Ryan’s letter, Newton writes, “glowed with the white heat of passion” he claimed to speak for other Australian soldiers who, he insisted, “hated the war”. While recovering in England from wounds and shellshock in 1916 (and being readied to re-enter the western front slaughter) the Australian wrote “to the man the pro-war newspapers depicted as the best-hated and most dangerous … in Britain” – the anti-war Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald. This year Douglas Newton’s new book about the soldier and objector Private Edward James Ryan highlighted the deep divisions among soldiers and broader society about Australian involvement in the first world war. Since 1916 many war veterans (not least the original Anzacs who protested against the politicisation of the war they fought) have refused to take part in commemorations. Next, Anzac – and its special day – have always been contested. Curriculums evolve with knowledge and debate, while teachers, historians, writers, film-makers and dramaturgs shift their gazes in line with new understandings and historical disclosures of – and willingness to confront – the past. Then, good history involves the constant contestation and re-contestation of past events and how they have been culturally presented. Is Anzac really sacred? Of course it is not, even though it has tended to be treated as such in Australian politics where, until recently when some have hit back at Tudge’s ham-fisted claims, in the words of the historian Peter Cochrane, “drape ‘Anzac’ over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct”.įirst, Tudge is dead wrong: Anzac should be contested. “It is the most sacred day in the Australian calendar.” “Anzac Day should not be a contested idea,” he contends. He even called it all a bit “woke”, the classic right cultural warrior’s indictment of anything he/she finds distasteful.Įlsewhere he has criticised a proposed curriculum that would teach “the commemoration of world war one, including different historical interpretations and contested debates about the nature and significance of the Anzac legend and the war”. Predictable play to the audience, that one. If they don’t learn this, they won’t defend it as previous generations did.” And yes he was speaking to the socially conservative Centre for Independent Studies when he said: “We should expect our young people leaving school to have an understanding of our liberal democracy and how it is that we are one of the wealthiest, most free, most tolerant and most egalitarian countries in all of human history, which millions have immigrated to.
He has been banging on with these dreary, condescending, cliched cultural themes for a while now, each instalment a little more ridiculous for its hysterics.
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