I don’t attend ANZAC Day ceremonies. I was burned by last ANZAC Day ceremony I attended in the early 2000s on the Gold Coast, where I took my adolescent children to a ceremony for the first time, hoping that we would be able to mark the futility of war, an honouring of sacrifice and a commitment to peace. In a big white marquee the local RSL dignitaries berated anyone who opposed Australia’s involvement in one of America’s wars- can’t remember if it was Iraq or Afghanistan- and we left, quietly but with determination never to attend another ANZAC ceremony again. Over the years I have, however, read a fair bit about ANZAC, particularly during the centenary ‘celebrations’, and I usually read an article or two about Gallipoli and ANZAC on the day itself.
This year has been no exception. I read Inside Story’s re-print of Mark Baker’s 2020 piece “My God, it would have been easier than I thought” which argues that Gallipoli was not the pointless disaster that has been portrayed, and that in fact, the Turkish troops were far more vulnerable than is usually acknowledged.
Then I started thinking about Anzac Day in my suburb in 1926, Heidelberg, by which time local Anzac Day commemorations had moved out of the churches, where they had largely been held since the first commemorations in 1916, to public ceremonies around war memorials and in the largest auditoriums available in 1926 – the picture theatres. Although no longer conducted in churches, the 1926 local commemorations still had religious overtones, with all of the Protestant ministers in attendance and taking an active part. But were there Catholic commemorations? What about the Catholic returned soldiers?
And this led me to a M.A. thesis written by Monica Van Gend in 2022 “That all may Justice Share: Sydney Catholics in the interwar years 1919-1929. In this thesis, she challenges Michael McKernan’s assertion that Australian churches became less relevant to Australian society after the war by looking at the Catholic Church (which she refers to as ‘the Church’) in Sydney and its response both during and in the decade following the war.
The shift in universities to imbue theses with beautiful and creative writing has been a slow one, and this thesis has the usual trappings of literature review, theoretical underpinnings etc. Nonetheless, it was easy to read, and I found quite a few things of interest, and several parallels to the current discussion of ‘just war’ and the US government’s pushback to Pope Leo’s warning that God doesn’t listen to the prayers of those who wage war.
I was interested to read that the sectarianism which split Australian society for the following fifty-odd years (and which of course was present right from the start of British settlement) was less potent on the battlefield than I imagined. Notwithstanding Archbishop Mannix’s anti-war stance, there were Catholic chaplains appointed to the battalions in a ratio representing Australian society: 2 Anglican, 1 Catholic, and one other Protestant chaplain. Because of Catholicism’s emphasis on the importance of the sacraments, Catholic chaplains tended to stay close to the troops, where they could hear confession and say Mass prior to a battle or administer the last rites. They gained respect, both from the men and from other chaplains. Sectarian prejudices were far more hard-line on the homefront than on the battlefront itself.
This was reflected in the Protestant response to Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Proposal, issued on August 1, 1917 and blithely ignored by everyone. The Sydney Morning Herald, echoing the view of local Protestants, argued on 17 October 1917 that “On the one side were ranged the champions of human right and liberty, and on the other the lawless henchmen of medieval dynastic despotism” (and you can guess who the lawless henchmen were….) Papal interventions in times of war, and the pushback from some quarters, are obviously nothing new.
And neither was fake news. In August 1914 a pamphlet was circulated around the Forbes NSW area purporting to reproduce an oath by the American catholic group The Knights of Columbus where adherents swore to “denounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers”. It was spurious, but it shows that we’re not the only generation exposed to fake news.
Particularly interesting to me was the move within the Catholic church and its organizations, both during the war and after, to promote an Australian patriotism as something worth fighting for, rather than for Empire, especially given the rise of the Irish Free State and the Irish Civil War. To that end, Catholic commemorations of the war did not display the Union Jack, or start or end with the National Anthem, which was then ‘God Save the King’, but with what they called the ‘Australian Anthem’. Sung to our present dirge ‘Advance Australia Fair’, the words are quite different:
1. Australia’s sons! Let us rejoice
For we are strong and free
Defenders of our glorious faith
We guard its liberty.
Our standard high, across the sky,
In Beauty shining there,
Points out the way, wherein we may
Advance Australia Fair
2. Beneath our radiant Southern Cross,
In knighthood’s bond we stand,
To help the weak, to right the wrong,
That truth may rule the land.
For conscience’ sake and Freedom’s cause
That all may justice share,
This is our aim when we acclaim
Advance, Australia Fair!
This is our aim when we acclaim
Advance, Australia Fair!
[Souvenir of the First Annual Communion of the Catholic Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Association of NSW 11 Nov 1928, cited p. 74]
You might recognize the allusion to ‘Knights of the Southern Cross’, a secret society formed after the war to counter the lure of Freemasonry amongst young Catholic men, and the anti-Catholic sentiment fostered by some Masons in their employment practices where it was reported that ‘Catholics need not apply’ for positions. In her footnotes, Van Gend mentions her difficulty in obtaining sources on the Knights of the Southern Cross while writing her thesis because it was a secret society after all, there had been a fire in their offices, and because she was not able to gain access to their archives.
There was a similar impetus for equitable treatment behind the formation of the Catholic Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Association (CRSSA). The mainstream RSL (then Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia) threw itself behind the Empire – as denoted by its erstwhile title- and their ANZAC Day ceremonies had a strong religious- and particularly Protestant- element. Catholics were forbidden from attending any kind of non-Catholic religious ceremony, and particularly after 1919 ANZAC commemorations were increasingly Protestant in nature. Rather ironically, to promote unity between Protestants and Catholics, the CRSSA was formed to promote a national sentiment that transcended sectarianism. It didn’t work, obviously.
So, an idle speculation about Catholic commemorations in Heidelberg on ANZAC Day led to me sitting down and reading a thesis- not quite how I envisaged spending the day. But definitely worthwhile, nonetheless.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 