentenary as a moment in which support for a national founding moment at Anzac Cove rather than Sydney Cove became less morally complicated. The counter-demonstrations around Sydney on 26 January 1988 ultimately meant that ‘Australia Day, traditionally a day of rest for both body and mind, despite all government-led attempts to give it serious purpose, was now beset with a far more intractable problem: entrenched Indigenous opposition’.25 This opposition was always broarder than the Indigenous community alone.26 Support from within sections of the white settler community delineated Australia’s past not just as part of the ‘history wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, but as part of the wider ‘culture wars’ of the same period and after; a marker of differences between the left and right of politics in an age of voter de- and re-alignment. As McKenna noted, ‘as Australia Day became a lightning rod for historical and political disputes, Anzac Day came to be seen as a less complicated and less divisive alternative’.27
18In contrast to the conspicuous and copious memorialisation that took place in the aftermath of the war and since the 1990s, there are fewer than ten memorials in Australia specific to Aboriginal military service, and ‘most are local in focus, understated and erected without state sanction’.28 This lack of official recognition stems from the unsettling nature of Indigenous memories of conflict that do not take 1915 as their point of departure but rather 1788, the year of the arrival of the First Fleet from Britain. In Indigenous memories of conflict, 26 January 1788 was not the inauspicious start to the creation of what was to become a country with one of the highest living standards in the world and a successful multicultural society, but instead represents ‘invasion day’, the moment when dispossession began and Indigenous peoples – created as such through their encounter with Empire – were forced into a long struggle for survival. Part of this struggle took the form of the ‘frontier wars’, a series of conflicts between incoming white settlers who benefitted from the notion that the Australian continent was terra nullius, and long-standing Indigenous populations with well-established cultural and political structures and highly sophisticated relationships with their surrounding environments.
19Against the historical background of these conflicts, Elizabeth Rechniewski has drawn a distinction between ‘fighters’ and ‘soldiers’ when analyzing the remembrance and commemoration of Indigenous involvement in twentieth century conflict.29 This divergent memory of war leads to tensions when situating Indigenous perceptions of conflict within wider, ‘mainstream’ Anzac narratives, even if at times attempts are made to recognize this divergence. More common, however, is unease with such recognition and at times open hostility to the unsettling presence of Indigenous memory of conflict on one of the frontiers of the British Empire.
20At the heart of the tensions between the seemingly universal values that have been attached to Anzac since the 1990s is the ambiguous figure of the Indigenous warrior, an identity incorporated into the Anzac narrative through war service but only in an uncomfortable manner. As soldiers in the Queen’s uniform, contemporary Indigenous servicemen and women can be incorporated into the Anzac narrative and through this the Australian nation. However, they also present a wholly less comfortable memory, at once at odds with the Australian nation and yet symbolically central to its historical formation since 1788. In other words, the ‘civic’ national values transmitted via acts of remembrance and commemoration hide a majoritarian nationalism that prescribed acceptable ‘national’ behaviours. In this sense the evidence supports McKenna’s argument that Anzac masks an anxiety with ‘unreconciled’ dispossession and that race and Empire still play a large yet implicit role in war commemoration in Australia.
