Anzac remembered : selected writings of K.S. Inglis

162 Pages·1998·0.481 MB·English

by  Kenneth Stanley Inglis, John F. Lack, Jay Murray Winter

ANZAC Remembered
Preface
When, in 1996, Ken Inglis was presented with an Honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of
Melbourne, the Department of History determined also to honour him as a most distinguished colleague. A
former history student and a graduate of Melbourne, Ken Inglis throughout his life as teacher, scholar,
writer and commentator, practised the injunction of his teacher, Max Crawford, to bring humane
scholarship to bear on public life. As early as 1961 he displayed great courage in publicising a case —
The Stuart Case — where justice seemed to have miscarried. On a host of other issues and subjects, from
the role of the media to the patterns of Australian language, he was to provide incisive commentary and
leadership.
Before he went to the ANU in 1963, Ken Inglis was opening new fields of historical inquiry, and writing
classics in those fields. Hospital and Community: a history of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1958) was a
distinguished ‘first’. His early work on the social history of religion in modern Britain — published as
Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (1963) — was extended to the study of religious
faith in Australia. His book The Australian Colonists (1974) explored the ceremonies and rituals whereby
the European settlers of this country constructed a public culture. A pioneer in studies of the media, he
wrote This is the ABC (1983), a history of the Australian Broadcasting Commission from 1932 to 1983.
These exceptional books were created during years when he undertook substantial university leadership
positions. As Vice Chancellor from 1972 to 1975, Ken Inglis guided the University of Papua and New
Guinea at a crucial stage when that country was preparing for independence from Australia. His prior
engagement there as professor of history gave him understanding of the colonial experience; his
sympathy for indigenous aspirations enabled him to provide intellectual leadership. From 1977, as
professor of history at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Australian National University, he provided
national leadership for the Australian history profession, notably through the Australian Dictionary of
Biography, and the bicentennial Australians: A Historical Library.
From the mid 1960s Ken Inglis had also opened to his fellow Australians the nature of Anzac Day as a
subject for fresh appreciation. For this writer, a young schoolteacher in training, it was extraordinarily
exciting on the eve of Anzac Day 1964 to find in the feature pages of the Melbourne Age Ken Inglis’
moving observations on the national day which had been part of my life for as long as I could remember,
but whose meaning had been assumed and therefore only imperfectly articulated and understood. In the
following year - the 50th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing - there came his seminal article ‘The Anzac
Tradition’, an essay rejected, astonishingly, by Historical Studies, but published in Meanjin.
No one who had ever listened to an Anzac broadcast for schools, participated in a schoolyard Anzac Day
ceremony, or been chosen to make the pilgrimage to the Shrine, resplendent in father’s medals and
ribbons, often to the discomfort of friends who had none to display, could fail to be excited by Ken Inglis’s
probing of the meaning and significance of Anzac Day in those articles of 1964-65, and to be moved by his
reflective introduction to The Australian Colonists in 1974:
The Anzac ceremonies at North Preston State School, No. 1494 of the Victoria Education Department, are
among my most vivid memories of the years from 1935, when I was five, to 1939. Later the Anzac tradition
began to attract me as a theme to write about, a base from which to explore areas of Australian history not
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yet well mapped. The more I learned of it and thought about it, the more its ceremonies, monuments and
rhetoric seemed to me to constitute in some respects a civic religion.
Ken Inglis had become intrigued by the sometimes uneasy relationship between Anzac celebrations and
institutional Christianity, and between Anzac and the labour movement, or at least the historians of the
labour movement. In 1965 he made the first of a number of pilgrimages to Gallipoli and the Western Front.
‘25 April 1915 was said to be the consummation’, he observed. ‘Of what?’ he asked himself. That question
set off a further series of questions about the consequences of 25 April 1915, questions which, it would
seem fair to say, have been his major preoccupations for more than 30 years. Since 1964-65 he has
lobbed among students of Australian history at pretty regular intervals a series of grenades of learning —
not only learned and lucid papers at academic conferences, but pithy, reflective pieces aimed at the
general reader in the daily press — on the meaning of Anzac and of the One Day, fruits of his domestic
observations and of his visits to the battlefields and memorials of Gallipoli and France. He also wrote
searching surveys of our struggles as a people with the principles of voluntarism and conscription; he
pioneered academic scrutiny of C.E.W. Bean, the historian of the First AIF who was regarded as the
historian who shaped most profoundly Australian’s views of who we were as a people, and how we came
to that identity. Just as he made us ponder the ceremonies and rituals of Anzac Day, Ken Inglis persuaded
us to look anew at our nation’s memorials, at home and overseas. His writings on war memorials, and
about the interment of unknown soldiers, have become part of a burgeoning and sophisticated
international discourse.
