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
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 citizenship (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 opportunity to discuss it in a rational
manner. While there won=92t be opportunities 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 adva nce 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 importance 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=
Singapore 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
documenting 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, ship=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 Singapore, 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
http://www.awm.gov.au/events/talks/oration2006.asp
worth reading the entire article IMHO , it exposes why Howard is
ramping up the public ready for WW3 , for Israel and USA
kanga
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
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