Edition 48
Enduring Legacies
- Published 5th May, 2015
- ISBN: 9781922182807
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Exploring the consequences of Australia’s involvement in war with a critical and inquiring eye, Griffith Review 48: Enduring Legacies assembles a team of scholars, non-fiction and fiction writers, journalists and broadcasters to pose hard questions about why we remember and what we forget. How did the wars shape Australia socially, economically and politically? How did they alter the understanding of Australia’s place in the world and in our region? Did Gallipoli mark the coming of age of the new nation, or did that war devastate its potential?
Subjects traversed include the politics of commemoration and forgetting; the fear of Asia and the racial dimension of our participation in wars; how wartime experience has shaped political leadership; the personal experience of war and the broader historical perspectives that make sense of it; protest and dissent in wartime; the legacy of wars for democracy; indigenous Australians and the effects of twentieth century wars; the Labor Party and the Anzac tradition; the POW experience; veterans and trauma, plus myriad other legacies of war, including the familial, the psychological and the surgical.
Featuring work by: John Clarke, Clare Wright, Tim Rowse, Jenny Hocking, Peter Cochrane, Tim Bonyhady, Peter Stanley, Frank Bongiorno, Joy Damousi, Cory Taylor, Jim Davidson, Barry Hill, Marina Larsson, Rosetta Allan, Gerhard Fischer, Laura Jan Shore, Ben Stubbs, Gerard Windsor, Ross McMullin, Jill Brown, David Walker, Jeannine Baker, Craig Cliff, Paul Ham, Meredith McKinney, David McKnight, Tom Bamforth, Stephen Garton and David Carlin, as well as three soldiers with distinguished military service and successful careers in academia, research and writing – James Brown, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired), Christopher Pugsley and Greg Lockhart.
Griffith Review 48: Enduring Legacies, co-edited by Julianne Schultz and Peter Cochrane, will highlight the importance of remembering beyond prescribed and celebratory frameworks.
Reviews
‘The high standard of this collection reflects Griffith Review’s reputation not only for engaging writing but for an informed embrace of the most challenging debates.’ Sunday Star Times (NZ)
‘The title of this excellent collection is, at one level, obvious but, at another, full of possibilities. A legacy, in common parlance, is something left to you… The articles presented show much thought and deserve wide dissemination… The book is a solid alternative to Anzackery, the overblown and jingoistic – and money-making – celebration of our military exploits. “Anniversaries”, says Tim Bonyhady, “can be more than occasions for remembrance; they may transform our understanding of what is being commemorated” Legacies can be invested and produce something rather different from the events that generated them.’ Honest History
‘There is much wise and thoughtful writing in this issue, and editors Julianne Schultz and Peter Cochrane deserve congratulations for sourcing diverse perspectives and original thinking about so many different aspects of military history.’ ANZ LitLovers
‘Celebrated soldiers, military historians, academics and admired writers challenge folklore and discover multi-layered inheritance of the wars to provide new insights, graphic portraits and telling analysis of their consequences.’ PS News
‘I eagerly accepted the invitation to launch the latest issue of the Griffith Review, one of the finest and most consistent publications in the social sciences in Australia, and, with the centenary of ANZAC looming, I was particularly impressed by its superb collection of essays on Gallipoli, or on related themes… I congratulate Julianne Schultz and Peter Cochrane for their exemplary editorial work and their choice of authors.’ Barry Jones, launch speech
‘With vigour and creativity, prominent Aussie academics and four Kiwis, including military scholar Chris Pugsley tackle 20th Century Wars and the dirty secrets that lie under the surface… The Griffith Review won’t be the only voice of debate in this commemorative year but it might be the most sane to date. I’ve read many books already that tackle different aspects of the war but nothing is as poignant or a well informed, travelling between high level political and socioeconomic to individual and very personal accounts and critiques. For all this it proves the sheer capacity for us all to think. It’s just a shame that our leaders and politicians don’t read this before they act.’ Groove.fm
‘Anyone interested in the ongoing cultural–historical debate over Anzac should pick up the latest Griffith Review – some outstanding essays.’ Adam Brereton, The Guardian (via Twitter)
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In this Edition
The past is not sacred
THE TERM ‘HISTORY wars’ is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today. That debate, though hardly resolved, is...