So in April 1996 the Department of History invited Ken Inglis to return to Melbourne and give a public
lecture reflecting on his 30 years of writing about Australian memorialising of the Great War. We wished to
honour him, and he honoured us with ‘Remembering Anzac’, and by agreeing to the publication of a
selection of his writings under that title. We were delighted, too, when Jay Winter, another distinguished
historian of the Great War, readily agreed to contribute an appreciation.
The eleven articles here reprinted appear exactly as they were originally published, except that
typographical errors have been corrected, the Anzac Day press articles of 1964 have been re-
paragraphed for book format, and the opportunity has been taken to publish the full text of ‘Remembering
Australians on the Somme’. Complete bibliographical details may be found in the checklist. This preface
has drawn upon the citation read at the D. Litt. conferring ceremony for Ken Inglis, whom we thank for
answering technical queries and for providing the illustrations.
The project was assisted by University of Melbourne Arts Faculty Publication Grants. I thank Ingrid Barker
for the typing, Sue Lack for the proofing, Joanne Townsend for her editorial assistance, Robin Harper and
Erica Mehrtens for carrying this book through to production, and Charles Zika and the Publications
Committee for their continuing support.
John Lack
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Ken Inglis on Language, Culture and Commemoration
There is much discussion in contemporary historical literature about ‘the linguistic turn’ in the writing of
social history. On one level, what this means is that many historians have turned to the study of language
as a way of reinterpreting the history of ideological trends or political movements. What is new is the
emphasis on the structure of language and its effects upon historical writing itself. There is no certainty
any more that social ‘facts’ exist outside of the language in which they are conveyed. The expression,
narrative character and the complex nature of the interpretation of messages matters as much these days
as their overt referents, intellectual origins and outcomes.
Such attention to the nature of language and the forms of social expression also represents a shift in the
relationship of social history to political history. In the 1960s and 1970s, much social history was devoted
to the analysis of the material out of which political conflict and power were fashioned. In other words, it
was held that the study of social structure and social practices could lead in either a linear or an indirect
fashion to a better understanding of political movements and their trajectories. For one group of historians,
this was no more than a reformulation of a vague kind of materialist interpretation of history. For others, it
was a belief in what Clifford Geertz has termed ‘thick description’, or a commitment to the view that when
historians study how people earn a living and how they organize their working and domestic lives, they will
be in a better position to account for the successes and failures (usually failures) of movements for social
change. Workers become workers long before they enter the factory gates, is the way Jean Paul-Sartre
put this view, and many historians in the 1960s and 1970s concurred. The result was a rich outpouring of
studies of working-class life and political struggles, first in Britain, then in the Anglo-Saxon, and finally in
the European worlds of historical scholarship.
With the unravelling of Marxism as a theory of historical change by the 1980s, such arguments about the
nature and agenda of social history were revamped. There has been an idealist reaction, prompting many
historians to move away from the study of social practice to investigate the realm of representations,
understood as the codes, languages, and imageries through which individuals and groups construct
reality. In some hands, this approach tends to suggest that ‘reality’ has ceased to exist entirely; others still
explore the linkages between the signifier and signified. Scholars drawn to ‘the linguistic turn’ profit from a
rich set of exchanges among philosophy, linguistics, anthropology and history to create a promising
agenda of the history of gestures, codes and symbols, as well as forms of political and social action.
In registering the significance of these developments, it is important to take stock of those who prepared
the ground for them. Ken Inglis has inhabited this territory long before many others arrived in it. The
modesty of the man belies the significance and international echoes of his scholarship. But every one of
the elements of ‘the linguistic turn’ in historical study has been present in 40 years of Inglisian scholarship.
He has led the way, not through programmatic statements, but through practice, and his role as a pioneer
in this field is happily acknowledged in this collection of essays, as it is by scholars throughout the world.
