Gallipoli: Remembrance As Forgetting - John Bevan-Smith

Abstract : This article complicates the notion that the consciousness of nationhood was born in Australasia on April 25, 1915. It argues that in remembering the violence of the Gallipoli invasion, Australia and New Zealand forget the violence by which their indigenous populations were dispossessed of approximately eight million square kilometres. This has left a moral deficit that must be exchanged for an equivalent benefit if these settler societies are to maintain belief in their legitimacy and civilizing destinies. The discourse of history facilitates this notional exchange while also promoting nationhood as a collective and progressive good.

Cause for pause

With the centenary of the landing of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli almost upon us, we in Australasia might pause to ask how it is that an early twentieth-century military misadventure, ill-conceived on the other side of the world, large of scale and resulting in an obscene loss of life, is widely accepted as having given birth to the consciousness of nationhood in Australia and New Zealand. For on the 25th of April this year both countries will be awash with faux religious rhetoric and imagery purporting to explain this extraordinary cultural phenomenon. But what will the numerous nation-wide performances of remembrance really be about?

Before we can answer that question we need to consider what history is, because it is history as we know it, that nineteenth-century literary invention that helped explain the transition from sacred to secular power in nineteenth-century Europe, that both articulates and promulgates the notion of nationhood, carrying within its metanarrative the myths of national exceptionalism that nourish and sustain the citizenry of Western nation-states, and in the case of Australia and New Zealand and other settler societies, their settler populations.

What is history?

History is a portmanteau term commonly taken to mean the study of the past. However, two fatal problems accompany this definition: the past is inexistent and the now, Aristotle’s ‘nun’, is irreducible. That is, we cannot access the past in any empirical sense and the now has no inherent meaning and only attains to such through a differing and deferring from the moment meaning is added to it. As a synonym for the past, history is also problematic in that this usage is viciously circular: for history to exist, histories must be presupposed, and for histories to exist, history must be presupposed as the sum of all histories. Hence, history is not the study of the past per se but ‘a perspective apparatus, a form of realism, a temporal counterpart of pictorial realism’, as Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has it, that facilitates a type of conversation called a discourse about a notional object we call the past.

More particularly, history is a self-referential discourse that arises out of the lack of coincidence between an event and our understanding of that event, which in turn is a consequence of the event’s inability to be present to itself. Furthermore, in the metaphorical rupturing of the now that enables this attribution of meaning, the historian not only imagines different ways of understanding an event but also finds opportunity to create new meaning about it, which, because that meaning is presented in narrative form, appears to be at one with the event itself. Thus, all historical meaning is created post hoc in the face of what is known and/or believed, and with a not uncommon result: ‘the confusion of consecution and consequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by’, or to put it more prosaically, with effect being taken as the origin of the cause. That is, historians—‘and we are all historians’ to some extent—while purporting to access an observable past somewhere beyond their discourse, reference only the discourse itself, of which they are a part and participants in creating. In short, there are no grounds on which the being of history can be established. Thus, despite its once scientific pretensions, history remains a connotative not a denotative discourse, a contingent conversation built on acts of faith and belief in improbable ideas such as linear (historical) time. We know the latter is the case because the time series, past-present-future, on which we rely to position our existential selves, is itself a contradiction and therefore an illusion. As John McTaggart explains: ‘all the three incompatible terms are predicable of each event, which is obviously inconsistent with their being incompatible, and inconsistent with their producing change.’ In other words, history is ‘achieved not found’; it has no existence in and of itself and must be written into existence. Hence we can say, after Jacques Derrida, ‘that there is nothing outside the text.’

We should also take into account that in the act of remembering history also forgets. That is, because history is discursively constructed it is necessarily selective; based on ‘a relentless making of choices’, it ‘organises amnesia’ even as it ascribes and re-ascribes meaning to ‘the no-longer now.’

