Joan Beaumont

Contested trans-national heritage: the demolition of Changi prison, Singapore.

In 2004 the Singaporean government demolished Changi prison in the face of considerable opposition from the Australian government because of the prison’s association with the captivity of prisoners of war during the Second World War. In opposing the demolition the Australian government was constrained by the fact that it was challenging the accepted right of a sovereign government to manage national heritage sites; by the lack of a shared history surrounding Changi; and the absence of any agreed international regimes governing ‘transnational heritage’. The case of Changi also demonstrates the manner in which heritage significance can be displaced from ‘real’ to ‘un‐real’ (or substitute) sites, that lack the authenticity attributed to them but are invested with a significant emotional power at the level of individual memory and popular culture. In this, Changi is, finally, a testimony to the way in which the construction of memory is a dynamic interactive process between individuals, organisational stakeholders and the state.

The diplomacy of extra-territorial heritage: the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea

Abstract The global interest in the memory of war in recent decades has brought challenges in managing and conserving extra-territorial war heritage: that is, sites of memory that have a greater significance for people outside the sovereign territory in which the sites physically reside. This article considers this issue in relation to the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, a site of central importance in the Australian national memory of war. The successful conservation of the Track throws new light on the practice of heritage diplomacy. Working mostly outside the more commonly explored arena of global heritage governance, the Australian and New Guinean governments employed bilateral diplomacy to manage domestic stakeholder expectations, and thereby identified a convergence of interests and mutual gain by linking heritage protection with local development needs. They have also encouraged the construction of a narrative of the events of World War II that in some respects might be described as shared. Thus, heritage diplomacy is underpinned by a transnational consensus about the heritage’s significance, at least at the government level, which arguably divests the Kokoda Track of its exclusively ‘extra-territorial’ quality.

The politics of memory: Commemorating the centenary of the First World War

This symposium examines how the centenary of the First World War has been marked in five countries: Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Given their distinctive national historical experiences and political cultures, the metanarratives of the war in these countries differ; as does the relationship between the state and sub-state actors in memory making. However, in each case the commemorations of the war have been shaped by a negotiation between the state and other agents of memory at the sub-state level. National memory has also been consciously projected into international relations, through carefully orchestrated anniversary ceremonies and performative memorial diplomacy. But, despite these transnational commemorative practices, the centenary of the war remains predominantly framed within local and national imaginings. 这次研讨会议论了一战百年在奥地利、法国、德国、英国、美国这五个国家是如何庆祝的。考虑到各国不同的历史经验以及政治文化，这些国家关于一战的元叙事各不相同，国家与次国家主体关系的记忆也是如此。不过，每个国家的战争纪念，都是国家与其他次国家层面主体协商的结果。通过精心策划的纪念仪式日以及表演性纪念外交，国家记忆被有意识地投射到了国际关系之中。除了这些跨国纪念活动，一战的记忆主要是在地方以及国家的想象框架内形成的。

Australia's Global Memory Footprint: Memorial Building on the Western Front, 1916–2015

Shortly after the First World War ended, Australian authorities erected memorials in France and Belgium in memory of the Australian Imperial Force. Decades later, during the so-called ‘second generation of memory’, Australians again engaged in planting memorials on sites of memory on the Western Front. This article compares the two periods of memorial building, contrasting the sites that were chosen for commemoration and examining what these suggest about the difference between past and contemporary modes of remembering the First World War. It highlights the growing importance, in extra-territorial commemoration, of memorial diplomacy and the development of a shared memory between Australians and the communities which host their memorials.

