http://uniken.unsw.edu.au/features/cover-story-%E2%80%93-busting-anzac-myth

Cover story – Busting the Anzac myth

‘Let silent contemplation be your offering.'

Gallipoli commemorations, Anzac Cove. Photo: News Ltd/Newspix

Has a national obsession hijacked centenary commemorations of the Great War? Chris Sheedy and Steve Offner report.

At a recent conference in the United States, UNSW Canberra military historian Professor Jeffrey Grey found himself at a roundtable discussion in the company of some of the world’s most respected Great War scholars.

As they discussed the centenary of World War I and the commemorations that will begin rolling out on 28 July this year, the panel Chair noted “Australia is without doubt the most aggressive of the centenary commemorators”, Grey recalls.

He was immediately struck by the comment.

“I said to her afterwards that I thought ‘aggressive’ was exactly the right word. We Australians have taken the opportunity of the centenary and are spending something in the vicinity of half a billion dollars on the commemoration,” he says.

That price tag was calculated by former Australian Army officer and UNSW alumnus James Brown in his book Anzac’s Long Shadow. Brown, who has tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is a Military Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, is a vocal critic of the Australian approach to the centenary.

“At the War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park, inscribed words decree: ‘Let silent contemplation be your offering’,” Brown writes in his book. “Instead, Australians are embarking on a discordant, lengthy and exorbitant four-year festival for the dead.”

Brown estimates $325 million is being forked out by the Australian taxpayer for the string of “festivals”. Add more than $300 million expected in private donations and what we will have, Brown predicts, is an Anzac centenary that risks fetishising war.

The national enthusiasm for the centenary project is all the more perplexing when Australia’s part in the war is analysed, says Grey, who is one of Australia’s leading WWI experts. Based at UNSW Canberra’s Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS) Grey has undertaken the writing and editing of Oxford University Press’ new five-volume history of the war to commemorate the centenary – the first since Australia’s official war historian Charles Bean penned his six-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 from the 1920s to ’40s.

Unlike other countries in the Great War, Australia was never under serious threat of invasion, Grey says. Even the number of Australians killed – around 60,000 – represents a tragic but small figure, compared with the 600,000 British deaths, more than one million Austro-Hungarian fatalities and almost 1.4 million French lives lost.

In commemoration of the centenary, Australia is not only spending more than twice what Britain is, we’re even outspending the French. “And the French, you might think, have more reason than most to remember the Great War,” Grey says.

Grey set out his reservations in an opinion piece published in The Australian. “If Australia’s centenary observance is little more than a four-year long Dawn Service, replete with all the hackneyed cliches and self-serving a-historical mythology trotted out each Anzac Day, it will be a monumental waste of time and money,” he wrote.

He adds: “I wonder about the commemorations at Anzac Cove next year. I don’t know that I necessarily want to scratch too hard to find out what is below the surface and why all those people will be there.”

The power of myth

According to Grey and his colleagues in ACSACS – Professor Peter Stanley and Associate Professor Craig Stockings – you don’t have to dig too deep to uncover the reasons behind Australia’s obsession.

Anzac Day has arguably replaced Australia Day as our de facto national day and the events surrounding Gallipoli have established themselves as our national story. In particular, our soldiers’ bravery at Gallipoli is seen to exemplify idealised virtues that lie at the heart of our self-identity.

“The driving need to celebrate the deeds of past servicemen and promote conceptions of national identity wrapped in the imagery of war have come to dominate our national discourse,” Stockings writes in the introduction to his book Anzac’s Dirty Dozen – 12 Myths of Australian Military History.

From this foundation myth a whole host of historical misunderstandings has been spawned – and these are not harmless, says Stockings, whose earlier book Zombie Myths also sought to dispel some of the more stubborn misconceptions around Anzac. “These misunderstandings shape our picture of ourselves in obscuring and inaccurate ways … they situate our attitudes to the past falsely, distort our reading of the present and our expectations of the future. They are monsters of the mind.”

With the centenary celebrations it stands to get a lot worse, Stockings predicts.

“These myths are aided as never before by blogs, Wikipedia, Anzac supplements in the weekend papers, and bestselling popular histories not always based on archival research.”

