Writer
Greg Lockhart
Greg Lockhart is a Vietnam veteran and an historian. Formerly of ANU, he is author of Nation in Arms: the origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam (1989), The Minefield: an Australian tragedy in Vietnam (2007) and, lately, essays on Australian history.
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Anglicans, ANZAC and the nation
There has been a change in the way we understand the ANZAC tradition. Since 1945, the literature on ANZAC has led us to think of its ‘classical’ and ‘stoic’ sources as a ‘secular’ national religion. Darren Mitchell’s important Sydney University PhD Thesis ‘Anzac Rituals’ (2020) more reasonably demonstrates its British imperial religious ethos. Continue reading »
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The khaki election this ANZAC Day
The khaki does not primarily represent the defence of Australia. It still represents something close to what Lord Salisbury intended it would be in the first khaki election of 1900: the defence of the empire. Continue reading »
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Casting Lockheed Martin out of the Australian War Memorial
The Medical Association for the Prevention of War is appealing to the Australian War Memorial not to renew its partnership with weapons giant Lockheed Martin when the current agreement expires in April this year. Continue reading »
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The fall of Kabul: false friends for over sixty four years
On hearing of the fall of Kabul a few days ago on 15 August, I recalled how shocked I had been by the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. As an Australian soldier who served in the Vietnam War between September 1972 and March 1973, I was an adviser to the old Army of Continue reading »
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Reinventing ANZAC Day away from its imperial origins
Attendance at ANZAC DAY dawn services plummeted by 70% between 2015 and 2019, and questions have been asked about the Day’s ‘fading relevance’. We need to re-invent ANZAC Day as a day of restitution for the appalling losses of an imperial expeditionary tradition that bears no relationship to the defense of Australia and its dignity Continue reading »
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Not knowing one’s enemy: fundamental intelligence failures in Australia’s Afghanistan and Vietnam
There are disturbing parallels between what occurred in Afghanistan and what occurred 50 years earlier in Vietnam. The accidental killing of innocents is one link. So, too, is the intelligence vacuum into which our expeditionary military tradition sucked us in both countries. Continue reading »
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Heart of Darkness: Our expeditionary imperial culture and alleged war crimes in Afghanistan – and elsewhere
We tend to forget that our military, political and other cultures were formed in the frontier wars of British imperial expansion in the 19th century. Because those wars were fought in the process of taking the land of Aboriginal and Maori peoples and of inflicting partial genocide en passant, they were always going to produce Continue reading »
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The importance of the Brereton report on our alleged war crimes in Afghanistan
On 20 November, the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF) General Angus Campbell finally presented the public with the redacted version of NSW Justice Major General Paul Brereton’s report into our alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Continue reading »
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PR Spin on Our Alleged War Crimes and ‘Rogue SAS Squad’ in Afghanistan
Senior members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) have been drip feeding us through the media with information about the alleged war crimes committed by the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) and other Special Forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Continue reading »
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‘Poor moral leadership’ and our alleged war crimes
‘Australia’s SAS must be accountable for possible war crimes’ in Afghanistan, says Professor Philip Dwyer (P &I 27.7.20). Indeed, it must. We must emphasise also that individual soldiers have responsibility for their actions. And that we, our government and nation, are responsible too. Continue reading »
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Anzac and the Great Deception in Australasian History
This year, Anzac Day marches have been suspended for the first time in almost a century. Because of the coronavirus the Australian War Memorial (AWM) will broadcast a socially distanced Dawn ‘Service’. The New Zealand National Memorials will represent their Dawn and Citizens’ ‘Services’ on media and on-line. At State Memorials in Australia, Governors will Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART.- Quarantined in the Jazz Age
A friend mailed me recently to ask if I was well and safely distanced socially. He also pasted the following letter and asked me if I’d seen it. I hadn’t. Continue reading »
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David Walker’s Stranded Nation
Professor David Walker’s Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is a work of great and very readable erudition, which does something new: places Australian cultural, political and diplomatic history in its regional context at the time of Asian decolonisation. Continue reading »
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What we forget on Anzac Day
On the first Anzac Day, 25 April 1915, the Australian Imperial and New Zealand Expeditionary Forces landed at Gallipoli. On Anzac Day 2019, Anzac forces are again in the Middle East – and Afghanistan – this time 16 years after their initial deployments at the beginning of the Iraq War. Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. On the back of the great crime against humanity in Iraq.
It was ‘a bloody mess’. So said one Iraq veteran heavily involved on the logistics side of things and quoted in Dr Albert Palazzo’s recently declassified studies The Australian Army and the War in Iraq 2002-2010 (572 pages, 2011) and Deploy, Sustain, Return: Australian Logistics and the War in Iraq (156 pages, 2008). But note Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. On reading Peter Stanley’s review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget.
I’ve just caught up with Peter Stanley’s review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914-18, which was posted on Pearls and Irritations on 15 November 2018. I mention this, because it provoked a response that I think deserves underlining: John Mordike’s 15 November reply, which pointed out that a main Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. Armistice and Remembrance Day in Australia
The signing of the armistice at 11 am on 11/11/1918 did not raise great enthusiasm among members of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), because their first thought was for sleep. It then took a year for the battlefield silence to spread across the Empire. Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART: Tearing down our heroes.
The Director of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), Dr Brendan Nelson, has inappropriately used his position to criticise Fairfax Media over its reporting of allegations that former Special Air Service (SAS) Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC has committed ‘war crimes’. The Director says the allegations are an attempt to ‘tear down our heroes’ and that ‘unless Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART: Remembering the charge at Beersheba and forgetting the Balfour Declaration
This week, as our $600 million Great War centenary rolled on, the Australian Light Horse charge at Beersheba on 31 October 1917 has come out of the culture in a tsunami of centenary excitement at home and abroad. Media enthusiasm for the charge has been unbounded in Australia, while talks in Tel Aviv between the Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. An old imperial reflex
Rawdon Dalrymple’s 4 August blog ‘A personal link to World War One’ presents us with an automatic defence of the old imperial order. Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 5 of 5)
Part 5: Narrative Overview and Conclusion The emphasis in our military history and remembrance on asking how we fought does not inherently preclude an interest in what we were fighting for. The two narratives could co-exist and interact. But not effectively in our culture – yet. We still lose sight of what our remembrance confirms: Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 4 of 5)
Part 4. A race strategy to save ‘White Australia’ Political manipulation of the society’s racially inflected anxieties was a major factor in the imperial ascendency over national defence policy in the Commonwealth in 1911. The secret implementation of a race strategy then determined our entry into the Great War. This information was not available to Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 3 of 5)
Part 3. Empire over nation. In 1914-18, the fight for Empire against Asia minimised independent Australian national interests. Ambiguous, interchangeable use of the terms ‘empire’ and ‘nation’ also protected that ‘imperial’ bias in our political culture. Continue reading »
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GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 2 of 5)
Part 2. Empire against Asia The ‘imperial’ nature of Australia’s involvement in the Great War was distinctively Australian and, it should be said, a sign of the doubt white settler society had about its survival as a remote outpost of the British Empire in Austral-Asia. Continue reading »
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What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? Part 1 of 5-part series.
To find out what we were fighting for in the Great War we must get past the usual fig-leaf explanation, which is as remarkably effective as it is short on cover in Australian culture. Continue reading »
