In the footsteps of the Anzacs: Teaching about war,yesterday and today

On 24 April 2015, I walked along the beach at Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey just as the sun was setting. Exactly 100 years before, soldiers from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) had been waiting on ships in the lee of the island of Lemnos. As dawn broke the next day, they were to land on the beach and take the peninsula from the Turks to enable British ships to advance through the Dardanelles Strait. It was eerily quiet as several thousand New Zealanders and Australians made their way along this precarious stretch of beach 100 years later. Each of us was lost in our own thoughts. I was caught in the emotion of the occasion. I had been brought up on a diet of the Anzac myth of our brave and fearless soldiers. I remember the pride of representing the Girl Guides and laying a wreath on the cenotaph at an Anzac Day dawn parade in my home town. Two of my brothers joined the army. Yet, in the 1970s, as a university student, I marched against New Zealand’s involvement in the Vietnam War. War, and the commemoration of war, had become a more complex matter for me by then.

In 2014, as the anniversary of the First World War was getting underway, I sat with a colleague in her kitchen and we discussed setting up a project that would examine how the war had been portrayed at the time and what had changed in today’s representations. The project ‘Teaching about war, yesterday and today’ was born. After deciding to use the New Zealand School Journals (a teaching resource provided to all New Zealand school children) as our main historical source, we started analysing the build-up to the war, the patriotic and imperialist rhetoric, and the seeding of the Anzac myth. Imagine my surprise when my son phoned from the United Kingdom to tell me that he had been successful in winning two places in the ballot to attend the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. He wanted me to accompany him. He was excited. Attending the Anzac Day service at Gallipoli had become a rite of passage for many young New Zealanders and Australians. I was conflicted – what an amazing opportunity! But, did I want to be caught up in the very hype I was critiquing? In the end, I decided I would go. As I told my wider family, my cousin, the family’s genealogist, told me that our grandfather’s brother had died at Gallipoli. Great Uncle Samuel was not much older that my son when he was killed at Suvla Bay in August 1915. And so, as I walked along the beach in 2015, I did have a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. I was now carrying my family’s mantle. I was linked to this stretch of land in a way that I had never expected, in a way that many other New Zealanders and Australians are. It made my relationship to the Anzac story more complicated. My thoughts included anger at the futility of war, especially the role of New Zealanders in this part of the world that had nothing to do with us. I felt sorrow for those who had died and those they left behind. I was reminded that as educators we have an important role to play in teaching about war in ways that highlight the multiplicity of perspectives and the avoidance of trite and superficial renderings of complex historical events. That is the point of this Special Issue – war, and teaching about war, is complicated. These are the very issues the authors of this Special Issue have grappled with.

From humble beginnings at my colleague’s kitchen table, the project grew to include over 10 academics, librarians, research assistants and summer scholarship students. Our most significant contribution was in finding, accessing, scanning and making available to students and scholars almost every issue of the New Zealand School Journal since its inception in 1907. In 2015, we presented some of our findings at the Australian and New Zealand History of Education conference and, in 2016, at a further seminar at the University of Auckland. The articles presented in this issue of Citizenship, Social and Economics Education are drawn from those presentations. While the context for our research is clearly New Zealand, the findings will resonate with teachers and students of history, social, studies, civics and literature world-wide. The contexts may differ but the conundrums are the same.

The first article sets the scene by discussing some of the very real tensions teachers face when teaching history. How do you engage students in both cognitive and affective understandings of history? Martyn Davison explores the Gallipoli campaign to teach empathy. He provides a comprehensive model that will help guide other teachers as they navigate their way through such historically contested topics. He makes the argument that the teaching of empathy in history classes also prepares students for participatory democracy by helping them to understand multiple perspectives and walk in the footsteps of others.

The next article introduces the first set of findings from different analyses of the early New Zealand School Journals. In this article, Maria Perreau and Lynette Kingsbury give a little more detail about the project and the sourcing and analysing of the early School Journals before highlighting the patriotic and imperialist themes that children were introduced to at the time of the First World War. The title of the article, ‘An Anzac Iliad’, takes its name from the way in which ancient myths and legends were placed alongside reports of the Anzac campaigns, leaving the impression that the exploits of the Anzacs ranked alongside the heroes of old. This article also discusses how children were being exhorted to be dutiful citizens who understood the importance of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the empire.

The second of the historical articles continues the theme of preparing young people for duty and sacrifice, in this case young men to be ‘war-ready’ soldiers. Stories in the School Journals included brave boys taking part in battle, such as Bugler Dunn, ‘a mere boy with the heart of a man’. Rosie Bingham argues that not only did items in the early School Journal reinforce the aspiration to be a soldier, it was also a particular type of soldier – a very ‘manly’ masculine ideal. When the Gallipoli campaign was reported, the Anzac soldiers embodied these particular masculine traits. They were portrayed as brave, strong and stoic while retaining that typical Kiwi sense of humour and fair play. They were even described as ‘some of the finest specimens of manhood that this country has ever produced’.

The third article brings us to the present day, to the resources prepared by various government and non-government agencies for the 100th anniversary of the First World War. Over 30 sources were examined from websites to picture books – from factual accounts to movie portrayals. The majority of resources were celebratory and commemorative, with picture books for younger children avoiding the real nature of war by telling the Anzac story through the role that animals (donkeys, horses, puppies, even eels) played. Resources for older children introduced a wider range of perspectives, but the authors note that it was not until later in the 100th anniversary commemorations that topics such as conscientious objectors or the role of women began to appear as resources to support a more complex and challenging approach to unpacking the myths of the First World War.

The final article is more experimental in its format. Rather than traditional reporting on the findings of his three projects relating to teaching about the First World War, Peter O’Connor interweaves excerpts of text from these projects without commentary. Alongside children’s innocent questions, such as whether the soldiers’ mothers made their lunches, are emotional stories from real combatants. This piece is a fitting way to complete this Special Issue because it does not pretend to give us glib answers; it merely reflects our own confusion back at us.

And so back to 25 April 2015. My son and I huddled uncomfortably on the cold hillside above North Beach waiting for the dawn. An Australian didgeridoo sounded as the first rays of the sun came over the hill behind us. It was followed by a Māori karanga (call) which raised goosebumps on our arms. In the distance, a warship and set of frigates representing the countries involved in the conflict made their way towards us in the half-light. A roll call of fallen soldiers played on the big screens. You could not help but be caught up in the emotion of the commemorations. Later that day, we made our way up the hillside towards the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair. On the way, we stopped at the many cemeteries. My son took to picking the wild poppies that grew on the roadside and placing them on the graves. We stopped to look at the tunnels dug by both sides, not more than 20 m apart. We remembered the story of the two sides calling a truce, going out to help each other collect their dead, swapping cigarettes and small mementoes and then returning to their trenches to shoot at each other. We arrived at Chunuk Bair for the New Zealand Anzac memorial service a little early. We needed to wait while the Turks were finishing their commemoration of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk’s great victory of 1915, on the same spot. Perhaps that is the real story of war – there are winners and there are losers, there is commemoration and commiseration, but everywhere are stories to tell – stories that help us understand what it is to be human in all its fragility, complexity and contradiction. It is my hope that the articles in this Special Issue add to our understanding and teaching of one of history’s great contested stories – the story of war.

Carol MutchThe University of Auckland, New Zealand