Charles Bean and the birth of a nation
A Nation Born on Paper.
The anniversary of the Anzacs brings to mind how Charles Bean helped shape and define this chosen crucible for Australian national identity.
Bean was the official press representative with the Australian Expeditionary Force at Gallipoli. His early disapproving reports of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers’ conduct while in Cairo made him unpopular both with the men and back at home. These young men had answered the call to war expecting to go on an adventure. They were full of excitement at the prospect of imminent act of heroism, bolstered by the imperial condescension towards foreigners. Many frankly had never been overseas before.
And here was this dry, school-masterish man lecturing them in print on their drunken behaviour.
But when the slaughter began at Gallipoli and the bodies started mounting up on the beach, the shrub and even the water around that narrow disputed stretch of land, it was Bean who immortalised these young dead men.
When politicians trots out values such as mateship and larrikinism, citing the experiences of the Anzacs, it is Bean’s efforts to define that history of the war that informs the rhetoric. But the superficial sloganeering that dominates the Anzacs as a celebration, not a commemoration for the dead, fails to grasp the double-meaning of Bean’s thinking. He said “… the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born” at Gallipoli.
However, this was not the nationalism of the victorious hero, but the working soldier outmanoeuvred by the defending Turkish forces and left to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of an Empire on the other side of the globe.
Far from an anti-authoritarian — that prudish streak never left Bean — his writing celebrating the ordinary Australians instead of the commanders.
That brought with it some troubling notes though as regards the man himself. In Peter Rees’s Bearing Witness, Bean is quoted as follows:
“The N.Z. man is a good trustworthy soldier; but has not the devil of the Australians in him; the wild, pastoral independent life of Australia, it if makes rather wild men, makes superb soldiers.”
He also suggested Kiwis fought with ‘gloves on’, having a broad sympathy with the Turk. That the war caused him to finally question the supremacy of the British Empire is something that is frequently noted. Perhaps though his shared blood debt paid with Australians on the front line — Bean famously refused to leave Gallipoli despite a bullet wound — now bound him to the Australian soldiery in a similarly uncritical fashion.
These contradictions continue to inform the troubled Australian perspective on its own national identity — with Bean a symbol of the complex blend of nation, race and Empire.
