Lest
Australian War Myths
Mark Dapin
Cammeray, NSW: Simon & Shuster, 2024
Paperback 186pp RRP: $34.99
Reviewer: Mike Annett, July 2024
This book can’t be accused of having a title that leaves the reader wondering what it’s all about and while the author, a journalist and academic historian, has written an entertaining and well-crafted tale, there is not much new in this example of a now familiar genre. That genre being the challenging or de-bunking of some long-cherished truisms or ‘myths’ of Australian military history.
There have now been several iconoclastic works of this type in the last few years, partly to provide a counter point to the raft of popular histories, especially those released during the Great War Centenary period, that provide most of the targets that Mark Dapin takes aim at. The usual tropes are there, the natural soldier of the bronzed Anzac type, the perfidious British upper class sending trusting colonials to their doom, the single-handed Anzac effort at Gallipoli and Monash the brilliant, but almost sidelined general who won the war and could have replaced Field Marshal Haig as the overall commander of British Empire Forces on the Western Front.
We have Mark Dapin’s entertaining writing correcting the record on these and many other falsehoods or exaggerations. However the reality is that the record has in most cases already been corrected, if corrected is the right word because, as the author himself concedes, all the serious histories of Australia’s military endeavours provide a fuller, more balanced perspective, without propagating lazy self-congratulatory jingoism.
Like most nations, Australia’s military story is complex, nuanced and inevitably at times both tragic and inspiring. Not all the villains were British and not all Australians were heroes – self-evident perhaps but Mark Dapin sets it all out for us again. His examination of the anti–Vietnam War moratorium protest movement and its influence on subsequent community and political responses to the more recent ‘wars of choice’ (for Australia anyway) in Iraq and Afghanistan is interesting and insightful given that he is now writing from the vantage point of a professional journalist and scholar; someone who has lived through these events and their aftermath.
On the other hand his section lambasting the former RSL leader, the late Bruce Ruxton and the ‘no poofters’ attitude to official commemorations during the period of Ruxton’s presidency restates a long-corrected record – assuming that anyone, Ruxton included, genuinely believed what he thundered about at the time. In overall terms this, like much of the book, offers little new but for those who want a primer of Australian military myths and the rebuttals to all of them, this covers the field in an entertaining and insightful way.
Of course the trouble with demolishing myths is that there is often a kernel of truth in many of them.
The RUSI – Vic Library is most grateful to the publishers for making this work available for review.