What a legend

The Anzac story stands alongside the ancient Greek classics in embodying values of enduring significance, writes IPA Adjunct Fellow Bradley Bowden.

The Iliad of Homer, the Histories of Herodotus, and the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides are foundational texts for our Western Civilisation. In their pages we discover how a unique Greek civilisation was defined through war, first against Persian invaders and then against each other. In the canon of Australian literature, only one study equals these epic studies of war and its effects: Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, authored and edited by Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean (1879-1968), a “boy from Bathurst” who, as Peter Rees (1966-) observed in Bearing Witness: The Remarkable Life of Charles Bean, “arguably created the Anzac legend”.

A 12-volume epic, the Official History covers every aspect of Australia at war, from Gallipoli’s beaches to the home front. Six volumes were completed by authors working under Bean’s oversight. The most consequential, however, are the six that cover the battles of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) at Gallipoli and the Western Front. Each was undertaken by Bean himself. Bean also authored an abridged single-volume version, Anzac to Amiens (1946). In any canon of Australian literature, this volume, at least, demands inclusion.

Bean, having served as Australia’s Official War Historian throughout World War I, brought to his work a knowledge of the AIF’s experiences that few others possessed. Of the Gallipoli campaign, Bean noted in 1920, there existed no “record from which even the shortest history of those events could be written” other than his own “private diaries” and the “notes of his conversations with officers and men”. Bean also brought to the Official History a commitment to unvarnished truth. As he explained in his first volume, “bare and uncoloured” truth was “the only memorial” worthy of Australia’s fallen heroes.

Inevitably, Bean’s pursuit of truth courted controversy. Of the British veteran who led the AIF between 1914 and early 1918, Sir William Birdwood (1865-1951), Bean observed he was “not outstanding as a tactician”. Greater controversy surrounds his relationship with Australia’s greatest general, Sir John Monash (1865-1931). In his Official History, Bean is fulsome in his praise for Monash, contrasting his “methodical, painstaking thoroughness” with Birdwood’s leadership. When a decision was made to replace Birdwood with an Australian-born officer, however, Bean supported another candidate, Sir Cyril White (1876-1940), who was Birdwood’s chief-of-staff. This intervention was ill-advised. Bean’s job was to report events, not to choose the AIF’s commander-in-chief. Any doubts as to Monash’s abilities were dispelled at the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918 when Australia’s divisions attacked as a single unit for the first time. By 11am, with few casualties, a stunning victory was evident. This success, Bean recorded, “never passed from the mind of the 50,000 Australians who saw it”. Each attributed success, justly so in Bean’s opinion, to Monash’s organising skills.

Bean paid little heed to the official despatches.

For critics of Bean and the Official History, the belated appreciation of Monash’s full capacity, when combined with some passing references to Monash’s Jewish heritage, are enough to discredit both as antisemitic. Others find little of merit in any aspect of the Anzac legend that Bean helped forge. In What’s Wrong with Anzac, for example, Marilyn Lake (1949-) and Henry Reynolds (1938-), two of the nation’s most prominent historians, argue that “the Anzac spirit and associated militarisation of our history” needs repudiation in the interests “of social justice”. Such controversy highlights the fact that Bean’s Official History is not a long-forgotten text and is, instead, central to how Australia perceives itself.

REPORTER, HISTORIAN, VISIONARY

At war’s end, Bean could not surrender the memory of those who had fallen. Instead, he convinced the Australian government to support an Australian War Museum (now Memorial) and an official history of our war effort. Although Bean kept the AIF’s history for himself, the other volumes—covering the cavalry’s campaigns in Palestine, our navy, our Flying Corps, the home front, our role in the Pacific, and our medical services—were given to others. Bean’s vision, nevertheless, pervades every volume. In commenting upon Bean’s role, Col. A.G. Butler, author of the volume on medical services, acknowledged his study “had the inestimable advantage” of Bean’s “guidance, inspiration and scholarly insight” that pervaded “almost every paragraph”.