21A stark example of the unresolved position of Aboriginal people in contemporary Australian memory played out in mid-2015. Celebrating a goal during the ‘Indigenous round’ of the Australian Football League (AFL) in May of that year, the award-winning Indigenous player Adam Goodes celebrated with a ‘war dance’ in which he mimicked throwing a spear towards opposition supporters who had been booing him persistently throughout the game and the season.30 Subsequent reactions from fans and media commentators to Goodes’ mimicking of a stance instantly recognisable as an act of Indigenous resistance were intense and initially divided over whether the booing was about Goodes’ style and attitude as a player or as an Indigenous man adopting an aggressive posture. The controversy escalated when another Aboriginal AFL player, Lewis Jetta, similarly adopted a spear-throwing pose towards booing fans at a subsequent game in July 2015.31 When the leading Australian department store David Jones named Goodes their ‘brand ambassador’ in October 2015, the company’s website received racist abuse (subsequently countered with messages of support).32
22Politicians and political parties stayed out of this row, possibly sensing little to gain by getting involved, and it instead played out within civil society. The Indigenous journalist Stan Grant – one of a very small minority in Australian journalism – spoke out in support of Goodes and Jetta.33 But for the conservative ‘mainstream’, who were actually a small, but well-organised and well-funded minority themselves, Goodes’ ‘war dance’ was deeply unsettling, if not downright threatening. Well-known commentator Andrew Bolt, spokesmen for the libertarian right in Australia and himself convicted of racially discriminatory language in 2011,34 called it ‘inflammatory’ and tantamount to challenging the opposition to a ‘race war’, suggesting that such ‘symbolic violence’ had no place in the professional football league that Goodes played in, despite professional sport being a form of symbolic conflict itself.35 Furthermore, Goodes attracted such attention because he was no ordinary football player, having twice won the AFL’s best and fairest award, been named Australian of the Year in 2013, and having achieved visibility in May 2013 for pointing out racist abuse from a crowd member, who turned out to be a thirteen year old girl, at an AFL game. The political context of this debate is also important, as these incidents came at a time of an attempt to shift rights protection in favour of ‘free speech’ in Australia. Between the incidents involving Adam Goodes in May 2013 and May 2015, the Federal Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis argued in Parliament during a debate over the possible repeal of Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act (1995) that ‘people do have a right to be bigots’.36
23Goodes’ and Jetta’s insertion of an Aboriginal memory of conflict into the symbolically significant arena of professional sport in Australia upset the relationship between unity and memory of conflict. Overall in Australia there is only a weakly developed repertoire of language to discuss persistent racial difference, its relationship to past conflicts and Indigenous memory of violent resistance against colonial dispossession and discrimination. Anzac unwittingly contributed to this situation because its ‘inclusive’ rhetoric and seemingly universal values meant that diversion and disruption of the narrative with a ‘war dance’ was ipso facto ‘un-Australian’. Goodes’ and Jetta’s gestures upset the relationship between military or armed service and Australian nationhood that Anzac repeatedly reinforces along racial lines. This is not to say that Goodes’ and Jetta’s actions were representative of all Indigenous Australians nor to suggest that all Indigenous Australians remember conflict and service in this way.37 Indeed, an Aboriginal service at Lone Pine in August 2015 and the recognition of the Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion during Prime Minister Abbott’s week long visit to the Torres Strait in August 2015 made a contrast to the row about Goodes’ and Jetta’s ‘war dance’ playing out in southern Australia. In these instances, Indigenous servicemen and women were ‘greenskins’ whose khaki uniforms obliterated distinctions of race amongst servicemen and women.
24Here we return to an understanding of the political nature of memory that underpins remembrance and commemoration outlined by Ashplant, Dawson and Roper: the power of dominant memories to silence or marginalise others – or more pointedly, the power of particular dominant groups or individuals to silence or marginalise the memories of subordinate groups.38 This politics of memory happens in two mutually reinforcing ways that crowd out unsettling narratives in relation to Indigenous commemoration. The first is that Australians are always on the side of ‘good’ in historical terms, so memories of dispossession and attendant culpability are disturbing for the broader legitimating national narrative.39 The second is that in the ‘new’ Anzac narrative that emerged in the post-imperial era, Australians are victims rather than perpetrators.40 This makes the idea of dispossession doubly hard to conceive of within the framework of Anzac, and thus troubles the recognition of Indigenous war service.
25In order not to undermine the Anzac narrative, Indigenous memory and commemoration must be contained within the broader commemorative repertoire by power-holders within government and civil society. As Indigenous broadcast journalist Stan Grant asserted in a public lecture, released on the eve of Australia Day 2016, ‘Every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country’s history’.41 Grant’s speech included a reference to his great-grandfather, whose war service was not recognised when he returned to Australia in the 1940s because of his race. Here again the trope of kinship was used to link contemporary Australians to the nation via the Anzac narrative. However, in the case of Grant, artist Tony Albert, discussed below, and many other Indigenous Australians, this familiar commemorative device of kinship via family military service is overlaid with race and racism.
