John Treloar,Official War Art and the Australian War Memorial*

John Treloar's involvement in the Australian War Memorial began in 1917, and he was Director from 1920 until his death in 1952. The idea of a national war memorial serving also as a museum, gallery and library was not his: the credit for that goes to Charles Bean. But there would have been no museum, gallery or library without Treloar's organisational ability and collecting genius. Treloar was responsible at first for collecting a documentary record, but later as the vision expanded, he began to acquire many other kinds of material, including art. It was an unusual challenge for a soldier, public servant, and man who scrupulously distanced his emotions from his work. This article examines aspects of Australia's official and commissioned war art and teases out the relationship between the bureaucrat and the artist. I suggest that the administrative effort involved in the war art schemes has to be recognised as part of the process of cultural production, and that in these circumstances the life of the bureaucrat is as worthy of exploration as that of the artist.     

Australia’s Army Nurse: Locating a Woman as the Heart of Sacrifice in the Hall of Memory

This article contests the misconception that the Hall of Memory of the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, represents an irreligious space. While accommodating the expectations of a post-secular society, this belief fails to recognise the influence of Christianity upon the generation that experienced World War I and developed the memorial practices that arose in response to it. Veteran-artist M. Napier Waller embedded complex religious symbolism in the scheme of three windows he designed and executed for the hall. Drawing on his individual experience of battle, personal philosophy of art and the medieval customs of his forebears, Waller told the story of Australia’s experience of the war and aligned a nation’s sacrifice with that of Christ: His Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension are symbolised in the south, west and east windows, respectively. The inclusion of a nurse was central to Waller’s plans and required he manipulate the men creating the memorial to achieve his goal. In doing so, he neutralised the greatest threat to his vision: its founder, Charles Bean, and located a woman of many identities—a Martial Madonna—as the heart of national sacrifice in Australia’s premier war memorial.     

Humanitarianism from the Suburbs: Australian Refugee Relief and Activism during the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War

The Bangladesh Liberation War against West Pakistan in 1971 triggered an exodus of ten million refugees, the deaths of approximately 1.5 million people and widespread destruction of villages, crops and infrastructure. Preoccupied with the Cold War and domestic politics, powerful nations such as the US and UK did not intervene directly and reluctantly provided aid. The Australian government, for its part, was particularly slow to offer aid, trailing efforts of New Zealand and most Western European governments. While the McMahon administration remained indifferent, Australians from diverse backgrounds engaged with this conflict by raising public awareness, fundraising and lobbying the Australian government to increase its aid contribution to Bangladeshis displaced by war. At a time when Australian government policies focused on the war in Indo‐China, Cold War politics and development in south‐east Asia and the south Pacific, I consider the ways Australian individuals offered aid to Asian, non‐Christian refugees, some of whom held Maoist views. Using archival materials, historical newspapers and census data, this article argues that, paradoxically, it was individuals with little political capital who spearheaded Australian efforts to aid Bangladeshi refugees. In short, the Bangladesh Liberation War provoked a groundswell of suburban activism that acted independently of government policies.     

Regimes of truth: Australian combat photography in the Second World War

This paper examines the policies and directions framing the professional practice of Australian combat photographers in the Second World War. It argues that while their endeavours to offer an account of the nation at war were constrained by predictable considerations of politics and censorship, their commitment to truth was also framed and constricted by an array of cultural considerations. The nation’s ongoing engagement with the history of the First World War, the contrasting organisational cultures of the bureaucracies that the photographers served, and Australian culture’s visual inarticulacy concerning death on the battlefield played key roles both individually and collectively in shaping the photographers’ practices and outputs. The paper will trace the operations of these influences and contend that, as a result, the photographers’ visual record of the Second World War, particularly as it related to the death of Australian servicemen, served to conceal rather than reveal the ultimate truth about the Australian experience of the war.     

Treasonous Conduct: Assessing the Wartime Activities,Post‐War Trials and Tribulations of Australian Collaborators in the Second World War*

There has been very little written about the activities of Australian citizens collaborating with the Germans during the Second World War. There are, however, a few instances where Australian citizens were involved in activities in Germany which could be considered treasonous. A number of these were individuals involved in an ill‐conceived military unit created by the Germans from British prisoners of war while there is at least one example of an Australian who allegedly carried out propaganda broadcasts for the Germans. The activities of these individuals and the way the authorities dealt with these cases after the war will be the focus of this article.     