To understand Bean’s imprint, we must first comprehend the experiences that shaped his intellectual vision. Bathurst-born, Bean’s father, Edwin, was headmaster of the town’s Anglican College. Religiously devout, his parents conveyed to Bean a respect for classical philosophy and a moral purpose that found expression in a relentless pursuit of truth. Moving to England at the age of 10, Bean subsequently obtained degrees in classics and law from Oxford. More English than Australian on his return in 1904, he half-heartedly pursued a legal career before obtaining a job at the Sydney Morning Herald with help from the poet, A.B. (Banjo) Paterson (1864-1941). There he found his calling as an investigative journalist. Venturing into the Outback to study the wool industry, Bean experienced an intellectual transformation; a conversion recorded for posterity in On the Wool Track (1910). Like many before him, Bean discovered what he called ‘the real Australia’ in the self-reliant pastoralists and workers of the bush. Inherently practical, the people of the bush were nevertheless well-read and politically engaged. Of the typical shearing shed, Bean observed that he heard conversations superior in every way to what one found in the lobby of Parliament.

By 1914, after a two-year stint as the Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent, Bean was a highly respected journalist. Tall, thin, bespectacled, and with a shock of red hair, he was also a familiar figure in political circles. The outbreak of war presented an unexpected opportunity. The British army offered Australia a position for an Official War Correspondent. To fill the position, the Labor government held a ballot of those belonging to the Australian Journalists’ Association. Winning the vote, Bean joined the convoy full of Australian and New Zealand troops that departed from the Western Australian port of Albany on 1 November 1914. Subsequently, Bean stood alongside his nation’s soldiers from the Gallipoli landing (25 April 1915) until the final armistice (11 November 1918). Wounded at Gallipoli, he refused evacuation. For his bravery in rescuing wounded soldiers, he was recommended for a Military Cross; an award his civilian status denied him.

A constant figure in the trenches, Bean paid little heed to the official despatches issued by the military hierarchy. Instead, by venturing into the trenches he was able to capture the first-hand experiences of the troops. At Gallipoli, his goal of giving voice to the ordinary Anzac (that is, soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), caused him to put together a ‘New Year’ magazine within which soldiers recorded their individual experiences.

Denied local publication by the December 1915 evacuation, these first-hand accounts found a wider audience when published as The Anzac Book, selling more than 100,000 copies in 1916 alone. In its pages, Australians back home glimpsed something new in their history, “the Anzac”. They were defined, Bean recorded in his Official History, by a unique “creed”,

… the chief article was that a man should at all times and at any cost

stand by his mate. This was and is the one law which the good Australian must never break.

The qualities that Bean found in the bush were also those he found in Gallipoli’s trenches. Ninety per cent of those who joined in time for the landing at Anzac Cove were single. Twelve thousand were shearers and shedhands who boasted membership of the Australian Workers’ Union. What most distinguished Australian soldiers from most others, Bean observed, was their individualism, their egalitarianism, and the sense they were “masters of their own lives”. Bean noted similar characteristics among “other armies from the British Dominions”, most particularly those of New Zealand and Canada. Within these “Dominion forces”, Bean concluded, there was an atmosphere of democracy. Whereas in the British military tradition a democratic spirit was “looked upon as a condition adverse to military effectiveness”, in the Dominion forces it was the key to their fighting spirit.

Selfish aims were pushed into the background.

The Anzac spirit, Bean argued, also owed a debt to the experiences at Gallipoli. On the Western Front, Gallipoli veterans were distinguished from others by an ‘A’ embroidered in gold on their regimental colour patches. From these veterans, new recruits imbibed an ethos that exerted a greater influence than any other they had experienced “since they left their mothers’ knees”. This ethos was, Bean concluded, a product of the psychological change he witnessed at Gallipoli. Behind this alteration was the realisation that battle after battle lay ahead. With life uncertain, selfish aims were pushed into the background, Bean wrote. The only ambitions that counted were those of “their regiment, their squadron, their company”—and the Australian nation. Whereas pre-war Australians saw themselves as British subjects, post-Gallipoli allegiances were decidedly Australian. When dignitaries visited troops in 1916 to tell them Britain’s opinion of Australia rested on a ‘Yes’ vote in a conscription referendum being held at the time, they were greeted with derision. “The attitude of the troops,” Bean recorded, “was quite clear: they did not care whether Australia came first in the opinion of Great Britain or not.”

