Australian Soldiers in Asia-Pacific

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