The characterisation of the quintessential Anzac is fairly consistent throughout various forms of Australian media. They are remembered as overtly charming, racially tolerant, and strikingly youthful and innocent. The Australian film and media industries have preserved these qualities and raised Gallipoli to an almost sacred level within the nation’s collective memory. This essay aims to explore the enshrinement of what Historian David Carter terms “the cult of Anzac”[1] within two major disciplines of the Bachelor of Arts, namely History and Screen Studies. Carter’s Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity and Daniel Reynaud’s The Changing Anzac Legend will be used to compare and contrast both approaches to the ever-changing articulation of the Anzac legend.
Carter’s Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity challenges the importance of Gallipoli and Anzac within Australian culture, insisting that it is perhaps manufactured by certain multimedia outlets in the interest of conservative politics.[2] He examines both the continuities in the national meanings invested in Anzac and the major shifts in how they are expressed. Similarly, Reynaud, in The Changing Anzac Legend, inspects the changes in how the Anzac legend has been expressed to Australian audiences through three films. Though these articles are written from two different academic perspectives, they both deal with the sociological concept of collective memory. Carter focuses on the rhetoric of Anzac Day as recorded in newspaper articles, claiming that these sources “cannot be taken as direct evidence of what ‘Australians’ believe about Anzac Day.”[3] He claims that newspapers do more than simply report on the rituals of Anzac Day, instead opting to execute their own ceremonies through distinctive editorials and articles that span multiple pages. “In short,” Carter writes, “they play a significant role in creating Anzac as a national occasion, and thus disseminating and shaping its meaning for a broad public.”[4] Comparably, Reynaud explores the influence of film over the Australian public’s understanding of the Anzac legend. The partially reconstructed The hero of the Dardanelles (1915), Forty thousand horsemen (1940), and Gallipoli (1981) are compared and contrasted in order to investigate the changes in how the Anzac rhetoric is expressed over sixty-six years of commemoration.
Despite Carter and Reynaud’s different academic fields, their articles are easily paralleled. As an Historian, Carter endeavours to record past events, particularly those in relation to human affairs, and interpret their short and long-term significance. Reynaud, through a Screen Studies perspective, attempts to develop a similar understanding as he pulls apart the carefully constructed images of Anzac in film. Both academics rely on a variety of primary and secondary sources to build their arguments. It is through these carefully selected sources that their audiences are able to gain an understanding of how the Anzac rhetoric was expressed and received at certain periods of time in Australian history. The hero of the Dardanelles and various sources used in Carter’s article could be closely examined in order to gain and understanding of how the Anzac legend was communicated in the decade after Gallipoli. Throughout Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, Carter questions the necessity of the ‘coming of age’ rhetoric that has formed within Australian media. According to Carter, this merely expresses the out-dated nineteenth century idea that “nations were formed in the crucible of war.”[5] He argues that the idea that Gallipoli represents Australia’s ‘coming of age’ is incorrect as the campaign’s initial reception was one of imperial sentiment. “It was not national independence that born at Gallipoli,” Carter writes, “…but rather a nation fit to take its place as an adult member of the empire.”[6] Carter’s careful use of two articles from The Sydney Morning Herald highlights this argument. In 1916, the article in the Herald rejoiced as mother’s relinquished their sons “to the Empire’s service” and referred to Australia and the Empire as “… one in purpose and one at heart.”[7] Eight years later, the same paper prompted readers to remember ‘What Anzac Means to the Empire’:[8]
“We glory in the fact that we were counted worthy to be comrades in arms with men of historic regiments, and take part in a great Empire movement which was no small or ignoble part of the general victory.”[9]
Carter’s argument, that today’s intense focus on nationalist qualities within Anzac rhetoric was not always present, is comparable to Reynaud’s analysis of Alfred Rolfe’s silent film, The hero of the Dardanelles. The hero of the Dardanelles was released in July 1915, a mere three months after the landings at Anzac Cove.[10] It is the first cinematic representation of the Anzac legend and is ripe with imperial sentiment. Reynaud notes that the egalitarian bush myth that came to monopolise later Gallipoli films, such as Weir’s Gallipoli, is absent. Instead the protagonist of the film is pictured as a city boy from a wealthy family.[11] The language and imagery of the film is noticeably more English than Australian, reflecting an imperial bias that was consistent with the times.
