“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.     

John Howard's “Use” of the Anzac Legend: Applying an Epideictic Lens

While many have remarked upon Prime Minister John Howard's “use” of the Anzac legend for political purposes, our understanding of the nature and dynamics of such use remains fragmented and underdeveloped. Using the area of foreign policy as a case study, this essay approaches Howard's Anzac Day and related ceremonial rhetoric as examples of the epideictic genre, which presents speakers with a combination of unique rhetorical opportunities and strict generic constraints. While often perceived as apolitical and inconsequential, the genre embodies a form of argumentation that serves not only to increase the “intensity of adherence” to certain values, thus laying the groundwork for later deliberative appeals, but also creates a “disposition to act at the appropriate moment”. This paper will argue that Howard's employment of Anzac was bounded and defined by the nature and dynamics of the epideictic genre, of which Howard proved to be a savvy user.     

“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.     

The Missing Fifth Dimension: The Writing of Australian History in Germany*

German historical writing about Australia can be traced back to the early periods of European exploration of Terra incognita. A corpus of German‐Australian literature exists in the historical notes that were part of early travel books, geographic sketches and emigrant guides. Historical fiction provides another element. However an empirical historiography which elevated Australian history from footnotes and established it as the focus of a professional discipline did not develop until later. Australia was too often wrongly viewed as a space without history. This article examines the professional treatment of Australian history in Germany and the difficult path which faced those who sought to establish the history of Australia as an independent research field. It focuses upon three aspects: (a) the historical background of German Overseas Studies; (b) Australian history as topic in Germany's historiography; and (c) the post‐war situation of Australian historical studies in Germany.     

Art,Cold War Diplomacy and Commonwealth: Australian and Canadian Art at the Tate Gallery 1962–1964

This article analyses the formation, presentation and reception of two seminal exhibitions: Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary (1962–1963) and Canadian Painting 1939–1963 (1964). The presentation of these exhibitions at London’s Tate Gallery reflected the institution’s support for “old dominion” Commonwealth members. The exhibitions also highlight the differing visions of the Canadian and Australian governments concerning the relationship between art, diplomacy and politics during the Cold War. In Canada, Vincent Massey (Governor General 1952–1959) played a key role in ensuring that all forms of Canadian art were promoted internationally. Massey wanted to connect with the European and American avant-garde and to be part of a multiracial Commonwealth. This contrasted with the rather “old-fashioned” views of the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, and the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. They supported a Commonwealth dominated by the “white dominions” and the initial exhibition plan for Australian Painting recalled previous British Empire art shows. The British response to the Canadian and Australian exhibitions is also discussed. British critics preferred the nationally identifiable “exotic” art found in Australian art to the transnational forms of international abstraction in Canadian art. Eventually, Australia “caught up” with Canadian cultural policy following the establishment of the Australia Council.     

Norman Lindsay and the ‘Asianisation’ of the German Soldier in Australia during the First World War

Abstract

From the beginning of the First World War, atrocity stories about German depredations against Belgian civilians circulated throughout the Allied world. Caricatures of German soldiers rapidly degenerated into depictions of monstrous ‘Huns’ who were subhuman beasts, prone to acts of rapine and banditry. The most prominent producer of ‘Hun’ cartoons in Australia was artist Norman Lindsay, who published extensively throughout the war. Through an analysis of the antecedents of Lindsay’s monstrous ‘Hun’, this article will demonstrate that the rapid creation of the ‘Hun’ in Australia was made possible by the pre-existing racial caricatures of non-European people that were popular during this period. Chinese and Japanese people who were excluded from Australia by the White Australia policy were the previous targets of Norman Lindsay’s racial caricatures; as stories of German atrocities filtered into Australia, Lindsay transferred traits of Asians on to the German ‘Hun’, thus transforming him into the enemy ‘Other’. These traits were products of British imperial propaganda, and part of an ideology that asserted it was the job of the white man to civilise the barbaric coloured man. By ‘Asianising’ the German, Lindsay used a well understood language of racial caricature to reduce the German to the status of a barbarian. Race was therefore one of the central paradigms through which Australian propaganda operated.     

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.     

