Week 10: Gallipoli, Mythmaking, and the Shadows of ANZAC

Eleanor Finch

Welcome to the show. I'm Eleanor Finch, here with Simon Carver. And Simon, I want to start with a date that is etched into the very core of Australian identity: April 25th, 1915. On that morning, the troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the ANZACs, landed on the beaches of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey.

Simon Carver

Right, the landing that supposedly birthed a nation. But when you look at the actual military reality, [pauses] it was an absolute disaster, wasn't it? They were pinned to these tiny, rocky beaches, facing disease, dysentery, typhoid, rotting corpses, millions of flies. And after eight agonizing months, they just... evacuated. [sighs]

Eleanor Finch

Precisely. It was a complete military failure. In fact, Gallipoli made up less than a quarter of the war's length, and eighty-seven percent of Australian deaths in World War One actually occurred on other fronts, like the Western Front. Yet, Gallipoli is the one we remember. And a massive reason for that is the journalism of two men who were there: the British reporter Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, and the official Australian war correspondent, C.E.W. Bean.

Simon Carver

Ah, Bean. He's really the architect of this whole thing, isn't he? I remember reading a quote from Ashmead Bartlett first, though, calling the ANZACs a "race of athletes." Like they were these classical Greek gods storming the cliffs. [chuckles]

Eleanor Finch

Yes! Ashmead Bartlett wrote that even when shot to bits, their cheers resounded through the night. But Bean took that romanticism and did something much more specific. He argued that the Australian soldier was physically and culturally superior to the British soldier, specifically because of the Australian bush.

Simon Carver

[chuckles] So, wait, because they grew up in the woods, they were automatically better soldiers? How does that work?

Eleanor Finch

Well, Bean wrote that "the bush still sets the standard of personal efficacy, even in Australian cities." He claimed that by the time an Australian boy was ten years old, he had already learned half the arts of a soldier: how to sleep under any shelter, cook meat, bake flour, find his way across country by night, and ride a horse. He called the Australian "half a soldier before the war."

Simon Carver

That is such a specific kind of mythology. [thoughtfully] It's like he's grafting the soldier onto these older 19th-century archetype characters we've talked about before—the rugged bushman, the outlaw, the larrikin. The guy who doesn't care about authority but gets the job done.

Eleanor Finch

Exactly. It was a pre-existing masculine ideal, and Bean just wrapped it in a khaki uniform. And this ties directly into the myth of Anzac egalitarianism. The idea was that these men had absolutely no respect for social class. Bean wrote about how Australian soldiers had never known restraint that wasn't self-imposed, and that if an officer tried to rely on his upper-class British accent or expensive education, the Australians would "merely incline them at first sight to laugh at him."

Simon Carver

[laughs] I love that image. This tall, rugged Aussie private literally looking down his nose at a posh, short British officer. But it's a very selective kind of egalitarianism, isn't it? It sounds great on paper, but it only applied to a very specific group of people.

Eleanor Finch

That is the great contradiction. While this myth celebrated mateship and equality, it was built on massive exclusions. First, it almost completely invisibleized women. Near the front lines, women's active roles were swept aside. Instead, they were cast purely as the maternal justification for war—the pure, vulnerable guardians of the home.

Simon Carver

Right, they became the motivation for the "brave men" to go fight, rather than active participants in their own right. But the exclusion that really gets to me is what happened to Indigenous Australians. [somber]

Eleanor Finch

Yes. When Australia federated in 1901, the Commonwealth explicitly barred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from enlisting. Yet, when war broke out in 1914, many rushed to sign up anyway. The Australian War Memorial estimates that over thirteen hundred Aboriginal men served in the Australian Imperial Force during World War One.

Simon Carver

Thirteen hundred? [pauses] But how did they get in if they were legally barred?