Finally, we might note, after Roland Barthes, that history is ‘a fake performative discourse’ in the sense that it is constructed in the manner of a realistic novel and not in relation to an extradiscursive reality. Thus, ‘the apparent constative (descriptive)’ on which it relies ‘is merely the signifier of the speech-act’—the historian’s enunciative act of writing history—‘as the act of authority.’ That is why, in order to make the past seem present and to disguise the propositional or belief-based nature of the meaning attributed to it, history must suppose a complex double operation that sees the referent (the past, more broadly, an event, more narrowly) detached from the discourse thereby giving the appearance that the referent controls the discourse. The second phase sees the merging of signifier and referent to the exclusion of the signified, creating what Barthes calls ‘the referential illusion’, the result of which, ‘the reality effect’, provides an appearance of reality within the historiographical text.

The consequences of the above are necessarily far-reaching: because the past is an abstraction that cannot be visited and studied in the manner of a laboratory experiment, historians are able to write almost anything about it they wish provided that what they write is commonsensical and grammatical, meets the expectations of the group or society for which they are writing, and conforms to the protocols of the historiographical community to which they belong. Michel de Certeau characterizes this relationship as follows: ‘History would fall to ruins without the key to the vault of its entire architecture: that is, without the connection between the act that it promotes and the society it reflects’. Hence, one of the principal functions of national histories is to facilitate entry into the national culture by providing for the child as well as the immigrant an apprenticeship in proper names, heroes, places and dates.

Gallipoli as ‘fabulous retroactivity’

Gallipoli, arguably the central name and story of Australasian settler culture, exemplifies this pedagogical process and the manner in which historical meaning is created through ‘a sort of fabulous retroactivity.’ Below is a selection of belief-based propositions that have been advanced in support of the Anzac tradition, beginning with what could count as the tradition’s founding statement.

Charles Bean (Australian historian, 1924): ‘In no unreal sense it was on the 25th of April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born.’

John Masefield (English poet and writer, 1926): ‘the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and the Royal Naval Division . . . were . . . the finest body of young men ever brought together in modern times. For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen; they walked and looked like the kings in old poems, and reminded me of the line in Shakespeare: “Baited like eagles having lately bathed.”’

Keith Sinclair (New Zealand historian, 1959): ‘W. P. Morrell . . . concluded that New Zealand announced its manhood to the world on the bloody slopes of Gallipoli in 1915. . . . After the war there was a very general agreement among New Zealanders that they were a new nation.’

Russell Ward (Australian historian, 1966): ‘Since the slaughter at Gallipoli the anniversary of the Landing has become not only a day of Australian mourning and remembrance for the war dead, but also the Australian national day above all others.’

Christopher Pugsley (New Zealand historian, 1984): ‘Gallipoli was a major step in our recognition of ourselves as New Zealanders. It is a process that continues today. . . . Every man who served on Gallipoli endured, and established a reputation and a sense of identity that is important to us today. Through it we can establish who we are.’

Chris Mclean and Jock Phillips (New Zealand historians, 1990): ‘During the war itself many New Zealanders came to believe that the performance of the soldiers on foreign fields had established the country’s “manhood” in the eyes of the world. The war was considered the birth of national identity. At welcome-home receptions, and in Anzac Day speeches, the Kiwi soldier was praised for his physique, his courage, his ingenuity – and the plaudits of foreign observers were endlessly rehearsed.’

Michael King (New Zealand writer, 2003): ‘The cost to New Zealand was 2721 dead and 4752 wounded out of a total of 8450 men – a staggering 88 per cent casualty rate. The remains of those killed were left there; many were never found. . . . The necessary myth quickly evolved in both countries that they had “come of age” on the slopes of Gallipoli.’

Margaret Wilson (New Zealand politician, 2006): ‘The cost to New Zealand was 2721 dead and 4752 wounded out of a total of 8450 men – a staggering 88 per cent. The remains of those killed were left here; two-thirds were either never found or remained unidentified. . . . Gallipoli had a seminal effect on the development of our character as a people. It is impossible for any one of us to view these events without pride and painful sympathy.’

