Landscape, Memory and the Australian War Experience, 1915–18

Abstract

The Great War (1914–18) continues to shape political culture and collective memory in the major combatant nations. Its influence can be seen in public holidays, expressions of national identity, and attitudes towards war and peace. This is most certainly the case in Australia, where ANZAC Day (25 April) still anchors the public calendar, and the first world war experience anchors the activities on that day. Why have the battles on the Western Front and at Gallipoli on the Dardenelles remained at the centre of those commemorations and their visions of Australian identity? Why has the Anzac myth remained so powerful while Australian society has changed so much? This article considers those questions in light of the early literary creation of the Anzac tradition in the writings of C.E.W. Bean, the official Australian war historian, John Masefield, the English Poet Laureate, and many of the soldiers themselves. Wartime diaries, letters, poems and reflections suggest the powerful linkage of the Australian war experience with commonly held ideas and images of the Australian landscape and collective past. The more that the writers and myth-makers described fighting and battlefields as complements and sometimes mirror images of key Australian landmarks, such as the Outback and Botany Bay, the more meaningful and accessible the war experience became. Without a military tradition to draw upon, Australians made sense of the unprecedented horrors of the first world war by comparing them to mythic experiences of migration, exile and struggles with a hostile land. Those might be revelant and accessible to different social groups and different times, whether Aboriginal Australians, white settlers or more recent Asian migrants. Such national myths are not forms of escapism, but integrate experience and imagination, linking citizens in a persistent and viable way not only with one another, but with a shared, more inclusive past.