Talks at the Memorial
"Was there a Battle for Australia?"
Australian War Memorial Anniversary Oration by Dr Peter Stanley, 10
November 2006
For Australia, 1942 was the year of greatest losses, a year of crises
confronted and overcome. It was a year in which war briefly touched
Australia=92s shores. What does this mean for the way we remember 1942?
It suggests that we should at least question whether there was a
=93Battle for Australia=94, or ask if there was, what did it involve?1
Then there is the problem that it is based on one of the most
tenacious myths of 1942, the idea that the Japanese planned to invade
Australia in 1942. There is no doubt that the Japanese could not have
invaded and decided not to:
So, was there a Battle for Australia? No: not in the literal meaning
of the term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_invasion_of_Australia_during_World_War_=
II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Australia
http://www.awm.gov.au/events/talks/oration2006.asp
There was a phrase in vogue in museum circles a few years ago, that
museums are =93safe places for unsafe ideas=94. My scepticism the reality
of the Battle for Australia would certainly be regarded as unsafe.
When I=92ve spoken or written in this vein several times over the past
few years I=92ve been abused as unpatriotic or even =93un-
Australian=94 (whatever that means). My citizen****p (dating from 1971)
has been called into question =96 one persistent critic habitually
refers to me as =93English-born=94 =96 and the Memorial=92s Director has
bee=
n
urged to sack me. These are representations that he=92s felt able to
resist =96 so far. If criticising the Battle for Australia is an unsafe
idea, I=92m glad that the Memorial offers an op****tunity to discuss it
in a rational manner. While there won=92t be op****tunities for debate
this evening, I hope that you=92ll contact me by letter or e-mail to
express your reactions.
I offer reflections on a phrase which over the past decade has assumed
a growing significance in the ways Australians remember the Second
World War. Indeed, I=92d argue that the new idea of the =93Battle for
Australia=94 is the most significant single development in Australia=92s
understanding of that war since the publication of the official
histories between the 1950s and the 1970s. The idea that there was a
Battle for Australia has perhaps captured the popular imagination.
It=92s an idea which few historians have endorsed, but which thousands
of Australians have embraced. For that reason, I have decided to take
the idea of a =93Battle for Australia=94 seriously as a basis for
considering our past. I want to use this address to consider its
validity for Australia=92s remembrance of the Second World War. As
you=92ll hear, it has a place in our thinking about this war: but not,
perhaps, as an all-embracing event that can be justified historically.
Those who advance this idea argue that from the outbreak of war with
Japan Australia was the objective of the Japanese advance, and that
1942 saw a series of crucial campaigns that resulted in the defeat of
this thrust. In some versions of the battle it is seen as continuing
up to the Japanese surrender. The point of the Pacific war, they
imply, was that Australia was in danger of attack or conquest, and
that the significance of the campaigns in the south-west Pacific was
that they prevented such a calamity.
This idea of a Battle for Australia is both attractive and
superficially plausible. It is dramatic. It seems to explain a series
of campaigns to Australia=92s north. It seems to give purpose to the
bombing of Darwin, the submarine raid on Sydney and the submarine
offensives off the east coast: even the Papuan campaign can be
stretched to fit the rubric of the =93battle that saved Australia=94. The
growing awareness of the im****tance of the mobilisation of Australian
civilians =96 men, women and children =96their motivation to work for the
war effort and their contributions as individuals and in communities,
all fits easily into a view that places Australia at the centre of
events. Above all, a Battle for Australia nourishes Australians=92 pride
in surmounting what was truly the greatest crisis the nation has
faced. These are all reasons to subscribe to this interpretation. But
first, I want to look at where this new idea has come from and suggest
why it has arisen in the form it has.
The idea of organising the events of 1942 around the idea of a =93Battle
for Australia=94 is quite a new one, though the phrase itself was used
in wartime propaganda. In turn it seems to have come from a speech
delivered by Prime Minister John Curtin on 16 February 1942. In an
echo of Churchill=92s speech of June 1940 foreseeing that the fall of
France would open a =93Battle of Britain=94, Curtin said that =93The fall
of=
Singa****e opens the battle for Australia".2 The phrase was used in a
few booklets produced by the Department of Information, but it did not
appear even in the booklet While You Were Away, produced in 1945 to
inform liberated prisoners of war what had occurred at home.3
Curtin=92s phrase did not resonate with those first charged with
do***enting Australia=92s part in the Second World War. It appears just
once in Paul Hasluck=92s official history The Government and the People,
but not at all in Gavin Long=92s Six Years War or indeed in any general
history of Australia published until the mid-1990s. There is no battle
honour =93Battle for Australia=94 on any regimental colour, ****p=92s crest
or unit plaque. The phrase - even the idea =96 disappeared. The first
time it appeared in print in a work of significance was in the late
John Robertson=92s Australia at War 1939-1945, published in 1981.4 But
he used it as a striking opening line to his chapter on the collapse
of the so-called Malay Barrier. He did not endorse the idea of such a
battle having happened.