The Genre of Prime Ministerial Anzac Day Addresses, 1973–2016

The last quarter of a century has seen an explosion in prime ministerial engagement with Anzac, and in particular, the marking of Anzac Day with a national address. Correspondingly, there has also been enormous interest in Anzac from members of the academy, but there has been little systematic analysis of the breadth and depth of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses. This paper seeks to correct this omission by conducting a critical discourse analysis of prime ministerial Anzac Day addresses from 1973 to 2016 in order to sketch their imprecise, but increasingly institutionalised and consistent, genre boundaries. The paper delineates the various thematic and characteristic features of these addresses, including where and when the addresses have been delivered; the fixity and hybridisation of the prime ministerial Anzac speech genre; the thematic and tonal representations of Anzac; the wars and battles prime ministers associate Anzac with; and who Anzac's agents are. As will be shown, whilst Australian prime ministers may closely adhere to the traditions of Anzac with their addresses, they also subtly renovate understandings of Anzac in alignment with their policy agendas.     

Why Weren’t We Taught? Exploring Frontier Conflict Through the Lens of Anzac

This article examines public understandings of two key strands of Australian history that sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of remembrance: frontier conflict and Anzac. The former, W. E. H. Stanner argued in 1968, was subsumed in a vacuum of silence, lost to popular consciousness in a wilful act of forgetting. Despite a wealth of subsequent scholarship documenting the violence and dispossession that characterised European colonisation, considerable gaps in public awareness about these foundational events remain. Anzac, in contrast, has become a defining narrative of Australian history for large segments of the general population and the political class. Recent scholarship suggests that this prominence has served to mask other, important histories of the continent, including frontier conflict. In this article, we argue that this is neither a necessary nor essential binary, and further, that one can inform the other. The written reflections of 320 tertiary students enrolled in a course about Australian military history provide insights into the ways that frontier conflict is popularly understood and how the fascination with Anzac can be leveraged to raise awareness of the violent historical dimensions of colonisation.     

Natural‐Born Subjects? Race and British Subjecthood in Australia

From the time of European settlement in Australia until 1948, British subjecthood was the preeminent Australian citizenship classification. "Australian citizenship" was only created as a legal category in 1948, and from then until 1984 British subjecthood continued to exist, alongside Australian citizenship, as a kind of parenthetical citizenship status. This article explores the meanings and significance of British subjecthood in Australia, and considers the reasons for its eventual demise. The article argues that the advent of formal (legal) racial equality in Australia for Indigenous people and for immigrant groups (which culminated in 1975 with the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act ), was one significant factor that helped to render obsolete the scenario whereby Australian citizens were deemed also to be British subjects.     

Exhibiting the Enlightenment: Joseph Banks’s Florilegium and Colonial Knowledge Production

ABSTRACT

The returned Australia-Japan Foundation Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo (2014–15), Anna Johnston, reflects on a 2014 exhibition held in Tokyo: The Bunkamura Museum of Art’s “Captain Cook’s Voyage and Banks’ Florilegium.” The Florilegium continues to have resonance as part of Australia’s complex colonial inheritance from the Enlightenment past. Its display and interpretation both overseas and within Australia provides an opportunity to better understand its origin in a pivotal historical period, globally, and its contribution to knowledge in arts and sciences. The Florilegium also reveals how Indigenous knowledge was central to European exploration and knowledge production. This article outlines contextual issues and seeks to provide a complex biography of this scientific and artistic artefact of Empire, in order to propose new ways of reading the Florilegium that pay attention to that enriched biography.     

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 Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance.

