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The State of Australian History of War

AUSTRALIAN MILITARY historians are used to being unfashionable. In contrast to countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, where military history is a prestigious pursuit, and specialist chairs are devoted to the genre, in Australia the study of war has tended to be on the margins of the academic community—however popular it might be with students. This is despite the fact that armed conflict remains the pre-eminent source of human suffering, and was one of the greatest sources of political, social and economic change in the twentieth century. There are a number of reasons for the marginality of military history, at least its traditional form of strategic, operational and tactical studies. Australia's participation in wars over the twentieth century reflected its alignment with British imperial strategy and, after 1945, with the United States—an alignment that a generation of historians, radicalised by the experience of Vietnam, found instinctively unpalatable. Traditional military history has also been strongly empirical, theoretically unadventurous, and—literally for millennia—a masculine domain. Strategic studies, meanwhile, focuses on decision-making elites: again these are masculine and irremediably associated with realism and amoral power politics. None of this sits well with decades of Australian historiography that have privileged the nationalism of the left and social, feminist and Indigenous history; nor with the shift in recent decades from 'epistemology to ethics'—that is, 'from a critique of knowledge to a concern with doing (and being good)', to quote Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas. 1 There is something in Greg Lockhart's point that military historians have tended to work within the paradigms of the defence policy they study. This does not mean, however, they uncritically accept these. The passage Lockhart quotes from my edited Australia's War 1914-1918, for example—to the effect that Australians took comfort in being secure within a wider white Anglo-Saxon race—is not an endorsement of that view but rather a description of Australian attitudes in 1914, attitudes that I argued Australians of the late twentieth century might find incomprehensible. The question raised by Lockhart, however, remains: is there a great divide in Australian war studies, between those who 'leave unexamined the assumptions of the strategic argument in our imperial military history', and the 'relatively small number of sociological and military studies that are uneasy with the expeditionary tradition'?