Introduction

The apocalyptic writings of Victor Eugene Kroemer (1883–1930) provide us with an insight into millenarian responses to the outbreak of the Great War, a subject that has been little noticed in research on Australian religious history. This article, however, will also show that a study of Kroemer's occult beliefs can illuminate larger themes in the Australian cultural response to the war. Kroemer's interpretation of the war as an essentially spiritual conflict between the forces of Zion (Great Britain) and Babylon (Germany) was not confined to the religiously unorthodox, nor did his belief in the appearance of battlefield angels and other supernatural phenomena fail to find echoes among more conventional believers. Much research in Australia and overseas in the last thirty years has challenged the notion of the Great War as a modernising and secularising experience and this article, through a study of a single Australian author and activist, draws attention to the quest of occult authors in Australia and Great Britain to explain the “world crisis” in spiritual terms to a range of audiences.     

Federation and Australian Nationalism: Early Commemoration of the Commonwealth

Much has been written about the nature of Australian nationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While post-Second World War historiography analysed the role of class in nationalist sentiment, more recent work has examined the racialised and martial aspects of Australian nationalism and imperialism. There has been less consideration of how the nature of turn-of-the-century Australian nationalism affected the Federation that was established on 1 January 1901. This article examines early debates about commemoration of the anniversary of Federation, revealing an indifference to the occasion that was common to the public and most political and civic leaders, including Prime Minister Edmund Barton. It finds that popular enthusiasm at the inauguration of the Commonwealth in January 1901 and the opening of the first parliament in May was a response to imperial pageantry and celebrity, rather than the creation of the Australian federation. The article suggests that Australians’ longstanding resistance to reform of the Federation is a legacy of their historic failure to attach to it.     

“In the Front Line”?: Internment and Citizenship Entitlements in the Second World War

This paper analyses the experiences of Australian civilian internees of the Japanese in the Second World War and the Australian government's responses to their desires for repatriation, compensation and rehabilitation. It argues that civilian internees stood in awkward relation to understandings about sacrifice in wartime and entitlements to compensation. The dominance of the citizen‐soldier in Australian narratives of war placed civilian internees in an ambiguous position. Civilian internees had not played a direct part in battle but did have direct contact with the military enemy. They had personally suffered privation at the hands of the enemy, but were not military personnel in service of their country. Civilian internees expose the tensions around citizenship and citizenship entitlement attendant upon the elevation of war service as the ultimate sacrifice for one's country.     

Shaped on the Anvil of Mars: Vance and Nettie Palmer and the Great War

In Australia as elsewhere within the belligerent nations of the Great War, dissenting thinkers were marginalised with the mobilisation of militarism. Vance and Nettie Palmer, Australia's most important literary partnership in the interwar period, were initially critical of the war, their response typical of the English radical intelligentsia among whom they were living at the time of its outbreak. Forced back to Australia in 1915, the Palmers had to re-establish themselves in its increasingly turbulent intellectual battlefields. Nettie's earlier anti-war beliefs and cosmopolitanism were undermined while Vance became ever more deeply enmeshed in a discourse concerning the virtues of the “ordinary people”, which encompassed the men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Nevertheless, in their extensive writings about Australia, neither Palmer ever endorsed the legend of the heroic Anzacs. The Great War, however, profoundly shaped their political consciousness and their choice of genre and writing strategies, as it did others of their literary generation. This article will show that the war was a far more important influence on their work than usually acknowledged in Australian literary scholarship, and thereby reveal some of the cultural patterns that shaped their generation of Australian radical writers and intellectuals — particularly in Melbourne, arguably the heartland for the tradition of democratic literary nationalism which the Palmers have been seen to epitomise.     

“The Symbol of Our Nation”: The Slouch Hat,the First World War,and Australian Identity

Australian scholars are now familiar with the tropes of the Anzac legend. This narrative describes the realisation of an Australian masculine identity, whose characteristics were forged on the Australian frontier and validated through the ordeal of battle. Though many writers contributed to this narrative, C.E.W. Bean, the official historian of the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, is most closely associated with the popularisation of this myth, which fused frontier and martial masculinity into a national archetype.

