UNNECESSARY WARS
HENRY REYNOLDS
Newsouth, 2016, 266 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Australia’s first war (the
Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902), notes the historian, Henry Reynolds, in Unnecessary Wars, was intimately bound
up with the uniting of the six Australian colonies into a single nation within
the British empire. This conjunction of
militarism, nationalism and imperialism was ominous and Australia has never
broken the habit of being at the military beck and call of its imperial managers.
War, says Reynolds, has become
“the central and defining national experience” of Australian society. For 58 of the last 76 years, Australia has
been involved in war, whilst the national obsession with all things military, especially
the endless, government-sponsored commemoration of past wars, “normalises war”,
making it easier to get involved in every new one.
Australia’s pre-Boer-War military
expeditions followed Britain into the Sudan and China but did not involve all
six colonies and resulted in no real combat experience, and were thus found
wanting as occasions for a national-military ‘coming-of-age’. Both outings did, however, set a precedent of
unquestioning Australian involvement in imperial wars. The Boer War strengthened this tradition.
The war was Britain’s fight
against two small Dutch republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) with
the aim of annexing them (especially their gold mines) to the British empire. It was “an imperial war of conquest” with all
the brutal baggage which that concept entails.
Conveniently far away and vigorously
censored, “the horrors of battle and the brutalisation of the Afrikaner
civilian population” were hidden from Australians at home, as was the role of
the Australian troops in Britain’s scorched earth war strategy. Forty towns were razed and 30,000 farms
destroyed, whilst Boer women, children and the elderly were detained in
concentration camps – over-crowded and starved tent cities where 28,000 civilian
Boers perished (22,000 of them children) along with 14,000 of their African
servants and labourers. One in five of
the total Boer population was wiped out.
Australian soldiers took part in the general pillage and destruction,
dragged the Boers onto wagon trains for transportation to the camps, and authored
their own war crimes and atrocities.
Britain’s need to project
military power meant that war was a constant companion to empire – “Britain was
fighting somewhere in the world almost every year during the second half of the
19th century”. War would automatically
involve its colonial assets as suppliers of soldiers to defend Britain’s global
reach. In turn, war would politically
and culturally bind the dominions to empire in blood sacrifice. The Boer War was Australia’s loyalist blood
oath - Arthur Conan Doyle (the British Sherlock
Holmes author) enthusiastically wrote that ‘on the plains of South Africa …
the blood brotherhood of the Empire was sealed’.
The Boer War served as
“martial grooming” of Britain’s colonies which was to fully mature a decade
later in the human abattoir of 1914-18.
The murderous scale of the first World War relegated its South African
predecessor (with its paltry ‘sacrifice’ of 600 Australian soldiers) to the
shadows but the Boer War has recently been fully readmitted into the approved Australian
militarist narrative. Australia’s Boer War
troops have been given the required propaganda treatment, morally cleansing their
direct involvement in incarcerating and terrorising Boer civilians, and burning
and looting their farms. Australia’s Boer
War soldiers have been officially elevated to the rank of ‘Fathers of the
Anzacs’ and formally enrolled in the religiously venerated ‘cult of the digger’.
Subsequent Australian wars
have been likewise sanitised and depoliticised.
Elite and popular attention is focused on how the Australian soldiers fight
(heroically, yet compassionately, ‘punching above their weight’) and not why
they fight (stealing land, markets and resources). Not up for polite discussion is Australia’s auxiliary
role in fighting the unnecessary wars of ‘our powerful friends’ against countries
which pose no territorial threat to Australia against people we don’t know in
places we can’t find on a map.
Australia’s fortunate continental remoteness and size have been recast
as “liabilities not strategic advantages” and neutrality or ‘homeland defence’
have never been considered as official options to war.
War is seen as so “natural and
inescapable” that contemporary Australian governments find it easy to go to war
despite its costs, legality and morality.
There is, however, an honourable tradition of anti-militarist dissent
that has accompanied every war, from the Boer War on. Reynolds’ book is a worthy part of the
resistance to the khaki tide.
