ANZAC Day as Australia’s ‘Civil Religion’?

This article has been revised for accuracy. It is an update of an article that appeared in St Mark’s Review, No. 231 April 2015 (1). Page numbers are identical to the original.

Anzac Day as Australia’s ‘civil religion’? John A Moses

There is considerable paradox in the writing about the nature of Anzac Day. That should not be surprising. Indeed, it is to be expected when investigating the origins and essence of the stuff of legends. They abound in paradox, but the most prolific writers on the subject appear unable to recognize this. Authors such as Bill Gammage and Ken Inglis ironically place their own ‘faith’ in secularism and have been at pains to deny that there was much if any Christian religious content in the way the Diggers of the First World War commemorated their fallen comrades, but at the same time there was an undeniable spiritual dimension to the way they felt.1 The historian George Shaw, who is also an Anglican priest, realized this and called it ‘Australian Sentimental Humanism’. There was “ASH” in the Australian soul—sentiment without doctrine.2 Others writers such as Michael McKernan have argued that the churches got it completely wrong by their apparently jingoistic support of the First World War. Since then, however, Dr McKernan has magnanimously revised his previous conviction. The churches’ alleged failure to understand the mentality of the fighting men did irreparable damage to the Christian cause in Australia.3 Professor John A Moses is a professorial associate of St Mark’s National Theological Centre and Charles Sturt University, and author, with George F Davis, of Anzac Day Origins: Canon DJ Garland and Trans-Tasman Commemoration, Barton Books, Canberra, 2013.

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I have contested this across-the-board dismissal of the role of Christianity in numerous articles on Anzac commemoration and the role particularly of the largest denomination in Australia at that time, the Church of England.4 And now, the former Melbourne University graduate, Patrick Porter, who completed his Oxford DPhil on British and German chaplaincy in the First World War, has presented his much more differentiated and theologically informed findings about Australian chaplains during the First World War.5 None of the authors mentioned, apart from Shaw and Porter, and not even the late Eric Andrews, have deemed it necessary to evaluate this critical religious dimension.6 This is remarkable because the first and most vigorous Anzac Day Commemoration Committee (ADCC), namely that formed in Brisbane, was composed predominantly of leading clergy, among them former chaplains, of all mainstream denominations. It was precisely this committee that drove the Anzac commemoration movement during the war and immediate post-war era. Persistent lobbying led finally to the Federal legislation of 1930 that institutionalized Anzac Day as a national day of commemoration throughout the Commonwealth. Alistair Thompson has noted the efforts of the Brisbane ADCC in his book Anzac Memories, based on information provided by Wendy Mansfield in two short papers in 1977 and 1982, which were mined from her pioneering research.7 Numerous articles by Professor Ken Inglis from the mid-sixties onwards that culminated in the weighty tome, Sacred Places (1998), which stands like a secular Mt Sinai in the Australian desert landscape, virtually deny that any tablet of stone prescribing Anzac ritual as a Christian-inspired religious event ever existed. This paper is an attempt to clear away the rhetorical and metaphorical cobwebs that have enveloped the mystical components of ‘sacred’ and ‘holy’ in relation to war and its commemoration in Australia. As the secular retelling of the myth goes, Australian soldiers, it would seem, were all ‘plain blunt men who loved their brothers’, for the most part highly skeptical of the claims oforganized religion and the chaplains who represented them. Since the appearance of Inglis’ work there has only been one book-length study to challenge his thesis regarding the religious commitment of Australian soldiers, namely that of the American Evangelical author, Robert D. Linder (The Long Tragedy: Australian Evangelicals and the Great War, 1914–1918). This book focuses exclusively, however, on chaplains and soldiers of only the Evangelical theological tradition.8