Kevin Rudd (Australian Prime Minister, 2008): ‘That we are a good people who want for the good of others. That we stand for a deep sense of liberty for which our forebears fought and which should never be surrendered – whatever the cost. That we are a people who by instinct cannot stand idly by and be indifferent to the suffering of others. A people with a sense of a fair go for all carved deep into our national soul. A people also alert to the needs of our friends and allies. These are the values which summoned forth the sons and daughters of ANZAC over the last 100 years from our smallest towns, our greatest cities and our most remote outback. It is this, I believe, that touches us afresh each ANZAC morning – the fresh voices of those who have indeed not grown old because their voices still whisper to us amid the quiet reflections of this sombre day . . . [c]ausing us to remember afresh . . . that . . . freedom is always purchased by sacrifice. Lest we forget.’

Garth George (New Zealand journalist, 2009): ‘[Young New Zealanders travel to Gallipoli because] [t]hey want to connect with their nation’s history, some with their family history too. They are not taken in by the milk-sop pacifism preached in their schoolrooms and lecture halls, or by the politically correct gaps in the laundered history they have been taught. They want to know where they come from because that helps them know where they are going.’

Jonathan Coleman (New Zealand politician, 2013): ‘Gallipoli was the furnace in which was forged the modern collective New Zealand identity.’

New Zealand Government website (2015): ‘the Gallipoli campaign showcased attitudes and attributes – bravery, tenacity, practicality, ingenuity, loyalty to King and comrades – that helped New Zealand define itself as a nation . . . . After Gallipoli, New Zealand had a greater confidence in its distinct identity, and a greater pride in the international contribution it could make.’

ANZAC Day as theatre

If we take as our example New Zealand’s 2009 Anzac Day commemorations, we can see how meaning is carefully crafted around this day for nationalistic purposes.

On April 25, 2009, the then Governor-General, Sir Anand Satyanand, was in Turkey attending the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Anzac Cove where he told the 7500 gathered, many of whom were young Australians and New Zealanders, that ‘New Zealanders lost their innocence at Gallipoli but from that loss of innocence, and from deep grief at the loss of so much life, New Zealanders also came to see their nation as more than just an adjunct to Great Britain’. Later in the day he delivered his Chunuk Bair Address. ‘This battle’, he said, ‘has a wider significance for New Zealand and New Zealanders. Like the splitting of the atom and the conquering of Mt Everest, the story of Chunuk Bair has become a legendary part of what it means to be a New Zealander.’ Although Satyanand used the referent Chunuk Bair to anchor his speech, his speech was really about national exceptionalism and identity and notions of cultural difference on which they are based. We know this because two of the notable events he referenced—Ernest Rutherford’s splitting of the atom (1917) and Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay’s ascent of Everest (1953)—occurred after the battle for Chunuk Bair in August 1915. While these events have no logical connection outside of Satyanand’s speech, their connection appears indissoluble because the speech was made while Satyanand was standing on the spot, a literal merging of signifier and referent at the moment he ascribed meaning to the nominal designator, Chunuk Bair. Even the sense of his statement is dependent not on the existence of the place, Chunuk Bair, but on Chunuk Bair having been invested with a particular meaning in keeping with the Anzac tradition. In other words, Satyanand was not extracting meaning from the geographical location Chunuk Bair but applying meaning to it that supports the originary fiction of New Zealand’s national birth. Having described the assault on this now famous high point on the Sari Bair range, Satyanand produced his counterfactual moment by claiming that ‘the failure to press home’ the advantage of the winning of Chunuk Bair by the New Zealanders ‘doomed the Gallipoli campaign and led eventually to the evacuation of Allied troops just before Christmas 1915.’ This was the cue for his ‘incorporated fiction’: ‘“In his play, ‘Once on Chunuk Bair’, New Zealand playwright Maurice Shadbolt recounted the taking of the summit. He imagined the following response by New Zealand’s Colonel to a British general’s enquiry about progress: “Tell him some scarecrows called Wellington Infantry have taken Chunuk Bair. No. Tell him, God dammit, that New Zealand has taken Chunuk Bair. Tell him New Zealand is holding Chunuk Bair.”’ No mention here of the fictional Colonel Connolly’s preceding words: ‘Say we seem to have the war by the throat. History by the balls.’