Setting the record straight

One of our most cherished and enduring myths is the idea Australia’s military history – and by association our national identity – began at Gallipoli in 1915, despite Australia’s military involvement in conflict extending at least to the 1899 Boer War, if not to colonial times.

Other myths “that will not die” include the boast that the Australian Imperial Force was the only all-volunteer army in WWI (it wasn’t), that its volunteer status made Australian soldiers inherently superior to their conscripted counterparts (there is no evidence their skills were inherent), and that Australian soldiers had higher ethics and morality (they demonstrably didn’t).

Another oft-repeated misconception is that Australia has only ever fought in other people’s wars as a consequence of misplaced loyalties or sentiment – a claim particularly levelled at WWI. While this view has obvious appeal, Stockings says, it fails to stack up. “Australia’s wars have been her own,” he writes. “For better or worse, successive Australian governments have chosen to fight. They have done so in the main for cold, calculating, realpolitik reasons.”

Stanley, one of Australia’s most active military historians and author of a number of books including Lost Boys of Anzac, and Digger Smith and Australia’s Great War, says what’s seductive is the emotional appeal of military history – especially Gallipoli.

“Many Australians believe the landing at Gallipoli was in the wrong place, that the British put us down in the wrong place,” he says. “These beliefs have been around for decades. But if you look at the documents, as historians do, then you will challenge those popular beliefs.”

Stanley, who headed the Australian War Memorial’s Historical Research Section from 1987 to 2007, says it has become clear through generations of scholarship that Britain’s Royal Navy could not have navigated to a more exact point than it did, in the dark, using the navigational aids available a century ago.

“The spot they put ashore was actually a better place because it was less heavily defended,” Stanley says. “Everyone at the time, including all of the officers, agreed it was a reasonable place to land. So you can’t attribute the failure of the operation to that.”

If blame must be apportioned, he says, it might be better to focus on what happened once the troops made it to shore on 25 April 1915. The Australian commanders simply didn’t follow their orders, he says.

“They didn’t push on to the objective, to get to the other side of the peninsula. Instead they told their troops to dig in and that was where the line stopped. The Turks certainly played their part, but so did the Australian commanders. That’s not something most Australians would understand or believe or accept, but it’s true.”

For many Australians, facts like these are at odds with the legend that was born that day. Prior to 1915, Australian identity was largely centred on the myth of the pioneering bushman. Thanks to Gallipoli, that image was replaced by the bronzed warrior – the ultimate fighter and larrikin prepared to die for his mates.

But look more closely and a different picture emerges. It is a picture of ordinary men coping as well as they could in terrifying conditions, says Stanley. He wrote Lost Boys of Anzac, using soldiers’ personal letters and previously unresearched Red Cross records, because he felt a “human gap” existed in the conventional historiography.

“They are very candid records and quite destroy the idea that the landing on Gallipoli was in any way glorious,” he tells Uniken. “I wanted to show that the Anzacs were ordinary young men – if we can understand that we can keep Anzac in perspective and understand Australia’s military history realistically and maturely.”

The ordinariness of the Diggers is reflected in records that show the Australian Imperial Force had a higher rate of desertion than any other force on the Western front and that one in 10 Australian soldiers had some form of venereal disease. The honest accounts of the soldiers’ lives are included in Stanley’s book Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force, which was jointly awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2011.

“That book was made feasible by the release of the AIF’s court martial files,” Stanley says of Bad Characters. Getting the tone right was critical. “I needed to be honest – this story had largely not been told – but also sympathetic to the situation of young men who in many cases suffered death and wounds in circumstances that none of us experienced. I remembered Madame de Stael’s aphorism ‘to know all is to forgive all’, and that became the book’s epigram.”

The reviews of the book demonstrated the validity of this approach. “To my secret disappointment no one burned the book, and it sold reasonably well,” Stanley says.

Despite the warts-and-all stories, one of the things that emerged from the historical accounts was that these ordinary people, when they entered battles and performed their duties in war zones, had a superb reputation.

“New Zealand soldiers were good. Canadians were good. Many Brit divisions were good but Australian divisions were very good and remarkably consistent,” Stanley says. “Were they among the best fighting forces? Everybody at the time seems to agree they were.”

