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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

While Australians grapple with shocking allegations of war crimes levelled against our armed forces, the federal government is moving ahead with a massive redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial.

The memorial, which has already been criticised for failing to grapple with the more controversial aspects of our war history, is now being seen by some as propaganda.

Today, historian and writer for The Monthly, Mark McKenna, on why Australia valorises its military history and what our preoccupation with war tells us about who we are.

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RUBY:

Mark, the Australian Government has approved a spend of $500 million on the Australian War Memorial. That is a fairly large amount of money. Can you tell me what exactly it's being spent on?

MARK:

You're right, yeah. Look, it's a lot of money, much more money than any other national institution has been given for a long time.

The funding is actually for a major redevelopment of the Australian War Memorial, and you can actually see a digital walk through the whole redevelopment on their Youtube channel.

And the video is set to a kind of bizarre, orchestral rendition of Waltzing Matilda. Quite something.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“These plans are imaginative and they are creative and appropriate for the Memorial's purpose and place in Australia…”

MARK:

And that involves new extensions, renovations...

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“There will be paintings and dioramas, there will be planes - more planes, in fact.”

MARK:

A new southern entrance, for example. A whole new ANZAC hall. It also involves the extension of the parade ground.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“The funding will allow the Memorial to implement these plans and not be limited in its ambition.”

MARK:

And it includes what we might say could argue are political operations such as Operation Sovereign Borders.

Archival Tape --

“That’s what’s housed within its stone and brass walls. It is sacred to us all. It transcends politics, it transcends all of us.”

MARK:

And the whole idea behind it really is to allow the memorial to exhibit more of its collection, including to allow the memorial to tell the story of recent and current military conflicts.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“The Australian War Memorial, the soul of a nation.”

RUBY:

Right, and this redevelopment, can you tell me about the criticism of it?

MARK:

So a lot of the proposals behind this redevelopment are being criticised by former directors like Brendan Kelson of the War Memorial,

Archival Tape -- Brendan Kelson:

“The thing that worried me, particularly, was that at the outset, I and others warned the Australian War Memorial that current and recent operations were dangerous territory for a national museum.”

MARK:

You know, they can be seen to be, I guess, turning what is a memorial and museum into a kind of, pushing it more into an entertainment function, and people have described it as a possible theme park.

Archival Tape -- Brendan Kelson:

“And without sound evidential support, it would be exposed to serious criticism, appearing as an extension of defence public relations and even an agent of propaganda.”

RUBY:

Ok, let’s talk a bit more about the criticism that has been levelled at the war memorial, because even before this redevelopment, it’s been a controversial site. So, why is that?

MARK:

So the memorial is being criticised for a lot of different reasons. It’s been increasingly subjected to criticism because it doesn't acknowledge the loss of life in Australia's frontier wars.

So it's been criticised for that reason and it's been criticised also because it hasn't paid enough attention to the history of anti-war movements in Australia, peace movements. And as Peter Stanley, the former principal historian of the War Memorial, has argued, nor has it paid sufficient attention to the questionable and sometimes criminal behaviour of Australian soldiers when they've been serving overseas. The bad characters, if you like. We always focus on the heroic aspects, the sacrificial aspects but we don’t focus on a lot of things or anything, for that matter, that might question that narrative.

RUBY:

And in more recent times, the biggest challenge to that narrative has been the Brereton report into alleged war crimes by SAS soldiers in Afghanistan. Can you tell me about that report, and the way it’s been received?

MARK:

That report was very extensive, it involved over four hundred interviews with 400 witnesses.

Archival Tape -- Angus Campbell:

“It’s alleged that some patrols took the law into their own hands. Rules were broken, stories concocted, lies told and prisoners killed.”

MARK:

Sometimes for new recruits or new people on the field, they were asked to shoot prisoners to blood themselves so that they could have their first kill.

Archival Tape -- Angus Campbell

“It starts with culture.The report finds that some Special Air Service Regiment commanders in Australia fostered within the SAS what Justice Brereton terms a self-centred "warrior culture”.”

MARK:

Its findings were shocking. So shocking, in fact, that the prime minister at one point came out and warned, actually had a press conference and warned Australians that they'd better be prepared.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“This will be difficult and hard news for Australians, I can assure you.”

MARK:

From the very beginning, there was an attempt by the government, I think the Morrison government, quite clearly, to control as much as it could to soften the blow of this report.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Our responsibility is to ensure now that we deal with this in a way that accords with our Australian standards of justice, that uphold our values and standards and the respect we have for our defence forces that they have earned, and deserve.”