26Despite this dissonance, the Anzac narrative remains relatively unscathed, because accounts of wartime service often stress the equality with which black Diggers were treated, even if their return to civilian life was blighted by discrimination and non-recognition as in the case of Grant’s grandfather. However, this recruitment into the mainstream Anzac narrative does not resolve (or even ameliorate) the racism that was experienced by many returned Aboriginal service people.
Memorialising Frontier Conflict: city, nation-state and scale
27The contemporary memorialisation of Indigenous war service therefore occurs against a background of a complex entanglement of the history and memory of Empire and colonial settlement, race, political reconciliation for racist official policies, and the mainstream Anzac narrative. Despite evidence of community unease with making Anzac ‘overtly politically correct’,42 it was impossible not to have some sort of official recognition of Indigenous service during the Centenary. In common with other Anzac commemoration, attempts to connect contemporary Australians with their forebears occurred through the stories of individual soldiers situated within the wider histories and narratives of the First World War. For example, the Connecting Spirits project has taken groups of South Australian school children on organised trips to the Western Front since 2006, in part to commemorate individual Indigenous servicemen. The students were required to research individual First World War soldiers, including Indigenous servicemen, and then performed their own ‘commemoration ceremonies’ at their gravesites on the Western Front. As one student wrote when reflecting on her trip in 2015:
Being on this trip has finally made me realize that it is very important to acknowledge & respect our Aboriginal/Ngarrindjeri & Non-Aboriginal soldiers who went to war for us & for our country.43
28It should be noted that ‘country’ has a double meaning here: for the Indigenous Australians, it meant a close association with a productive landscape with deep historical, religious and mythological connections; for the settlers it has historical overtones of ‘King and Country’, a formula that allowed expression for emergent colonial nationalisms within an imperial framework.44
29In Australia, the emphasis on narrating Anzac through the service stories of individual soldiers has also inspired new expressions of cultural commemoration. One such example was the play Black Diggers, directed by Wesley Enoch and written by Tom Wright, that premiered at the 2014 Sydney Festival. The stories in the play are drawn from the experiences of Indigenous men, based on archival and oral history sources, and dramatized into a set of composite characters. This particular example shows Anzac’s ‘inclusive’ malleability. For the director, the play was an attempt to write Indigenous experience back into mainstream Australian history, through the device of a ubiquitous Australian figure, the Anzac.45 A similar malleability was found in the Anzac folk song ‘On Every Anzac Day’ commissioned in 2015 by Peter Morrison, the Chief of Army. The song, written by John Schumann, incorporated a memory of frontier conflict but contained within the Anzac version of nationhood:
I asked him once why he volunteered for that hellhole far away
To fight for someone else’s king and the land they took away
He said ‘One invading mob’s too many’ and then he walked away
And I lost him in the crowds waving flags on the side of the road – like every Anzac Day.
Soldiers, brothers, all Australians, we had no time for race
When the bullets are whining past your head, you’re all just shades of grey.46
30Permanent and tangible commemoration of Indigenous service grew in this period too. The Adelaide Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island War Memorial, designed specifically to commemorate Indigenous service people, claimed to be the first Australian memorial that commemorated the war service of Indigenous people.47 It was unveiled by the Governor-General of Australia, Quentin Bryce, who echoed the value of personal stories in linking citizens to wider narratives: ‘The telling and remembering of experience’, she said, ‘are crucial to understanding who we are, individually and as a nation.’48 The use of personal records and family stories to capture and reflect on experiences in this way is common in commemorative projects. The particular attraction of this approach for some Aboriginal Australians is not just that previously unknown individual stories have come to light, but that these are effectively being used as a corrective to a longstanding invisibility within the Anzac narrative. Thus, the stories that inform Indigenous Anzac commemorative projects are selected examples drawn from those of the many thousands of ‘black Diggers’ who have served in Australian military operations since the Boer War.
31The link between personal stories and remembrance was represented in a much more public form by the new war memorial to Indigenous Anzacs unveiled in 2015 with which this chapter opened. Yininmadyemi, Thou didst let fall by Indigenous artist Tony Albert was unveiled in Sydney’s Hyde Park, a prominent city-centre location. It was commissioned by the City of Sydney as part of their focus on representing local Indigenous history, proving that such historical statements, even when resisted at the federal level, can emerge at other levels of official public bureaucracy, underscoring the contested place of Indigenous people in the Australian memory of conflict. The spatial context of Yininmadyemi was significant; a memorial in a central park in the nation’s largest city is visible to and used by a substantial everyday audience, as well as international visitors, and it is proximate to the New South Wales Anzac Memorial, also located centrally in Hyde Park and unveiled in 1934.