On the same day in Wellington, in the Cenotaph Chapel of the National War Memorial, Dame Sian Elias, Administrator of the Government of New Zealand and Chief Justice, gave ‘the oral history reading’ based on part of Shadbolt’s 1982 interview of Gallipoli survivor Dan Curham: ‘By some miracle I was the only one who got anywhere near the summit of Chunuk Bair. I never saw or heard of my companions again. I don’t even know what happened to their bodies. I didn’t weep physically. I was not a weeping chap. I wept in my heart. I have felt their loss very deeply for the rest of my life. Talking about Gallipoli, especially about Chunuk Bair, brings sorrow to my heart, even as I talk to you now.’

Elias’s rendition of sacrifice and stoicism was followed by the Anzac Day address given by the Prime Minister, John Key, which included the familiar retrospective claim that ‘both New Zealand and Australia emerged with a new sense of certainty about our place in the world’ from Gallipoli. As he explained: ‘Anzac Day unites generations of Kiwis and binds us to our history as a country. Today we mark our proud history of sacrifice and heroism, we remember those men and women who put their lives on the line for our country, and who fought for a better world. . . . Let us celebrate the Anzac spirit we continue to share with our Australian neighbours. For we who were brothers in arms are brothers still. Finally today let us salute the Anzacs who fought for us . . . to preserve our freedom and humanitarian ideals . . . who rose to heights of sacrifice and, in doing so, preserved the living standards of all of us, for generations to come. They fought for each and every one of us, they fought for New Zealand, and they fought for our world.’

Key’s address not only exemplifies what is known as presentism—explaining the past from a present-day perspective often to the benefit of one’s own beliefs—it also violates the chronology on which it is based. That is, those participating in the Gallipoli campaign could not have been fighting for our freedom, because we did not then exist, they had no concept of our living standards, and, in any event, were, more likely than not, having an overseas adventure on the politics of empire, fighting not for their country, let alone our then nonexistent world, but for the British Empire.

We can see here history’s fake performativity in full flight, in the correspondence between the rhetoric of government ‘actors’ and the work of historians and writers on which that rhetoric is based: part of a deceased author’s research material for his 1982 play was rendered as a ‘sacred’ reading in Wellington on the same day an extract from the author’s play was read at Gallipoli, thereby turning absence into presence by collapsing linear time on which their narratives are based: 2009 ‘performances’ by government officials, an interview from 1982, and a military invasion in 1915. Importantly, the extract from Shadbolt’s play was immediately preceded by the ostensive phrase, ‘once on Chunuk Bair’, the ‘cognitive pretensions’ of which were realised by it being read at the geographical location to which it refers. In this way the imaginative referent of the phrase and play (‘Chunuk Bair’) attains an apparent tangibility and its attendant meaning is transformed into an apparent reality cognised through Satyanand’s performance. Hence, the meaning attributed to the nominal designator ‘Chunuk Bair’ in Wellington was carried to the place Chunuk Bair by the country’s nominal head where it was delivered to an expectant audience for whom, in that physical setting, it made sense, despite that nominal designator no doubt having quite different meaning for those who live nearby. Thus because of the rigidity of the nominal designator, which permits the attachment of different meaning in different discourses to its unchanging name, and through the conflation of the ostensive and the cognitive in the narrative, the notional attained the status of the tangible thereby enabling the transformation of wholesale death into the imaginary moment of collective birth.

Gallipoli as a totalising fiction

What, then, lies behind this massive investment in Gallipoli, and how is it able to succeed as a foundational discourse for two settler societies when it is little more than a totalising fiction?