This article will examine the role of the slouch hat as a material and visual device that helped communicate the Anzac legend. While most of the scholarship that examines the construction of this narrative focuses on its articulation in prose, this narrative was also popularised through other media. Artists drew symbols of the frontier into their paintings while museum directors arranged their artefacts to support this narrative. This article will argue that the slouch hat provided an essential visual device to connect the narratives of frontier and martial masculinity through the image of the Australian soldier.     

Citizenship,Rights and Emergency Powers in Second World War Australia

In times of war or the threat of war there is a heightened tension between individual rights on the one hand and public safety and the protection of the community on the other. This situation is again facing the democracies at the present time. One aspect of the way tension between these two principles affected the citizenship status and civil rights of certain individuals in Second World War Australia is examined in this article. It focuses on Australian citizens who were deprived of their liberty and interned without trial, for periods varying from a few months to a number of years. In seeking explanations for the denial of one of the basic civil rights of a section of the Australian community, this article examines some formal constructions of nationality, and considers the implications of these constructions for citizenship and civil rights in wartime Australia. ¹ 1 Part of this paper was presented as a work‐in‐progress for the Cultural Citizenship: Challenges of Globalisation Conference at Deakin University, Melbourne, 5‐8 December, 2002. Proceedings, pp. 132‐139.
     

Power,Politics, and Primitivism: West Papua's Struggle for Self-Determination

The Bush administration answered the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, with what it called the “global war on terror,” first the assault on and invasion of Afghanistan and then the invasion and occupation of Iraq. More and more Americans joined the opposition to the Iraq war, but for some, Afghanistan remained “the good war.” But was the war on Afghanistan ever a “good war”? The authors of Ending the US War in Afghanistan (Olive Branch Press, 2010) address these and other frequently raised questions in an easy-to-read style. The chapter reproduced here, “The War in Afghanistan Goes Global,” is one of six chapters in the pocket-sized book. Other chapters are “The USWar in Afghanistan,” “The US Invasion of Afghanistan,” “The US and Other Players in Afghanistan,” “The Impact of theWar,” and “Ending the War.”     

The Strained Alliance: Peking,Pyongyang, Moscow and thePolitics of the Korean Civil War

Abstract

The burden of many conventional interpretations of the Korean War is that the conflict represented a test of strength between the Soviet and American Cold War antagonists which helped establish the ground rules for limited war in the nuclear age. The great virtue of Simmons' book is that it confronts us with the obvious but hitherto elusive truth that the Korean Civil War (as it is correctly called here) originated in Korean political issues. Simmons paints Korean features onto the Soviet-American Cold War mask. His book's second significant contribution is in its probing beneath the surface unity of the communist camp in the early 1950s to suggest that serious conflicts of interest arose between Moscow, Peking and Pyongyang in the course of the war.     

Attitudes towards German Immigration in South Australia in the post-Second World War Period, 1947-60

Considering the reaction against Germans in Australia during and after the First World War, it is surprising that German immigration to Australia was permitted again soon after the Second World War and even subsidised by the Australian government. Just seven years after the second war fought with Germany within a generation, Australia signed a five-year agreement to permit Germans to immigrate. This article examines the extent of the Australian public's acceptance of this policy during the period from 1947 to 1960. It concentrates on the state of South Australia where some of the earliest settlers in the colony had been of German origin, where their behaviour and achievements had been praised in historical writings about the colony, and where German immigrants may, therefore, have been viewed more positively. Yet there was some suspicion towards and discrimination against Germans in South Australia after 1945. Negative stereotypes of Germans were apparent in comments made by politicians and in press reports. However, these fears were minor and faded even further when more Germans arrived in Australia.     

“Secure in our Identity”: Regional Threat and Opportunity in Australian Election Discourse, 1993 and 1996

Anxiety about the Asia‐Pacific region has held an evocative place in the Australian imagination, and has featured in federal elections since Federation. This article explores discussions of regional opportunity and threat in the spoken campaign language of Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, and his Liberal opponents, in the 1993 and 1996 elections. This language forms part of an ongoing project by Australian political leaders to provide voters with a secure identity by managing regional threat: from extending “civilisation” in the first half of the twentieth century; to the image of Australia as a benevolent stabilising force in an unstable region following the Second World War; and the contested frameworks of engagement and opportunity from the 1980s onwards. While specific constructions of regional threat have changed since federation, leaders' discursive reassurances have remained remarkably consistent over 110 years.     