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Not many Australian academic historians are interested in religion save those who have investigated the history of the various denominations. Most are therefore at a loss to explain the Anzac phenomenon—in short, to explain what Inglis correctly calls Christianity’s ‘complex relationship’ with the cult of Anzac.9 They are baffled by the spiritual dimension and so shy away from attempting a systematic investigation of it. Inglis covers his embarrassment in the presence of the spiritual by virtually dismissing it or rather reducing it to a layman’s one-dimensional assessment. And to do this he has to somehow detach it ‘one way or another’, as he says, from the Christian cultural matrix of Australian society. Clergy are there, but only when asked by the Diggers’ representatives to play a part. It is always best if they stay in their place and keep in the background because of sectarian bitterness within the Australian community. Clergymen only arous sectarianism and can be a disturbing element in the commemorative proceedings. Inglis was right to notice that the Irish Roman Catholic element—one could virtually sum it up by calling it the ‘Mannix element’10—did not endorse the ‘God-King-and-Empire’ rhetoric of the non-Roman, Anglo-Celtic majority of the Australian community. As will be shown, the Brisbane ADCC was in fact highly sensitive to this important feature of Australian life at that time. Inglis is at pains to identify the distinctiveness of Anzac ritual. It was culturally peculiar. He says for example, ‘[M]uch in the rhetoric and ritual at the dedication of Australian Great War Memorials was new and singular, as celebrants affirmed in the distinctive idiom of Anzac, the connexions between the national, the sacred and the military’.11 But it was/is part of a universal human phenomenon, and it would appear that Inglis, in his concern to isolate a unique Australian form of commemoration or the spirituality on which it is based, fails to appreciate this. He wants to argue the Christian component out of the equation, and that is clearly why he refuses to evaluate the fundamentally essential work of the Queensland ADCC. Indeed he has to avoid this in order to sustain his case. It can be argued that Inglis’ work amounts to a description of the tree without investigating the ground beneath it that sustains its life. Good history is about going beneath the surface, into the depths, and in this case it means to investigate what lies at the source of the Anzac legend. Certainly, the writers I mentioned have ignored or dismissed the central role played by the Brisbane ADCC in getting Anzac Day institutionalized, though some have significantly revised their earlier positions. 25

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Sacred Places, now in its second edition, has been furnished with a very diplomatic foreword by the Right Reverend Dr Tom Frame, who at the time was Anglican bishop to the forces. Inglis attempted to stake out the field of research into Anzac commemoration, but by consciously refusing to confront the arguments of alternative positions. Given, however, that all historical research exists to be revised, one is obliged to set the record straight. One may begin by listing the assumptions made by Inglis to support his thesis that Australian commemoration of the Fallen was essentially the spontaneous response of decent blokes who mourned the loss of their mates. I will then present the facts, and the theological rationale behind them, of the essentially religious origins of Anzac Day commemoration.

The theses and assumptions in Sacred Places 1. The Diggers were not very religious men; indeed they rather held chaplains in amused contempt. But they were loyal to their mates out of some unaccountable sense of decency, and mourned deeply when they were killed. 2. There was a spontaneous drive after the catastrophe in the Dardanelles to commemorate fallen comrades, but it had little, if anything, to do with organized religion. Anzac memorials that sprung up in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, and the rituals associated with them, were ‘sacred’, ipso facto because of what Professor Inglis calls ‘the singular purity of the AIF’, meaning presumably that they had all volunteered to fight for a cause they believed was just.12 The imposing presence of the many war memorials made them so—that is, sacred. They in fact do no such thing. Rather it is our beliefs, our perceptions, indeed, literally our faith, that accomplishes this. 3. Where, indeed, chaplains were prominent in Anzac commemoration, as was the war-time Chaplain General COL Riley, Anglican Archbishop of Perth, it was not due to his role as chief pastor but to his innate ability to be a ‘good bloke’—in short, a ‘plain, blunt man’ who also happened to be a prelate. 4. The Anzac commemoration was clearly not a Christian event. Clergy were usually but not always invited to participate in the official ceremony that was led by a public official or a member of the RSSILA 26

Anzac Day as Australia’s ‘civil religion’?