Backlash

Predictably, attempts to set the historical record straight have attracted criticism and angered some.

Former James Cook University academic Dr Mervyn Bendle, writing in the conservative journal Quadrant, distilled the criticism, accusing the UNSW historians and the Lowy Institute’s James Brown, of declaring “a war on the Anzac legend”, an accusation also seized on by The Australian.

According to Bendle, they have embarked on an “elitist project explicitly dedicated to destroying the popular view of these traditions”. Ensconced in elite institutions (located mostly in Canberra, he adds), they exhibit a disdain for ordinary Australians and their beliefs.

“[Australians] should be allowed to honour the centenary without constant sniping from an anti-Anzac elite of obsessive academic leftists and disgruntled ex-officers,” he concludes.

It’s a cheap criticism but not entirely unexpected. After all, no one likes to have closely held beliefs challenged.

Nevertheless, Grey, Stanley and Stockings believe it is essential to continue to make the distinction between historical inquiry and mythology. The military is a reflection of Australian society and an agent of government policy, Grey stresses.

“For the vast majority of Australians their understanding of war and of our defence forces is refracted through their knowledge of the Great War. If that understanding is partial at best, by the time it is applied to today’s defence force – one that bears no relation to the army of 1914 – it is going to be so skewed as to be deeply misleading.”

Stockings agrees. “I have no problem with the Anzac myth and sentimentality around that. As far as national foundation stories go, it’s a reasonably positive one. My problem is when that type of mythology or sentimentality is mistaken as a substitute for history.

“It’s one thing to believe in the idea of an invincible, seven-foot-tall Anzac soldier. It’s another thing to understand these guys as normal people in harrowing circumstances who still achieved amazing things.

“They were human beings with human frailties. That’s the reality; it’s evidence from the source. Their legacy is far greater in truth than it is in myth,” Stockings says.

What, then, of the upcoming centenary commemorations?

“It’s not the worst thing to happen,” Stockings concedes. “I have friends who were wounded in places like Afghanistan. I have no problem with commemorating loss, but I have no interest in carnival-like, almost joyful celebrations.

“A very large proportion of the first Australian Imperial Force was not interested in marches or the like – they just wanted to get on with their lives.”

The first casualty of war is the truth. tbh I was enamored by the universally negative reaction to the over commericalisation of Anzac day evidenced by Woolies "fresh in our memories."

I would like to think that most Australians commemorate Anzac day out of the respect of the sacrifices of so many whilst still acknowledging that war is horrible and should be avoided as much as possible. Thankfully I haven't seen too much glorification, but the media is clearly going to milk the shit out of this and I suspect most Australians will be disgusted by it. Apparently the major networks are scaling back their plans for full scale commercialisation in the wake of the reaction to Woolworths. They just don't get it.

The RSL I go to every year, the guy who plays the bugle ALWAYS gets at least one note wrong.

That is the true travesty of ANZAC day.

The "travesty" is that virtually everything anyone has ever been told about Anzac day is a big fat bunch of bullshit.

from the so called "fact" that "Australians were cannon fodder under hopeless English command",

to the story of Simpson and his donkey being a complete fabrication,

to the "fact" that Australians were "natural" soldiers who punched miles above their weight in combat when actually Australians had the highest rates of desertion and veneral disease amongst all of the Armies there and the least casualties,

to the "fact" that the Australians there were all "country lads", (The majority coming from cities. Australia being the 2nd
most urbanised country in the world in 1915),

to the "fact" Australians were shafted at Suvla bay when nothing of the sort happened,

to the fact "we landed at the wrong beach"

and so on and so on.

The whole mythology has been made up and perpetuated by clowns, probably, to make people feel a little bit better that their son, husband, father or grandfather died in a shitful, meaningless, nothing to do with us war and their lives were likely wasted on nothing but base politics.





Edited by MUNRUBENMUZ: 23/4/2015 04:16:03 PM

http://www.smh.com.au/national/taken-for-a-ride-20130306-2fli4.html

Taken for a ride?
Date March 7, 2013

Mark Baker

A federal government inquiry has found that the legendary heroism of Simpson and his donkey is more myth than reality. Mark Baker reports.