32For Yininmadyemi’s artist Tony Albert, this memorial recognised the long history of Indigenous military activity, stretching before and after the Great War. Thus, the artist’s intention was to extend the notion of conflict back beyond Federation in 1901. In a television interview he hinted at the connection between official military service and the much more ambiguous status of Aboriginal resistance to settler colonialism:
The sculpture in Hyde Park is incredibly important. It is long overdue. We have a hidden history of our people being written out of history [and] we still have yet to acknowledge the frontier wars and the wars that happened on soil in this country.49
33Indeed, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, echoed Albert’s concern about the lack of visible, official Indigenous representation in Sydney’s public spaces at the unveiling in Yininmadyemi, an argument that collapsed space and time and linked contemporary Sydney with its past through a process of spatial recognition in the form of a memorial:
… we were clearly told that there was an emptiness at the heart of our City, that there had been a failure to publicly recognise not only its rich and complex Indigenous story, but also to recognise the continuing contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to the life of this City.50
34Yininmadyemi deploys a family narrative to frame war commemoration, just as other Anzac sites do.51 But because the story underpinning the memorial is an Indigenous one, it inevitably works to remind us of a history of racism that adheres to the Anzac narrative, given the colonial basis of Australia’s founding moment. Yininmadyemi had a more critical undertone than other forms of official narrative, such as those promulgated by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA) or the Australian War Memorial (AWM). Asked about his design for the Sydney memorial, Tony Albert said that Yininmadyemi is a word ‘that represented the continual struggle of Aboriginal people when they returned from service… our country suffers with a cultural amnesia of anything associated with first nations people’.52 As with Stan Grant’s grandfather’s post-war experience of racism noted above, Albert described how his grandfather’s Second World War service, including internment as a prisoner of war, was not enough to mitigate or overcome his exposure to racism by other Australians upon his return to his own country. For Albert, Yininmadyemi was an attempt to link Anzac to the colonial frontier wars, another crucial element of the forgotten place of Empire in Australian memory of conflict.
35The Adelaide and Sydney memorials made the absence of an official Indigenous memorial at the national level all the more obvious. In Canberra, there is only one small memorial to Indigenous military service. This is not on Anzac Parade, the main ceremonial axis that links the Australian War Memorial to the city’s central feature, Lake Burley Griffin, in line of sight with the federal Parliament. Nor is it on the grounds of the Australian War Memorial, an established memorial precinct. Instead, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Memorial is situated in a small clearing off a walking track behind the Australian War Memorial on the lower slopes of Mount Ainslie. In a precinct with multiple memorials to different services in many other conflicts, this small plaque is notable in its inconspicuous location and unprepossessing form, and is a stark contrast to the monumentalism of the Australian War Memorial and Anzac Parade.
36For several years, the memorial, erected by a local private funder in the 1980s, has been the site of an unofficial Anzac Day service on 25 April. The Indigenous service follows the official (and symbolically ‘national’) Dawn Service, held at the nearby Australian War Memorial, and attended by many thousands of people. Although attendance figures should be treated with caution, in 2014 a small crowd of about two hundred people attended the Indigenous Service; a contrast to the 37,000 whom it was claimed had attended the main official event.53 There are ongoing calls for a more accessible and prominent national Indigenous memorial on Anzac parade, but the reasons given for not building such an official memorial commonly refer to cost or the difficulties of planning permission. Instead of the permanency of a physical memorial, activities of Indigenous remembrance at the national level are based on museum or educational displays, cultural activities or temporary projects. In 2016 the Australian War Memorial mounted its first exhibition dedicated specifically to Indigenous service ‘For Country, For Nation’.54 In 2017 – on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum – indigenous veterans led the march along Anzac Parade.