The Boer War
THE ANZACS AT Gallipoli have not only eclipsed the greater Australian involvement on the Western Front, but have occluded another war altogether. This is the Boer War – more properly the Second Boer War – fought in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, where...
Immigration, integration, disintegration
ON 26 SEPTEMBER 1999, the Governor-General delivered the opening address at the inaugural Australian Conference on Lutheran Education at a Gold Coast resort.[i] In his speech, Sir William Deane offered an apology to members of the German–Australian community present at the meeting: The tragic, and...
Breaking ranks with Empire
IN 1920, THE New Zealand official war artist George Edmund Butler presented a painting to the New Zealand Government for the proposed National War Memorial Museum. It is titled Butte de Polygon with the subtitle, Thy Father and I have sought thee sorrowing. Luke...
What was lost
DURING THE CENTENARY commemorations of the Great War, it will no doubt be frequently asserted that the conflict ‘made’ Australia (in a positive sense) after the nation was ‘born’ at Gallipoli. Such claims are dubious.It’s true that what Australia’s soldiers did and how they...
Family casualties
IN 1927, MRS Clara Stephens wrote to the Repatriation Department describing life with her son, a returned soldier who had seen active service on the Western Front during the First World War. Herbert Stephens was discharged in 1919, suffering from shell shock. He was...
An unexpected bequest
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to look at daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century Australian women in their hats and heavy, long dresses without wondering how they managed to wear all those clothes in the summer heat. Or when enduring a heavy period or a hot flush. Poor things.The...
A legend with class
FOR THE AUSTRALIAN labour movement, Anzac has been more like a first cousin than a close sibling. There is no missing the family connection: the first Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was an overwhelmingly working-class army, with an ethos instantly recognisable as such.[i] Its members...
Gough’s war
It took Gough’s war years and his time in the RAAF, freed from the happy but sheltered home life of a public servant’s son, to turn Whitlam into a politician.Craig McGregor, Good Weekend, October 1988 IN JULY 1944, stationed with RAAF Squadron 13 in Gove,...
Reaching to homelands
STORIES OF WAR never lose their power to shock, sadden and confront. Witnessing death and experiencing violence and atrocities creates traumatic memories. Indelible and unavoidable traces of these events are left behind – not just for those who witness them, but also for future...
Marked men
GERMAINE GREER’S FATHER never hugged her. Born just before World War II, Greer’s childhood was overshadowed by a father who had served in military intelligence and survived the protracted horrors of the German siege of Malta, and returned suffering the effects of anxiety disorders...
Dangers and revelations
FOR INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS, experience of the Second World War went beyond service in combat roles. Consider the Davis brothers in Western Australia: as Jack Davis tells us in A Boy’s Life (Magabala Books, 1991), his brother Harold ‘was taken prisoner at Tobruk and was...
Forgetting to remember
Learning to remember means…transforming individual memories and struggles into collective narratives and larger social movements. Henry A Giroux, The Violence of Organized Forgetting, (City Light Books, 2014) WHEN I WAS a little girl, I began poking and prodding the world with an infernal curiosity for historical...
War stories
JUST SIX WEEKS after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki triggered the end of World War II, Australian newspaper reporter Lorraine Stumm was in a small party of journalists taken by airplane over the destroyed Japanese cities. Like other Western journalists in Japan,...
Continuing fallout
THE STORY OF Japan’s marriage to nuclear energy is so fraught with suffering, you have to wonder why they ever got together. Just what are the dynamics of this abusive relationship? It’s easy to look at a bad marriage and shake your head over it...