Anzac legend John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his donkey as depicted in the painting by Horace Moore-Jones.
He is the soldier who was the embodiment of all we admire in the Anzac legend: tough, stoic, fearless and selfless. His life exemplified the finest qualities of mateship and heroism. His death enshrined all that was noble in the lost cause that claimed him.

His deeds have inspired, and been celebrated by, generations of young Australians. His image has graced banknotes, coins and postage stamps. His story has been told and retold in books, movies and plays. He has been deified in paintings and sculptures.

John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a knockabout 22-year-old Englishman who enlisted in the First AIF under his middle name to hide the fact that he was a deserter from the merchant navy.

He landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 as a stretcher-bearer with the 3rd Field Ambulance. Just 24 days later he was dead, shot through the heart as he carried a wounded soldier on the back of a donkey he had found wandering at Anzac Cove the day after the landings.

Simpson and his donkey have become the most famous figures of the Gallipoli campaign, in which more than 8000 Australians were killed. Their story has been an integral element of the process by which a crushing military defeat has been transformed in the national consciousness into a foundation stone of identity.

So what are we to do when, after a century of veneration, the legend of Simpson and his donkey is officially punctured and new evidence emerges that the story is largely a myth inflated and exaggerated by the sloppy work of journalists, amateur historians and jingoistic politicians.

A year-long inquiry by a government tribunal last week flatly rejected the long-running populist campaign to have Simpson awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross - the highest award for gallantry in the Commonwealth. But, more significantly, the tribunal found that Simpson's deeds were no more exceptional than those of hundreds of other stretcher bearers working at Gallipoli at the time. The inquiry's report said there were many accounts describing Simpson's conduct. ''The tribunal was, however, unable to find any witness accounts of a specific act of valour … which could single out Simpson's bravery from other stretcher-bearers in the Field Ambulance.''

In the process of what has been the most forensic review of Simpson's war service, the tribunal heard startling evidence that much of the legend of the man with the donkey has been built on false or faulty evidence, richly embellished over the years as history has been turned into hagiography.

In a 60-page private submission, Graham Wilson, an official in the awards branch of the Defence Department who has written extensively about Simpson over many years, says: ''Just about every word that has ever been written or spoken about Simpson, apart from the bare facts of his civilian life and his basic military service, is a lie.''

Wilson demolishes the assertion - so often repeated that it has become widely accepted fact - that Simpson had ''saved the lives'' of at least 300 Diggers. He says it was physically impossible for Simpson to have assisted more than half that number of wounded in the few weeks before his death, and that military records and witness accounts indicate he only helped lightly wounded men whose lives were not in danger.

Wilson also debunks the persistent claim that Simpson repeatedly dashed into no man's land while under Turkish fire to rescue wounded soldiers. He says there is no archival evidence that Simpson or any other stretcher bearers ventured into no man's land to rescue the wounded in the first weeks after the Gallipoli landings as no soldiers were stranded at that time.

But in the biggest challenge to the Simpson legend, Wilson confirms that some witness accounts that have been repeatedly cited as evidence of Simpson's exceptional bravery are fraudulent.

In 1965, Sir Irving Benson published The Man with the Donkey, one of the most popular accounts of the Simpson legend. It appeared on the 50th anniversary of Gallipoli, when the federal government presented every veteran of the campaign with a handsome medallion and lapel badge featuring Simpson and his donkey.

The book includes the astonishing story of Able Seaman William ''Billy'' Lowes of the Royal Naval Division who was badly wounded in the thigh on the night of May 2, 1915 and evacuated, semi-conscious, by a man with a donkey he recognised as Jack Kirkpatrick - a childhood pal from South Shields in northern England.

Benson said Lowes had told him the story - the only direct testimony that Simpson rescued men with life-threatening injuries - during a research trip to England. Lowes had written to Simpson's mother during the war giving the same account.

But, according to Wilson, the service record of TZ/64 Able Seaman W.Lowes of the Royal Naval Division shows that while he served at Gallipoli, he was never wounded. ''Billy Lowes was never wounded and therefore could never have ridden on Simpson's donkey … When Lowes wrote to Simpson's grieving mother and told her about his encounter with her son Jack, his supposed boyhood friend, he lied,'' Wilson says.

