Beating the khaki drum: how Australian identity was militarised | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Thu, 01/02/2018 - 3:49pm

Becoming a top arms exporter fits neatly into a national narrative that has become hostage to ‘Anzac birthers’

A nation’s capital should be an outward looking place, a city that faces the world to convey the type of country it represents. What, then, might be the first thoughts about Australia of those who fly into Canberra as they traverse the arrivals hall and concourse at our national capital’s airport?

The giant illuminated billboards advertising the names and wares of some of the world’s biggest manufacturers of combat machinery impart an unmistakable impression: here is an Australia tying its identity to warfare.

Australia’s colonial and national leaders, with only a few exceptions, have always rushed to beat the khaki drum.

And so the AWM’s failure continues by seeking and obtaining support from ‘the merchants of death’. With their global power and influence the arms manufacturers are winning in their struggle to keep the US and its allies like Australia continually at war. That is not what the founders of the AWM intended.

At the opening of the AWM in 1941 the Governor General Lord Gowrie said the Memorial would be … ‘not only a record of the splendid achievements of the men who fought and fell … but also a reminder to future generations of the barbarity and futility of modern war’.