The secret centenary

ABC.net.au: The secret centenary
Sixty thousand Anzacs were killed in the Great War. Hundreds of thousands of Australians had their lives shattered. The impact of the war was so far-reaching it is often said that it changed the course of Australian history.

Yet historians rarely recall that the secret decisions, which led to the sacrifice, were driven by manipulated race fear - of Japan - and then covered up.

My current Griffith Review 32 (May 2011) essay draws on neglected work by Defence historian John Mordike to show that the development of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was determined by a secret agreement that the Australian defence minister senator George Pearce made at the war office in London on June 17, 1911. That clandestine arrangement did not come out of the blue. It was the culmination of a brilliant British imperial deception going back to at least 1909. The formation of Alfred Deakin's post-federation national guard was used as a Trojan horse to mask an imperial expeditionary agenda and subvert the independent defence policy of the new nation. Such deceit was then facilitated by ruthless British manipulation of Australian fears of a Japanese attack on White Australia.

In the lead-up to the War Office discussions of 1911, the British chief of the imperial general staff general Sir William Nicholson said privately that he believed the threat of Japan was "somewhat remote". Yet Mordike has shown in Army for a nation (1992) and "We should do this thing quietly" (2002) Nicholson and other British officials played ruthlessly, on what they realised were the "irrational" fears of Australian ministers of the Japanese, to promote British interests.

By 1911, the British wanted an Australian expeditionary force to bolster secret preparations they were making for a war they anticipated with Germany by 1915. Pearce and prime minister Andrew Fisher, who was in London with him in 1911, believed that supporting Britain in such a war would be the best way of locking Britain into the defence of Australia against the Japanese in the pacific. Pearce then arranged with Nicholson to prepare an expeditionary force in the war office discussions, and Nicholson shrouded the arrangement in secrecy. He said: "I think it is much better we should do this thing quietly without any paper on the subject, because I am sure in some of the dominions it might be better not to say anything about preparations." Pearce agreed.

Both he and Nicholson had clearly realised that the undertaking violated the intention of the Australian Defence Act (1903), which denied the Australian government authority to send troops out of the country. Both Pearce and the Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher, who was aware of the secret undertaking, also believed that they would lose an election on the issue.

To ensure the cover-up, Nicholson then withheld the record of war office discussions from inclusion in the published "minutes of the proceedings of the imperial conference, 1911", of which those discussions were a part. In moves that kept the record out of circulation for 77 years, he first kept it in the War Office until 1912, and then placed it on secret war office operational planning file 106/43 where Mordike found it in 1988. Until then there was no public knowledge that the discussions, which determined the nature of Australia's involvement in the First World War, had ever taken place.

With the destruction of the Great War, the original cover-up grew into a monstrous deception. The 20,000 members of the First Contingent of the AIF were recruited in six weeks. But without the planning, organisation, formulation of tactical doctrine, training, supply, transport, medical and legal requirements that were under way from 1911 there was no way the AIF could have been ready as it was for Gallipoli. Without the Gallipoli landing and all that followed Australia's expeditionary military tradition would have been different. So would the national sense of dependence on "big and powerful" friends to save us from the perceived threat of an Asian invasion - which has never materialised. In 1914-18 the Japanese proved to be reliable allies. In 1942 when they bombed Darwin and Broome, they decided not to invade Australia because they calculated it was strategically impossible to do so.

The imprint of the Great War on our culture is so deep that historians have revealed a remarkable incapacity to deal with the hard evidence of the secret expeditionary decision and preparations of 1911-14. When Mordike finally presented the irrefutable documentation that our independent national defence policy was subverted by imperial subterfuge, our historians apparently lapsed into cognitive dissonance. As I show in my essay, they simply ignored the documents he had discovered and dismissed his work in a threadbare critique.

Hopefully, then, the centenary of the great expeditionary deception on June 17, 1911 will reveal the capacity of a new generation of historians to face the facts as we approach the centenary in 2014-15 of our involvement in the Great War. Only then will the sacrifice of the first 60,000 Anzacs be graced with the search for truth it deserves.

Greg Lockhart is a writer and academic, and has served with the Pacific Islands Regiment in Papua New Guinea and The Australian Army Training Team in Vietnam. His essay 'Race fear, dangerous denial' is published in the Griffith REVIEW 33: Wicked Problems, Exquisite Dilemmas (Text Publishing) www.griffithreview.com.