Today I’ve been thinking about an experience I had in primary school. I was part of the Senior Choir, composed of students in grades 3-6, led by a well-known vocal teacher. It was different to my experiences of singing in church which was pretty informal, in its classical bent. And we did festivals and concerts.
One of the events we sang at was an ANZAC Day memorial on a Sunday at a local RSL. I guess we sang other songs too but the one I definitely remember is the hymn Abide With Me, popular at funerals too.
But now I look back at it and I wonder.
I wonder why my family was one of the few Asian families there (possibly the only). I wonder why that experience sticks out against other ANZAC Day memorials I’ve attended. I wonder why I felt more at home with the ceremony of it than with any personal connection to the ANZAC myth.
Though to be fair, I have a pretty intimate understanding of sacrifice as it is.
The thing is, ANZAC Day is part of war commemoration. And war commemoration is part of national myth-making and identity formation.
ANZAC Day is a day of remembrance for the WW1 soldiers who landed on 25 April 1915 on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey for an ill-fated campaign.
But I’ve never felt comfortable with that colonial history, culture, or identity. Because my family doesn’t come from that. My family is part of the South East Asian diaspora, and our heritage is particularly unique as I’ve spoken about in other blogposts.
So every time I hear the bugle, or the Words of Remembrance in the ode, while I appreciate the sentiment, I also wonder why it seems a little shallow.
Now, I realise why. ANZAC Day traditions are effortless to uphold. And so is the glorification of war and the culture of violence that is imperative to the very beginning of the Australian colony. There is no Australian Federation, or Australian colony, without war and violence and death and genocide and slavery.
You might think that ANZAC Day memorials are themselves sombre occasions, and perhaps you might be right. Yet even if it’s not an occasion for celebration, it is an occasion that has a certain mystical exaltation to it. And I also wonder why we are so keen to see our Defence Force as heroes, and why we don’t consider their complex origins in social class, family, education, etc.
They’re not really my heroes, for starters. Firstly, because of my identity as an Asian Australian, which means I have a complicated understanding of how colonists took over my parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ countries, either killing them or traumatising them, and then leaving. And now my parents have moved to a colony because it is still better to live in a colony that has betrayed itself for other imperial, war-mongering countries, than to live in a place that is our true home, because those Asian countries are now economically and socially bereft.
But also, and secondly, because I simply do not believe in the morals of war. The reality is, war is not heroic, ever, for anyone. And we can blame the people at the top, the military leaders and politicians who actually sign the papers to go to war. But we the people also uphold the idea of war too.
Later, when I was in my final years of high school, I applied to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to visit Gallipoli and see where Australian soldiers had fought. I wasn’t successful. I wonder if my cultural and ethnic identity has to do with it. Just recently, a report came out saying that Chinese Australians are particularly underrepresented in Australia’s public service, considering China is a huge focus of our diplomacy right now (unsurprisingly).
And I wonder if I had gone, before I studied history at university and learnt to really question the narratives we’re taught in the public education system, what I would have come back with. Would I have understood earlier that war is not moral? Would I have understood earlier that Australia is built on lies? Would I have understood earlier that the Australian identity is not really my identity? I probably won’t ever get the answers to those questions.
But this I do know:
Wars are built on lies, and if we’re happy with that narrative and don’t confront the truth, let alone teach the truth of our histories in school classrooms, wars will keep going. There will be no peace, no matter the olive branch we try to extend.