Benson's papers also include a letter signed ''No 239 Pte W.R'' from the 3rd Field Ambulance who describes witnessing Simpson's courageous help to the wounded and says: ''Many times we told him to be careful at that certain part of Shrapnel Gully but he was too brave to take any notice.''

Wilson points out that the official service record of 239 Private William Robertson of the 3rd Field Ambulance shows he did not land at Gallipoli until July 22, 1915 - more than two months after Simpson's death.

Another of Benson's sources - and a source cited by subsequent amateur historians - is the so-called ''Gallipoli original'' F.W.Dyke who described a charming incident in which Simpson asked a chaplain to move along the beach while he dealt with his obstinate donkey. Dyke quoted Simpson saying: ''I'll have to speak to him in Hindustani, and Padre, I wouldn't like you to think I was swearing at him.''

As Wilson confirms, only one F.W.Dyke enlisted in the First AIF - 4181 Private Frederick William Dyke of the 9th Battalion. But Dyke did not enlist until August 16, 1915 - three months after Simpson's death - and never served at Gallipoli.

Says Wilson: ''I am not for a moment suggesting that Simpson was any less brave than his fellow stretcher bearers, far from it. What I am saying here, however, is that there is not a single shred of proof anywhere that Simpson was even a scrap braver than his fellow stretcher bearers.''

Historian and journalist Les Carlyon agrees, in somewhat gentler terms, in his submission to the inquiry: ''The myths are stronger, and more numerous, than the facts. Simpson became the legendary figure of Gallipoli, not on the peninsula itself, but in Australian and British newspapers months after his death. He was beatified, then canonised.''

Carlyon says a number of stretcher bearers worked the same route as Simpson, along Shrapnel Gully and into Monash Valley, and did ''much the same work'' as the man with the donkey.

He says Simpson was not particularly well known beyond the area where he worked and few diaries and letters in the Australian War Memorial research centre mention him.

''Simpson, in death, acquired a fame he never had in life. His was an affecting story and the public warmed to it. Simpson became a folk hero and this is never going to change and that is perhaps no bad thing.''

So how did the commendable, if unexceptional, deeds of an ordinary stretcher bearer who conscripted a donkey as his mate become the ultimate exemplar of Australian heroism at Gallipoli?

It started with Australian war correspondent Charles Bean who, in one of his first dispatches from Anzac Cove, sent a gushing account of Simpson and his donkey that described emotions and motives Bean can only have guessed at - a degree of poetic licence that was surprisingly uncharacteristic of his later work as the official war historian.

A few weeks after Simpson's death, Bean wrote: ''You cannot hurry a donkey very much, however close the shells may burst, and he absolutely came to disregard bullets and shrapnel. The man with the donkey became fatalistic - if they were going to hit him, they would whatever his precautions.

''For nearly four weeks he came up and down that valley - through the hottest shrapnel, through the aimed bullets of the snipers and unnamed bullets which came over the ridges. When the shells were so hot that many others thought it wiser to duck for cover as they passed, the man with the donkey calmly went his way as if nothing more serious than a summer shower were happening.''

Many other accounts soon appeared in newspapers around Australia. E.C.Buley's Glorious Deeds of the Australasians in the Great War - which included a breathless account of Simpson's heroism - was adopted as a school text in Victoria in 1916. It was Buley who had first described Simpson repeatedly making ''a lightning dash'' into no man's land to rescue wounded men whom he would carry out on his back, a claim based on anonymous sources.

Yet, as Graham Wilson points out, Buley was a ''scurrilous gutter press journalist'' who had been jailed for theft and fraud in Melbourne before emigrating to England in 1900. And before writing Glorious Deeds, he had penned a propagandist pot-boiler entitled The Real Kaiser - ''replete with images of raped Belgian nuns and French and Belgian babies being tossed on the points of Prussian bayonets''.

The repetition and embellishment of such accounts turned them to gospel truth for later generations of Australians, with the few bold enough to question or challenge the detail risking accusations of heresy. As the legend has grown, so has the clamour to right the presumed injustice that Simpson's gallantry was never rewarded with a Victoria Cross.