First, we should remember that history is a paradox—it is both absent and exceeded by that which is to come—and ‘that there is nothing outside the text.’ In other words, the meaning now associated with Gallipoli is not extracted from the Gallipoli Peninsula but is added to it by way of an elaborate rhetorical and metaphorical operation that retroactively supports the idea of Gallipoli as a sacred site of national nativity for Australians and New Zealanders. However, there is, of course, nothing real about any of this except for the choreographed spectacle of government representatives circulating a nationalistic theology, ‘designed’, as George Orwell has it, ‘to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ For while we might set foot on the Gallipoli Peninsula, even stumble across the detritus of war—bullets, shrapnel, human remains—we cannot best the Grandfather Paradox and travel back in time. Indeed, all that remains visible at Gallipoli are the names of the missing and the dead, names that have no meaning, only a function to which can be attached ‘an indefinite number of unpredictable descriptions.’ Thus, what takes place every Anzac Day is a quasi-religious act of pure theatre, an elaborately staged production that doubles as a demonstration of state power and a means of forgetting.

Remembrance as forgetting

What, then, might be the reasons for attaching fabulistic meaning to ‘Gallipoli’ and how might we account for its astonishing success as arguably the ‘central marker’ of Australasian nationhood? While we can only speculate and, like the historian, not escape history’s impossible possibility, what we can say from the historiographical making over of settler sites and the way linguistic systems function is that all settler societies construct their originary selves in opposition to the indigenous societies they displace. That is why the discourse of Gallipoli performs such a vital double function for the Australasian settler: it not only acts as ‘the moment of foundation’, the moment of ‘real’ national birth that supersedes the ‘unreal’ originary myths and traditions of tāngata whenua, the indigenous people the settlers have displaced, but also acts as ‘the instituting moment’ that introduces and extols ‘superior’ settler values and related cultural benefits, which in turn legitimate the prior settler acts of expropriation. Hence the extraordinary investment by Australia and New Zealand in the Anzac legend may be considered more or less commensurate with the level of violence and deception visited on their indigenous populations and the need to forget the associated acts of dispossession and displacement. That is, because these settler societies cannot squarely face what they have done, because they cannot square their need to belong with the cost of that belonging, they facilitate in the annual re-staging of this spectacle of remembrance, a spectacular forgetting that situates their crimes, at least temporarily, beyond their collective consciences. Remembering is forgetting on Anzac Day. As Ani Mikaere has it in regard to non-indigenous New Zealanders: ‘One barely has to scratch the Pākehā surface to find the guilt lying immediately beneath, guilt which manifests itself as denial, self-justification, defensiveness and, incredibly enough, a sense of victimhood. . . . The cost to Pākehā . . . is a burden of shame that they cannot escape.’ Across the Tasman, Marilyn Lake considers that Anzac ‘serve[s] as White Australia’s creation myth’, and Martin Ball that it ‘is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent.’ In other words, the expropriation of both geographical domains has left a moral deficit of such monumental proportions that it must be exchanged for an equivalent benefit if these two settler societies are to maintain belief in their legitimacy and civilizing destinies.

To elaborate, the Anzac narrative of national nativity both remembers the imperial violence of the Gallipoli invasion and forgets the imperial violence used to dispossess the Australian and New Zealand indigenous populations of their land, along with the ignoble qualities associated with the brutality, murder, greed, ruthlessness and deception that accompanied those acts of dispossession but for which these societies would rather not be known or remembered. In this regard, Anzac Day, as a day of national theatre, works a treat. With its eerie mix of faux religion and military rehearsal, it acts out a notional exchange in which the colossal loss of life that occurred during the Gallipoli campaign (and the wider cataclysms of World Wars I and II) is exchanged for the perceived benefits of nationhood and the masculinist values that underwrite it: courage, duty, endurance, honour, mateship, self-sacrifice.