(later called the RSL). 5. Christian religious symbols are seldom in evidence in war memorials in Australia. In fact most of the memorials seem to have been inspired by non-Christian symbolism, the nature of which would have depended upon the artist’s own educational/religious formation. The symbols that derived inspiration from ancient Greece are prominent, but Inglis does not recognize, nor seek to delve into, the real extent that classical Greece was saturated with religion and war, non-Christian as it was. Ancient Greece was undeniably a deeply religious society. 6. Inglis goes to great lengths to evacuate the commemorative ceremonies, as well as the monuments erected in memory of the fallen, of any Christian content. He gives no space to war memorial tablets and stained glass windows in hundreds of Australian churches and where that is unavoidable he minimizes its significance. To quote Inglis directly: Christianity had a complex relationship with the cult of Anzac. In a society with no church established by law, organizers of ceremony might or might not remove prayers, bible readings and hymns in order to accommodate Catholic sentiment and canon law. They might even keep clergymen off the platform altogether, for that reason and also from a feeling that the presence of denominational Christianity was not required for Anzac commemoration and might even impede it. The rarity of the cross as a monumental form had a similar significance, and so had the scarcity of biblical inscriptions on the memorials and the un-dogmatic character of such passages as were chosen. The makers might not like the branding of such ceremonies, forms and messages as secular, since that could imply, wrongly and even offensively in their view, a lack of spiritual purpose. Nevertheless, for one reason or another, [emphasis added] few of the artifacts devised for the cult of Anzac did invite the congregations to take comfort from orthodox Christian declarations about life, death and the hereafter. Their name

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liveth for evermore. We will remember them. Lest we forget. These were the basic texts of Australia’s civic religion.13

We are told that ‘for one reason or another’ Christian ideas were rarely advanced in Anzac commemorative ceremonial. But Professor Inglis appears to have ignored the facts concerning the prescriptive way in which the outwardly ‘secular’ observance of Anzac was devised and continues to be celebrated. ‘Complex relationships’, one would have thought, demand a multi-dimensional investigation and conclusions. And let it be stressed that Professor Inglis was fully informed of the details of the origins of the Anzac commemoration in Brisbane.14 He chose, nevertheless, to ignore them because to include them would have run counter to purpose of eliminating traditional Christianity in the launching the annual Anzac commemoration, not to mention the essential role of the religious dimension that lies at the core of how the Anzacs and war are commemorated in Australia and abroad. Here the rules for disciplined historical research, as initially laid down by renowned German scholar Leopold von Ranke (1795–1884), have much to recommend them, even today. His objective was to establish as far as humanly possible ‘how it essentially was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen). We should apply this maxim rigorously to the origins and institutionalization of Anzac Day. Regrettably, Inglis does not seriously investigate this question of how it essentially was. He mentions, for example, that the Christian hymns which were and are still sung on Anzac Day mysteriously ‘chose themselves’. Neither has anyone else investigated the specifics of the ceremonial of Anzac Day or thought the question significant enough to enquire into. It all just ‘happened’ spontaneously. One should mention, however, that the late Eric Andrews indicated that he knew where to look for the sources of Anzac commemoration, namely in the files of the Brisbane Anzac Day Commemoration Committee. He chose, however, not to investigate these records, which are located in Brisbane’s John Oxley Library. And what he wrote about the origins of the Anzac movement in Brisbane was fatally flawed, since he confused the Premier TJ Ryan with the actual originator of the idea for Anzac Day, TA Ryan, a Brisbane businessman and member of the Recruiting Committee.15 The essential source material for all this is located in Brisbane and in the Prime Minister’s files in the National Archives, Canberra

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Anzac Day as Australia’s ‘civil religion’?