Figure 2: The Mt Ainslie Indigenous Anzac memorial after the Anzac Day service, 2014
(Image: Shanti Sumartojo)
37However, neither event – significant in and of themselves – was followed by an announcement of plans for separate and permanent commemoration within the War Memorial or along Anzac Parade. Such a decision – or the absence of one – should be placed in the wider context of the AWM’s longstanding resistance to commemorating the frontier wars – the lengthy and murderous conflict between Indigenous Australians and white settlers from the arrival of the British colonisers into the twentieth century. Black casualties of this conflict were estimated at 60,000 dead in 2014, a tripling of previous estimates.55 Given evidence of colonial military involvement, it arguably falls within the AWM’s remit to memorialise it with the involvement of Australians in the Maori Wars in 19th century New Zealand. However, AWM director Brendan Nelson said in 2015 that the complexities of the history and the variety of views on the topic meant it was not an appropriate subject for the AWM to memorialise, reiterating the entrenched difficulties of commemorating frontier conflict at the state level in Australia.56
38A final example shows the importance of different scales of government in crafting the public articulation of the history of race and conflict in Australia. In September 2016, Standing by Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner, by Brook Andrew and Trent Walter, was unveiled in central Melbourne. It memorialized the 1842 execution of two Indigenous men who had been convicted of murdering two whale-hunters and who were hanged close to the site where the ‘public marker’ now stands. The first such public work to explicitly address the ‘frontier wars’, it was commissioned by the City of Melbourne to help ‘Melbourne locals and visitors to discover how this story informs our knowledge of Aboriginal history and contested histories of colonisation’.57 In its central location, its focus on the stories of two particular men and its incorporation of ‘tomb-like’ elements designed to invite people to ‘sit, contemplate and reflect’, according to the artists’ statement, the marker demonstrates municipal priority for public recognition of complex local histories told through individual accounts. As with the Sydney memorial, Standing by Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner was commissioned and funded at the level of the city rather than the Federal state. In this regard, smaller, urban political constituencies have been able to promote much more nuanced conversations through the public realm than has so far been possible at the national level. These examples demonstrate the importance of considering how race and Empire, and indeed national identity more generally, play out at all political levels, rather than simply focusing only at the level of the state. Instead, the conversation about the ongoing legacy of race, Empire and Anzac in Australia has emerged most recently at football matches, in urban public places and in the creative arts, rather than in national commemorative events or memorials.
Conclusions
39This chapter has shown that efforts to keep Anzac separate from – and to some extent a solution to – the painful memories associated with Empire and colonisation have been only partially successful. Within this, the space for Indigenous Australians to commemorate their own, fully articulated stories of conflict, war service, and the complex experience of race, empire, country, nationhood and belonging in which they are entangled, is heavily proscribed. Race and empire were important categories of governance at Australian’s founding national moment in the years surrounding the First World War, but despite this, explicit memory of race and Empire are hard to find in official Anzac commemorations. Nevertheless, race and Empire continue to influence what it is possible to say and do within the confines of Australian memories of conflict and service, and this is most visible when memories of frontier conflict – particularly if articulated in word, deed and stone by Indigenous people themselves – intrude on the dominant narrative of war memory.
Notes de bas de page
1 Mark McKenna ‘Memorialising as recognition’, History Australia 12/3 (2015), 219-21.
2 Mark McKenna, From The Edge. Australia’s Lost Histories (Carlton, VIC: Miegunyah Press, 2016), 178.
3 Elizabeth Rechniewski, ‘Contested Sites of Memory: Commemorating Wars and Warriors in New Caledonia’, 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), 190.
4 Frank Bongiorno, ‘Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion’ in 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), 97.
5 Department of Veterans’ Affairs, A Century of Service. Community Research Reports I (Canberra, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 2013), 5.
6 TG Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: contexts, structures and dynamics’ in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration in TG Ashplant, G. Dawson and M. Roper, eds. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 13.
7 Elizabeth Rechniewski, ‘Reconciliation or récuperation? Indigenous soldiers in WWI’, The Conversation (31 July 2014): http://theconversation.com/reconciliation-or-recuperation-Indigenous-soldiers-in-wwi-29539 accessed 17 Feb 2016.