Congenital to this process of constructing settler nation-states as a collective and progressive good is the savage/civilized binary opposition that establishes the settler story as hegemonic and the settler as the civilizer of the savage. It also underwrites settler ideology and acts as settlerism’s mythopoeic trope. As a result, settler violence is valorized in settler historiography as epic, sacred and rules-based while indigenous violence is demonised as hypersavage, barely human and irrational. That is, by denigrating indigenous violence while valorizing settler violence, the settler society is able to retroactively legitimate its tenuous moral and legal claim to the expropriated geography it now controls by promoting the positive values it has attached to the heroic and epic deeds of its progenitors. Thus, what is on display every Anzac Day is not so much a collective mourning as an economy of desire expressed in quasi-religious terms backed by the power of the state. In this ‘civil religion’, which supplants but not entirely replaces the de facto state religion, Anglicanism, the proper names ‘Australia’ and ‘New Zealand’ substitute for the Supreme Being, ‘God.’ In our 2009 example, Elias’s oral history substitutes for the Gospel reading as does Key’s address for the sermon, each of which tells of past heroic actions and articulates a creed based on the values believed to be inherent in those deeds. Dedicated spaces, such as the altar in the World War I Sanctuary at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Hall of Memories that serves as the commemorative chapel of the National War Memorial in Wellington, substitute for the sacred space of churches. Golgotha, the Biblical site of crucifixion, becomes, for New Zealanders, Chunuk Bair, the elevated site of death. The Bible’s Good Samaritan is, for New Zealanders, the medic Richard Henderson and his donkey Roly, and for Australians, Simpson and his donkey Murphy. Christ, who died ‘for everyone’, becomes the Unknown Warrior who ‘represents all New Zealanders who were never to return from war’, and ‘the life everlasting’, from the Apostles’ Creed, becomes ‘Lest we forget,’ Anzac Day’s appeal for collective rememoration, which facilitates the ‘secular transformation of fatality into continuity.’

Although much contested during its early development, ‘Gallipoli’ is now a sign that functions synecdochally: it stands for all our war dead; it stands for us. In this theatre of desire there is no excluded middle: you are either a believer or you are not, either for us or against us, either an apostle or an apostate. With an extensive record of photographs, official despatches, personal letters and journals ‘to signify that the event represented has really taken place’, it not only meets the criteria for being a proper object of historical study, it also satisfies modernity’s taste for the verisimilar and for sacralized relics of war.

What, then, is at stake that might account for this massive investment in commemorating a military defeat and the wholesale loss of life that accompanied it? Quite simply, cultural, economic and political control of the expropriated landmass of Australasia. For there is little dispute that by invoking the legal doctrine of terra nullius Britain stole the entire island continent of Australia from its indigenous inhabitants, some 250 tribes who had lived there for an estimated 40,000 years. And if the Waitangi Tribunal’s ‘essential conclusion’ of its Stage 1 Report into the Te Paparahi o Te Raki (Northland) Inquiry is accepted, that ‘the rangatira who signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi in February 1840 did not cede sovereignty to the British Crown’, then the archipelago of Aotearoa may also be categorized as a stolen geography.

It thus seems fitting in this neoliberal age of unfettered capitalism that the Perth Mint of Australia, in association with the Australian War Memorial, released two new coins, the ‘Making of a Nation’ silver coin and the ‘Baptism of Fire’ gold coin in the same month the Reserve Bank of New Zealand unveiled its first coloured coin to likewise ‘honour the spirit of Anzac’ and to commemorate the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli, ‘the beginning of a bloody campaign which was to change the face of this country forever’, as Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae put it at the New Zealand coin’s unveiling. For these newly minted coins not only extol the Australasian settler values ‘discovered’ at Gallipoli—‘It is a tangible way to pay tribute to the comradeship, steadfastness and promise which exists to this day between our two nations’, Mateparae noted—they also add another layer of meaning to the national nativity myth, signifying that the economic benefits accruing from the theft of Australasia’s eight million square kilometres have been exchanged, in a kind of retroactive futures trade, for the incalculable moral deficit of that theft.

Such are the lengths to which settlerism will go to forget ‘the criminality of the act of foundation of what became known as “Australia”’, and the betrayal and brutality by which the equivalent of Maori sovereignty, ‘te tino rangatiratanga’, guaranteed by Article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, was effectively extinguished in New Zealand.

Author profile and declaration:

John Bevan-Smith holds a PhD in English and a First Class Honours degree in History from the University of Auckland. He worked for the Waitangi Tribunal on its Stage 1 Report of Te Paparahi o Te Raki (Northland) Inquiry.

This article is a revised and abridged version of the article ‘Lest we remember/“Lest we forget”: Gallipoli as exculpatory memory’ originally published in the Journal of New Zealand Studies, NS18 (2014), 2-22.

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