‘How it essentially was’ The ‘liturgy’ of Anzac Day com memoration was the creation of a team of mostly former chaplains (usually known as ‘padres’) of all mainstream denominations led by one Canon David John Garland, of the Church of England. That Garland was a a priest of decided Anglo-Catholic conviction is a fact of central significance.Anglo-Catholics or High Anglicans believed in commemorating the dead, as did Roman Catholics. This was/is done primarily in a form of service known as the Requiem Mass or Eucharist. But if there was to be a combined public service of commemoration of the Fallen in Australia there were two obstacles. The first was that Roman Catholics were at that time forbidden to pray with so-called non-Catholics, and the second was that so-called Nonconformists did not believe in praying for the dead anyway. Remarkably, however, the very first memorial service for the Gallipoli Fallen was held at St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane on a Thursday at 10.00 am on 10 June 1915, attended by some 600 people. It was a Solemn Requiem Eucharist celebrated by the then Archbishop St Clair Donaldson, and there were 100 communicants. It was a state occasion attended by the governor as well as the consuls for Imperial Russia and the Republic of France. The Russian Kontakion for the Departed was solemnly sung as part of the liturgy. Why did such a high profile event take place in the northern capital and not in Sydney or Melbourne?16 First, the published casualty lists contained a disproportionately higher number of names of men from the Brisbane/ Toowoomba area than elsewhere, because that was the region from where the 9th Battalion of the Third Australian Infantry Brigade was largely recruited, and these were the first ashore at Anzac Cove. Second, the Diocese of Brisbane was largely Anglo-Catholic, and so praying for the dead was not a problem for many. So, from June 1915 onwards there were regular weekday services for the troops and prayers for the cessation of hostilities. Within a short time other denominations followed suit and public services were held regularly until the end of the year when the withdrawal from Gallipoli took place. Even Methodists conducted services that included prayers for the dead, signifying that an exceptional pastoral need had to be met that required a suspension of normal Protestant convictions regarding praying for the dead and invoking words of consolation for the bereaved. In other state capitals extra services were conducted on weekdays and nights for the Fallen and for the cessation of hostilities. Leading in this 29

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movement were all the Anglican cathedrals. Those located in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide were very active, certainly far more so than the decidedly Evangelical dioceses of Sydney and Melbourne, although Melbourne had always been somewhat less rigidly Evangelical than Sydney, and more pluralistic in its churchmanship. The evidence points toward the conclusion that there was a widespread culture of ‘grief management’ led by the Anglican Church, accompanied by great anxiety about how long the conflict would last. The Brisbane recruitment committee chaired by Canon David John Garland with the assistance of two leading citizens, interestingly of Irish Roman Catholic origins, the afore-mentioned TA Ryan and the lawyer AJ Thynne, organised a public meeting in the Brisbane for 10th January 1916 at the Brisbane Museum building. It was to be chaired by the state governor, Hamilton Goold Adams, at which the keynote speaker was Inspector General of the AIF, James Whiteside M’Cay, recently invalided back from the Dardanelles. The official party consisted of state and municipal politicians, and local Church leaders. It was at this meeting that the 25th April was mooted as a national day of mourning. And, as indicated, the suggestion came from Ryan, who had a son who had survived Gallipoli. The meeting then deputized Canon Garland to convene and chair an ADCC to devise what essentially became the liturgy for Anzac Day. Garland was chosen for the post (which he held until his death in 1939) because of his unusual public profile in Brisbane.17 He was a highly reputed activist in the affairs of both city and state, often to the chagrin of his archbishop; and was a man who could, because of his background, negotiate with both politicians and various church leaders. Having been born in Dublin, a member of the Church of Ireland, he arrived in Australia in 1886, apparently with the intention of resuming work as a clerk in a law firm. This he eventually found in the southern Queensland town of Toowoomba. There, however, he soon came under the influence of Canon Thomas Jones, Rector of St James parish church, 1881–1888, an Anglican priest formed in the tradition of the Oxford Movement who trained Garland for holy orders as was the practice in the days before there were any theological colleges. 18 Garland went on to serve in the Dioceses of Grafton, Perth, North Queensland and Brisbane where he occupied senior administrative posts and engaged in agitation for a number of causes such as the Bible in State Schools League and the movement to settle teenaged orphaned boys and girls 30

Anzac Day as Australia’s ‘civil religion’?

