War

War stories are never extrinsic to war. The us-and-them plots, domino theories and governing metaphors, the operational jargon and vast naming schemes, even the post-hoc synopses (we won, we should have won, another win like that and we’re finished): these are not patterns laid over something real; they stream from the enabling code.

Between 1966 and 1971 the Australian Task Force Vietnam administered its own war in Phuoc Tuy, a province south-east of Saigon. The Australians had their own allocation of enemy (D445 local guerrilla battalion and elements of the NVA 5th Division), their own style (US gear and fire-support, Vietnamese patrol tactics) and, of course, their own story. They were the latest Anzacs. Right?

Frank Coaldrake was a significant figure in the history of the Anglican Church in Australia: a founding member of the National Union of Australian University Students; active in the Student Christian Movement; a member of the Bush Brotherhood, which ministered to indigenous Australians in outback Queensland; active in the Brotherhood of St Lawrence in Depression-era Melbourne; President of the Federal Pacifist Council of Australia; a missionary to Japan in the early post-World War II years; Chair of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) from 1956; and elected as Archbishop of Brisbane in 1970, but tragically passing away before effectively taking up this office.

Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.

How different South-East Asia looks in 2001, compared with just four years ago. The economic crisis of 1997 gave the region a terrible shock. There is an entirely new country, Timor Loro Sa’e. Indonesia, that former bastion of stability and economic powerhouse, is now racked with unrest. It may well no longer exist in its present form a few years from now. The Philippines has just ejected another president, although its eternal problem of a landowning elite and an impoverished populace never seems to get addressed. Colonial borders are a problem everywhere in the region, incorporating tribes and peoples that would likely be better off if the whole map were redrawn.

A brief moment of reflection on the quantum of grief in Australia associated with wars of the twentieth century is, to say the least, unsettling. Nearly 100,000 killed in combat, many seriously wounded, many dealing with the physical and mental consequences long after the cessation of hostilities. Lives snatched from the everyday and made into noble sacrifices. The darker dimensions of the Anzac legacy have seeped into the national imagining in recent years, and we are now more open to the poignant melancholy of remembrance, undercutting the bellicose flag-waving of former years. But our sense of the costs of sacrifice has largely been focused on those who served. Joy Damousi in this and her previous book, The Labour of Loss (1999), opens our eyes to those others who have borne the pain of grief most acutely: the wives and families of those killed and those forever transformed by the experience of battle. These illuminating books are a long overdue acknowledgment of the burden of mourning that many Australian families have had to bear.

Breaking The Codes was published last August. The time that has subsequently elapsed makes it possible to comment not only on the book itself but also on some aspects of its reception.

The title is not provocative: The Brisbane Line Controversy, but Paul Burns’s subtitle flags the partisanship that will mark his study. This is a case, he contends, of ‘Political Partisanship versus National Security 1942–45’. His conclusion is unobjectionable: ‘belief in a “Brisbane Line” was our barometer of fear about the vulnerability of our own continent which no Australian Army could negate’. In political demonology, the Brisbane Line signifies the intention of the Menzies–Fadden conservative governments of 1939–41 to abandon all but the south-east corner of Australia to the Japanese, should an invasion come. Burns is keen to absolve Menzies and his colleagues of blame and to find where, and with whom, the notion of the Line originated. In the process he indicts Labor front-bencher Eddie Ward, whose allegations about a Brisbane Line led to a Royal Commission in the election year of 1943.

A nation at war is a less than gripping tide, although it is suggestively ambiguous. Australia was at war in Vietnam for most of the decade covered in Peter Edwards’s book. In senses chiefly, but not wholly, metaphorical, it was also a society ‘at war’, divided over conscription and the commitment of troops to Vietnam. The excellent cover photograph illuminates the latter implication of Edwards’s title, as well as the importance of media coverage of both overseas conflict and domestic protest against it. A newsreel photographer looks back into another camera, and away from the policeman who is struggling to shift an inert demonstrator.

The serious academic study of war has grown considerably in Australia in the last ten to fifteen years, bringing with it an often welcome diversification in focus and a willingness to subject old issues to fresh scrutiny. One sign of the increasing acceptance of war as a subject of serious study in the universities is the increasing number of university historians and other who, with little knowledge of or interest in the mechanics of war, nonetheless extend their work to include consideration of war and the military as these affect their particular areas of interest.