Eleanor Finch

They had to get creative. Some lied, pretending to be Italian, Indian, or Maori. In other cases, local recruiters simply looked the other way because they needed to fill quotas. And by March 1917, the rules were slightly loosened to allow men of mixed descent. While they were in the trenches, many reported being treated as absolute equals. There's this incredible letter from a veteran named James Bennett, who wrote to protest school segregation after the war. He said, "I have stood shoulder to shoulder with half-casts in Hell's pit on Quinn's Post and seen them die like the grandest of white men."

Simon Carver

"Die like the grandest of white men." [reflective] That is such a heavy sentence. It shows they earned that respect in the worst conditions imaginable. But then they came home. And that's where the egalitarian myth completely falls apart, doesn't it?

Eleanor Finch

It collapsed entirely. Upon return, almost all Aboriginal veterans were denied basic soldiers' benefits. They returned to living under restrictive Protection Acts. But the most blatant injustice was the Soldier Settlement Schemes. State governments passed laws to give returned soldiers land grants to start farms. In New South Wales and Victoria, they actually closed down and sold off Aboriginal reserves to give that land to white veterans.

Simon Carver

Wait, let me make sure I have this straight. [scoffs] They took land that had been set aside for Aboriginal people, took it away, and gave it to white soldiers, while denying those same land grants to the Aboriginal soldiers who had just fought alongside them?

Eleanor Finch

Yes. Only two Aboriginal veterans in the entire country are known to have received soldier settlement blocks. One was Private George Kennedy, a shoeing smith who rose to become a warrant officer. But his wife Eliza noted that he only got it because he was of mixed descent, had a fair complexion, and was "brought up as a white person." For the rest, the nation they bled for essentially shut the door in their faces.

Simon Carver

It's just devastating. [sighs] And it makes you wonder... why? Why did Australia cling so tightly to this highly selective, romanticized Anzac legend if it was so disconnected from the reality of who actually served and how they were treated?

Eleanor Finch

Because nations often construct the history they need, rather than the history that happened. In 1915, Australia was a very young nation—federated only fourteen years earlier, in 1901. And because enlistment was entirely voluntary—Australia actually rejected conscription in two separate referendums in 1916 and 1917—the government desperately needed a heroic narrative to encourage more men to sign up.

Simon Carver

Ah, so the myth was a recruitment tool. If you tell young men they are part of a legendary "race of athletes," they're much more likely to volunteer for the meat grinder. But there's a deeper psychological need here too, isn't there? To console the grief of losing so many young lives.

Eleanor Finch

Absolutely. If those thousands of men died to "birth a nation," then their sacrifice had meaning. But also, think about the alternative origin stories Australia had at the time. You had the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788—a penal colony, which was a source of deep shame. Even in the 1960s, a PhD student was banned from publishing convict names to avoid embarrassing their descendants! And, of course, you had the dark, violent reality of frontier conflict and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

Simon Carver

Right. So instead of a shameful convict past or a bloody domestic frontier, you get to choose a glorious, tragic "baptism of blood" on a foreign shore. It's much more digestable. [chuckles] And honestly, let's be real—it's way more exciting than the actual legal process of Federation.

Eleanor Finch

[laughs] Oh, infinitely more exciting. There's a historian, Anna Clark, who wrote about how primary and secondary teachers find teaching the 1901 Federation "mind-blowingly dull." One student described it as "just that people sat down and decided it." It's the "eat your broccoli" moment of Australian history.

Simon Carver

[laughs] "Eat your broccoli." Yes! Writing a constitution and voting on it peacefully in a parliament just doesn't have the same emotional grip as storming a beach in the dark. As the historian Peter Fitzsimons put it, there's this tragic notion that we weren't a "real" nation until we had shed blood.

Eleanor Finch

And that is the lingering tension of the Anzac legend. It provided a young country with a sense of identity, courage, and unity when it desperately needed it. But it did so by papering over the quiet, legal birth of the country, and more tragically, by ignoring the deep sacrifices of the Indigenous people who fought for a nation that refused to see them as equals.

Simon Carver

It makes you realize that the myths we choose to tell say far more about who we want to be, than who we actually were. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Eleanor Finch

Goodbye.