The date marks marks the anniversary of the landing of New Zealand and Australian soldiers – the Anzacs – on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. The aim was to capture the Dardanelles, the gateway to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. At the end of the campaign, thousands of young men - and double the number of Turkish men than those from France and the British Empire - had died and Gallipoli was still held by its Turkish defenders. For the would-be invaders, it was a military defeat.
For the European powers, the Gallopli campaign was a sideshow in the main theatre of the First World War: the battles of Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele on the Western Front pushed the number of casualties into the millions. But for Australians and New Zealanders, the campaign played a role in further developing a nascent sense of national identity apart from the British Empire. Today, Anzac Day commemorates all those who have died in battle and honours returned servicemen and women.
But as these servicemen and women die off, something intriguing is happening. Anzac Day is growing in popularity, rather than lessening. During the 1960s and 1970s, Anzac Day was a focus of anti-war protests. From the 1980s, however, it underwent a renaissance, and the number of younger people attending dawn services and commemorative parades has been steadily increasing:
Now, people remark on the number of young New Zealanders in the crowds. Some wear the medals their grandparents and great-grandparents won during war. There are now no veterans left from Gallipoli or the First World War. Bright Williams, who passed away in 2003, was the last, and the number of Second World War veterans becomes fewer each year. (' Modern Anzac Day', NZHistoryNet)
Furthermore, for New Zealanders on their OE, attending the Anzac Day dawn service on the Gallipoli peninsula has been elevated to the same kind of pantheon as running with the bulls in Pamplona or getting hammered at the Munich Oktoberfest: it is a rite of passage. On Anzac Day, the quiet peninsula is swamped by young Australians and New Zealanders, some of whose behaviour has been censured as disrespectful and reflecting poorly on their Anzac forebears. A 2012 Australian study found that Anzac Day was primarily seen as 'a party for drunk yobbos'. The dawn service at Anzac Cove is now so popular that attendance is decided by a ballot, and politicians and Prime Ministers also attend.
I have been part of this renaissance: as a young girl in the 1980s, I marched in the Anzac Day parade through the main straight of town, my Brownie pack trailing behind the returned servicemen and women, the cubs and the scouts, and just about everyone else; and as a expatriate living in the UK in 2000, I visited the Gallipoli peninsula (which is now a historical national park) - not on Anzac Day - while travelling in Turkey.
The latter visit was an interesting experience: on arrival at Istanbul, the customs officer took one look at my passport and said 'Ah Anzac' with a big smile. The Turkish guide on the peninsula itself was very positive about the relationship between Turkey, Australia and New Zealand, telling us that since our countries' sons were buried there, they had become part of Turkey. And we learned that, no less than for Australia and New Zealand, Turkish involvement in the First World War had played a crucial role in national politics and national identity. The old Ottoman Empire was more or less overthrown by the end of the war, and the modern Republic of Turkey was established in 1922.
The group that I travelled to the peninsula with were emotionally primed for the visit, not by a documentary, nor old soldiers telling their stories, nor footage from the First World War, but by the mostly-accurate-but-fictional Mel Gibson film Gallipoli (1981). The people sitting behind me were transfixed, occasionally breaking off to murmur 'such a waste', and 'so awful', and 'bloody Poms'. Of such fictions are national myths made.
In the 1990s I had a disagreement with my flatmate about the significance of Anzac Day. She was disgusted by the militarist and patriarchal values in which it seemed to glory. With two younger brothers, both in their late teens at the time, I found the idea of thousands of young men being slaughtered deeply upsetting, and thought the injunction 'lest we forget' was a profound statement against war transmitted from those who had directly experienced its horrors. Now, I think we were both partially right, but that there are still other elements in play.
In New Zealand, for example, I think it says something quite significant about cultural unease with New Zealand's actual national origins and originary warfare in the nineteenth century - a story of promises made, agreements broken, invasion and resistance, dispossession and alienation - that means modern New Zealanders seek, whether consciously or not, to make Anzac Day into a national day. Every year, it seems, the call to make Anzac Day our official national day, rather than Waitangi Day (which commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi) is repeated (see, for example, this opinion piece published just hours ago). The same rhetoric is repeated: Anzac Day is unifying, Waitangi day divisive.
The call to unity is a call to subscribe to a totalising national narrative. The 2012 Australian study noted above sounded a note of caution: such unifying calls are also potentially divisive, particularly as the multicultural composition of the nation increases. What of those 'new' New Zealanders and Australians who don't share this history? What is their place in this national narrative or does this dominant national narrative say that there is no place here for them?
Blood sacrifice on distant battlefields that resulted in heroic defeat is a much more romantic national narrative than that offered by Waitangi Day or by increased multiculturalism. And, as my flatmate pointed out, it is overwhelmingly male. I don't wish to sound trite, or to disrespect the young men who lost their lives during this campaign, but what of the women on the home-front - those who raised children or worked for the war effort? What of the working-class men in essential services (during the second world war both of my grandfathers fell into this category - my maternal grandfather, who was a wireless operator, went to Japan as part of the J-Force after the war as part of the occupying force engaged in re-construction rather than destruction)? What of the conscientious objectors who suffered for their pacifist beliefs on the Western Front? In We Will Not Cease, pacifist Archibald Baxter describes how he was subject to 'crucifixion' in No-Man's land for his beliefs. Essentially, that is, left to die by his 'own side'. A new drama - Field Punishment No 1 (2014) - released this year also tells the story of Baxter and 13 other 'conchies'.
Which brings me to why I am writing about Anzac Day on a blog about feminism and motherhood. In Of Women Born, poet Adrienne Rich wrote about the historical role of mothers to 'raise sons for the army' ... and to raise daughters to continue to produce sons for the army. Women were expected to bring forth life, to continue the species, in order to offer it up for sacrifice at the appropriate moment. To do so, until relatively recently, they risked their health and potentially even their own deaths. In modern terms, 'raising sons for the army' means raising patriarchs, boys who will become men who reproduce - no pun intended - the norms and values of patriarchal culture. Patriarchal culture valorises and commemorates the sacrifice of young men in wars waged by men, and only intermittently recognises the price paid by women or those men who do not conform to patriarchal values.
In every town and city in New Zealand, there are phallic memorials in the centre of town to the young men who died during the First World War. These cenotaphs are the focus of Anzac Day commemorations and the maintenance of the nationalist narratives of blood sacrifice.
But where, I wonder, are the memorials to the women who 'raised sons for the army'? The women who died in childbirth, of puerperal fever or birth complications? The women who died from botched back-street abortions?
And, in this moment, when childbirth is much less risky and abortion is, for now, legal and safe, what about the women who suffer and die at the hands of men - usually men they know - every year? Imagine what might happen if we also said 'lest we forget', heard the melancholy strains of the Last Post, and listened to the words of 'For the Fallen" for them:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Next year, it will be 100 years since 1915. 100 years is an arbitrary marker but, no doubt, the centennial commemorations will dwarf even those that have taken place in the past few decades. Will we, I wonder, find room in that spectacle of national commemoration to remember what else patriarchal and nationalist violence entails?
