History

With the sun’s morning rays glinting off their bayonets, the Australian soldiers rushed headlong towards the Italian fortress of Bardia in Libya. They sang as they advanced. Although there were isolated pockets of resistance, within hours the Australians had broken through the perimeter and Italian troops were beginning to surrender in their thousands. The capture of the supposedly ‘impenetrable’ fortress of Bardia in early January 1941 by the 6th Australian Infantry Division, fighting its first battle, was a major success that led to the capture of more than 40,000 Italian soldiers. The resounding victory by these sons of the original Anzacs was held to prove the inherent combat prowess of Australians. Major General Iven Mackay, the 6th Division’s commander, afterwards commented there was the notion ‘that the Australian is a born soldier and that, once given the weapons, he is alright’. Or so the myth goes.

The opening sentence of Norman Davies’ blockbuster Europe: A History (1996) notes that ‘History can be written at any magnification’. Yet the superlative asserted in the title of John Hirst’s latest book does bring one up, well, short. Its claim is plainly contestable – how about ‘Plato to NATO’ (the irreverent shorthand for once-fashionable US undergraduate ‘Western Civ.’ survey courses)? Moreover, Hirst makes no pretence of giving us Europe from go to whoa. Commencing with the ‘Ancient Greeks’ (omitting Minoans and Myceneans), he concludes around 1800 with the French Revolution and Napoleon, because the lecture course at La Trobe University from which his book derives went no further. These lectures were first offered ‘to students in Australia who had had too much Australian history and knew too little about the civilisation of which they are a part’. This is a remarkable statement from a distinguished historian of Australia, even granted the growing recognition that what usually passes for ‘Australian history’ cannot in and of itself meet all the cultural, educational and intellectual needs of Australian students.

War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.

A remarkable ice cream made in 1991 included two thousand eggs, ninety litres of cream and fifty-five litres of milk. No one but Phillip Searle, Australia’s emperor of ice cream, would have set out to make Ball and Chain, a giant, medieval, spiked weapon which melted in the mouth. The spikes themselves were thirty-centimetre silver-leaf-tipped cones of vanilla ice cream and raspberry sorbet, and these were broken from the enormous ball, which had been sculpted around a heavy iron frame. This included long handles so that the servers, naked but smeared with clay, might carry the weapon through the centre of a rectangle of some 180 diners towards the performance of Music for Ball and Chain, composed by Tony Buck and commissioned by Searle. The musical instruments were indeed a ball and chain.

It is genuinely hard for countries like Australia, which have never regarded a powerful and alternative intelligentsia as particularly crucial, to appreciate either the role such an entity famously played in Russia or what a homegrown one might offer.

Do not be put off by this book’s bland title. In a country that has placed the Anzac Legend at the centre of its national identity, Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War is a profoundly subversive book. Cherished ideas of the Australian army as an egalitarian institution and of Australians as natural soldiers whose setbacks can always be blamed on the failings of others (generally the British or the Americans) are put to the test and found wanting. Those looking to have their strident assertions of Australian nationalism validated will be disappointed, but there are already plenty of other Australian military books that can satisfy them. Garth Pratten provides a portrait of Australians at war that is less heroic and more ambiguous, but ultimately more realistic because more human.

One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First AIF. The scant historical regard that has been paid to these damaged men, and to their families, is rectified by Marina Larsson’s brilliant study of Shattered Anzacs. Her subject is the cohort of revenants who returned to Australia after the war – their bodies ruined, shell-shocked, infected with venereal disease and tuberculosis – and the families, institutions and government bureaucracies into whose hands they fell.

In a delightful memoir of a boyhood spent in Mussolini’s Italy, Umberto Eco recalled that the heady days of the Liberation in his small town near Milan were encapsulated in the taste of Wrigley’s Spearmint, given by an African-American GI (New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995). After the years of ‘palefaces in blackshirts’, these Americans appeared like exotic time travellers from the future. At the same time, the boy discovered that, unlike the long-winded Duce, large slabs of whose bombast schoolchildren were expected to commit to heart, the leader of the local partisans addressed the cheering crowd in the piazza with a few well-chosen and rhetoric-free words. Equally astonishing was the discovery that newspapers could carry opinions other than those mandated by the state.

Brenda Niall has the knack of lucid multi-focus, a great thing in a biographer. That organisational deftness, an ability to keep the tangled loops of people’s lives spooling freely through her fingers while she projects a rich and dramatic context for them, was evident in her group study of The Boyds (2002), and it is the structural virtue in this new work, The Riddle of Father Hackett.

The design of this book is something of a mystery, not least because it presents as a critique of design, seeking to recuperate something that has been lost through ‘the graphic orthodoxies of cartography and architectural drawing’. This lost cultural component, the ‘dark writing’ of Carter’s title, is variously evoked as mythological, participatory, creative and recreative, as a body, a form of movement, a certain kind of substance.