Inglis is an historian of language par excellence. Whether the words and images are etched in stone or
imprinted in prose, written or spoken, his approach has been the same: to remind us that performance
matters as much as composition, that echoes exist alongside enunciation, and — as the new generation of
historians has affirmed — language is too important a subject to be marginalised in historical study.
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It is not my intention to provide a survey or an assessment of the range of historical scholarship he has
produced, from his days as a student at Melbourne and Oxford, to his work at Adelaide, Papua New
Guinea and Canberra. Others are better placed to do so than I. Rather it may be useful to show the
international and professional context in which his contributions should be placed.
Among his achievements, two may be singled out as significant within the broad movements of recent
historical scholarship described above. The first relates to his contribution to the history of broadcasting;
the second, to the cultural history of warfare, and in particular, his writings reprinted here on the cultural
consequences of the 1914-18 war. Both show Inglis as a pioneering historian, and one who has helped
shift the centre of gravity of historical study towards an emphasis on cultural forms and the social action
associated with them.
Inglis’s study of the ABC followed the work of the Oxford historian and contemporary Asa Briggs. Briggs’s
multi-volume history of the BBC provided a model of scholarship which has rarely been surpassed. But in
1983, Ken Inglis did so, in his book This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932-1983.
And the way he did so speaks to the central point of this introductory essay. Briggs provided the ‘warts
and all’ account of a central institution of British life. So did Inglis for its Australian equivalent, but he went
beyond the history Briggs wrote. Inglis managed to emphasise the significance of broadcast, of the
messages that people heard, of the echoes first of the radio and then of the television output of the ABC in
a way Briggs never attempted to do for its British equivalent. Inglis made the institution speak in his book,
not through its committees or quarrels, but through its own distinctive voice, the voice people heard.
The second field of work describing Inglis’s sensitivity to gesture and public expression is located within
the cultural history of the Great War. Here too Inglis drew on materials handled by colleagues abroad, but
he has done so in highly distinctive ways. I recall a meeting organised by European colleagues in 1991 at
the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, on the subject of the comparative history of war memorials of the 1914-18
war. Inglis stood up and told the large gathering that he had been working on war memorials in the
Australian context for many years without exciting much more than bemused puzzlement among his
colleagues as to why he was doing so. There in Paris, twenty years later, Inglis said, he felt no longer that
he was ‘in the closet’; he was ‘coming out’. And doing so, he said, among a host of historians now flocking
to the field.
The truth is not that Inglis ‘came out’, but that so many historians have ‘come in’. He recalls that his
interest in Anzac dates from 1965, when he acted as a journalist accompanying veterans back to Gallipoli
half a century after the landing. What he heard were the voices of these men, and the immense variety of
their experience, their outlook, their memories. It was there that he began to explore the sense of the
sacred these men bore with them, and which has informed so much of the commemorative history of the
past eight decades and more.
It is Inglis who has emphasised most persuasively and most authoritatively the element of social action, of
active remembrance, in the ‘collective memory’ of the Great War. He has extended fruitfully Benedict
Anderson’s notion that monuments are ‘a type of speech’, a focus of a living conversation, which when the
conversants move away or die off, come to fade away themselves. Now, 30 years later, Inglis has
completed his long journey to each and every war memorial constructed in Australia in the aftermath of the
Great War. He has given voice to the men and women whose lives are inscribed on them and in the act of
constructing them. He has recaptured their language, their gestures, and the cadences of their
commemorative work.
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Here he has provided a powerful example of how the history of ‘social facts’ — in this case the ‘facts’ and
feelings of Australian national identity — are inextricably tied into the cultural forms in which they are
expressed. The essays which follow are in the same vein. They show his characteristically robust
approach to cultural history, not as an isolated and elevated sphere of elites, but as the history of us all.
Jay Winter
Pembroke College, Cambridge
October 1997
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Anzac Day: The Little Boy from Manly grows up*
*The Age, 24 April 1964.
For more than a century after Arthur Phillip and his charges reached Sydney, Australians searched for an
occasion on which they could fittingly celebrate their nationality. On a number of days each year — a
surprising number, so it seemed to visitors — they stayed away from work to commemorate some event;
but none was felt to be a wholly adequate expression of national spirit.