BEAN AND MONASH

Born in Melbourne to German-Jewish parents, John Monash excelled in everything he did. At Melbourne’s Scotch College, he was Dux in 1889. At the University of Melbourne, he obtained degrees in arts and law. Unable to obtain legal work in the 1890s Depression, he pursued a successful career as an engineer, becoming expert in the use of reinforced concrete. By 1914, he was president of the Victorian Institute of Engineers. His subsequent tendency to see every problem from an engineer’s perspective is indicated by the title of the thesis he submitted to the University of Melbourne after the war for his Doctorate of Engineering: The Australian Victories in France in 1918 – a Thesis on the Application of the Principles of Engineering to the Conduct of War. Somehow, Monash also managed to fit military training into his pre-war career. By 1913 he was Colonel of an infantry brigade in Australia’s militia.

At Gallipoli, Monash was a brigade commander, his unit holding “the most difficult sector … for over a month”. His motto, at Gallipoli as in France, was that “the staff must be the servant of the troops”. While Monash’s cerebral approach to war won Bean’s respect, it did not produce affection. Used to soldiers who confronted death at every turn, Bean, in his Official History, stated that Monash’s Gallipoli campaign was characterised by paucity of “physical audacity” and rare appearances on the front line. While, Bean adds, there was never any sign that he “lacked physical courage”, it was also obvious that he “took no delight in running bodily risk”. Events in the European theatre, where Monash was taken out of the line to train the Third Division, while others died, reinforced Bean’s prejudices. When his division entered the fray, his conduct still fell short of Bean’s warrior ideal. “Monash’s leadership as divisional commander,” Bean recorded, “was still hampered by an insufficient experience of the firing line.” In Monash’s defence, it can be argued that a commander’s job is to plan and direct, not serve in the front line. What is nevertheless obvious is that Bean and Monash had different understandings of soldierly behaviour. For Bean, what counted was a willingness to share the best and worst of the battlefront. For Monash, what counted was military success.

Dedicated to the pursuit of truth, Bean was fulsome in his praise for Monash’s accomplishments in 1918. “By the crude test of success,” Bean adds, “few leaders in the British Empire could match his record.” He nevertheless avoids the hyperbole of those such as Roland Perry (1946-), author of Monash: The Outsider Who Won A War. In this we read that the “decisive win” at Amiens was due to Monash; that British generals were “bumbling”, and that the Australian Corps was the biggest on “the entire Western Front”. By contrast, Bean, while applauding Monash and his Australians, also notes the success of the French and Canadian divisions who fought alongside them was equally “overwhelming”. The hundreds of tanks that were key to victory were also British, not Australian. If we read Canadian accounts of the same battle, moreover, we can easily conclude that victory at Amiens was solely due to their troops. In Tim Cook’s Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917-1918 (2008) we thus read that the Canadians were “an elite force”, the “shock troops” of the battle, “100,000 strong”, uniquely capable of “improvising solutions on the spot”.

Critics find nothing but racism in the Anzac legend.

The fact both the Australians and the Canadians were regarded as elite units in 1918 is apparent confirmation of Bean’s thesis that there was something unusual about the “Dominion forces”, namely an egalitarian spirit and atmosphere of democracy that was missing in British units. The wellspring of success in this reading is thus the innovative capacity of the societies from which they are drawn. A lawyer, engineer, and citizen-soldier, Monash was arguably the ultimate war-time expression of his society’s democratic ethos.

BEAN’S LEGACY

In articulating the Anzac legend in his final volume on the AIF, Bean famously stated,

…the AIF is not dead … It arises, as it will always arise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and, for their nation, a possession for ever.

Today, sadly, an endless array of critics finds in the Anzac legend nothing but racism and an unacceptable image of Australia. According to Peter Cochrane (1950-) in his Best We Forget: The War for White Australia, 1914-18 (2018), the battles fought in distant Gallipoli were merely part of “a war for white Australia”, and thus a source of shame. Bean, through his creation of the Anzac legend, is racist-in-chief. For Marilyn Lake it is “inappropriate … to adopt an Imperial, masculinist militarist event [Anzac Day] as the focus of our national self-determination”. For Anna Clark (1978-), youthful enthusiasm on Anzac Day is proof of “uncritical fealty” and a failed education.

