School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemRevisiting Anzac in the Wake of World War Two: Memory and Identity in the Post-War Period, 1945-1960( 2021)This thesis explores how war remembrance—in the form of commemorative observance and the building of memorials—developed in Australia in the period that followed World War Two, from 1945 to 1960. It investigates three key questions. First, what was the nature of the interplay between post-World War Two memorialisation and commemoration and the remembrance traditions that had been established during World War One and the interwar period? Second, how was Australia’s post-World War Two remembrance shaped by the particular social, political, and economic circumstances of the period? And finally, what influence did the process and practice of post-World War Two remembrance have on changing conceptions of the Anzac legend and Australian national identity? In addressing these questions, this study contains five distinct case studies, each of which explores a different aspect of war remembrance between 1945 and 1960. These case studies examine the building of memorials, the efforts of veterans to enact remembrance projects, the observance of Anzac Day, the construction of cemeteries overseas, and interactions between Australian war remembrance and foreign diplomacy. In large part these case studies investigate the Australian state’s efforts to enact control over memorialisation and commemoration. However, the thesis also explores various responses to these projects, analysing how resistance from people outside of government, particularly from veterans of both world wars, was an integral part of how war remembrance in the period took shape. Between 1945 and 1960 there was significant change in the ways that Australians remembered war. During World War One and the interwar period, Australians commemorated the war by building around 1,500 memorials, erected in towns and cities across the country. It was also during World War One that Australians began to observe Anzac Day each year on 25 April. But with the advent of a second global conflict, a new range of perspectives, experiences, and memories were incorporated into this pre-existing culture of war remembrance. Forms of commemoration also reflected the shifting circumstances of Australian society. In the post-World War Two period, communities grew rapidly through migration, industrialisation, and economic expansion. It was also a time in which a new generation of veterans returned and reintegrated into society. Finally, Australia was forging a series of new international partnerships during this period. These social, political and economic changes influenced the way that Australians imagined themselves, their place in the world, and the meaning of the Anzac legend. Post-World War Two remembrance was therefore distinguished by an enthusiasm for utilitarian memorials, by the inclusion of new veterans into the fold of war remembrance, and diplomatically, by the representation of new international relationships with the United States and other Pacific nations through commemoration and memorialisation.
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ItemA Quarrel with the German People? The Totalising Logic of Enmity, Narratives of Enmity and the “German Question” on the Australian Home Front During the Second World War( 2021)A significant aspect of wartime discourse is the construction, definition and redefinition of in-group and out-group identities which justify, rationalise and strengthen the support and unity behind a war effort. The totalising “logic” of contemporary visions of twentieth century peoples’ wars, and the horrific realities of such conflicts, facilitated the systematic demonisation, dehumanisation and condemnation of entire peoples and nations. Recent scholarship, however, has emphasised the need to account for unique contexts and political, cultural and moral choice when analysing enmity during the Second World War. Such factors rendered the totalisation of enmity during the conflict, and its concurrent “communitarisation” of identities, contextually contingent, conditional, and far from inevitable, notwithstanding the irrevocable momentum of the enmity process in totalising peoples’ wars. This thesis explores the logic of totalising enmity during the Second World War. It analyses Australian public discourse and contemporary framing of the German enemy between 1939 and 1945. It focuses on the dynamic of this logic by exploring the structures, forms and contested nature of various “narratives of enmity” relating to the “German Question” in the Australian context. Reduced to its core, the German Question summarises the polarising debates on the Allied home fronts as to whether the German nation and people, through their national character, history, culture and aims, expressed bellicose intent and complicity with the objectives, ideology and horrors of National Socialism and the Nazi regime. These questions, this thesis posits, heavily influenced wartime enmification and problematised Australian conceptions of the enemy, despite the unanimity of Australian support for a perceived just, defensive, “good” war against Nazism. Qualitative analysis, largely focusing on Australian print media – editorials, foreign correspondence cables, reports, the correspondence columns, published speeches, cartoons and images across a variety of newspapers, magazines, journals – and other published materials, reveals several ambiguous, contested and often contradictory enmity narratives relating to the German people and nation. This thesis demonstrates Australia’s complex response to the totalising logic of enmity. This thesis proposes that totalising narratives of enmity encompassing the German people were far more pronounced in Australian wartime discourse than previously accounted for in the historiography, and grew exponentially as the war progressed. Widely held distinctions between the German people and Nazism professed in the first months of the war evaporated as the war progressed in light of changing wartime contexts. This process, however, remained contested between 1939 and 1945, even though there was a widespread receptiveness to, and expression of, totalising enmity narratives by the end of the conflict. This thesis investigates the intersecting relationship between three major themes in Australian war discourse – totalising enmity, narratives of enmity and the German Question – to further historical understanding of Australian experiences and attitudes under the pressures of a totalising peoples’ war and situate these findings within the broader historiography of such conflicts.