By Ramond Evans. St. Lucia. University of Queensland Press, 1988. pp, xv + 252. Illustrated. Seven maps. The Fight Goes On. A Picture of Australia and the World in Two Post-war Decades. By Ralph Gibson. Ascot Vale, Red Rooster Press, 1987. pp:280, illustrated. $23.00 paperback. The New Right's Australian Fantasy. Edited by Ken Coghill. The German Presence in Queensland Over the Last 150 Years Edited by Manfred Jurgensen and Alan Corkhill. Brisbane. Research Unit German Australian Relations, Dept. of German. University of Queensland, 1988. pp. 414. No price given. The Fenians In Australia 1865–1880. By Keith Amos. Policing In Australia: Historical Perspectives. Edited by Mark Finnane Law and Government in Colonial Australia. By Paul Finn. A Divided Working Class. By Constance Lever-Tracy and Michael Quinlan. Buongiorno Australia: Our Italian Heritage. By Robert Pascoe. Big-noting: The heroic theme in Australian war writing. By Robin Gerster. Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–90. By Shirley Fitzgerald. A Trunk Full of Books: History of the State Library of South Australia and its Forerunners By Carl Bridge. Delivering the Goods: A History of the NSW Transport Workers Union 1888–1986. By Mark Bray and Malcolm Rimmer. No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia 1788–1914. By Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright. Labour Party in New South Wales 1880–1900. By Raymond Markey. The Scottish in Australia. By Malcolm D. Prentis. Bunyip Aristocracy: The New South Wales Constitution Debate of 1853 and Hereditary Institutions in the British Colonies. By Ged Martin. Ambivalent Allies: Myth and Reality in the Australian-American Relationship. By Dennis Phillips. Te Aso Fiafia: Te Tala o Te Kamupane Vaitupu 1877–1887 [The Joyous Day: the tale of the Vaitupu Company, 1877–18871. By T. Isala and D. Munro. Funafuti & Suva, Tuvalu Extension Services Centre and the Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacfic, 1987. Intermittent Diplomat. The Japan and Batavia Diaries of W. MacMahon Ball. Edited and introduced by Alan Rix. Equal or Different—Women's Politics 1800–1914. Edited by Jane Rendall. British Policy in Relation to Poland in the Second World War. By Stanislaw Zochowski. Foreign Policy Implementation. Edited by Steve Smith and Michael Clarke.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this issue. Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century. By James Howard‐Johnston Dampier's Monkey: The South Sea Voyages of William Dampier. By Adrian Mitchell 1835: the Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia. By James Boyce The Protectors: A Journey through Whitefella Past. By Stephen Gray A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia. By Diane Austin‐Broos Joseph Lyons: The People's Prime Minister. By Anne Henderson Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence. By John Connor p. O.W: Australian Prisoners of War in Hitler's Reich. By Peter Monteath Australia's Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth. By Tom O'Lincoln Embodying Migrants: Italians in Postwar Australia. By Francesco Ricatti Mr Big of Bankstown: The Scandalous Fitzpatrick and Browne Affair. By Andrew Moore Labour and the Politics of Empire. By Neville Kirk Half a Citizen: Life on Welfare in Australia. By John Murphy, Suellen Murray, Jenny Chalmers, Sonia Martin and Greg Marston Michael Kirby: Paradoxes and Principles. By A.J. Brown A Private Life: Fragments, Memories, Friends. By Michael Kirby A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster and How It Led to the Settlement of Australia. By Emma Christopher A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians. By Timothy Larsen God's Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c.1801–1908. By Hilary M. Carey After Ruskin: The Social and Political Legacies of a Victorian Prophet, 1870–1920. By Stuart Eagles Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850–1950. By Leslie Howsam Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean. By Gillian Weiss All the Tsar's Men: Russia's General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914. By John W. Steinberg Belarus. The Last European Dictatorship. By Andrew Wilson Civil Society and Democratization in the Arab World: the Dynamics of Activism. By Francesco Cavatorta and Vincent Durac Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non‐Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. Edited by Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. By Susie Linfield     

From Missionary to Ministerial Adviser: Constance Duncan and Australia‐Japan Relations 1922‐1947

The contribution of A. Constance Duncan (1896‐1970) to Australia‐Japan relations has been overlooked in mainstream historiography. This article examines her role in the development of these relations from 1922 to 1947. She was one of the few women to be accepted into the elite inner‐circle of intellectuals influencing Australian foreign policy during this period. In 1922 she embarked on a career in Japan as a missionary, or “foreign secretary”, for the Young Women's Christian Association. She returned to Australia in 1933 and took up a position with the Bureau of Social and International Affairs. Her familiarity with Japanese culture and society, together with an abiding interest in promoting world peace, led naturally to her participation in the world of international relations at a time of heightened interest in the Asia‐Pacific region and Japan in particular. She was part of an intellectual movement that considered an educated Australian public to be of paramount importance in future Australia‐Japan relations and international relations generally. This article traces her activities and examines her influence in the educational field and on Australian foreign policy‐making.     