Among these days was Queen Victoria’s birthday, May 24, which was transformed into Empire Day after
the Queen died, and deteriorated gradually into Cracker Night. Even while the Queen lived it could not
wholly satisfy nationalists, since it symbolised nothing peculiar to their own country. Many radicals could
celebrate with more gusto the occasion known as Labor Day or Eight Hours’ Day. But since the character
of the Labor movement varied from colony to colony, different dates were set aside in different places; and
there was much discord over whether Australian workers should follow the Second International when it
decided in 1889 to identify Labor Day with May Day. May Day appealed most strongly to those whose
loyalty lay with the workers of all nations rather than with Australians of all classes. It was no more a
candidate for an Australian national day than were the various Labor or Eight (later Six) Hours’ days.
There were efforts to make the anniversary of Phillip’s landing at Sydney Cove an equivalent to the
Americans’ Thanksgiving. Official attention was given to January 26 while it was still in living memory;
Governor Macquarie ordered an official celebration of the day in 1818, and it was proclaimed a public
holiday in New South Wales in 1838, when the Government Gazette announced: ‘Grand Dinner at 42/- at
the Pulteney Hotel for the classes, a Regatta for the masses’. By 1880, some fervent nationalists
promoted the day, and a few republicans even looked forward to an antipodean Fourth of July, 1788.
This, said one of them, was a ‘date that will be classed in the world’s history with the founding of Rome,
the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, or the storming of the Bastille. There will be but one greater day in our
own Australia’s annals, and that will be the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence’. But that day
could dawn only if the custodians of Empire gave Australian patriots cause to revolt. And who could see
Queen Victoria as George III, or any of her Ministers, Liberal or Conservative, as Lord North? There was
to be one day which Australians would embrace more ardently than January 26. It would commemorate
another landing, and it would express a sense of nationhood achieved within the Empire, not a revolt
against it.
Campaigners for federation promoted January 26 — especially the Australian Natives’ Association in
Victoria, where some still call it ‘ANA Day’. But even in eastern Australia, people were less anxious than
Americans to recall ancestors who came on the first ship; and in parts of the country unsullied by the penal
system the day has never been popular. It has been regarded with fastidious distaste in South Australia.
Federation produced two new days that were potential candidates for consecration — January 1, the day
in 1901 when the Commonwealth was proclaimed, and May 9, when the first Parliament met. But the first
date had already a holiday character of its own, and intermittent suggestions on behalf of the second
evoked no enthusiasm. The bloodless federation of six self-governing colonies was too temperate an
achievement to throw up a national day.
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Before 1915, there was no day of mourning to compare with America’s Memorial (or Decoration) Day,
when the cemeteries, filled by fratricide between 1861 and 1865, were visited by the bereaved; for
Australia had been spared the horrors of civil war. There had, it is true, been a murderous skirmish near
Ballarat in 1854; but even in Victoria, how many people could name the date of the Eureka Stockade? Nor
had Australians any hero so esteemed as to make his birthday a festival, as the birthdays of Washington
and Lincoln were for Americans. ‘The Australian people made heroes of none,’ Brian Fitzpatrick has
written, ‘and raised no idols, except perhaps an outlaw, Ned Kelly, and Carbine, a horse’.
It was Carbine’s vocation that gave Australia its most singular holiday. In the late nineteenth century,
visitors wrote of Melbourne Cup Day with wonder. Only in Victoria was a public holiday proclaimed; but
from every colony people arrived by boat and train, and day after day it was the nation’s first topic of
conversation. From Bombay an Indian gentleman came to the Cup of 1884, and declared: ‘Everyone has
done his pilgrimage, and appears to have eased his conscience just as an Indian pilgrim would feel after
accomplishing a most sacred pilgrimage to a religious shrine’. A decade later Mark Twain described
Flemington as the Mecca of Australia. ‘The Melbourne Cup’, he reported, ‘is the Australasian National
Day’. Observers utterly without comic intent wrote much as Mark Twain did. Until Anzac Day appeared,
our only spontaneous and distinctive national festival was devoted to a race between horses.
‘The shrine of the local patriot is difficult to tend’, wrote a student of Australia and Empire in 1907. ‘The
altar has not been stained with crimson as every rallying centre of a nation should be’. The call for blood
was going up all over the world in the generation before 1914. Its tone varied from country to country. In
older nations, men wondered whether their race was still virile. In Australia, men wondered what colonial
conditions had done to the old stock, and whether the young nation had yet come to manhood.