MARK:

It's a real test for the memorial. It's a test for the memorial's commitment to truth telling about war. I mean, the fact that we were so shocked, that that tells us a lot, I think. It tells us that we’re shocked in part because we've been so accustomed to seeing our soldiers’ exploits in war as simply a reflection of our values and serving our interests.

I mean, Brendan Nelson for example, the former director, told a parliamentary enquiry in 2018 that the war memorial was in fact about love, but it wasn't about war. So, I mean, this is representing history for our own emotional needs.

And so, in a sense, we're shocked about those findings because we've forgotten to pay more attention and devote more attention and more of our efforts to recognising the horror of war and its brutalising nature.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Mark, we’re talking about the Australian War Memorial and the way it has traditionally portrayed our military history, and also the history that it might prefer to skate over. And on that, I’d like to know more about the Australian War Memorial’s response to the Brereton report. What was said in the wake of its release?

MARK:

So it's clear that the response of the War Memorial and its new director, Matt Anderson. Anderson came out quite early on after the release of the Brereton report and said that he wanted the memorial to be, quote, a place of truth, a place of truth. But immediately there was a backlash.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“I do not understand how on one lens we can say, ‘please do not let the actions of the few tar the many,’ but at the same time tar the many with the same brush.”

MARK:

You had veterans who were very upset, thinking that these people who'd been accused of war crimes were quote “bad apples”. So therefore, we should not get carried away here. And Jacqui Lambie stood up for those veterans.

Archival Tape -- Jacqui Lambie:

“It really annoys me when the top of the brass continually throw diggers under the bus and quite frankly I’ve had enough.”

MARK:

Talkback radio hosts were worried that the reputation of the defence forces would be severely damaged by this report if the memorial focussed too much on the negative stories.

Archival Tape -- Talkback Radio Host:

“Seriously, is this bloke running the Australian War Memorial or propaganda for the enemy?

What in the world are you talking about Matt? Nobody, and I mean nobody, would expect this to be acknowledged at the war memorial.”

MARK:

So, yeah, the strength of the backlash is indicative of really the power of these lobby groups and the determination of the government to always be seen to be on the side of the defence forces, which is not surprising.

RUBY:

Right, and Mark, why do you think that the government wants to be on the side of the defence force, why do you think we have such a focus on the battles that we've won, and also the battles that we've lost, in this country?

MARK:

Yeah, that's a big question. It's a good question. Well, where to start? Why?

I mean, historically, I think it's possible to argue that Australia was for a long time so uncomfortable, deeply uncomfortable about its convict origins. That Gallipoli especially, but World War I generally, was an opportunity to prove itself in that kind of manly way, to literally blood itself as a nation.

So it was an erasure, if you like, of that convict stain. So for most of the 20th century, Australia's performance on the battlefield is seen as a way of proving itself.

The funding of one, the sheer amount of dollars that have been put by governments over the last 15 years especially. We've got the $500 million for the redevelopment of the war memorial. Then we have hundreds of millions of dollars for the centenary of World War I.

So you put all of that together and you can see that the state has sanctioned and funded Military history above and beyond other national narratives. There's no question of that. The related question, of course, is what's the effect of that?

At a time when all of our other National Archives, our other institutions have actually had funding cuts in some cases, had to cut services, lost jobs. So it's about the weighting. The choice, the deliberate choice to focus on this history, and to make it the emotional centre of the country, it is a deliberate policy and it's very well funded.

RUBY:

And this choice to make the war memorial the emotional centre of the country and to really valorise our war history and also perhaps at the same time ignore the more problematic aspects of it, do you see this continuing?

MARK:

Yeah, I mean, I think that already we can see a clear intention on the government’s part, that the findings from this enquiry will be acknowledged, but they won't unsettle, they certainly won't dominate. They won't get in the way of that larger sanitised history of war.

The decision that the government has made in putting half a billion dollars into the war memorial is itself a kind of reflection of this conscious attempt to make that institution the emotional centre of the nation. I think that is, that's the bigger question here. That's the bigger thing that's going on that we need to debate and think about and reflect on.

And we need to seriously ask ourselves, at what cost is this happening? What kind of histories are we sidelining? What other histories are we not focussing sufficiently on in order to always play our own values and our own identity now through the stories of war. I think that that is the bigger question.

RUBY:

Mark, thank you so much for your time today.

MARK:

Oh, that’s a pleasure.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

The Chinese government has formally arrested Australian journalist Cheng Lei, after initially detaining her six months ago.

Cheng Lei was charged with "illegally supplying state secrets overseas". She was working as an anchor for the English-language state-run news service CGTN.

And more than 100 people have been placed into quarantine after the second hotel quarantine worker in Melbourne tested positive to Covid-19 in less than a week.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

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