from Britain as farm labourers and domestics in Australia. He was always interested in ministry to soldiers and had already become a chaplain in Perth to troops in camp training for the South African war. With the outbreak of the First World War he reactivated his chaplain’s commission in Brisbane for work among troops in the Enoggera camp there. He then started the so-called Lavender Appeal for soldiers’ welfare, specifically to set up more Anglican chaplaincies in training camps with increased facilities for troops, in direct competition with the YMCA. In 1917 Garland, using some of the collected funds, acquired a special chaplain’s brief to travel to Egypt in order to investigate troop welfare in the Middle East and to report on war graves and measures that might reduce the incidence of venereal disease among troops. Throughout this time he continued as Secretary of the ADCC with a joint secretary, ERB Pike after 1917. He returned to Australia in 1919. Garland’s public profile lent him considerable weight both in Brisbane and beyond. He was the acknowledged author of Anzac Day commemoration and it was he who undoubtedly designed the liturgy for the day. He wanted 25th April to be ‘Australia’s All Souls’ Day’, but he was acutely sensitive to the denominational realities of the time and knew that not all people would or could attend Anglican requiems in good conscience. Consequently the public liturgy had to be non-denominational, but sufficiently spiritual, in order to enable the expression of grief as well as give thanks for the sacrifice of the fallen. So the service was designed to enable all denominations to participate without having their non-negotiable theological beliefs compromised. This was Garland’s genius. He was acutely sensitive to the underlying sectarian divisions that then characterized Australian society, but was confident that these could be overcome by devising a service of commemoration that would be acceptable to most citizens.

The theology of Anzac Day From the foregoing it will be clear that agreement had to be reached among the representatives of all Brisbane churches as to how to make Anzac commemoration acceptable to the wider community, consisting as it did of numerous denominations with conflicting theologies of remembrance. The ADCC decided that each denomination should hold church services separately on the day according to its individual traditions, and that then there would be a march to a public place and later a war memorial for a civic service that was not identified with any particular denomination. 31

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Hymns such as Kipling’s recessional were chosen by Canon Garland for their broad deistic content. Indeed, Garland was able to draw upon a pre-existing tradition of empire and war theology. Along with the famous nineteenth-century liberal British prime minister, WE Gladstone, Garland saw the British Empire as an agency of Almighty God for the preservation of peace and the dispensation of justice in the world. Where it failed to do this it betrayed its divine commission.19 The German Empire, on the other hand, as theologians of all denominations in Belgium, France and Britain contended, had become an apostate power, despite its Christian motto of Gott mit uns, and with immeasurable hubris had embarked on a ruthless policy of world domination. The German atrocities perpetrated in Belgium at the beginning of the war served to illustrate the true character of Prussian militarism, whose god was not that of the New Testament but of Teutonic mythology, namely Odin or Wotan, a god of war. Of course, the God of the Old Testament, Jahweh, was in certain books, notably that of Joshua, a ruthless and nationalist warrior God.20 But the Old Testament also spoke of turning spears into pruning hooks and swords into ploughshares.21 There is a considerable literature on all this, mostly in German, but sufficient in English and French to enable us to achieve a more precise understanding of how secular scholars and theologians on both sides at the time comprehended the war as emphatically a ‘holy war’. Of course, if none of this is taken into account, our comprehension of Anzac commemoration will be far less than satisfactory. Consequently, the Brisbane ADCC, with its emphatically ecumenical composition, devised the highest expression of Australia’s ‘secular religion’. Anzac Day could not be Australia’s All Souls’ Day as it was in France, whose public religious face was emphatically Catholic. Here it was left to the individual churches to commemorate the dead according to their respective theologies, which they did. But the public services still had to facilitate the collective expression of grief and so could not avoid entering the religious/ spiritual dimension, predominantly a Christian one. As indicated, Professor Inglis knew about the work of the ADCC but for reasons only known to him declined to evaluate its contribution in determining the extent that Anzac Day was conceived and organised in a liturgical sense. Why was this a problem for him? Obviously, he had to deny that the Christian religion had any significant role in the creation and sustenance of Anzac Day. Certainly, denominational Christianity has been intentionally 32

Anzac Day as Australia’s ‘civil religion’?