'Unitedly we have fought': imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort

This article examines what motivated the dominions to make such a sustained and costly contribution to the war effort of the British empire during the First World War. With particular reference to Australia, it argues that imperial loyalty, now discounted as anachronistic, was the dominant ideology. Not only did it inspire the initial generous support for the British war effort but, for many Australians, the empires cause invested with meaning the battle losses which were proportionately the highest of any dominion army. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 is now celebrated as having given birth to the foundational narrative of the young Australian nation, but at the time this embryonic nationalism too was positioned within the framework of imperial loyalty. Moreover, with the conservative forces dominating federal politics after the divisive debates about conscription in 1916 and 1917, �loyalty� became entrenched as the litmus test of political reliability. Hence, while Australias Prime Minister W. M. (Billy) Hughes aggressively asserted the rights of the dominions to a new and more independent role within the imperial relationship in 1918 and 1919, this agenda for change found little support at home. It is therefore ahistorical to see the First World War as the birth of Australian nationalism in the sense that the term is understood today. Rather, imperial loyalty was affirmed by the British victory as the dominant ideology and proved able to accommodate the growing sense of national singularity that the war fuelled.

Commemoration in Australia: A memory orgy?

Australias commemorations of the First World War have thus far been massive at both the government and local levels, reflecting and affirming the dominance of the memory of war and the ANZAC ‘legend’ in the national political culture. The commemorations in 2014–15 triggered some debate about the commodification of the memory of war and the possibility of commemoration fatigue, but the centenary of the key commemorative event, the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April, attracted large crowds and blanket media attention. Whether Australians of culturally diverse backgrounds engaged with these centenary commemorations, and how strongly they identify with the ANZAC legend as the dominant narrative of Australian nationalism, however, remains unclear. 澳大利亚对一战的纪念迄今在政府和地方层面都大张旗鼓，反映并肯定了在国家政治文化中战争记忆以及澳洲军团传说的岿然不移。2014-15年的纪念活动引发了关于战争记忆被商品化以及纪念疲劳症的辩论，虽然一些关键事件如4-25的加里波利登陆的百年纪念日吸引了大众以及媒体的关注。不过文化背景各色各样的澳大利亚人士是否都参与了这些百年庆典，他们在多大程度上将澳洲军团的传说当做澳大利亚民族主义的主流叙事，这些都不清楚。

Remembering Australia's First World War

The war memory ‘boom’ is a tsunami that shows no signs of receding. Several more years of First World War remembrance stretch ahead, with countless anniversaries to be commemorated in national and international settings. For historians, this explosion of memory studies has presented both opportunities and challenges: opportunities, because historical research now incorporates subjects which were previously the domain of other disciplines, including the rituals of grief and remembrance, identity politics and the impact of trauma on individuals and communities; challenges, because the study of the past is no longer the exclusive domain of academic historians. It never was, of course, but the recent privileging of memories—multiple, subjective and contested, as they inevitably are—has bestowed a new authority on popular historians and individual memoirists. Much as the empirically-minded historian might lament the inaccuracy, subjectivity and chauvinism of popular histories of war, these tend to dominate sales of war history, illustrating that ‘memory’ has perhaps a greater hold than ‘history’ at the public level. We are too immersed in the memory boom to fully understand its causes and dynamics. However, the historian can play the role of recording and critiquing the processes by which the memory of war has become embedded in new rituals and processes of commemoration. Memory, after all, is not an agent in its own right. As Jay Winter reminds us: ‘If the term “collective memory’ has any meaning at all, it is the process through which different collectives, from groups of two to groups in their thousands, engage in acts of remembrance together’. This special issue of Australian Historical Studies, which marks the centenary of the Gallipoli landing of 25 April 1915, has two purposes: the first is to trace some of the processes whereby Australians have constructed and shaped the memory of the First World War during the past one hundred years. The second is to present new research on the imperial context of Australia’s involvement in the First World War and the cultural imaginings that arose from it. The Anzac legend, myth or spirit, as it is variously called, has already attracted considerable attention from historians, but we know comparatively little about the processes by which it gained such a hold in the Australian imagination and political culture. We lack a sophisticated understanding of how the memory of the First World War has changed over the past one hundred years and the role that individuals and organisations have played in effecting this

