Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. We all love Old Blighty. I defer to no-one in my admiration of the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the popular culture of Steptoe and Son or the heroic role of Britain in the extension of civil liberties and civility, from the Magna Carta to Churchill's heroic and successful defence of world civilisation in the Second World War—as he memorably put it, 'against a thousand years of darkness' which would otherwise have descended on the world—but it is wearying and exasperating to turn on the History Channel to watch another episode of Britain at War, about the 1940-41 campaign in the Western Desert, see the slouch hats but only hear about the 'British forces', with no mention of Australia.

Similarly, I was reading the otherwise excellent book, The Bitter Sea, by the Scottish historian, Simon Ball. Again, the ethnocentric, Eurocentric view of the world that denigrates Australia's role in those events in the Second World War is really exasperating. The book refers in passing to the first victory in the Mediterranean Battle of Cape Spada in the Second World War. Mr Ball refers to 'an Australian cruiser' that sank the Bartolomeo Colleoni, withoutmentioning its name. Of course, the cruiser's name was the Sydney. Mr Ball, 645 people died on the Sydney later in the confrontation with the German raider Kormoran. Later in the book, the enervating ethnocentricity which denigrates the role of Australia is repeated again and again. The role of Australian troops in liberating Bardia and Benghazi and, indeed, the whole of Cyrenaica in the Western Desert in the December 1941 battles is not mentioned by Mr Ball. Let me remind him that it was the 6th Division who liberated Benghazi. Troops from the 6th Division were involved in that campaign. Battalions of the 6th Division, like the 7th, were moved subsequently and 'used up' by the British in Greece.

In 1941—and Simon Ball mentions this in his book—the major infantry element trying to occupy and pre-empt a German invasion of Lebanon was the 7th Division of the 2nd AIF, which had very bitter fights with the Vichy French. There were also British and Free French forces there, but the principal infantry element, as in the Western Desert campaign, was the Australians.

Montgomery's chief of staff at El Alamein, de Guingand, said later that he wished he had had at Normandy the magnificent 9th (Australian) Division. Rommel said that, in all of his experiences during the campaign in the Western Desert, the Australian troops were the ones that the Germans feared the most. I say all of these things not out of pure Australian nationalism, although I do not disavow that.

The Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, problems with wartime co-operation and post-war change 1939-1951, published in 1958, quotes the great man himself, Winston Churchill:

To General Auchinleck Mr Churchill expressed his grief—

that the Australians were eventually withdrawn from Tobruk—

… but added: 'I have long feared the dangerous reactions on Australian and world opinion of our seeming to fight all our battles in the Middle East only with Dominion troops.'

Who was he talking about? The Australians. The quote goes on:

Once again, added Mr Churchill, the trouble had arisen largely 'through our not having any British infantry divisions in various actions, thus leading the world and Australia to suppose that we are fighting our battles with Dominion troops only'.

That was very much the case during the period of the Middle East campaign from 1940 right through to the end of the battle of Battle of El Alamein in late 1942.

One does not disparage the great role that Britain played in the Second World War. One does not disparage the role of British troops, the British Navy et cetera. But I wish historians like Simon Ball would pay tribute where it is due, to the people who played an absolutely key role in world history—the heroes of the Australian Army and Navy who fought in all of those campaigns and who are owed credit for it. It is disgraceful, in my view, that this seems to be a continuing problem with British historians in particular—that the role of Australia is completely negated. We had this experience with the First World War, in relation to the key role of the Australian corps who fought under Monash and broke through to the Hindenburg line and earlier defended the British at Amiens after the great German Schwerpunkt came from Russia. British ethnocentrism is a continuing problem. On behalf of most Australians, I say: we have had enough of it.

Question agreed to.

Main Committee adjourned at 13:03