While there is truth in accusations that Bean’s Official History found in the supposed racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race one explanation for Anzac success, Bean’s critics overlook the fact he placed greater weight on the nation’s egalitarian ethos and the Anzac’s combat experiences than any other factors. Also overlooked in the tarring of Bean and the Anzac legend is how Bean moved away from his pre-1914 assumptions.

By the mid-1930s, Bean was articulating anti-racist views. During World War II, he attracted ire for his condemnation of the racist propaganda directed against our Japanese foes. Subsequently, Bean published a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he wrote that, “In my youth it seemed to be almost universally believed that qualities such as courage or gentleness were ‘in the blood’.” Such opinions were, he conceded, ill-founded.

With less merit, Bean has also been accused of antisemitism; accusations that in 2018 witnessed a campaign to block naming a federal electorate in his honour. The loudest voice in this campaign was historian Roland Perry. In an article in Australian Jewish News titled ‘Don’t Name Seat for Anti-Semite’, Perry is cited as saying an electorate named in Bean’s memory would do “total disservice to the country”. The basis for such claims is a handful of references to Monash’s Jewish heritage in the Official History: that Monash “was Jewish by race and religion” (Vol. 1), that he was a “Jewish-Australian citizen-soldier”, that he was loyal to the Jewish members of his personal staff, that “his Jewish blood gave him an outstanding capacity for tirelessly careful organisation”. Such statements are submitted as proof that Bean’s opposition to Monash in 1918 was caused by antisemitism. In Monash: The Outsider Who Won the War, Perry also portrays Monash as a perpetual outsider in Australian society, subject to antisemitic prejudice.

This nation owes Charles Bean a great debt.

As we have discussed, the tension between Monash and Bean in 1918 is best explained by differing understandings of martial prowess. Nor should we assume this tension produced permanent alienation. On the contrary, each respected the other. In 1924 Monash entrusted his personal records to Bean’s care. Perry’s attempt to cast Monash as an outsider is also problematic. A dux of Scotch College, Monash by 1914 was not only a militia Colonel and president of the Victorian Institute of Engineers, he also served on the University of Melbourne’s governing council.

Suggestions Bean is undeserving of recognition are also at odds with the Australian War Memorial’s submission as to whether an electorate should be named in his honour: “The naming of an electorate for a man who did so much to establish our national character and values,” it advised, was “overdue … This nation owes Charles Bean a great debt.” The Australian Electoral Commission accepted this plea.

This article is an edited extract from ‘Greece & Rome: The Birth of Western Civilisation (500BC-AD354)’, a forthcoming essay in the ongoing series, How Australia Was Made, which is a project of The Centre for the Australian Way of Life at the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

Visit australia.ipa.org.au

POSTSCRIPT, FROM THE EDITOR

In consideration of the research undertaken by Professor Bowden for this article, and a number of erudite representations made to the IPA by various parties, it has been decided to add C E W Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918 to the Histories section of the Australian Canon.

This is a just recognition of a landmark work which both recorded the sacrifices and exertions of Australians in World War I, and also did so much to build our understanding of ourselves as a nation. A commentary will be commissioned and produced in due course.

This change is in accordance with the guidance given when the Genius of Australia project first promulgated an Australian Canon in 2021:

No Canon is ever truly definitive. We have been getting great feedback and great suggestions for alterations and additions to the Canon. There will be future iterations, but as befits the project the changes will not be frequent, or large.

In the Canon preference is generally given to single-volume works, as it is hoped that Australians can and will give serious consideration to reading as many books as possible in the Canon, and thus the mountain we are asking them to climb should be realistic in size. In this case we will note that ANZAC to Amiens (available as a Penguin paperback) is the achievable means of understanding the greatness of Bean’s accomplishment, and what it means to Australia today.

– Scott Hargreaves
This article from the Autumn 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Adjunct Fellow Bradley Bowden.