The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the Struggle to End the African Slave Trade

The climax of the battle of Kohima was in June 1944, 70 years ago. This article is about the part played in that victory by Ursula Graham Bower, an English woman subsequently honoured by the RSAA. She led a team of Naga tribesmen from North East India who acted as intelligence scouts, feeding the 14th Army with information about the Japanese, acting as guides for British units and providing a security network against spies. Graham Bower was effective because she had lived amongst the Nagas before the war and gained their trust. Inevitably she was glamourised in the media and hailed as the Jungle Queen or the Naga Queen, a Western beauty fighting against the Japanese. In reality, with the Nagas, she performed a intelligence role, not a fighting role, but it was a vital contribution to victory.     

From Heroes to Whingers: Changing Attitudes to British Migrants, 1947 to 1977

Shifts in attitudes towards British migrants from the late 1940s to the late 1970s chart the development of a non-British Australia. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, British migrants were accorded a special prestige based on a belief that Australia and Britain had fought to defend shared imperial British values. Although British migrants protested at hostel conditions, public sympathy remained on the side of the migrants. The rise of the Whingeing Pom stereotype around 1960 reflects the declining weight of British wartime experience and a strengthening of the idea of an independent non-British Australia. The 1970s saw the ending of British preference, and the debate surrounding British activism in Australian trades unions raised the question of whether British migrants were now merely an ethnic group within a multicultural Australia.     

“And Poland is filed away with Samothrace”: Australian Responses to Poland's June 1956 Crisis

The suppression of Poznan June 1956 workers’ rebellion (Poznanski Czerwiec) by Polish authorities prompted immediate Australia‐wide demonstrations and protests by Polish émigrés who were supported by friends and allies in the Catholic Church and the Australian anti‐communist movement. Nation‐wide demonstrations in Australia and subsequent approaches by émigré Poles and supporters required a disinterested Australian government to develop a position on Poznan June events. Pressure on the Australian government for a response, potentially disruptive to its foreign policies, was applied only by elements within the Australian political scene that posed little threat to its future. Poznan June ‘56's effect on Australia takes place within the particular nature of Australian domestic politics where the June events were used to fan the flames of bitter rivalry within the labour movement by a strident anti‐communist faction seeking to restructure the Australian Labor Party in a manner consistent with its ideological predilections. In taking up the anti‐communist cause of the Polish émigrés, the Australian anti‐communist leadership claimed a moral high‐ground, but lacked sufficient commitment to use their considerable parliamentary advantage to pressure the Australian government to adopt a more muscular position towards Poland's government.     

“Great and Powerful Friends of Yesteryear”: Australia's Dilemma with “East of Suez”, 1967–71

Great Britain's decision to withdraw its forces from Southeast Asia by the mid-1970s created uncertainty for those living in the region. The potential loss of British presence led Australia to attempt to discourage Britain from leaving, while also recsognising recognising the decision as an opportunity to re-evaluate Australia's strategic outlook in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Scholars have treated Asia and the Pacific as two regions with distinct experiences related to withdrawal. Some address changing Anglo-Australian relations but include little, or no, mention of the Pacific territories. Others, writing about the Pacific, focused more the individual paths taken by each island than on connecting the larger process of decolonisation in the Pacific to the one in Asia. This article pairs Australia's Strategic Basis of Defence papers with documentary evidence across multiple departments in Canberra to understand how British withdrawal from east of Suez connected Australian concerns about security in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. By connecting the two areas through Australian interests, the withdrawal from east of Suez can be understood as a catalyst for Australia's pursuit of a distinctive role within its neighbourhood.     

The Campaign for Japanese‐Australian Children to enter Australia, 1957–1968: A History of Post‐War Humanitarianism

Between 1957 and 1968, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies and several of his ministers, including Alexander Downer, the Minister for Immigration from 1958 to 1963, were inundated with hundreds of letters of protest demanding that action be taken to assist Japanese children fathered by Australian soldiers who had been stationed in Japan during the Allied occupation and beyond it between 1946 and 1956. The response from the Australian public forms the basis of this article to consider how attempts for the transnational movement of children in the postwar period point to understandings of humanitarianism at this time. The response to the predicament of the Japanese‐Australian children offers, I argue, an intriguing narrative of postwar humanitarianism that articulates the beginning of several historic shifts. The incident points to the growing challenge to the White Australia Policy, paradoxically on racialised and paternalistic grounds to bring white Australian children to Australia. The government shifted the discussion from one of immigration to foreign aid as a way of diffusing the public response and in doing so positioned itself in the new narrative about supporting rehabilitation and development. The media was crucial in evoking a response that depoliticized the issue of responsibility by reducing it to an emotional reaction.