In 1885, when New South Wales sent its unsought contingent of troops to the cause of Empire in the
Sudan, a cartoonist of the Bulletin invented the Little Boy from Manly to personify, as its maker said, ‘the
well-meant impetuosity of a young Colony’. As the volunteers left for Egypt in 1885 one well-wisher cried:
‘We shall have heroes, we must have martyrs’. Another said that the disgrace of Botany Bay would be
washed out in the waters of the Nile. The Acting Premier, W.B. Dalley, rejoiced at having awakened in the
colonies an enthusiasm for sacrifice. He expressed, writes Barbara Penny in a recent essay on this
episode, ‘that chilling urge towards a national baptism in fire and blood which would erupt again and again
at times of crisis until it was finally assuaged at Gallipoli in April, 1915’.
On April 25, 1915, the blood of Australians began to spill in the cause of nation and Empire. Their cool
heroism as it happened was reported with an admiration close to awe, and not only by Australian
witnesses. ‘The landing’, reflected the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘began a campaign which was a more
searching test of character than any single engagement’. It showed, said the paper, that liberty, equality
and a semi-tropical climate ‘have not caused the Anglo-Saxon race to degenerate but have added to it a
new strength’. It showed, said orators and preachers, that Australia had come of age. The Little Boy from
Manly had grown up into the Digger. His feats removed from Australia’s national culture, said a returned
soldiers’ journal, ‘a larrikin sense of inferiority, on whose inspiration the broad arrow blot of England’s
savage convict system was a worrying obsession. Only a deal of good blood could erase this ancient
stain; the pure blood of a free manhood’.
The first anniversary of the landing was celebrated spontaneously and diversely by the troops in Egypt,
England and France, and by soldiers and civilians at home. By 1918 it was customary to hold services on
Anzac Day at which deeds of valor were recalled and Australians were exhorted to preserve in peace the
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courage and solidarity which their soldiers had displayed at war.
But year after year Australians disagreed about how the anniversary should be celebrated. ‘It is the
quintessence of irony’, The Age remarked during one round of these disputes, ‘that the commemoration of
those who died for peace should cause the living to quarrel…Its solemn memories will knit the living with
the dead. The marvel is that those memories do not knit more closely, more graciously, the living with the
living’.
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Anzac Day:
The One Day will endure*
*The Age, 25 April 1964.
On April 23, 1915, from the Island of Lemnos, John Monash wrote to his wife and daughter. ‘Long before
this letter can possibly reach you,’ he said, ‘great events which will stir the whole world and go down in
history will have happened, to the eternal glory of Australia and all who have participated’. Two days later
the ‘great events’ began, and Australians woke to find that they had, at last, a day in their history which
could be commemorated with high solemnity.
In the three years of war that remained, Australian soldiers enhanced both their reputation and their sense
of nationality. But among the civilians at home there was grave disunity. For the first two years of the war,
misgivings about it were rarely expressed. Then the rebellion in Dublin at Easter, 1916, diminished the
loyalty of Irish Australians to the Imperial cause. Later in that year the Labor Government split over
conscription. ‘Those who are prepared to stand by the British Empire and to see the war through to the
end,’ said W.M. Hughes, ‘please come with me’. At the next election Hughes and his allies called
themselves the Win-the-War party and virtually accused Labor men of treason. Later, Hughes managed to
identify himself with Anzac Day more closely than any other politician. To this day, the empty chair of the
man who shrewdly got himself called ‘the little Digger’ is a part of Sydney’s Anzac observance.
Hughes’ enemies, and more generally those people who saw the war as an un-Christian holocaust or a
squalid clash of empires, could not join wholeheartedly in the ceremonies of Anzac Day. For many
reasons many people took no part in the occasion. Many returned soldiers never marched. Most of them
never joined the RSL. For the men who were eligible to join the AIF and did not — and they were a
majority of their generation — April 25 could be an uncomfortable day to endure.
A few people said that Anzac Day should be struck out of the national calendar. Others, more numerous,
recognised the anniversary but wanted it to express a different message from that of the politicians,
clergymen and returned soldiers who spoke from Anzac Day platforms. The schools became a
battleground between the custodians of the Gallipoli tradition and the radicals and pacifists. Producers of
school papers and readers, searching for themes which everyone could approve, were drawn to Simpson
and his donkey, the story of an Anzac who died saving lives, not taking them.