downplayed for the reasons advanced, but the Christian spiritual dimension lies at its core. There is an acknowledgement that Diggers would die for their mates, and that the survivors would experience the need to express their love for and solidarity with them. And indeed, to put it in theological terms, they overcome the supposed opposition between supernaturalism and rationalism by participating, apparently unreservedly, in what is undeniably a mystical experience.22 And this is precisely what Garland and his committee set out to enable within the context of an Australian society that was riven by sectarianism. The Anzac observance is the lowest common spiritual denominator that allows people of all persuasions, from Roman Catholic to agnostic to atheist, to unite in homage to the fallen. Anzac is ‘of the Spirit’ as Garland and like-minded padres clearly understood. For the participants the Anzac Day ritual is a religious experience. And the Diggers by virtue of their willing and devout participation in the ceremony clearly wanted to enter the mystical experience of commemoration and behold eternal things largely in order to assuage their grief. And these are perceptible not to the senses that only behold physical things, but to the spiritual eye in all human beings. As Rudolf Otto realized, ‘our X [that is, our perception of the sacred] cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened’.23 The intensity with which this is experienced will of course depend on the degree and nature of the individual’s religious formation. To conclude. On the surface, Professor Inglis has been assiduous in describing the ritual of Anzac commemoration, but his explanation for it leaves us with more questions than answers. Anzac commemoration falls into the category of an experience of the numinous—that is, the spirit—but, as indicated, Inglis shies away from enquiring into the question of institutionalization: the ‘hymns just chose themselves’; the monuments just sprouted up, proclaiming themselves. He readily acknowledges that we are dealing with a legend per se, but legends cannot be comprehended in a one-dimensional way, though that is precisely what Inglis demands. He purports to have discovered a unique Australian spirituality that emerged out of the pristine bush, unsullied by any influences from Christianity in any of its divisive denominational forms, and which was, moreover, allergic to attempts by churches to take a prominent role in Anzac commemoration. Indeed, Inglis wants to rationalize the Anzac legend in a secular way, 33

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conceding that it is complex, certainly many-layered, but then refusing to try to unravel it. The facts tell a different story. The combination of the secular and the religious provides the ‘complete fabric’ of the Anzac legend, neither of which elements can exist without the other, because mystic intuition that we perceive cannot dispense with the knowledge that comes through human reason and moral experience.24 Finally, Inglis has no doubts, in contrast to Bill Gammage, that Australia was right to engage in the war against Imperial Germany and her Turkish ally.25 It was a righteous war to be sure. War was necessary in order to have peace, Inglis concurs. So we should give thanks to the Anzacs for having tried so valiantly to bestow peace on Australia. But, while on the surface of things, Inglis rejects the intricate relationship between religion, war and the nation-state, he cannot avoid embracing the Christian mythology of war for his own ends, while nevertheless disavowing any knowledge of having done so in his underlying aim to simplify things. Given the endurance of Anzac Day, we may conclude by observing that the Anzac legend has become, on the surface at least, Australia’s moral compass. The legend has become our very own origin myth. Having lacked a credible ‘tradition of its own’, and seeking recognition of her new nation status, Australia, with the able intervention of the patriotic war correspondent, Charles Bean, invented ‘a tradition’ of her own based on ‘the European experience’—namely that of the Anzacs and all that they stood for, in the myth-makers’ eyes especially those qualities of initiative, mateship and courage that previously, according to Russel Ward, the Australian bush worker had held.26 These qualities happen to be the very same qualities in which most Australians pride themselves: pride in the Anzacs, pride in ourselves. According to Inglis, ‘Australian history before 1915 could not supply that theme of divine national purpose’ (emphasis added) which the American historian Robert Bellah perceived as the first component of America’s civil religion.27 The astonishing thing, as Inglis observes, was that ‘[t]he failure at Gallipoli could be mythologized away in the rhetoric of nation making’.28 So the significance of Gallipoli was crystal clear: the Anzacs provided us with divine national purpose; and war memorials generally, and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in particular, have become ‘the repositories of the Anzac tradition’, which, according to Inglis, enjoin not just respect but ‘an awareness of the holy’.

