The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
An Australian Hero
if a breath stirred which seemed to pretend harm to any member of the
family of nations to which he belonged, at that moment an emotion ran
deep through the heart of the Australian people. The men who did not
wave Hags, who hated to show sentiment, who spent their day jogging
round the paddock fences on horseback in dungaree trousers, with eyes
inscrutable in the shade of old felt hats, men who gave dry answers and
wrote terse letters—these became alert as a wild bull raises his head,
nostrils wide, at the first scent of danger. Any sympathetic human being
living in the "naval crisis" of 1909 could not but detect, far below the
superficial political squabble, the swift stirring of emotion which passed
through the heart of that silent sensitive body of working men and women
which makes the real nation. . . .
Which makes "the real nation" . . . Hence there seem to be two nations in
one. Behind or beneath the Nation-State conscious and aware of itself as a
result of War there is this other nation, the real nation and this, so it would
seem, is bound by racism and by mateship. Only in one point was the
Australian people palpably united prior to the War, according to Bean, and
that was "in determination to keep its continent a white man's land,"
and the Australian historian Bill Gammage introduces his 1974 account of
Australian soldiers in the Great War by noting the fear of Asian invasion as
a chief motive for Australian affection for the British Empire; i.e. in the red,
white, and blue wall provided by the Royal Navy, stemming the yellow
tide. 27
The culture of nationalism activates and indeed thrives upon sentiments
active in what we could call "civil society" (in contradistinction to the State),
and here mateship—the moral law replacing religion according to Bean—
is of strategic importance. As with Stanley Diamond's analysis of the way
the developing State of Dahomey took advantage of the best friend relationship,
so we can discern the way that the State in Australia built from
mateship not only the discourse of imperial relations but also the practice
of war.
This latter aspect caught Bean's eye. "Mateship is the one law which the
good Australian must never break " he wrote, and the legal inflection—
law—already signifies the State appropriation. "It is bred in the child and
stays with him through life," he continued.
In the last few moments before the bloody attack upon Lone Fine in
Gallipoli, when the 3rd Australian Infantry Battalion was crowded on the
". . . in whose depths they wage their victorious combat."
fire-steps of each bay of its front-line trend waiting for the final signal to
scramble over the sandbags above, a man with rifle in hand, bayonet fixed,
came peering along the trench below. 'Jim here' he asked. A voice on the
fire-step answered "Right, Bill; here." "Do vou chaps mind shirtin' upon
a piece?" said the man in the trench. "Him and me are mates and we're
goin over together.
Bean adds that the same thing must have happened manv thousands of times
in the Australian divisions, "The strongest bond in the Australian Imperial
Force," he reiterates, "was that between a man and his mate."
Fifty years
later the historian Bill Gammage found no reason to modify this opinion.
He claims that men actually deserted from base camps to go into the combat
line with their mates. From the letters and diaries of soldiers he culls
exemplary acts of self-sacrifice, such as that of the man who laid down his
life by giving his gas mask to a friend. It was on this tenacious loyalty that
the towering edifice of war rested. The mutuality knew no bounds. Mates
were immune from general custom, writes Gammage. "They could abuse a
man, use his possessions, spend his money, and impose where others could
not." And, finally, we are left with this image of love among the dead
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