School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe Great War in the Australian imagination since 1915( 2012)This thesis traces the history of the Great War in the Australian imagination from 1915 until 2000. It examines chronologically the principal ways that the war has been interpreted in various mediums, including official history, academic history, memoir, fiction, film, family history, popular history and political discourse. The history of representation of the Great War reveals how preconceptions regarding such concepts as race, empire, nation, class, gender and family identity have shaped the forms that the event has taken in the Australian imagination. Initial representations of the war were shaped overwhelmingly by the ideology of martial nationalism, which held that war was the ultimate test of manhood and nationhood. It was Australians’ overwhelming relief that they had passed the test of nationhood that provided the impetus for the Anzac legend. During the 1930s, returned soldiers produced works of fiction and memoir, the most popular of which presented the war as a tragic, often horrific event. The suffering was redeemed by the humour and camaraderie of the men and the pride they took in their cause. After the Second World War adherents to Marxist philosophy challenged the Anzac legend, not least through their attack on the imperial link that was an integral component of Australian remembrance of the Great War. Radical historians failed in their attempt to merge the categories of class and nation in the form of the Australian working-class male, in part because of the willingness of the digger to fight for the imperial cause. While they were inclined to celebrate the deeds of the Anzacs, radical nationalists perceived the Great War as the wrecker of Australia’s pre-1914 programme of social reform. Memory of the Great War has always been a barometer of Australia’s relationship with Great Britain. As Britain withdrew from the imperial embrace in the 1960s, Australians sought new means of conceiving their national identity. After a period of decline, caused in part by the leaching of opposition to the Vietnam War into commemoration of the Great War, the Anzac legend was revived in the 1980s. Its new incarnation was excised of imperial, racial and martial rhetoric and fitted with a much-enhanced strain of anti-British sentiment.The rise of memory studies and the burgeoning interest in trauma gave impetus to psychological interpretations of the Great War during the 1980s and 1990s, which sought to understand the event in a context outside nationalism. While cultural historians have developed the historiography of grief and trauma, the majority of family historians conceive their forebears’ war experience within the narrative of Australian nationhood. The strengthening nexus between politics and Great War commemoration since 1990 has consolidated the Anzac legend at the centre of Australian national iconography. Today, as throughout most of the ninety eight years since it began, memory of the Great War in Australia remains within the thrall of nationalism.