8 Kosmas Tsokhas, Making a Nation State. Cultural Identity, Economic Nationalism and Sexuality in Australian History (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2001), 2.
9 Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac. The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: New South, 2014), 145.
10 ‘Here We Come’, Herald Sun (5 August 2014), 1.
11 Ibid.
12 Frank Bongiorno, ‘Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion’, 91.
13 Andrew Markus, Race. John Howard and the Remaking of Australia (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 3-9.
14 James Jupp, ‘Immigration and National Identity: Multiculturalism’ in G. Stokes, ed. The Politics of Identity in Australia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142.
15 Nick Dyrenfurth, Mateship, (Brunswick VIC: Scribe, 2015), 101.
16 Shanti Sumartojo, ‘Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail’ 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), 291.
17 J. Donoghue and Bruce Tranter, ‘The Anzac Myth and Australian National Identity’, E-IR, May 8 2014: http://www.e-ir.info/2014/05/08/the-anzac-myth-and-australian-national-identity/ accessed 4 October 2016.
18 Matt McDonald, ‘Lest We Forget’ The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention. International Political Sociology, 4/3 (2010), 299.
19 Danielle Drozdzewski, ‘Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia’s Multiculturalism?’ Australian Geographer, 47/1 (2016), 4.
20 Bongiorno, ‘Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion’, 81.
21 Mark McKenna, ‘Anzac Day: How Did It Become Australia’s National Day?’ in Marilyn Lake and henry Reynolds (eds.) What’s Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: New South, 2010), 112.
22 Mark McKenna, Looking for Blackfellas Point, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 207.
23 Henry Reynolds, Why Weren’t We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth About Our History (Ringwood: Viking, 1999).
24 Robert Manne, In Denial. The Stolen Generations and the Right (Melbourne, Black Inc, 2001), 4.
25 McKenna, ‘Anzac Day’, 116.
26 Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism. History as Social Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10.
27 McKenna, ‘Anzac Day’, 116.
28 McKenna, ‘Memorialising as recognition’, 219-221.
29 Elizabeth Rechniewski, ‘Contested Sites of Memory. Commemorating Wars and Warriors in New Caledonia’ 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), 190.
30 Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Sydney Swan’s Adam Goodes celebrates goal with Indigenous war dance, ruffles feathers’: http://www.smh.com.au/afl/sydney-swans/sydney-swans-adam- goodes-celebrates-goal-with-Indigenous-war-dance-ruffles-feathers-20150529-ghczbr.html, accessed 13 February 2016.
31 Andrew Wu, ‘Lewis Jetta Performs spear-throwing Indigenous dance after kicking goal against West Coast’, The Age 26 July 2015: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/lewis-jetta- performs-spearthrowing-Indigenous-dance-after-kicking-goal-against-west-coast-20150726- gikx8x.html, accessed 13 February 2016.
32 Keesha McKenny, ‘David Jones flooded with abuse after Adam Goodes announced as ambassador’, The Age 19 October 2015: http://www.smh.com.au/business/retail/david-jones-flooded- with- abuse-after-adam-goodes-announced-as-ambassador-20151018-gkcacz.html accessed 13 February 2016.
33 Stan Grant, ‘I can tell you how Adam Goodes feels. Every Indigenous person has felt it’, The Guardian, 30 July 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/30/i-can-tell-you-how-adam-goodes-feels-every-Indigenous-person-has-felt-it accessed 4 October 2016.
34 Michael Bodey, ‘Andrew Bolt loses racial vilification court case’, The Australian, 28 September 2011: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/andrew-bolt-x-racial- vilification-court-case/story-e6frg996-1226148919092, accessed 13 February 2016.
35 Andrew Bolt, “Victim” Adam Goodes just crying wolf over war dance’, Herald Sun 31 May 2015:http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/victim-adam-goodes-just-crying-wolf-over-war-dance/news-story/2dd45566e486b438442821ec85050f34 accessed 25 January 2016.
36 Senate Hansards, 24 March 2014, page 1797.
37 Noah Reisman and Richard Trembath, Defending Country. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Service since 1945 (St Lucia QLD: University of Queensland Press, 2016).
