Quarterly Essay 62 Firing Line: Australia's Path to War by James Brown

Author:James Brown [Brown, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, Public Policy, Politics, War, Military, Political Science, Military Policy, Writing, History, Military Science, General
ISBN: 9781925435016
Google: WMoLEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30553077
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2016-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN …

Since returning from Afghanistan and leaving the army I’ve spent Anzac Day most years with fellow veterans by the bay at Bondi. Our dawn service ends as the sun rises, with an injunction to the thousand-strong crowd to turn to face the Pacific Ocean. Ever since this place was a colony, a fledgling outpost on the far side of the earth, Sydneysiders have been thinking about what might come to threaten us from across the sea. In the nineteenth century, when colonial engineers were constructing the last Martello tower of the British Empire at Fort Denison, Australia’s strategic environment was easily distilled in a single image: two broad red arrows thrusting their way into Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay, bringing threats from the outside world.

Listening to the reveille by the sea, I have often wondered how an enemy appearing at Bondi Beach might be met, and what kind of fight Australians might bring to them. This year, Tomorrow, When the War Began, the television adaptation of the popular series of children’s books, is being screened. There is something primal in this dreaming of young Australians rallying to a crisis, forging a community at a time of adversity and fighting an invading army as they would a summer bushfire. They answer the call much as their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations did when forced unprepared from civilian life into the global conflicts of World Wars I and II. But enemy forces, let alone threats to Australia’s sovereign interests, are not likely to land at Bondi telegraphing their intent. Limiting our imagination of threat in this way is like failing to heed bushfire warnings until the flames are licking the veranda. The harder questions are out there beyond the surf, where tracing the boundaries of our interests and values has become much harder.

Some of us will support any decision by the government to take us to war, and some of us will never accept the deployment of military force as a legitimate activity of government. In the middle, though, is the mass of us seldom provoked to think about war, but who, infused with stories of Gallipoli and Iraq, harbour a hidden instinct for splendid isolation. Permit me the imprecision of grafting psychological theory onto such an abstract thing as our national thinking on war. In a time of crisis, when there are numerous witnesses to an event, a collective diffusion of responsibility can occur, known as the bystander effect. A decision is taken not to become involved, but it is a decision all the same. It seems to me that many Australians want to default to the role of bystander, particularly when it comes to the changing power balances in Asia, and the role of the United States. Some are bystanders because they mistakenly think our allies are big enough to fight on their own. Some think our allies are ugly, continually rushing to fight and shed blood, sowing little more than mayhem. Some bystanders, perhaps, are

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