Lecture: 'From the deep black ditch of forgetfulness':

18.00-19.30, Thursday 28 October 2010
Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand Campus
 
 
 
 

In March 2010, the President of the Republic of Ireland, Mary McAleese laid the foundation stone of a new memorial to the Irish soldiers who died at Gallipoli during the First World War. For years, the 10th (Irish) Division of Kitchener’s New Army had been consigned to commemorative oblivion in the Republic of Ireland. Such was their unknown quantity that they could be summarily (and inaccurately) dismissed in Peter Weir’s 1981 epic Gallipoli as an irrelevant sideshow of ‘British’ stragglers, idly ‘sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea’. President McAleese’s presence at Suvla Bay in March this year, however, is symptomatic of a deeper sea change in Irish public memory of the First World War in recent decades. A long-standing habit of official forgetting of the Irish contribution to the British war effort has given way to a tentative, but unmistakable trend towards embracing the 1914-18 conflict as ‘Our War’ (to borrow the title of one recent influential volume). This has proceeded in step with a growing popular appetite for wartime memorabilia, whether in the form of novels, histories, or reissued wartime memoirs.
 
The parallels with the revival of Anzac Day in Australia are striking. The anniversary of the first major engagement of the Australian Imperial Force at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 experienced a protracted decline through the 1960s and 1970s, as the veterans themselves slowly died off, and the imperial cause for which they fought grew increasingly remote. But since the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing in 1990, public enthusiasm for the occasion has reached extraordinary new heights. Television and newspaper coverage has assumed epic proportions, with Anzac television specials and newspapers supplements drawing on a seemingly endless reservoir of war stories (and appetite for the same). Federal Governments have fostered the new mood, with education funding for schools and a steady stream of new monuments and memorabilia – including a new commemorative site at Anzac Cove itself, dedicated by John Howard and New Zealand’s Helen Clark in 2000 (beating Mary McAleese to the beach by a decade). The Gallipoli monuments and cemeteries have become a must-see on Australian travel itineraries in Europe – particularly on the eve of 25 April when the pilgrim hoards roll out their sleeping bags in ever-greater numbers.
 
This lecture explores the underlying contextual factors that have informed these intersecting lines of commemorative culture in both countries. It will consider the remarkably similar experiences of Irish and Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915, and the equally similar depictions of their achievements in political rhetoric and popular lore at the time. It will account for the profound divergence in Irish and Australian public memory of Gallipoli from the 1920s, before turning to the processes of recovery and redemption of more recent decades. To what extent are Irish and Australian wartime memories subject to a shared pattern of deeper influences and agencies? And to what extent can recent tendencies in Ireland be understood in a new light by viewing them in an Australian comparative context?