Epilogue

In closing the first edition of Forgotten Anzacs, I reflected on the differences between Australia and New Zealand in their experience of the Anzac legend, beginning first with the question of race. Whereas Aboriginal men such as Reg Saunders were the exception in the Second AIF, courtesy of the official discrimination practised against Australia’s first people, in the New Zealand army the Maori were accepted and recognised as patriots serving their county like any other. The difference had a constitutional base — in New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi provided legal recognition of the Maori as the first owners of the land, while in Australia, more than two hundred years after European settlement began, debate still goes on over whether and how to recognise the Aboriginal people in the same way. Australians have a tendency to look down on their little cousins across the Tasman, but in this matter we have much to learn.

I made a similar point about the different trajectories that Australia and New Zealand were now on in international and military affairs. New Zealand has adjusted its military and diplomatic posture to reflect its geo-political position. Perhaps a more self-assured country, it no longer seeks to fight wars for the great and the powerful, and thus its military has given up on ‘first world’ equipment such as fast fighter jets. By contrast, Australia — first in Iraq, then Afghanistan, and now in Syria — makes war readily, still eager to please its imperial partner (or protector), an outlook that has been easily transferred from Britain in 1941 to the United States in 2015.

If the new research in this edition of Forgotten Anzacs shows us one thing, it is that it is a profound national miscalculation to think that the great and the powerful do anything but advance their own position. It was a contemporary of Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, who made the point most succinctly, observing that ‘France has no friends, only interests.’ And when it comes to these interests, nothing is too sacred — least of all an honest discussion of the facts, for these are readily compromised among nominal friends. Australia and New Zealand — and the Greeks themselves — were persuaded to join the campaign in Greece on the back of half-truths, evasions, and downright misrepresentations of the known facts. If we choose to honour the second, Forgotten Anzacs, it might best be done by avoiding such naivety in the future.