Lord, what fools these mortals be!
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act
3, scene 2
ANZAC day is primarily an opportunity to remember those who
died in the service of the Australian nation state. Lives cut short, or
curtailed due to physical or mental injury, while serving in our name, deserve
our deep and heartfelt gratitude.
Yet as I grow older, limiting our concern to those who died
on active service, for one side only, seems increasingly unsatisfactory from an
ethical and philosophical perspective. As weapons have become more effective,
and hugely more consequential, war has increasingly become ‘total’ in its
design and intent. Its impacts, and concomitant costs, economic, psychological,
social and existential, increasingly extend beyond our limited ideologically
shaped conceptual constructs.
There are at least two reasons for extending our purview.
First, it is increasingly apparent that the rationale for
going to war is rarely straightforward, and is most often highly problematic.
Nation states have become expert in devising and promoting rationales for considering
war in terms of ‘defence’ or ‘justified interventions’, or as HG Wells famously
argued in relation to the First World War, as ‘The war that will end war’. Yet in
most if not all cases, wars arise because alternative policy options have not
been adequately considered let alone taken, and invariably lead to
extraordinary adversity and societal pain for all state and non-state protagonists.
Second, war in today’s world is never limited to
combatants, and indeed, it is clear that its adverse impacts increasingly fall
on non-combatants. Moreover, those impacts are potentially long-lasting both in
their physical ramifications on the environment and climate, and on the lives
of human beings wherever they reside on the planet.
It strikes me that it is time to re-assess the ideological
underpinnings that support ANZAC day (and its ancillary institutions such as
the Australian War Memorial).
For my part (and I am speaking only for myself here), limiting
our concern to those who actively participate in war or preparing for war, and
ignoring the impacts on non-combatants, seems increasingly less defensible. Today
seems an appropriate day to remember the lives of the millions of lives lost in
wars over the past century, whatever their nationality, their ethnicity, their religious
faith, or indeed their ideological concerns. At its core human life is sacred
and demands intelligent respect.
Seven years ago, I published a short post remembering the
service of a Gallipoli veteran I met in Farina in South Australia in around
1974 named Ben Murray (link
here). I often think of him on Anzac Day, and recommend the post and its
hyperlinks to readers.
Today however, I wish to remember the lives of the innocent
non-combatant Yiiji speaking people executed by a police party in June and July
1926 (97 years ago) at a number of locations to the west of the Forrest River
Mission in the East Kimberley (link
here). Much has been written about these events (too much for me to
critically assess here), and the actual numbers of individuals summarily executed
is indeterminate. A Royal Commission which reported in 1927, found at least 11 people had been executed,
and there are credible suggestions that the number was significantly higher.
A recent book by Kate Auty (O’Leary of the Underworld: the untold story of the Forrest River
Massacre link
here) and an earlier 2004 article in the journal Aboriginal History (Patrick Bernard O’Leary and the Forrest River massacres,
Western Australia link
here) make a persuasive argument that notes that the police party largely comprised
former members of the Light Horse Brigades who had served at Gallipoli. Auty
argues that at least one motivation was to revenge the death of a former comrade
in arms named Hay who was a part owner of a block called Nulla Nulla south of the
Forrest River mission. Hay was speared following an altercation with an
Aboriginal man named Lumbia who he had shot with a revolver while on horseback.
If Auty is correct, then their war service drew them together, and Auty argues,
their perceptions of poor treatment by Government afterwards left them bitter
and damaged, with appalling consequences for the Aboriginal people of the area
near the Forrest River mission.
While the myriad issues thrown up by the Royal Commission that
followed will never be determined with any certainty, what is clear is that the
police party, comprising former soldiers with experience of war took with them
over 500 rounds of ammunition. This patrol was just one of numerous similar
police patrols that had taken place in the East Kimberley since the arrival of
the pastoral industry in the 1880s. Take a moment to imagine the psychological
impact on the traditional owners of the country involved. It was a dynamic that
had been widely replicated across the continent since the early 1800s.
Without entering into the debate regarding whether
Aboriginal people resisted the invasion of their countries, who can know or
account for the distress, pain and suffering visited upon the Aboriginal men, women
and children who were innocent bystanders to a process with implications and
consequences truly beyond their comprehension, their world turned upside down.
Lest we forget.
[This post has been edited to correct two minor factual errors]