Dr. Toby Martin, who teaches Global Orientations: Australian Society and Culture at NYU Sydney, describes his approach to the course and a recent trip with students to an Anzac day dawn service. Professor Martin is musician and historian and he’ll be teaching a second course – The Australian Experience (within the Social & Cultural Analysis program) – starting next semester. His first monograph, Yodelling Boundary Riders: Country Music in Australia, will be published next year. Here is his description:
In the Global Orientations course at Sydney we seek to understand what has contributed to that thorny issue of ‘Australian identity.’ We look at how Australians have imagined themselves as somehow ‘distinctive’, and we look at how the Australian experience differs from the American experience. We also equip students with a framework that will enrich their time in Sydney: helping them to become ‘critical tourists.’ Where possible, we connect these course aims with field trips, both as part of Global Orientations and as part of the Student Life program.
With this in mind, a trip to the Anzac Day dawn service was a marvellous opportunity to bring to life some of the things we had been discussing in the classroom and to take part in one of the big events of the Australian calendar. Anzac Day commemorates the landing at the Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey, by Australian and New Zealand troops on 25th April 1915 as part of the First World War. It was a failure. It resulted in huge losses of life and limb, and the eventual retreat by the Anzac troops. It was the first time Australia had gone to war as a nation and although losing the battle (which was the fault of the British anyway, or so the legend goes) had acquitted themselves nobly. Australians seem to love stories about noble, or even ignoble, losers, and this story is the mother of them all.
Anzac Day seems to have risen in significance and popularity in the last few decades. Some 10,000 Australians now make the pilgrimage to Gallipoli every year, while at home, thousands attend dawn services and the subsequent veterans parade. Television specials extol the wonders of the ‘Anzac Spirit’ while an eager audience gobble it up along with their ‘Anzac Biscuits’. For many people the ‘Anzac Spirit’ is otherwise known as ‘mateship’, an Australian word for a very universal ideal: loyalty to one’s friends in times of struggle. This idea of ‘mateship’ is seen to be embodied in the deeds of Anzac. Anzac Day has its critics. Notable historians have recently argued that it glorifies death and militarism, or encourages ugly displays of jingoistic nationalism. The problem is not that war is remembered, but that Anzac Day seems to make war the central experience of the nation, and in doing so excludes many other experiences and people from ‘nation-building’. It’s a thorny issue indeed.
With all this cultural significance in the backs of their minds, several students braved the early (4am!) hour and came with me to Sydney’s dawn service. There we stood with 5,000 other early risers in the narrow canyon of a city street while hymns were sung, excerpts from soldiers’ diaries were read and the ‘Last Post’ was played. Crowds are usually loud. This one was eerily silent. Onlookers ranged from WWII veterans, to Afghanistan War veterans, to those in boyscout uniforms. There were young people who had perhaps not gone to bed yet, to families with small children, not long roused from sleep. For a country not known for its religiosity, the service had an unusually spiritual feeling. This feeling has led some commentators to call Anzac a ‘secular religion.’
However, Australians’ sense of occasion always has its limits. When the national anthem Advance Australia Fair was played, barely anyone sung along. Very few Australians even know the words and it is not uncommon to see Australian Olympians on the gold medal dais stumbling over the lyrics. I asked the students what they thought would be different about such an event in America. Certainly everyone would be singing the national anthem, one of them noted.