Dear mother
I am the scattered cherry blossomthat falls in the spring.I am the snow that feathersthe top of your headyour shouldersthe tip of your nose.I kept my daughter’s doll closepinned to the steel of my cockpitand called your namemother.I HAVE TO wonder where the women’s...
Terrorism and the Cold War
BEFORE THE WAR on terror, there was the Cold War. When the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was formed in 1949, it was frequently described as Australia’s ‘fourth arm of defence’ after the army, air force and navy. Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley created...
Allies in name alone
THE VIETNAM WAR lingers in the collective memory like some unspeakable crime, locked away in the nation’s attic. Contrary to popular belief, America did not compel Australia to join the war in Vietnam. Australia leapt at the chance – an opportunity to find ‘a...
Barrier thinking
IN VIETNAM, MINES accounted for half of the Second Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2RAR) soldiers killed in action. Two of those killed on mines were among the nine South Australian members of the Battalion who died on active service, and who are listed on...
A hundred in a million
MARTIN O’MEARA, A Tipperary man who had enlisted in Perth, was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC) for carrying both wounded comrades and ammunition under shellfire at Pozières in August 1916. In 1919, he returned to Perth with three wounds and sergeant’s stripes. The 1963...
Anzac instincts
IT IS A curious thing, perhaps unique to Australia, that someone appraising the phenomenon of Anzac – that shared national oath to remember military sacrifice and honour wartime service – must first present genealogical military credentials. It’s a defensive move; it declares you share...
Lots of rabbits this year
DISPERSED AMONG LENGTHY discussions of cycling, which must have been their shared passion, a teenage Charles Harlock was given some erratic career advice by an amiable relative in Sydney called Thomas Love in 1903:You say you are going to leave school soon. What are...
A Christmas story
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, six soldiers were shot in their beds in the Officers’ Quarters on Christmas Island. Their bodies were wrapped in bed sheets and mosquito nets, and tossed off the cliffs into the Indian Ocean where the silhouette of five ships could be...
A remarkable man
RAY PARKIN TOLD stories. He wasn’t exactly the Ancient Mariner, but there was an insistence and a very steady eye about the way he did it. It was Ray’s way of passing on what he knew and what he wanted you to understand. Some...
The bronzista of Muradup
NICOLA WALKED WITH his back straight and his shoulders scarcely moving. His upper body perfectly balanced and relaxed, his legs propelled him forward in a gait that seemed to have been born in him instead of learnt – a steady, flowing movement of maximum...
Claiming the dead
THE CEREMONY TOOK place on a glorious morning in March at Cowra cemetery, the sky above a flawless blue, the horizon visible in the green distance across miles and miles of rolling pasture. The Japanese dignitaries had arrived before us in their big black...
Know thy neighbour
WHENEVER THE DOORBELL rings late at night in our small Peking University apartment, we know who to expect. Our Chinese colleague in global politics at nearby Tsinghua University keeps late hours. There is now a pattern to these visits: we offer tea, he always...
The uses and abuses of humiliation
One year I said I didn’t Want to be arrested. Back too frail to be man-handled. I settled for the dawn peace-vigil: Candles flickering in the police horse’s eyes. War can make cowards of poets. This year I didn’t want to protest Under anti-SAS banners. Those young blokes might have been sent...
Set it down!
WAR IS A particularly slippery subject for any cold eye to fasten on. In May 2014 I was walking through the départements of Lozère, Aveyron, Lot and Tarn-et-Garonne in southern France, and the village war memorials caught my attention. Apart from the horrifying numbers...
My grandfather’s head
I FORGOT THE ‘great pogrom’, as my grandmother Edith Bonyhady called Kristallnacht with the voice of experience. I was booking a flight to Vienna where Good Living Street (Allen & Unwin, 2011), my book about my great-grandmother Hermine Gallia, grandmother Gretl and mother Anne,...