Despite abstainers and critics, the ceremonies of Anzac Day have been emphasised more spontaneously
and warmly than other rites performed by Australians. But there have been large differences of judgment
about how the day should be celebrated. The RSL and the churches have disagreed about the character
of services: some RSL men see clergymen as introducers on the platform (unless they happen to have
been chaplains); and some clergymen see the RSL as propagating a pseudo-religion whose temples, the
war memorials, are modelled on the tombs of pagan Greece. Many Protestants think that alcohol should
have no place in the commemoration of Anzac. They are supported by some returned soldiers who are by
no means wowsers.
Of all the disagreements about April 25, none has persisted longer or caused more pain than the dispute
over whether the living can pay proper homage to the dead if they spend part of the day enjoying
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themselves. In the first commemorations of Anzac Day, mourning and jollity were mixed. The ceremonies
in Egypt on April 25, 1916, included not only a solemn service that ended with the Last Post, but — as
John Monash reported — ‘a skit on the memorable landing by a freak destroyer manned by a lot of corked
black fellows hauling ashore a number of tiny tin boats full of tiny soldiers. It was screamingly funny’. Men
who might yet die in action could blend the sacred and the profane in a manner which later, in peacetime,
would have seemed like blasphemy.
After the war, argument over the proper extent of solemnity overlapped a controversy about whether April
25 or the nearest Sunday was the better day for commemoration. Clergymen, employers and shopkeepers
put the case for Sunday, pointing out that the landing had taken place on a Sunday and warning that a
public holiday during the week would be corrupted by the Australian love of pleasure until it became, like
Easter and Christmas, just one more opportunity to abandon work for play.
RSL leaders in every state resisted the case for Sunday; and at the Premiers’ Conference of 1922 it was
resolved that Anzac Day should be observed on April 25, that it should be a statutory holiday and that it be
regarded as Australia’s national day. The conference recommended memorial services in the morning and
in the afternoon ‘celebrations designed to inculcate the spirit of national pride and service…’; as far as
possible, race meetings should be forbidden and any sports should be ‘such as will develop a clean mind
in a healthy body’.
One by one, the states did make April 25 a statutory holiday; but what was prohibited and permitted on the
day varied. The RSL sought a uniform observance of the national day, but its own national congress could
never agree on the terms of uniformity.
From the beginning, people made different decisions about what was appropriate. In South Australia,
solemn proceedings in the morning were followed by an afternoon of sporting contests between returned
men. In Queensland, where clergymen and the RSL co-operated more harmoniously than elsewhere, the
‘closed’ observance originated — fit, as its designers said, for a holy day, the All Souls’ Day of Australia,
not a holiday. In Queensland the view has prevailed down to 1964 that the whole day should be free from
public pleasures. In Victoria it prevailed until 1960, when, for the first time, hotels opened after the march,
football was played and the Gallipoli Handicap was run at Flemington. Western Australia followed Victoria
in 1961. In New South Wales the inroads of entertainment began earlier, though for a long time the RSL
regarded horse racing as improper.
In Tasmania for many years hotels have opened at noon and the theatres at night; but to the locals things
seem quieter in Hobart than in Sydney. ‘In New South Wales,’ said a delegate to the Tasmanian RSL
Congress in 1960, ‘one would not know whether it was April Fools’ Day or Pancake Friday…’. Many of his
comrades in Sydney would defend the robustness of their observance. Some would even defend the
drunkenness deplored by clergymen and photographed by young Hughie Cook in Alan Seymour’s play
The One Day of the Year. A student of our folkways, Russel Ward, has said that to many participants ‘it
seems both natural and fitting to end the day with a serious attempt to make it the greatest alcoholic
debauch of the year’. Alf Cook, Hughie’s father says, ‘I’m a bloody Australian, mate, and it’s because I’m a
bloody Australian that I’m gettin’ on the grog’.
In 1954, when the Victorian RSL Congress was in uproar over a proposal to stop solemnity at noon, one
advocate of change declared: ‘This is not a Saint’s day, or a holy day as some would have us think’. When
the supporters of ‘open’ observance triumphed in Victoria six years later, some older men spoke with
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