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The problem is that for most Australians at the time of the Great War and for subsequent decades, the idea of the holy was unquestionably linked with the Christian tradition, and this is where Sacred Places as an account blanches before the facts. The book fails to serve the complete truth. Anzac cannot be detached from the dominant spiritual tradition of this country. In fact the cumulative impact of the loss of comrades turned soldiers into an armed community of the bereaved who would not disown or cheapen the sacrifices of the Fallen. Without the sanction of religion the sacred would be divested of its authority. Inglis is in fact revealing what he seeks to conceal. He embraces the Christian mythology of war for his own ends, and then disavows any complicity of religion in having done so in his desperate concern to keep things simple, and, one could add, to dissociate mainstream Christianity, and the Church of England in particular, from having contributed to the Anzac legend. Clearly, we first need to know how the ritual was initiated and institutionalised, precisely who was behind it, and what they were trying to accomplish in the Australian context. And further, we need to know the rationale behind it. When we understand these things we may begin to comprehend that Australia’s ‘secular religion’ was really Christian-derived after all.

Endnotes 1. Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, ANU Press, Canberra 1974; and KS Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2nd edn, 2008. 2. George Shaw, ‘Bicentennial Writing: Revealing the Ash in the Australian Soul’, in 1988 and All That New Views of Australia’s Past edited by George Shaw, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988, pp. 1–18. 3. Michael McKernan, The Australian Churches at War, Catholic Theological Faculty, Sydney & The Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1980, p. 178. Since the appearance of Anzac Day Origins (see below, endnote 17), Dr McKernan, in a spirit of the highest academic magnanimity, has revised his position on this. I have discussed the myopic treatment of the churches and the Great War previously in the 1999 Russel Ward Memorial Lecture

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

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at the University of New England, entitled, “The Terror of Naivety and the Arrogance of Orthodoxy: Australian Historians and the First World War`, published by the UNE Student Union. See: John A Moses, ‘Australian Anglican Leaders and the Great War’, Journal of Religious History Vol. 25, No. 3, October 2001, 306–323. Patrick Porter, ‘The Sacred Service: Australian Chaplains and the Great War’, War & Society, Vol 20, No. 2, October 2002, pp. 23–52. More recently, see Michael Gladwin, Captains of the Soul: a History of Australian Army Chaplains, Big Sky Publishing, Newport NSW, 2013, ch. 3. Eric Andrews, ‘25 April 1916: The First Anzac Day in Australia and Britain’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, No. 23,1993, p.13. Alistair Thompson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1994, pp.129–130; Wendy Mansfield, ‘Anzac Day 1915–1977: Its Origins, Its Cultural and Political Mythology. A Queensland Perspective’, B.A. Honours thesis, University of Queensland, 1979. Robert D Linder, The Long Tragedy: Australian Evangelicals and the Great War, 1914–1918, Adelaide, Open Book, 2000. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, p. 462. This was not the case in New Zealand, as Scott Worthy has recently demonstrated in his article on the origins of Anzac Day there. See Scott Worthy, ‘A Debt of Honour: New Zealanders’ first Anzac Days’, New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 36, No 2, October 2002, pp. 185–200. He documents the contribution of clergy, including the Archbishop of New Zealand, Averill, whose denomination is not identified. Worthy also mentions that the initiative for holding memorial services on 25 April, starting in 1916, came from the mayors of the leading New Zealand cities. This is very interesting because the Brisbane ADCC wrote to these people outlining what was planned in Queensland and urged the New Zealanders to do something similar. Again it is significant that the proposals of the mayors followed in broad outline the Brisbane ADCC proposals. None of this is surprising when one appreciates that Canon Garland spent from 1912 until after the outbreak of the war in 1915 in New Zealand at the invitation of the Anglican bishops to lead a campaign for Biblical instruction in government schools. His work was so much valued that the New Zealand Archbishop wished to recommend Garland to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a honorary doctorate. However, Garland’s own archbishop in Brisbane, St. Clair Donaldson, refused to support the move. See Alex

Anzac Day as Australia’s ‘civil religion’?

