Lest We Remember

How many thousand of my poorest subjects

Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee…

Henry IV Part 2, Act three, Scene one

 

I am glad that ANZAC Day comes around only once a year. I find it emotionally and ethically challenging.

It is important that we remember those who fought in past wars, those who died and were injured, and their families. Lives cut short or permanently compromised, families rendered asunder. These are both personal and national tragedies. Not only have wars harmed individual Australians, but the Australian nation has been harmed socially, economically and politically by the wars we have engaged in.

These tragedies are exacerbated by the reality that too often, Australians have fought in senseless wars, in the service of foreign states and interests, defending concepts such as freedom and democracy that have been selectively and unequally implemented and delivered. As a nation, we claim these values as fundamental to who we are, but too often we selectively frame them so that we are blind to their deficiencies and fail to find the will power to make the changes necessary to ensure they are fit for purpose. Increasingly we live in a world where those who claim the moral high ground, and proclaim it from the metaphorical hilltops, who assert they support freedom for all, and the precepts of democracy, are operating with much baser motivations.

For these reasons, I distrust narratives that glorify war and violence, that value hyper nationalism over the shared humanity of all peoples, and that lay the groundwork for political movements that leverage xenophobia and hate based on race, ethnicity, religion, artificial notions of purity and superior intelligence and so on.

There is a place for nationalistic pride and self-confidence, but (if we believe the world should be guided by principles built upon ethical principles and justice) not to the exclusion of respect for universal human rights, and the overarching value of respecting and even celebrating the existence of different societies, languages, cultures and peoples.

There is thus a fine line between on one hand remembering the painful sacrifices and losses involved in past wars and extolling the bravery and prowess of Australian servicemen and servicewomen, and on the other hand, celebrating and advocating the use and application of armed force. Invariably, lauding the use of force requires the concomitant necessity to ignore or downplay the consequences, direct and indirect, of violence on other humans, invariably in the service of some political objective decided by decisionmakers and interest groups that are far removed either by virtue of their wealth or status from the consequences of these policies.

Since the Boer War, many or even most Australians have seen serving in the armed services in a crisis or emergency as an obligation of citizenship. The rhetoric and ideology of nationalism has a strong hold on Australia, as it does on most nations.

Historically (and somewhat surprisingly) many Indigenous Australians have volunteered to serve in our military notwithstanding the history violent dispossession of First Peoples and the more insidious and longstanding adoption of exclusionary policies by the states and the Commonwealth.

John Maynard has an essay in the Conversation titled Aboriginal Anzacs fought for Australia, but returned home to racism. It fuelled their activism  (link here). It is worth reading.

I have previously published two ANZAC day posts on this Blog. The first in April 2016 titled Ben Murray Gallipoli Veteran (link here) remembered an imposing man of Diyari and Afghan descent, who when I met him in the early 1970s was living alone in a ramshackle ruin in the ghost town of Farina in northern South Australia. Ben Murray was captured by the Turks in Palestine and almost bayoneted. The account of his survival is recounted in the various short articles that are mentioned and linked to in my 2016 post. (Updated link here).

Here is a short extract from one of those sources (the original links no longer work):

With the passing of the years Ben has apparently telescoped his memories of the First World War and it is difficult to reconstruct the sequence of events. It seems likely that Ben went on after Gallipoli to fight in Palestine, and that in one of those battles, possibly during 1916, he was captured by the Turks. Ben recalls his unit making an advance on a town and that the Turks counter-attacked, killing Australians and narrowly missing Ben.

 I got a bullet too, the coat here - just missed my guts. And I dropped, I dropped and I lay there then, with the other dead boys. Mates of mine. They never missed them.

The Turkish soldiers were close by now, near enough apparently to finish Ben off if he had made the wrong move. His response was quick, unusual and may have saved his life. For Ben there was little to separate Turks from the Afghans he had known in Australia and so he called out the few words he had learnt from his Afghan cameleer acquaintances - the Muslim prayer uttered by them before they slaughtered a beast - as well as some Afghan names:

I sang out: 'Moosha malad! Akbar! Dadleh! Bejah! [Ben's father's name]’. I said: 'Bejah! Dadleh!' That's what I said. And they take me then. They kept me. Better than getting a bullet! If I didn't sing out...they would have killed me alright! They put a bullet through me - just missed coat [i.e. passed through coat]. But the second bullet didn't come, never come

Ben died in 1994 at the age of 101.

The second post published in April 2023 dealt with (by implication) the insidious pervasiveness of violence and its consequences once it becomes the primary means of engaging with the external world. The post was titled Anzac Day 2023 (link here).

In that post, I referenced recent writing by Kate Auty revisiting the Forrest River massacres in 1926, one hundred years ago this year, and the subsequent Royal Commission.

I wrote in that post

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.

Like Ben Murray in relation to his deceased comrades, we should certainly remember all those who have lost their lives in violent altercations undertaken by nation states, whether in formal wars, or informal conflicts, whether in foreign lands or within Australia.

It seems to me however that remembering must be more than wreath laying on one day of the year (important as that is). Proper remembering requires us to think long and hard about what underlies these conflicts and take action to identify policies and tangible reforms that diminish the likelihood of these tragedies occurring in the future. Unfortunately, as a nation we do not invest enough effort in contemplating what such policies and reforms might look at.

We have our democracy and our freedom, but we appear institutionally incapable of exercising these rights and opportunities in ways which will strengthen our independent capacity to choose our own future. For all the discussion of Australian values, we Australians are remarkably insouciant about protecting our sovereignty, and more importantly, about protecting our ability to protect our sovereignty in a rapidly changing world. In this respect, we settler Australians may have something to learn from this continent’s First Peoples, whose focus on celebrating and respecting the links between people and country is central to their worldview.

The institutionalisation of Anzac Day, and the ubiquity of the phrase ‘Lest we Forget’ are important and valuable, but not if they signify ‘Lest we Remember’.

 

25 April 2026