Remembering the Heroes of Australia’s Wars: From Heroic to Post-Heroic Memory

The memory of the 102,000 Australians who died in wars over the past century plays a central role in Australia’s national political culture.1 This is something of a paradox. Throughout the twentieth century Australians rejected military conscription as a mandated obligation of citizenship except for limited purposes of home defence. Australia has had no tradition of maintaining a large army in peacetime, creating its first recognizably professional army only in 1947. Since then the permanent army has always been small, never exceeding 33,000 troops, while in 2010 the permanent personnel of the combined Australian army, navy and air force totalled only 57,600.2 Despite this, a mythologized narrative about Australian soldiers and the distinctive characteristics they supposedly display in battle has progressively assumed a central place in the construction of national identity. It continues to inform national political discourse to this day.

Soldier settlement revisited

The soldier settlement scheme after World War I has long been recognised as a disastrous episode in Australian policy making. The plan to settle returned soldiers on the land was conceived early in the war as a means of reassuring volunteers for the Australian Imperial Force that they would be provided for after their military service. State and federal governments, who had long dreamt of closely settling Australia with yeoman farmers, also saw in soldier settlement a means of dispersing potentially restive veterans outside the major cities. In the event, the scheme had a high failure rate. The land that was allocated to many men was too small or arid to be economic, commodity prices fell dramatically in the late 1920s and settlers’ debts mounted to the point where many men had no choice but to walk off the land. (Contrary to popular perceptions, the soldier settlers were not given the land but accrued interest-bearing loans.) Moreover, many of the men who took up land bore wartime injuries and illnesses, which made it impossible for them to perform the manual labour that farming required. All of this became evident in the interwar years – several inquiries and royal commissions were held at state and federal level – and has been confirmed in recent decades by a number of historians and graduate students, among them Marilyn Lake, Kent Fedorowich, Clem Lloyd and Jacqui Rees. Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer’s The Last Battle therefore enters a relatively well-worked field. What makes it distinctive, and often emotionally powerful, is that it is not so much a study of the administration of the soldier settlement scheme but a social, cultural and environmental history. Using many thousands of files from New South Wales, and the recently released correspondence between the Department of Repatriation and returned soldiers, the book allows ‘the voices of the returned men and their families to take centre stage of the narrative’ (12). The Last Battle begins by studying the relationship between the soldier settlers and the inspectors who reported on their progress, or lack thereof. The authors accept the established view that the authorities managing the scheme were prone to divide the settlers into the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, but they take issue with Lake’s Foucauldian argument that the role of the inspectors was to discipline and punish. Although the relationship between settler and inspector was all too often adversarial, the authors conclude that inspectors often felt a deep sense of obligation to the veterans under their charge; they

The Europeans in Australia, Volume 3: Nation

ment with current Australian historiography on the cultural and political meanings of ‘White Australia’, not just pertaining to settler-Indigenous relations, but also encompassing the nation’s interactions with the Asian region. Attewell’s next two chapters turn to women’s reproductive autonomy, and what this meant in relation to the decline in fertility in Western nations and the crisis that this engendered. In limiting their capacity to have children, women were seen to be unwilling to support national imperatives, and ideas of citizenship were entwined with those of sexual and reproductive behaviours. Attewell returns to literary sources, examining works by Jean Rhys and F. Tennyson Jesse, bothwritten in the 1930s, on the politics of creole identity and colonialism as these intersect with abortion. This is followed by an analysis of a novel and unpublished prose poem by the New Zealand writer Robin Hyde which predict a future where the colonial nation, and its children, are doomed. The final chapter is more expansive, and moves to the second half of the twentieth century and the era of decolonisation. Through sources spanning John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the disassociation of Britain from its former Empire and the resulting crises of national identity are outlined. Attewell is an earnest and thoughtful scholar, but her book is one that will frustrate some historians through its magpie-like readings of diverse texts, and its often circuitous argument and dense prose. She concludes by reflecting on how her study has disrupted the ‘smooth narratives of settlement, repatriation, and homemaking that undergird post-imperial conceptions of British and settler identity’ (214).