AUSTRALIAN
SOLDIERS IN ASIA-PACIFIC IN WORLD WAR II
Lachlan Grant
NewSouth
Publishing, 2014, 276pp.
ISBN
9781742231419
As I read this book, my mind
continually returned to a simple question. What was Lachlan Grant’s purpose in
writing it?
At first, I thought it was
another work of that genre in which today’s educated thinkers reflect
critically on the attitudes of an earlier generation, often with a smug
attitude that they would not hold such crass attitudes. However, as I read the
book, this did not prove to be so. Indeed, Grant explicitly acknowledges that
the beliefs and language of an earlier generation might not be comfortable for
today’s generation.
Grant’s story starts when
Australians arrived in Singapore and Malaya, where they rubbed against British
racial and class attitudes. Grant portrays the Australians sympathetically,
suggesting that they found themselves in a similar position to the Empire’s
colonial subjects. He notes, however, that many adopted colonial practices,
including siestas and hiring servants for menial tasks. The latter, especially,
he sees as suggesting an acceptance (perhaps too ready) of British attitudes.
Maybe, but Grant shows that many wealthy Asians used servants too, implying
that the relative wealth of the individual was a key factor.
Strangely, given the
background of anti-Chinese feeling in Australia dating back to the gold rush
days, Australians seemed to get along better with Chinese than with others.
However, racism could be a two-way street, with Grant noting that some Chinese
girls ‘won’t look at white men’. Views about Indians were mixed. Men who served
in Malaya and Singapore, or visited India, were less positive than those who
liberated Indian prisoners of war in New Guinea. Finally, Australian prisoners
who were taken to Japan found their relationship with Japanese civilians more
amicable than they might have expected. Individual behaviour could overcome
cultural attitudes.
When the story moves from
Asia to Papua New Guinea, Grant sees a different dynamic. There, Australians
seemed comfortable with being colonial masters. Indeed, Grant mentions the
ambitions of the Curtin government, particularly the Minister for External
Affairs (H.V. Evatt) for greater Australian post-war control over nearby
regions.
Using letters to the Army’s
Educational Service periodical Salt
and other sources, Grant argues that some Australians saw the war as being
about the ideals of the Atlantic and United Nations charters. Perhaps so, but
those documents post-dated the enlistment of many, and cannot have influenced
their initial war aims. The evidence used by Grant is somewhat sketchy. A
debate in Salt on independence
movements in Asia apparently involved letters from only 31 men, from a force
numbering over 400,000 at the time, suggesting that while a debate occurred, it
was limited.
Grant does not accept that
there was a so-called ‘battle for Australia’. He argues instead that the cause
for which many Australians fought was the liberation of Asians from
colonialism. One wonders how many of the soldiers fighting in 1942, lacking
knowledge of Japanese wartime decisions and the benefits of hindsight, did not
believe they were fighting a battle for Australia? It seems difficult to
support Grant’s suggestion that because ‘defending Australia – either from
invasion or … a “battle for Australia” was not of immediate concern within
soldier debates’ late in the war, that they were not high among their concerns
earlier.
Ultimately, the book seems
to conclude that a generation born anywhere between 90 and 150 years ago
broadly reflected the attitudes of their era, attitudes that were imparted
during their adolescence. Australians (and others in the British Dominions)
were inculcated with stories of
‘symbolic images of empire’ by authors like Kipling, Buchan, Ballantyne
and Australia’s Ion Idriess.
As examples, an army
pamphlet written by an anthropologist emphasised the ‘attitude of superiority’
that whites must maintain in PNG, while a journalist/war correspondent used
‘natives’ for manual work, and sometimes assaulted them. Another regarded
Papuans as ‘not far removed from stone-age savagery’. Grant notes, but does not
seem to see the significance of, the attitudes of the editorial staff of Salt. Even these educated elites,
supposed ‘left-wingers’, shared attitudes with less educated junior soldiers.
Perhaps authors who study the attitudes of earlier periods should, as Grant
generally has, approach the task with a modest recognition that their own
attitudes might come under critical scrutiny in 50 or 75 years.
As an aside, Grant implies
some criticism of those who considered themselves both British and Australian.
Nowadays, such attitudes are reflected in the common practice of holding dual
nationality, and praised as elements of a multicultural Australia. Perhaps the
men of 1940 were Australia’s first multiculturalists, albeit affected by what
Grant describes as ‘British race patriotism’?
To try to answer the
question posed earlier, I suspect that Grant sought evidence to support a
theory that Australian soldiers serving in the Asia-Pacific during World War II
were converted to anti-imperialist the cause by their experiences. Perhaps they
were, but the evidence is not obvious in this book.
Grant lapses occasionally
into anachronisms (using the term ‘whiteness’ in a context that is suggestive
of the modern sociological fields of ‘whiteness studies’ and ‘white privilege’,
for example). Strangely, claimants to ‘whiteness’ and its power apparently
spent much time sunbathing, presumably to reduce their power of ‘whiteness’!
JOHN DONOVAN