But in the mid-1990s the idea was resurrected, though the exact
origins of what I=92ll call the Battle for Australia movement are for
the moment obscure. Recently Andrew McKay and Ryoko Adachi offered an
account of its origins in their exploration of Australia and Japan=92s
wartime memories, Shadows of War. They suggest that it was conceived
in 1996 by the Victorian President of the Air Force Association, Wing
Commander Reginald Yardley, and was fostered in schools by a former
Chief Executive Officer of the History Teachers=92 Association of
Victoria, Dr Jacqualine Hollingworth. Over the years Reg Yardley had
laid many wreaths on Battle of Britain Day when in 1996 =96
significantly, the year after the great year of =93Australia Remembers=94
=96 he realised that no one seemed to remember a Battle for Australia.
=93And there was a Battle for Australia=94, he emphasised in an interview,
=93we damned near lost it and yet nobody knows anything about it =85"5 He
thought of the =93battle=94 as spanning the period from the invasion of
New Britain in January 1942 to the battle of the Bismarck Sea in March
1943.
James Bowen=92s unofficial Battle for Australia website describes his
own role in persuading the Returned and Services League to commemorate
a Battle for Australia. He credits the then national and Victorian
state presidents of the RSL, =93Digger=94 James and Bruce Ruxton, with
recognising the value of his idea in 1997.6
Either way, by 1998 a national Battle for Australia Council existed.
Its aim was to =93enhance community knowledge and understanding of
Australian and Allied actions in the war against Japan from 1941 to
1945=94. It is interesting to note the expansion of the date range, to
encompass the entire Pacific war. The National Council lobbied to
establish the first Wednesday in September as Battle for Australia
Day, and now ceremonies are held in several states, marking the
anniversary of the battle of Milne Bay, the symbolic first Allied
victory against the Japanese in 1942.
The Council=92s lobbying has since been joined by several private
efforts, notably James Bowen=92s website, which engages in energetic
advocacy and robust critique of those who might offer a contrary view.
Mr Bowen has since parted company with the national Council. The
Memorial=92s Director and myself have been singled out for criticism
because we have disagreed with Bowen=92s interpretation of this period.
We have been accused of being =93revisionists=94, used as a term of abuse:
no less than thirty-five times in the course of his website=92s
denunciation. You can judge my views on their merits: to call Steve
Gower a =93revisionist=94 is simply ludicrous. Bowen=92s website offers an
aggressively positive view of the events of 1942, a simple and
colourful saga of threat, crisis and salvation. The essence of Mr
Bowen=92s case seems to be that by offering a different version of 1942
I must be demeaning those who died, that by disagreeing with political
leaders (on both sides of politics) I am disrespectful, and by
differing with Mr Bowen I must be wrong.
Though notably more moderate, the Battle for Australia Council=92s view
of 1942 connects several episodes into a single narrative. It presents
the defence of Singa****e, the conquest of the Netherlands Indies, the
battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, the Papuan and Solomons
campaigns, and the campaigns that secured Allied victory into a single
epic story. We might regard this saga as forming a =93collective story=94,
a story valued or heeded by an entity, such as a nation. The term is
used by the clear-thinking and plain-speaking historian Inga
Clendinnen in her recent Quarterly Essay, =93The history question: who
owns the past?=948
Inga Clendinnen reminds us why these =93collective stories=94 are
im****tant to us. But as the stories become more collective =96 and this
is a national story =96 they acquire =93de facto custodians=94 =96 like Mr
Bowen, perhaps. These guardians, she says, =93find they have to invent
crimes like blasphemy, heresy, treason or =93being un-Australian=94 to see
off any incubating counter-stories=94. The =93counter-story=94 here, in
the
context of the Battle for Australia debate, is actually the older,
established version, because it challenges what is becoming the new
orthodoxy.
Inga Clendinnen sees a risk in historians feeling a =93primary
responsibility to the present and the future of the nation and not to
the past=94. She disagrees with the proposal that =93the true purpose of
=91Australian history=92 [ =85 should be] patriotic and integrative=94.
She
thinks =96 and I agree =96 that =93historians need to resist participating
in the concoction of large, inspiriting narratives, because any [such]
narrative requires significant narrowing of vision and manipulations
of the truth=94 =96 or, I=92d rather say, of the evidence.
But an oration such as this, particularly one delivered on the eve of
Remembrance Day, is perhaps not the occasion for astringent analysis
which may alienate and offend at a time when our thoughts ought to be
in accord on at least the value of remembering war=92s cost. However
strong my conviction may be, I acknowledge that there is little point,
and less dignity, in trying, Canute-like, to turn back the waves. Or,
to switch metaphors, no amount of argument can now drive the genie of
the Battle for Australia back into its bottle. Indeed, especially on
an occasion such as this, we need to acknowledge that a purely
intellectual argument about the evidence will not carry the day.
