Beginnings of Australia's Anzac Heritage

The evolution of the Digger -
The Australian personality applied to the business of war.

The Australian Army has one of the most magnificent heritages of any in the world.  For a start there are no atrocities against civilians, systematic torture or other such human rights abuses to apologise for.  Very few military establishments around the world can make that claim.

It is also one of the very few national armies that has never fired in anger against its own citizens.  That also makes both Australia and our army special. 

Then add the fact that it was the only army to fight World War 1 with an all volunteer force; and that it was the only army in the world at that time that didn't shoot its own soldiers.  In these unique accomplishments the Australian Army was a half a century ahead of the English, the Americans, the Russians, the Germans and all the rest.

We staged the last successful cavalry charge of the 20th Century.   (Some have argued that the charge at Beersheba was not a true cavalry charge because the Light-Horsemen were using an infantry-man's bayonet and not the conventional cavalry weapon, the sabre.  However we believe that Beersheba was indeed a cavalry charge because those Light Horsemen used cavalry tactics.  Who will argue that the presence of a weapon is more important than the mind-set and intention of the man??

The Australian Army contributed more than any other army in the world to the breaking of the Napoleonic model of military combat that preceded the development of the "modern warfare".  Certainly, officially, we fought out of the British Manual of Arms during W.W.1, but down beneath the Generals and among the common soldiers other dynamics were at work; and their expression on the battlefield would revolutionise soldering forever more. 

At Gallipoli, when the English troops charged, it all went well until the officer fell whereupon the attack faltered for lack of that officer's leadership.  When the Australians charged and the officer fell the sergeant rallied the Diggers and the attack continued.  When the sergeant fell the corporal took over and so on.  This was totally deviant behaviour according to the still predominantly Napoleonic Codes being practiced at that time. 

This however was not what astonished the English generals so.  When all of the ranks were gone and it was just a bunch of privates left, the Diggers, our Fathers, elected a leader from among themselves and continued the charge yet again.  This truly confounded the English Generals who simply could not understand how this behaviour was possible. 

The result of this was that those generals reported back to London that we Australians were more effective in attack that the English regiments had been; and it was as a result of these reports that Kitchener put our fathers into the Vanguard of his army in France. 

We would argue that the behaviour that led to that high military complement is completely understandable if one looks at the uniquely Australian set of values, social customs and attitudes those Diggers brought with them out of the Australian Colonial Bush. 

Another story that hi-lights the difference between the Anzacs and the English parent army was told by the venerable Bruce Ruxton.  (Bruce recently retired after a life-time of Service to the Victorian Branch of the R.S.L.)  His story goes like this - When a Digger was injured at Gallipoli he was taken down to Aid Stations on the Beach (stereotypically by the revered Ted Simpson on his donkey).  All armies had Aid Stations and stretcher bearers of course; but if it was determined that a Digger was going to die, a mate from his unit was called down, away from the lines, to stay with him while he made his journey.  This practice made us unique.  No other Army did this.  If an Englishman or a Turk died in an Aid Station he died alone, or at best surrounded by strangers.  No Digger died alone at Gallipoli.  There was always a mate there; someone he knew and trusted, someone who knew him and cared about him. That mate was there to hold his hand against the pain and see him home safely.  In Bruce Ruxton's words, "Those were magnificent deaths."

The Australian military heritage is in fact far older than that of the Commonwealth.  Australia had a "military midwife" in the form of a Company of English Marines that escorted the First Fleet to Australia.  This English force was defeated at the Battle of Toongabbie by the Aboriginal warriors of the Darug Nation; and so many Imperial historians today find it more comfortable to believe that this battle never happened.

The first Australian military Regiment from the British point of view was the New South Wales Corps.  From the Australian point of view they were the Rum Corps and our slave-masters of course.

An English Regiment, it was formed to guard Convict slaves who were then building the Colony.  It fought bravely, and victoriously, in 1804 at the Battle of Castle Hill, (AKA Vinegar Hill) when the Convicts Rebelled and Australia's dream of a Republic was born; before mutinying against Governor Bligh and being sent back to England in disgrace.  Then, after some serious house cleaning, it was then re-named the 100th Regiment of Foot, and saw honourable service in Canada. 

Many of those convicts that the Rum Corps was guarding were sent here for rebellion, and in the course of those rebellions they acquired a considerable military background of course. 

Then there was our unrelenting rebellion against our captivity.  Many of the "Bushranger" gangs in Tasmania in particular were in fact huge armies when compared to the total population of the island at that time.  They demonstrated military style organisation and were as often as not more interested attacking in military outposts and freeing Convict from their slavery  than in robbing banks.

The unique Australian warrior's title of "Digger" comes directly from the Gold Fields of Ballarat and the Eureka Rebellion, where the Australian Nation was born. 

The term “Digger” was not used at Gallipoli on any evidence we have at the moment, but we know it was used on the Western Front.  What we do know is that the sward carried by Peter Lalor as he led the defence of the Eureka Stockade was carried forward to Gallipoli by his grand-son Captain Peter Lalor, of the 9^th Lighthorse. (The first Australian regiment to land at Gallipoli.) This precious sward was lost when Capt. Lalor fell charging the enemy.

