The Empire Air Training Scheme: Identity, Empire and Memory

Introduction: Evolution of the ImageI did not imagine that all my life I would look back on experiences,questioning myself about it, reading critics’ opinions of it. Nor would Ihave believed the Empire Air Training Scheme would close its doorsforever, much less believed that Australian generations would arise whowould scorn our loyalty to the Empire. 1In 2008 I listened to these words as I interviewed Don Charlwood expressingthe intense emotional impact he felt on his own identity of the experiences in theEmpire Air Training Scheme (EATS). The image he presented was one of a sense ofdiscontinuity, a rupture between past and present, represented in the division andtensions between the collective and individual memories of EATS. In his narrative,Charlwood also confronted the challenges met in such contradictions, searching forcontinuity in linking past experiences with his present identity. The certainty of beliefsof the young recruits to EATS had been shattered, first in their own experiences incombat, then through the changing Australian cultural framework that pushed the pastfrom the present, and was further compromised by individual emotional responses anda sense of alienation.The purpose of this thesis is to explore and chart the change in imagessurrounding EATS, evidenced in the national narrative and in individual accounts. Inboth public and private lives, involvement in EATS resulted in a series ofdisconnecting experiences. The institution of EATS was embedded in an environmentthat was to experience an upheaval in social and cultural values forcing therenegotiation of identities. Within this framework two central contexts forinvestigation emerge. First, an understanding of the changing position of EATS in theAustralian narrative as it linked to the transformation of social and cultural values1 Don Charlwood Interview conducted 18 July 2008. Similar sentiments were expressed in his bookJourneys into Night, Melbourne: Hudson Publishing 1991, 268. Charlwood served as a navigator, in103 Squadron, in Bomber Command, flying over 30 operations over Europe.1