38 Ashplant, Dawson and Roper, 2000, 13.
39 Ann Curthoys, ‘Constructing National Histories’ in Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster eds. Frontier Conflict. The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 188.
40 Christina Twomey, ‘Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: an argument’, History Australia, 10/3 (2013), 85.
41 Robert Burton-Bradley, ‘Explosive Speech by Stan Grant Emerges before Australian Day’, SBS News, 24 January 2016: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/01/24/explosive-speech-racism-stan-grant-emerges-days-australia-day accessed 13 February 2016.
42 Department of Veterans’ Affairs, A Century of Service. Community Research Reports I (Department of Veterans’ Affairs: Canberra, 2013), 5.
43 Connecting Spirits, ‘Reflections’, http://connectingspirits.com.au/pages/trips/2015/reflections. php accessed 22 Jan 2016.
44 Ben Wellings, ‘Crown and Country. Empire and Nation in Australian Nationalism, 1788-1999’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 5 (2004), 148.
45 Paul Daley, ‘Black Diggers: challenging Anzac myths’ The Guardian. http://www.theguardian. com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/jan/14/black-diggers-challenging-anzac-myths accessed 25 January 2016.
46 Lisa Mosley and Elise Pianegonda, ‘Musician who penned Vietnam war anthem “I Was Only 19” pays tribute to Indigenous soldiers in new song’, ABC News, 18 April 2015: http://www.abc.net. au/news/2015-04-18/song-pays-tribute-to-Indigenous-soliders-ahead-of-anzac-day/6403098 accessed 4 October 2016.
47 Callie Watson, ‘Nation’s first Aboriginal war memorial, at Torrens Parade Ground, unveiled’, The Advertiser, 10 November 2013, http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/nations-first-aboriginal-war-memorial-at-torrens-parade-ground-unveiled/story-fni6uo1m-1226756887144 accessed 25 January 2016.
48 Quentin Bryce, ‘Dedication of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander War Memorial’ 10 November 2013: https://www.gg.gov.au/speech/dedication-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-war-memorial accessed 25 January 2016.
49 Living Black, ‘Yininmadyemi Thou Didst Let Fall’, 28 October 2015: http://www.sbs.com. au/news/video/424437827914/Living-Black-Yininmadyemi-Thou-Didst-Let-Fall accessed 20 Jan 2016.
50 Clover Moore, ‘Yininmadyemi Launch’ 31 March 2015. http://clovermoore.com.au/ yininmadyemi-launch/. Accessed 25 January 2016.
51 Shanti Sumartojo, ‘You aren’t an Aussie if you don’t come’: National Identity and Visitors’ Practices at the Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux in Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens eds. The Uses of Art in Public Space (London: Routledge, 2015), 131-144.
52 Living Black, ‘Yininmadyemi Thou Didst Let Fall’.
53 Australian War Memorial, ‘Australians flock to Anzac Day 2014 Dawn Service’, 25 April 2014: https://www.awm.gov.au/media/releases/australians-flock-anzac-day-2014-dawn-service/ accessed 25 January 2016.
54 Australian War Memorial, ‘Indigenous Commemoration’ https://www.awm.gov. au/1914-1918/Indigenous-commemoration/, accessed 25 January 2016; Jessica Beange, ‘First exhibition honouring Indigenous military service launches at the Australian War Memorial’, ABC News Online: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-22/for-country-for-nation-launches-at-australian-war-memorial/7868470 accessed 20 October 2016.
55 Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen ‘‘ICannot Say the Numbers that Were Killed’: Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier’ (2014): https://ssrn.com/abstract=2467836, accessed 20 April 2017.
56 Paul Daley, ‘Australian War Memorial: the remarkable rise and rise of the nation’s secular shrine’, 19 May 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2015/ may/19/australian-war-memorial-the-remarkable-rise-and-rise-of-the-nations-secular-shrine, accessed 29 April 2017.
57 City of Melbourne, ‘Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner public marker’. http://www. melbourne.vic.gov.au/arts-and-culture/art-outdoors/public-art-melbourne/Pages/ tunnerminnerwait-and-maulboyheenner-public-marker.aspx, accessed 20 October 2016.
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Commemorating Race and Empire in The First World War Centenary
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