After deploying forces to put down the Eureka Rebellion in 1854 the Crown was again forced to deploy into Newcastle in NSW in 1861.  This time it was not gold miners but coal miners instead. 

At his time the military Penal Colony was giving way to a civil or Democratic Colony and the Convict use of Light-horse and Mounted Commando tactics of armed Rebellion that had preceded the formation of the Army of the Republic of Victoria at Eureka adapted in harmony to become a civilian Union Struggle; and so it continued as we drove towards our vision of one great nation united under the Southern Cross.

During the great Shearers’ Strike of 1891, the Eureka Flag was again flown at Barcaldine.

At this time these unionists were training to offer volley fire by Company. Certainly the distinction between Union and military action was far less clear in the 19^th Century than it is today. It was pressure from the Union Movement that ultimately forced the Colonies to federate.

Out of the unity of being bound by Imperial leg-irons, out of the shared indignation at the brutality of the Digger Hunts that triggered Eureka, out of Union inspired solidarity of the workers came the great underlying ethical principle that has guided the growth of the Native Australian Nation, that of “Mutual Loyalty Among Equals”, or the ideal of “Standing truly be a mate”. It was this uniquely Australian principle that saw a man dispatched away from the front to hold the hand of a dying mate.  It was this same Native Australian ethic that allowed the diggers to elect their own leaders as they charged the enemy lines; after all, that is exactly how they used to elect their Shop Stewards.

Of course many of the original Diggers from the Eureka Stockade were still alive at the outbreak of WW1.  They had held a 50th Anniversary Reunion only a few years before.  Their deeds and their name were also kept alive by the poetry of Henry Lawson and others across the entire Democratic Colonial Era, with the result that the title and mystic of the Digger was a living breathing mark of Honour and Identity by the time we landed at Gallipoli.

So we have got it figured out then, a bunch of rebellious pretty crim’s turned into pinko unionists. Well sort of, except for the totally contradictory fact that long before the Commonwealth was born and even while our own internal “civil war” was continuing, we Diggers, we "Damned Colonials" were fighting as "Soldiers of the Queen" in every far-flung corner of the Empire; and apparently we couldn’t any contradiction in that.  This we did in the Sudan to avenge the death of Gordon, in the Boxer Rebellion in China, with Wellington at Waterloo (4 New South Welshmen); and in so many other places across the Empire that the idea that "Australia would be there" was as natural in English thinking in the late 19th Century as the idea that men wear pants.

The slouch hat with the left side turned up is newer than the term digger but it is also one of the legacies of that pre-Commonwealth period, just, as it dates from the Boer War.   The Boer cavalry wore a hat with the right side pinned up, so the Breaker and his mates pinned up the left side of their hats to identify themselves as Australians.

As background, the practice of pinning the side of a hat up apparently started with medieval archers to prevent the rim of the hat interfering with the bow-string. Presumably those medieval archers pinned up either the right or left side of their hat according to whether they were right or left handed. Latter, the Cavaliers who defended the throne of Charles 1 against Cromwell's Roundheads wore a hat with the right side pinned up, and with a feather added as was the fashion of that day.  By that time in history a hat with the left side pinned up was universally recognised in England and in Europe as a woman's hat, an item of female clothing.  This Gender-linked Fashion Rule was still rigidly enforced at the times of the Boer War and the First World War when our great tradition was born. A complement to this rule still exists today.  Women's shirts have the buttons sown on the opposite side to men's shirts.

It was just that Larrikin, rebellious attitude that is such an integral part of the Federation Australian personality, wearing a woman's hat if it pleases us to, doing cavalry charges when we didn't even have any sabers, privates electing their own leaders without proper Authority, playing cricket on Gallipoli Beach in sight of the Turkish trenches, and treating the whole thing as a great adventure; this is what earned us that honourable title of "Damned Colonials" from our frustrated and bewildered "English Betters".  This is why we made such an impact.  This is what it was all about.  The Australian Spirit applied to the task of war.

At Gallipoli then, where the Anzac tradition was born, we were a brand new country seeking to make our mark, but in fact we were fighting from a century and a quarter of military tradition.  

Respectful Postscript: 

The New Zealanders, who formed the other half of that original ANZAC force and who do justly claim, and rightly share the term Anzac, do not call themselves Digger. That is because the Eureka Rebellion happened in Victoria and not in New Zealand.

Some might very well have done so.  There is a story from the Western Front that the New Zealanders fielded a special Maori Battalion who did nothing but dig trenches.  These Maoris became known as the "Digging Battalion’, or the Diggers. 

This suggests that the New Zealanders could have claimed the title had they wished to in memory of that service.  History shows us however that they didn’t.  Never-the-less it is apt to respectfully remember that the glory our Australian Fathers won at Gallipoli and beyond was won in partnership with our cousins across the water.  -  John Hibberd.

Anzac Cove