The Second AIF and the End of Empires: Soldiers' Attitudes Toward a “Free Asia”

Largely neglected within studies of Australian attitudes — and changing Australian attitudes — toward Asia throughout the twentieth century are the diverse views expressed by the single major group of Australians to encounter the region, namely the servicemen and women of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) who served the nation during the Pacific War 1941–1945. Within forums offered by soldier publications such as Salt, Australian troops were engaged in discussions about why the war had been fought (often with reference to the merits and ideals outlined within the Atlantic Charter, Declaration by United Nations and United Nations Charter). Central to such discussions were attitudes toward race, colonialism and Australia's role and future role in regional and world affairs. Importantly, well‐informed understandings of Asian affairs were crucial to discussions.     

“I’m awfully fed up with being a prisoner”* Australian POWs of the Turks and the Strain of Surrender

Nearly 200 Australians were captured and held as prisoners of war (POWs) by Ottoman Turkish forces during the First World War. They have largely been overlooked in Australian history and memory of the conflict with the result that little is known of their time in captivity or of its wider ramifications. In examining the emotional impact of their capture and imprisonment, this article offers intimate insights into how these Australian POWs felt about their captivity, from the moment of surrender until long after the war had ended. The humiliation of capture and confinement at the hands of a culturally, religiously and linguistically different enemy and the restrictions imposed by wartime imprisonment exacerbated the prisoners’ private feelings of shame and failure, feelings that were publicly reinforced in the aftermath of the war as the two dominant narratives of the conflict—the heroic Anzac fighter and the Turks as the honourable enemy—excluded or, at best, marginalised their experiences. Such analysis tells us much about the psychological dimension of wartime captivity, and adds to our understanding of the legacy of this POW experience.     

Just War Doctrine and the Invasion of Iraq

In this article we adopt the framework of Just War doctrine to assess whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was just. The six criteria against which we assess the justice of going to war are Just Cause, Right Authority, Right Intention, Reasonable Prospect of Success, Proportionate Cause and War as Last Resort. We focus upon what was known and said by the US, British and Australian governments around the time they decided to invade and consider whether there was sufficient justification and authorisation for the Iraq War. The key pre-war issues discussed include alleged Iraqi possession of WMD and links to terrorist organisations, and the meaning of UN Security Council resolutions. We conclude that, as the Just War criteria were not satisfied, the invasion of Iraq was unjust.     

Difficult Partners: Indo‐Australian Relations at the Height of the Cold War, 1949–1964

This article aims to make a long overdue re‐examination of Indo‐Australian relations in the early Cold War years. By drawing on available secondary sources, it reassesses the existing literature on Australian engagement with Asia. In so doing, it seeks to understand the reasons why the Menzies government found it so difficult to forge a close partnership with India. Canberra's rather frosty relations with New Delhi during the Menzies‐Nehru years had little to do with Menzies' alleged condescension towards the Asians or his personal antipathy towards Nehru. Rather, it had to do with the two leaders' different readings of Cold War politics as well as their responses to the structural changes taking place at the international level following the end of the Second World War.     

MOTIVATION AND MOBILIZATION FOR WAR: RECRUITMENT FOR THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE BECHUANALAND PROTECTORATE, 1941-42

This article traces the process of recruiting Batswana men intothe British army in Bechuanaland during the Second World War.It outlines the motives and political aims that led the chiefsto offer wholehearted support for the war effort and examinesthe attitude of the British administration to African participationin the war. The outlook of the men who were required to jointhe army is also analysed, as are the methods used to inducethem to enlist. Therefore a picture of the recruitment processis created that features perspectives drawn from all levelsof colonial society. The article is a contribution to existingliterature addressing the subject of Bechuanaland during theSecond World War, and to the general literature on Africa andthe war. It focuses more closely on the recruitment processthan has been the case to date and makes extensive use of oralmaterial to provide an African perspective on a process thatis usually viewed from ‘above’.