The Whining Wowser.pdf

Australian narratives of World War I (WWI) reflect a different but characteristic commemoration of that event. While the best (to modern eyes) novels of WWI present a comprehensive picture of disillusionment, futility and waste, Australian stories proffer the view that the war was worthwhile, and that the sacrifices of the Anzacs were honourable and justified. In placing WWI as a salient marker denoting the origin of the nation, Australian texts diverge from the revered WWI canon's convincing portrayal of the war as a symbol of civilisation's demise. Even accepting this divergence, however, there is much in Australian narratives that amplifies the memorialisation of the war in Australian society. Different styles of writing about WWI express different aspects of what was a long and complex event, with multiple perspectives not organised along demographic lines: for example, there is no such thing as " the woman's view " , as the works of women writers range from rabid jingoism to despairing pacifism. World War I remains the most literary war ever conducted, inspiring a vast mass of textual material including letters, diaries, memoirs, histories, plays, poetry, novels, short stories, journalism, propaganda, official records and even verse novels. Two major approaches to writing literature about WWI are the traditional and the disillusionment styles. Australian literature of WWI is understood to favour the traditional style (see Robin Gerster for a comprehensive analysis of Australian war writing across the decades). The traditional style of war writing has been employed for centuries and includes patriotic, consolatory, heroic, elegiac, cautionary, action-adventure and inspirational works. Australian WWI style is a subset of traditional war writing and has been shown to rely extensively on traditional heroic tropes spurned by more modern renderings of the war. 1

To appreciate Australian literature of WWI, it's important to place it into context. In the western tradition, there have been written narratives of war for at least 4000 years. Most of these stories perform foundational functions, in that they set the values for the society as well as explaining the society’s origins, preferred behaviours and geographical place. Most war stories include a cautionary element, lauding the society’s warriors while warning of the inherent contingency of mortal existence. While styles of writing about war have evolved, many narratives still address these fundamental concerns.

Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society , 2021

At dawn on Saturday 25 April 2020, hundreds of Australians gathered in their driveways to observe a minute of silence to commemorate Anzac Day. In suburbs across the country they found inventive ways to mark the occasion, decorating fences with rosemary and wreaths, letterboxes with paper poppies, and pathways with candles and chalked messages 'Lest we forget'. 1 Anzac Day fell during the national COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and 'Light up the Dawn' or 'Stand at Dawn', as the Returned Services League (RSL) termed it, was a response to the cancellation of dawn services around Australia. 2 After the recent decline in Anzac Day Dawn Service attendance of post-centenary celebrations, it was a poignant act of remembrance and one that was perhaps all the more moving given its disconcerting echoes with history. 3 Only once before in its over one-hundred-year history had Anzac Day ceremonies been similarly disrupted, during the public health crisis brought about by the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1919, when most events were postponed and some even cancelled. 4 Anzac Day 2020 was not only a commemoration of the country's military past but also an event, like Anzac Day 1919, that connected communities in the face of a global pandemic and the social isolation that it brought in its wake. The traditions sparked by World War I still hold an important place in Australian political and cultural life, and today, as the country deals with crises that resonate with those of a century ago, the history of this conflict has a heightened relevance. This special issue of Australian Historical Studies shifts the spotlight beyond Australians' wartime experiences onto the enduring effects and aftermaths of the conflict. World War I cast a long shadow and its legacies were many and 1

The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry, 2024

Little wonder soldiers fighting abroad loom so large, albeit problematically, in the discourse of Australian identity; at the end of the 20th century, this country had sent its soldiers to be “involved in more major conflicts for more years than any other industrial nation” (Kent 155). The numbers quickly reveal the components (not to mention the calculi) of a mythography: newly elected to office in September 1914, the Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher makes good on his pre-election promise to “stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling” (Curtis) and, in this recently federated nation numbering less than 5,000,000 citizens (indigenous peoples deemed unworthy to be counted as “Australians” until 1967 ), 330,000 will serve in the Australian Imperial Force (“A.I.F.”). The Australian War Memorial officially records the deaths of 61,604 personnel during World War One; when repatriated, a further 113,000 will be deemed “unfit” (Tibbitts). A generation later, conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies announces that “in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her […] as a result, Australia is also at war” (“Wartime broadcast”). By 1939, the Australian population had swelled to 7,000,000; of these, “nearly 500,000 were engaged in munitions, or building roads or airfields, and over 1,000,000 joined the armed services” (Higgins), and these figures comprise both enlistees in a second iteration of the A.I.F., alongside conscripted personnel participating in the “Citizen Military Forces.” The Australian War Memorial records 39,655 deaths; when demobilized at the end of World War Two, it goes without saying that a multitude of surviving armed services personnel returned in varying states of disfigurement and damage. Though the number of Australian soldiers killed in the so-called “Korean” and “Vietnam” wars is significantly lower (340 and 521 respectively), and lower still in the North American-lead invasions of the Middle East at the start of the 21st century, these figures in no way mitigate a resounding fact: very soon after federation, a newly-fledged “Australia” followed the British empire into a series of ideological, global conflicts. By the middle of World War Two, allegiances were switched from Britain to North America and, thereafter, there followed further national involvements in ideologically inflected wars. The result? For generations, old soldiers have walked among an Australian citizenry, enduring emblematically in tropes of sovereignty and statehood. Into the 21st century, codifications of the soldier-legend remain pervasive, performative, ritualized, and reifying. From the annual calendar in Australia (ANZAC Day, Remembrance Day) to the ubiquity of war memorials, honor boards in public buildings, RSL clubs, surplus equipment scattered across civic parks (canons, tanks, etc.), in this sovereign state that did not exist before 1901 the soldier myth endures, a part of lore presented as if immemorial tradition.

International Review of Social History, 2007

Feelings of community, cultural definition and memory were kept alive through the soldiers’ mass circulation tabloid, the Aussie, examined here in the light of theorisation of memory and representation, applied to both text and cartoons. The publication’s aim for veterans’ values to become shared national values is analysed in the light of its high-profile usage of soft cartoon humour and also of nostalgia—highlighting the limitations as well as the effectiveness in terms of Australia’s evolving national identity. When the post-war economic situation worsened, deeper issues of national tension were glossed over by the use of scapegoats such as “profiteers” and “lazy workers”. The armed forces were obliged to take on a political role of lobbying for their cause, but the Aussie as “cheerful friend” experienced its own identity crisis that proved to be terminal.

Australian Historical Studies, 2015

Choices are made in representing so large and complex an event as the Great War. Journalists, artists, historians, diarists, letter writers, poets, and official despatch writers all chose what to include, what to expunge, what to emphasise and what to minimise. Will Dyson’s ‘winter’ drawings show only one of what he calls the ‘many moods’ of war. Of these many moods, Australian perspectives tend towards two polar notions: the heroic proving of the nation, or reprehensible, readily manipulated obedience to the British Empire’s demands that led to shattering disenchantment with ‘glorious war’ notions. The heroic myth (myth as convenient cultural explanation) of Australian popular memory has been linked to militarism, while the disenchantment myth is privileged in literary criticism. Both these views overlook the complexity displayed by the best of both Australian and overseas narratives. The nature of much discussion of Great War texts is habitually adversarial; Pickthorn noted as long ago as 1924 that ‘it may be that anyone’s account of the [recent] war is bound to irritate everyone else’.4 Most prose accounts of the Great War continue to be divided (by readers and critics) into the two opposed perspectives. Consequently the middle ground, encompassing both poles and recognising both as extremes in a range of experiences, is unclaimed. Inhabited by some texts that are largely forgotten in Australian literary history, it is a no-man’s- land of critical appreciation.