“The English term ‘pals’ is used rather than the Australian ‘mates’ when Will encourages his friends to enlist. He displays a recruiting poster of Lord Roberts, complete with Union Jack flags. The soldiers are portrayed wearing the English-style peaked caps rather than the distinctive Australian slouch hats.”[12]
Carter and Reynaud, though from different academic backgrounds, both approach their arguments in a similar manner through their reliance on multiple media sources. Both academics concede that the imperial bias of the interwar period, evident through the expression of the Anzac tradition in film and media, was the result of “conservative, anti-labour interests.”[13] Carter uses another Sydney Morning Herald article to illustrate this. “It is this typically British consciousness of a worthy and historic past that gives Anzac Day to-day its dominant place in the hearts of the community.”[14] Reynaud, too, highlights the federal government’s role in commissioning The hero of the Dardanelles following the success of it’s prequel, Will they never come?.[15]
The imperial sentiment of earlier Anzac rhetoric was to wane considerably during the Second World War. Reynaud discusses the 1940 film, Forty thousand horsemen, in relation to this decline. Charles Chauvel, the director of the film, had gained a personal interest in the Australian Light Horse and endeavoured to “valorise the egalitarian Anzac legend, with only brief glimpses of the officers at work.”[16] Notably, this is a technique that was later evident in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli. Carter and Reynaud both argue that the Anzac legend “had gone through hard times in the interwar years, as competing interest groups tried to shape it.”[17]
“On the one hand, there was a popular ‘digger’ nationalism which emphasised the distinctively Australian, often larrikin and anti-authoritarian, qualities of the ordinary soldier… On the other, there was a conservative Empire patriotism.”[18]
Reynaud also examines the widespread public indifference to Anzac experiences during the 1940s as a nation “tired of war talk.”[19] In these circumstances, Chauvel’s film needed to accommodate various opinions in order to draw a substantial audience. According to Reynaud, the determining factor of the film was the casting of John Graffe as the “laconic outback horseman with a wry sense of humour.”[20] Graffe’s added improvisations helped to personify both the mythic Anzac and the archetypal Australian in local and international films for the next thirty years.[21] Surprisingly, Carter does not use any secondary evidence from the Second World War period, though he states that the decline of the British Empire signalled the nationalisation of the Anzac tradition.[22]
Reynaud concurs that Chauvel’s Forty thousand horsemen “seemed perfectly attuned to the needs of Australian audiences at the time, giving a stirring and inspirational account that was at the same time not completely naïve about the grim nature of war.”[23] If this were any indication of a successful Anzac film, Weir appears to have taken notice. The 1980s marked a particularly turbulent time for relations between Australia and Britain. Australians had become distanced from their attachment to Britain as a result of the latter’s disinterest in providing assistance in the Pacific war and an influx of European migrants.[24] Reynaud maintains that this signalled the “beginning of a vigorous search for an exclusively Australian identity.”[25] Weir’s Gallipoli was an effort to serve the nation’s needs at the time. It revised the Anzac legend, portraying the British hierarchy as the enemy and the Turks as the worthy enemy of the Anzacs, who were in turn now enshrined in popular culture as archetypal Bushmen as represented by Graffe. The unpopular Vietnam War had similarly shaped this realignment of the Anzac story present in Gallipoli, which now depicted war and it’s supporting political and military institutions as immoral.[26] It was the noble, heroic Anzac that remained in the public’s good graces. Similarly, Carter states that it was not until the 1980s that a distinctive set of national characteristics came to be linked with Anzac in a variety of newspapers. These characteristics, which remain in circulation today, included “mateship and a willingness to take on any odds [with] free-spirited independence”[27], “courage”[28], “the universal right to equal treatment and justice encapsulated as a ‘fair go’, and a refusal to be mindlessly bound by tradition and hierarchy.”[29] These terms, and one could suggest the characterisation of diggers in Weir’s Gallipoli, have been brought to the forefront to articulate a new sense of the Anzac spirit for the younger generation. Carter notes that the Anzac tradition has been evoked outside of the context of war in recent years, for example, in describing the efforts of volunteer fire fighters during bushfires.[30]
Through The hero of the Dardanelles, Forty thousand horsemen, and Gallipoli Reynaud argues that the Anzac story “[evolves] from a derivative British story to one which is wholly Australian, having transformed the Anzac from an aristocratic city boy to the country larrikin, and having recast the British in the role of the villain.”[31] Carter, too, maintains that the bias of the Anzac rhetoric shifted from imperial to national over time.[32] As he strives to determine why Gallipoli is so ingrained in Australia’s collective memory, he concludes that the influence of the media is paramount. As a Historian, Carter relies on the language present in each secondary source to form the basis for his argument. Reynaud’s use of multimedia sources is comparable, though naturally dependent on certain stylistic features that are exclusive in the field of Screen Studies. Though they are from different academic backgrounds, Carter and Reynaud dually acknowledge that the way that the Anzac legend has been articulated has evolved considerably over the last century.
References
[1] D. Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies, Frenchs Forest, Australia, 2006, 117
[2] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 111
[3] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 111
[4] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 112
[5] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 112
[6] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 117
[7] “Anzac Day”, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1916
[8] James Green, “The Landings: What Anzac Means to the Empire”, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1924
[9] Green, “The Landings: What Anzac Means to the Empire”, 1924
[10] D. Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend in three key Australian films, Melbourne, 2007, 1
[11] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 2
[12] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 2
[13] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 119
[14] Sydney Morning Herald, April 26 1934
[15] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 1
[16] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 2
[17] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 2
[18] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 118
[19] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 2
[20] B. Larkins, Chips: the life and films of Chips Rafferty, Melbourne, 1986, 19
[21] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 3
[22] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 119
[23] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 3
[24] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 3
[25] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 3
[26] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 3
[27] Courier Mail, 25 April 1990
[28] Australian, 25 April 1996
[29] Australian, 25 April 2003
[30] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 120
[31] Reynaud, The Changing Anzac Legend, 4
[32] Carter, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity, 117
ashsutherland11.wordpress.com 