That campaign - backed by a clutch of vocal MPs from both sides of politics - was instrumental in Simpson being one of 13 servicemen from the First and Second World Wars and Vietnam whose cases for the award of a retrospective VC were considered by the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal.

But the tribunal found there was no such injustice in the case of Simpson who, on May 14, 1915 - five days before his death - was one of eight members of the 3rd Field Ambulance commended for their work by the officer in charge of medical services at Gallipoli, Colonel Neville Howse, VC.

All of them, including Simpson, were subsequently Mentioned in Dispatches, an award entitling them to wear an oak leaf emblem on their service medals.

The tribunal also curtly rejected long-running arguments that Simpson had been denied a VC due to procedural errors or administrative stonewalling. ''On both process and merits, Simpson's case was properly considered at the time. The process and procedures were … appropriate and fair. Private Simpson was appropriately honoured with an MID. A merits review was unable to sustain an alternative outcome.''

After a century of overwrought adulation, it is perhaps time to do justice to the memory of ''Jack'' Kirkpatrick by setting the record straight on the facts of his service and sacrifice.

He was a brave and tenacious soldier who gave his life doing his duty and supporting his mates - like thousands of others whose deeds were never acknowledged and are now long forgotten.

Mark Baker is editor-at-large.

If you look at the pilgrimage of Aussies to Gallipoli, its become nothing more than a dumping ground for bogans who get pissed and leave their rubbish behind afterwards.

[img]http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/811968-3x2-340x227.jpg/img]

The first step for the ANZACs to make the occasion more sacred is to encourage less drinking by the amount of piss drunk only for Aussies to fight with each other over a game of two up.

I respect the ANZAC tradition, but it seems a very Anglo thing on the day.

Australia's top sniper was Billy Sing, a Chinese Australian, who is barely rated a mention.

I find the myth making quite sad actually.

Take the Simpson and his donkey article. Here is an average man who has been killed while on duty and someone somewhere has though to themselves "You know what, your death wasn't good enough. Giving up your life serving your country during war doesn't cut it so i'm going to make up some facts to make your story seem cooler".

Having your mate tell lies, though still dodgy, i can understand, but to have an author or official somewhere blindly accept this because it's a cool story saddens me.

I find negative articles about veterans painfully pathetic. It's all well and good to disrespect others when you weren't the poor soul being shot at.

So the stories of the WWI recipients of the Victoria Cross are all BS? Get a grip.

You can respect the fact that soldiers fought on behalf of Australia regardless of motives.

So many cynical motherfuckers. 60,000 Aussies shed blood for the country and the only appreciation they can muster is to pick on some legends and have a crack at their fellow Aussies for supporting the day. Even if all the stories were true the iconoclasts would find some angle in which to attack the Anzac tradition, probably because their coward families have no military heritage.

Fucking crap. You disrespect Australia by accepting lies told in their name.

Australian historians (including the Australian War Memorial) agree that the Australia soldier is no better or no worse than any other soldier and yet tonight at the end of that show "Australia: The Story of Us" there is Ben Roberts saying (and I'm paraphrasing) that "when it comes to a fight there's no one that fights harder or with more passion than Australians".

More perpetuating of the mythology of the Australian super soldier.

The question you have to ask is why?

The answer is that no one wants to think that good/bad/indifferent men died for no good reason.

Your logic is that myths are more important than the truth.



No one said that.

But there's a reason they give out medals.

Watch and learn.

http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/lest-we-forget-what/DO1321H001S00

Skip through to the 10th minute and watch a historian tear your logic to pieces.

For who's country exactly?

:roll:

Because you are obviously incapable of rational thought I'll spell it out for you.

Due to a set of convoluted treaties originating some 40 years previous, empirical shitfights between increasingly irrelevant monarchs and an unfortunate incident in Sarejevo Australia invaded Turkey.

So explain to me again which country Australia was fighting for?

Go on....say "OUR FREEDOMS" !