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Kidd, ‘The Brisbane Episcopate of St Clair Donaldson, 1904–1921’, PhD, University of Queensland, 1996, pp. 133–34; and John A. Moses with Alex Kidd, ‘Canon David John Garland (1864–1939) and the Problem of Who Leads’, in Episcopacy: Views from the Antipodes, Anglican Board of Christian Education, Adelaide, 1994, pp. 151–170. For a perceptive comment on the “Mannix phenomenon” see James Griffin, Daniel Mannix: Ambiguity and Ambition, Chauvel Lecture, University of New England, Armidale, 24 August, 2000. For a more thorough analysis of the Irish prelate’s career, see James Griffin, (with Paul Ormonde) ,Daniel Mannix: Beyond the Myths, Garrett Publishing, Mulgrave, Vic. 2012. Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 209. Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 184. Inglis, Sacred Places p. 462. It is interesting to note that the phrase, ‘Their Name Liveth’, comes from the book of Ecclesiasticus, sometimes called Sirach, in the Old Testament (Apocrypha), 44:14: ‘Their bodies were buried in peace and their name liveth to all generations.’ Further, this text was chosen by the Brisbane ADCC to be inscribed on the ‘Stone of Remembrance’ which stands before the ‘Cross of Sacrifice’ at the Toowong Cemetery in Brisbane, erected in 1924, much earlier than that on the Stone of Remembrance in front of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra that also bears this inscription. Another distinctive Christian feature of the work of the Brisbane ADCC is that from the beginning (1916) they authorised the sale of lavender-coloured ribbons on which was emblazoned the lion of St Mark, because the 25th April is St. Mark’s Day in the Christian Calendar. The motto under the crest is audax ac fidelus, Bold and Faithful. The proceeds from the sale of the ribbons were intended for soldier welfare and, later, for the construction of war memorials. Professor Inglis actually chaired a session at a conference of the Australian War Memorial on 5 November 1992, at which I presented a paper on the Brisbane ADCC. I afterwards supplied him with the full text a considerable time before he completed Sacred Places, and he personally acknowledged my information at the time with courtesy and enthusiasm. That paper appeared as ‘Canon David John Garland and the ANZAC Tradition’, St Mark’s Review, No 154, Winter 1993, pp. 12–21. Eric Andrews, ‘25 April 1916’

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17. Detailed information regarding the institutionalization of Anzac Day is contained in John A. Moses, ‘The Struggle for ANZAC day, 1915–1930 and the Role of the Brisbane Anzac Day Commemoration Committee’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical .Society, Vol. 88, part 1, 2002, pp. 54–74. 18. On Garland’s career, see John A. Moses and George F. Davis, Anzac Day Origins: Canon DJ Garland and Trans Tasman Commemoration, Barton Books, Canberra, 2013; and Moses, ‘Canon David John Garland and the Anzac Tradition’, pp. 12–21. 19. There is no traceable documentary record of Garland ever having actually been an articled clerk in Toowoomba, though it is possible that he worked in the office for a now defunct firm. The family oral tradition holds that Garland had been already an articled clerk in Dublin prior to his arrival in Australia. Certainly, Garland evinced a remarkable knowledge of the law through out his ministry as well as highly developed administrative and organisational skills. 20. Garland was an admirer of Gladstone as is shown in his article in the Brisbane diocese’s newspaper, The Church Chronicle, 1 August 1933, p. 273. Here Garland quotes with approval Gladstone’s assessment of the state of the Church of England prior to the re-invigorating impact of the Oxford Movement from 1833 onwards. See also John A Moses, ‘The faith of Canon David John Garland (1864–1939) – an Australian Gladstonian imperialist’, St Mark’s Review, No. 225, August 2013 (3), pp. 71–84. 21. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Cross Roads, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1997, especially pp. 143–49. 22. This occurs three times in the Old Testament books of Isaiah (2:4); Joel (3:10) and Micah (4:3). 23. Most helpful here is the seminal work by the German theologian, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2005 [1917], p. 14. 24. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 7. 25. Otto, The Idea of the Holy (see the translator’s preface, p. xvii). 26. Ken Inglis, ‘Was the Great War Australia’s War?’ in Craig Wilcox (ed.), The Great War: Gains and Losses – ANZAC and Empire, ANU, Canberra, 1995, pp. 5–15. 27. Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1978. 28. Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 461. 29. Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 368.

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