We’ve made heroes of the men of Gallipoli. We have made much of the spirit that symbolises them. They didn’t develop that spirit at Gallipoli.
On the contrary, they carried the ‘Spirit of Australia’ with them to the Anzac Cove because that is who they were and that is who we are.
History has demonstrated and Henry Lawson and Dorothea Mackellar wrote of how this country, with its vastness, furnace-breathed droughts, bush fires and floods, is character building to say the least.
The truth is we are too stubborn for our own good. We know that when we are faced with calamity we need and can rely on each other and we refuse to let any bugger get the best of us.
So let’s not idolise or mythologise these soldiers. They were from and of this place. They are descendants of migrants from all corners of the earth, pioneering men and women who carved out a great nation from a land so harsh and desolate that only the stubborn and brave dared persevere despite the hindrance of flood, drought, war and governmental interference.
The Anzacs would have thought of themselves as ‘just doing a job that had to be done’.
In almost every conflict since, men and women of Australia have gone to war because they felt they were doing the right thing and acting to protect and defend their loved ones and their country.
When you talk with them them you find that they honour their mates dead and alive for being with them in the midst of the most fearful moments of their lives and got each other through the other side.
None of them would consider themselves heroic.
Since the first ‘Gallipoli Day’, which later became ‘Anzac Day’ our list of battle honours has grown.
That is where my mind goes in the silence we share in remembrance.
Our service men and women have served us in Belgium, France, the Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean and the battles of Britain and for Europe.
They have served in south-east Asia and the Pacific, in Timor, in New Guinea at Kokoda, Milne Bay, Buna, and in Borneo. More recently they have fought in Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Australian peace keeping forces have witnessed the Rwanda genocide in Africa. They watched the break-up of Yugoslavia in Europe, where they saw the bloody slaughter of Muslim civilians.
In East Timor they saw, first hand, the devastation and massacres in a tiny nation to whom we owed so much, and failed so miserably.
These service men and women share common experiences that they universally, pray their children will never know.
The horror, the terror, the hurt and the pain, their guilt over the relief that they felt when they survived where their mates did not, these stay with them for as long as they live.
This is the issue I want to address today.
The trench warfare of World War I introduced the terms ‘Bomb Happy’ or ‘Shell Shock’ to our language. The authorities, of course, condemned those who could not endure the fighting; as “lacking moral fibre” and some men were executed on all sides of the conflict for what we now understand is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Our Politicians are all too willing to send us off to fight other people’s wars in the naive hope that they can gain great and powerful friends and protectors.
They cloak themselves in the glory of battle honours hard won but they are most unwilling to accept their long term responsibility for the returned crippled, disfigured, blind and insane.
The Australian Constitution vests ‘command in chief’ of the Commonwealth’s military forces in the Governor- General who exercises this power on advice of the Prime Minister.
Decisions about war and the deployment of Australian forces, have therefore, ultimately become matters solely for the Prime Minister of the day.
The powers of the Prime Minister should be set out in writing instead of being so loose that he/she can apparently do anything they like. Originally (in England) a prime minister was only ‘first among equals’ and his role was restricted to chairing Cabinet meetings in the absence of the King. Successive PMs have grabbed more and more executive power so that now they have puffed themselves up into some kind of presidential head of government.
The constitution explicitly states that executive power is vested in the Queen and exercised through the Governor-General with advice from the Queen’s MINISTERS OF STATE. There is no mention of a Prime Minister.
During the First World War, Australia’s fifth Prime Minister Andrew Fisher pledged to fight to the “last man and the last shilling” (he did not count himself or his in that of course).
Bob Menzies, on September 3rd 1939 said, “Britain has declared war on Germany and, therefore, Australia is at war”. He did this without consulting his Cabinet, who to its credit did not necessarily agree that after the First World War, Australia needed to blindly follow Britain.
John Curtin recalled Australian troops from the European theatre to defend Australia in the Pacific, much against the wishes of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who argued that Australia was expendable and the priority of the entire British Empire should be to defend Britain.
Later, in 1950 and concerned that the UK had decided to send troops to Korea and that an announcement was imminent. The Country Party leader and Deputy PM, Arthur Fadden was determined to get in first and make an immediate announcement that Australia would be committing ground troops (Menzies was sailing to New York from London). The decision was made without consulting Menzies (or the rest of the Cabinet) and broadcast on ABC radio an hour before the British announcement.
Once Menzies was informed, he brazenly told the US Congress that he expected British and New Zealand troops soon to be joining Australians and Americans in fighting the communists in Korea.
Prime Minister John Howard, told cabinet we were off to war, no ‘ifs ’or ‘buts’. The question of who decides for Australia apparently is, by default, left in the hands of one man.
It is a foul, foul obscenity that cynical, manipulative men like Hawke, Howard and Abbott can still today send our young into harm’s way, to address the failures of leadership, policy, diplomacy and the incredible incompetence of the same old men.
Our John Howard’s imposed sedition laws still forbid me from saying what I think .
International law is moving closer and closer to the point where national leaders like Tony Blair are coming under forensic scrutiny and it would certainly be prudent to put our house in order now.
The Question to be asked is. What if in the future, decisions to go to a war are found to be illegal and service men and women, who are in need of compensation or legal protection, are put beyond the protection of the law by an action of one person?
For example, what if we find that a future government or the High Court decides that there are no grounds to continuing to pay compensation to war widows or veterans because the actions of previous Prime Ministers were not constitutional?
It is up to us, the people of Australia, to insist that the parliament (both houses sitting jointly, not just the executive) decides if we go to war and recognises it has the duty to provide ongoing psychological and health support for veterans, their wives and families.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the one thing that applies to all the campaigns Australians have been involved in over the last one hundred years. Unfortunately, it not only harms those directly affected, it harms those they love and reverberates through the generations and the community in general, like ripples on a pond.
My personal experience of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder began as a 10 year old, when my dad came home from the war in 1946. The trauma remains with me to this day.
My father, every night, in his troubled mind, relived his actions as a Sapper during the siege of Tobruk, and as a survivor of the El Alamein defeat of the Afrika Corps. He would cry and scream in his sleep.
Awake he had violent, drunken rages fuelled by morphine and grog that resulted in abuse and brutality being heaped on my mother, my sisters and myself.
From age eleven to fourteen I attempted to safeguard my family against this man who towered over me. A man who, in his distressed, delusional state, believed I was a Nazi soldier that he needed to strike down.
When he would attack my mother, I often knocked him unconscious with blows to his head using beer bottles, half house bricks and lumps of wood. Finally in 1950, my mum fled with my sisters from Sydney to Melbourne to avoid the possibility of me killing my own father.
Eight years later, I actually joined the Army, to learn from my own experience how and why my dad ended up the way he did. He died before I could tell him I was beginning to understand what war had done to him and why we had become a dysfunctional family. I never laid eyes on him or talked to him after we fled to Melbourne.
I tell you this story, to illustrate that these are the experiences that large numbers of ex-service men and women and their wives, husbands and loved ones have all suffered and continue to suffer today.
Day by day all members of these families experience sleep disturbance including nightmares, emotional detachment, ‘flashbacks’, mood swings, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, alcohol and other drug abuse.
Please reflect on the enormous price, physical and mental, that veterans and their families have paid, one way or another, directly or indirectly, down through the generations to defend our country so that we, here and now, can live in peace.
Lest we forget.