But history is not just about the evidence of what happened in the
past, im****tant though that is. It is also about how we shape an
understanding of that past to satisfy our present needs. So rather
than simply laying into the idea of the Battle for Australia on the
basis of chronology and evidence, we need to examine its meaning
today. That is why this lecture is called =93What is the battle for
Australia?=94 I suggest that the idea arises from emotional roots, a
desire to connect with the Second World War and to incor****ate it more
securely into Australian remembrance. And on that note, I am in
complete accord with proponents of the battle for Australia. I, like
them, am determined that the sacrifices and the achievements of the
Second World War, and especially those of this country, should be
never be forgotten. I have devoted a good part of my professional life
at the Memorial to that end. I want to find ways in which we can do so
without skewing the evidence of history.
This struggle over the meaning of our history is itself part of an
historical process. For ninety years, Gallipoli has been a part of
Australia=92s discovery of itself as a nation, and its exploration and
assertion of its national identity. That process has entailed the
creation of an Anzac legend, one which has focussed not just on the
Great War, but specifically on Gallipoli.
But for at least a decade, at least since the Australia Remembers
anniversary, there has been a move, if not supplant Gallipoli=92s
centrality, at least to assert the significance of the Second World
War as part of the story of an emerging Australian national identity.
This process arguably began with the fiftieth anniversary of 1942,
when Prime Minister Paul Keating gave his celebrated speech at Kokoda
the day after Anzac Day in 1992. This was the occasion on which he
revered =93the blood that was spilled on this very knoll =85 in defence of
the liberty of Australia=94.9 Perhaps the entire Battle for Australia
movement can be traced from that moment. This is at one level highly
laudable: how could we not wish to remember the Second World War and
recognise its significance in Australia=92s national story? Certainly:
except that this new emphasis stresses not the Second World War as a
whole, not Australia=92s contribution to Allied victory against Nazism
and fascism in the Mediterranean and Europe, but only Australia=92s
defence of itself.
It would seem that the Battle for Australia movement is an example of
historical nationalism, an interpretation, as Inga Clendinnen would
say, being shaped to fit the needs of the future, not the evidence of
the past. It is the product of the emergence of a school of history =96
and especially military history - that justifies the name
=93nationalist=94. It promotes relatively unim****tant events close to
Australia over im****tant events far away, purely on a rather
simplistic calculus of proximity. It has become the new orthodoxy in
Australian military history. The polar opposite is a view that sees
Australia=92s contribution in the context of a global war and an
international coalition against inter-continental enemies, in an
alliance in which Australia played its part as much as any and for
longer than most. We might call this the =93internationalist=94 school of
Second World War history. It has many proponents overseas though very
few in this country.
In essence, I submit, the nationalist tendency is a matter of the
heart, the internationalist approach a matter of the head. The Battle
for Australia movement arises directly out of a desire to find meaning
in the terrible losses of 1942. (And let us remember the terrible
litany of Malaya, Rabaul, Singa****e, Ambon, Timor, Java and all the
massacres and misery that followed.) There is an understandable desire
to make those sacrifices directly relevant to Australia. That explains
the need to find a satisfying national drama in the approach and
defeat of a deadly Japanese thrust. A global war fought for abstract
democratic principles, as a small part of a great Allied coalition, in
which the most significant battles occurred far away, satisfies only a
part of the need felt by many Australians to make this war meaningful.
I suggest that this is a result of the Australian concentration from
1942 on a war essentially fought in and close to Australian
territories in Papua New Guinea. Australia=92s withdrawal from the
broader war, especially in Europe, deprives us of a sense of having
contributed directly or substantially to the defeat of Nazi Germany
(notwithstanding the decisive contribution Australians made to the war
in the Mediterranean in 1941 and 1942, and its efforts in the air war
over Europe). The Battle for Australia bequeaths us a partial memory
of the most im****tant war in which Australia has ever been involved, a
war that truly did save the world as we know it.
Our national memory of 1942 is suffused by emotion. That =93memory=94,
though, is not simply a matter of pitting veterans who =93remember=94 a
battle for Australia against younger =93historians=94 who challenge that
belief. The Battle for Australia movement has garnered a coalition of
old and young, veterans and descendants, journalists and writers, and
sponsors from across the political spectrum. They have been animated
by the highest motives =96 by a desire to acknowledge those who served
and suffered, and by a need to acknowledge that deaths and sufferings
mattered in a war too often marked by futile losses, defeat and
disaster. Historically I think they=92re wrong: emotionally I share
their desire to make sacrifice meaningful.
It needs to be said that this is not the first epic of threat and
salvation that Australia has seen. Professor Joan Beaumont of Deakin
University has been comparing Australia=92s memories of the world wars
and promises to illuminate a phenomenon we all-too-often take for
granted. She has shown, for example, how for about forty years it was
accepted that the battle of the Coral Sea =93saved Australia from
invasion=94.10 The decisive Coral Sea battle (in May 1942) has now been
subsumed into the Battle for Australia. Now we are told that the
struggle for national survival continued into 1943, and even until the
war=92s end. Professor Beaumont reminds us that history is malleable,
not static, and not immutable: our feelings guide our understanding as
much as does the evidence we consult.
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