Education or the bush: The origins of the Anzac legend

Abstract

The Anzac legend is one of the formative stories of the Australian national character. The Anzac character has its origins in the diverse cultural symbolism of the late Victorian and Federation decades in Australia. The Coming Man, the idea of the Australian as an evolved, stronger variant of the Anglo-Saxon type, the idea of the individualist Bushman who was toughened by having to survive a hostile environment, and the pioneers who risked life and forwent basic comforts to bring civilization to the edges of settlement. Many of these ideas were masculinist, involving the profession of close cooperation and bonds between men—mateship—and extolled risk-taking and the use of innovation to succeed in life. Most of these ideas involved the unique element of the Australian landscape—the bush. C.E.W. Bean, as a man of letters, had all these concepts in mind when he extensively travelled the New South Wales outback between 1906 and 1910 settling on the notion that the Bushman was the distinctly Australian type and the source of the Australian character. Bean and many subsequent scholars, the most critical being Russel Ward in his seminal The Australian Legend, argued the bush sets the standard for the Australian character. This thesis proposes that Australian education reforms of the 1880s and 1905–1907 made a significant contribution to the formation of the Anzac legend and therefore the national characer. The particular type of education that resulted from these reforms also helps to explain the ready reception and embrace of the legend by the general public. The Australian public were literate and culturally aware as well as engaged in civic society. This was because of mass education which made them receptive to the Anzac legend in the form in which it was promulgated by Bean, John Treloar, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and others. Ironically the education that Australians received also promoted the idea and narrative of the bush as the definitively Australian scenario in children’s literature and school reading material, and so they were predisposed to accept the bush explanation rather than their own experience of Australianness experienced in large measure in childhood in the schoolyard and the classroom.