Anzac day 2023

                                                                         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]