I get it mate. You get your jollies taking a dump on Australian traditions. Good for you. Even if the Anzac legend is mired in mythology it doesn't change the fact Australians fought and died in the Great War and their sacrifices should be remembered and honoured. You're getting caught up in the web of murky details you're missing the big picture which is to remember all Australians who fought and died in the world wars. Maybe suspend your brooding cynicism until the 27th or something, and then you can enlighten us with your superior historical knowledge, but by then no one will give a shit.

Surely you're talking shit?

I'm the least patriotic person around (I actually hate Australia's self obsessed culture), but read that all of that is 'fabricated' is a bit of a kick to teeth to be honest. No-one believes the super soldier shit... That's like football coaches talking about the Aussie 'spirit and fighting attitude', get fucked :lol:

Ben Roberts our latest VC said it on prime time telly tonight.

You may not believe it but plenty do.

Charles Bean, official historian for WW1 wrote plenty of florid praise about the "mighty" Australian soldier.

I'm not arguing that, I'm arguing that the Australian soldiers were fighting for Australia. Not Australia fighting for other countries.

I'm not getting my jollies.

The truth may be uncomfortable but it is the truth.

"Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Swallow it hook, line and sinker if you want and it makes you go to bed feeling all warm and cuddly.

And BTW there is a day for remembering and commemorating Australian soldiers. It's called Remembrance Day.

No soldier says that. All the majority or them ever talk about is how they don't want to let their mates down. The flag or the country never gets a look in.

And I'll blow your puny mind here but the Australians never fought under the Australian Flag in WW1.

That's at all.

EVER.

http://www.ausflag.com.au/fighting_for_the_flag.asp

Obviously you know more than any general in the Australian Army does because they see it as important to tell Australian soldiers that most, if not all, of the Anzac story is just that, a story. (Refer the iview video posted.) Even warning that believing that rubbish (his words) may get you killed.

Far smarter blokes than you think it's important. I'll probably go along with what they reckon ol' Russ instead of you. No offence..

Cheer up mate. Take a walk along the beach or something. Buy a dog perhaps. Or are dogs biological vessels programmed by nature to manipulate their caretakers into giving them food?

Pop some Mentos. You'll feel better.

I'm not sure the historian speaks for the Army and all Australian soldiers. I'm not sure he even takes your position of denigrating the sacrifices the Anzacs made and takes joy in shitting on their memory. There's probably lots of bullshit surrounding Anzac Day but I'm not sure that war historian spends his Anzac Day burning Australian flags.

Babies eyes are large relative to their heads so that they look cuter and therefore it makes it easier to care about them rather than let them get eaten by meandering wildlife.

Evolution BITCHES!

I'm not denigrating them nor taking any joy.

People should know the truth and if they knew the truth maybe they turn their attention to some of the great stories about Australia rather than made up ones.

theres a time and place for this sort of discussion, and the week before and after ANZAC Day isn't it

Its a topic worth discussing, just not right now

fighting for the poms in gallopoli. surely you know that

Bah to that.

It's the perfect time.

Next week it'll be something Tony Abbot ate or drank. These are great discussions.

If anyone here has thought deeply about something written here tonight then it's been a good result.

I for one am grateful that this thread exists. Had always taken that crap for gospel, and now I have to say that I feel very cheated.
I lost family in WW1 and both my grandfathers fought in WW2, but hearing stuff like that makes me so ashamed of my country. Doesn't affect how I view their sacrifice, but it's a bit of an eye opener.

Munrubenmuz. Youre a douche.

Fucking bullshit. The way you talk makes it out as if the average aussie is stupid and believes everything they hear.
War is a fucking brutally disgusting abhorrent thing. Aussies deserted, Whimpered, cried for their mothers and they also fought as hard as they could as well. God knows what any of us would do.
As for the stories... guess what, history if endless with stories that have been exaggerated, manipulated and even completely made up. The average person can investigate the stories and will find the truth. Everyone knows there is no super aussie soldier they were everyday guys doing something they obviously believed in.

The story of the Anzacs is important to alot of people for many different reasons. It is our day to remember the sacrifices of people in our families (i have no relative that fought in any war for australia).

Im by no means patriotic. Nothing worse than a flag waving Bogan but its a sacred day for everyone.