Peter Edwards

When the United States recently announced its commitment to enforce a ‘no-fly zone’ in Libya, the State Department spokesman was asked whether the United States was now at war. He could only manage a floundering non-answer. The unfortunate spokesman’s difficulty with this apparently simple question is a reminder of the vast changes in the nature of military conflict in recent decades. Major conflicts are seldom a matter of one state formally declaring war on another, with a largely agreed set of rules on the conduct of operations (sometimes flouted in horrific ways) and with some generally accepted markers of victory and defeat.

One of the most disconcerting aspects of the 2010 election campaign was the intrusion of former prime ministers and aspirants to that post. Liberals had tired of Malcolm Fraser’s interventions long before he decided not to renew his membership of the party. Labor supporters did not welcome another round of bickering between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. The interventions of Mark Latham were hardly edifying.

Not many Australian historians have managed to publish major books, based on years of scholarly research, which have evoked both immediate and enduring acclaim. It therefore says something both about intrinsic value and about the tastes of the book-buying public when such a book goes into a second or even a third edition, ten or more years after its first appearance. The weeks preceding Anzac Day are always a popular time for the publication of books on military history, but this year has been especially notable for witnessing a number of reissues, alongside a flood of new titles. The two under review here are the third edition of Jeffrey Grey’s A Military History of Australia, and the second edition of David Horner’s and Jean Bou’s history of the Royal Australian Regiment, Duty First. Others include the third edition of Ken Inglis’s highly acclaimed study of war memorials, Sacred Places, and new issues of Ross McMullin’s biography of Major General ‘Pompey’ Elliott and Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese.

Notwithstanding the old adage, you can tell a certain amount about a book by its cover, especially if it has two covers, each displaying a different subtitle. The British edition of Forgotten Wars, on sale in Australian bookshops, has the subtitle ‘The End of Britain’s Asian Empire’. The cover photograph shows Lord Louis Mountbatten, in spotless white naval uniform, inspecting a guard of honour of Burmese soldiers in 1948. The soldiers appear smart and loyal, while the Burmese civilian accompanying Mountbatten is deferential. The American edition of the book, published under the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press, has the less precise but more evocative subtitle ‘Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia’, and a cover with a blurred photograph of a truckload of Asians celebrating ‘Independence Day’. The caption identifies neither the country nor the date, but a likely candidate would be India in 1947.

If journalism is the first draft of history, this book is a rough-hewn draft of some important historical chunks. Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of The Australian, may not match some of his colleagues there in gravitas, intellectual depth, or analytical precision, but he compensates with an abundance of enthusiasm and enviable access to those in high office. In the early and mid-1990s, when The Australian was prominent among those boosting Asia and Australian–Asian relations, Sheridan was cheerleader for the boosters. His columns and books were often based on long interviews with presidents and foreign ministers, recounted in a tone more often found in celebrity journalism than in diplomatic reports. Sheridan’s obvious delight at being granted personal interviews with the powerful aroused some envious comments, but his technique served a purpose.

Arthur Tange joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1942, at a point in time when it was undergoing ‘a permanent revolution at once in the size, the calibre, the philosophy and the significance’ of what it was and what it did. Most Australians now forget, if they ever knew, just how limited the function and reach of federal government was in the first decades of the Commonwealth. As in so many areas of national life, World War II wrought a profound transformation in virtually all aspects of central government and public administration, and the young Tange was in at the beginning of the process. As Sir Arthur Tange, Secretary of External/Foreign Affairs and Defence successively from the 1950s to the late 1970s, he did more in turn to shape the formulation and execution of policy in these two areas than any other official, and many ministers, of his time.

Important political issues sometimes cut across traditional party lines, making it harder for us to confront and debate them. The ‘children overboard’ affair, for example, raised important questions about the relationship between public servants and their ministers. Some of these questions were blurred in the subsequent debate, however, for a simple reason. Since the 1970s, governments from both sides of politics have had, in effect, a common policy of restricting the independence of the public service, especially of heads of departments, in the name of accountability and responsiveness. Ministers now have departmental secretaries who can be dismissed for no stronger reason than that they have lost the minister’s confidence. The powerful mandarins who, it used to be said, ruled Australia from the lunch tables of the Commonwealth Club in Canberra are a distant memory. Political influence now affects appointments down to middle managers in ways that those mandarins would have thought totally improper.­­­

On May 24 this year, a memorial service was held in the Great Hall of Parliament House. The great and the good were there in force. They were marking the death of Sir Arthur Tange, widely regarded as the last of the great public service mandarins who flourished from the 1940s to the 1970s. Although the usual partisan conflicts were temporarily suspended, an element of controversy intruded. In his eulogy, Malcolm Fraser lamented that changes to the public service meant that ministers today and tomorrow would not have the benefit of the frank, fearless, non-partisan ad-vice of the kind that he had received from Tange. The next eulogist, Alexander Downer, felt compelled to give an unscripted response, asserting that he and his ministerial colleagues did indeed receive advice of comparable quality and independence from their departmental secretaries. The third eulogist wisely stayed clear of the debate, although his views would have been highly relevant, for Dr Allan Hawke occupies the last position held by Tange, that of Secretary of the Department of Defence.

Breaking The Codes was published last August. The time that has subsequently elapsed makes it possible to comment not only on the book itself but also on some aspects of its reception.

A nation at war is a less than gripping tide, although it is suggestively ambiguous. Australia was at war in Vietnam for most of the decade covered in Peter Edwards’s book. In senses chiefly, but not wholly, metaphorical, it was also a society ‘at war’, divided over conscription and the commitment of troops to Vietnam. The excellent cover photograph illuminates the latter implication of Edwards’s title, as well as the importance of media coverage of both overseas conflict and domestic protest against it. A newsreel photographer looks back into another camera, and away from the policeman who is struggling to shift an inert demonstrator.