AustLit

'In his article from 2007, ‘Anzac: The Sacred and the Secular’, Graham Seal explores the status of the Anzac as a ‘talismanic mythology [that is] powerfully associated with dominant concepts of nation and cultural identity (Journal of Australian Studies 31, no. 91, 135). In the story of Australia, the Anzac is courageous, resilient, cheerful and bound together with his comrades in a comforting, homosocial brotherhood. He is also, as the myth would have it, white, male, heterosexual and wholly sacrosanct. Thankfully, this has not prevented historians and others from taking aim at the pernicious homogeneity of the Anzac stereotype. Recent work by Yorick Smaal, for example, exposed the intricate worlds and identities of men who desired other men in Australia during World War II. Smaal begins his monograph by recalling the reaction to an attempt by a group of veterans to lay a wreath at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne in 1982. It was a gesture that was meant to acknowledge queer men and women who had served and died during World War II. It was ultimately prevented however, because, according to Bruce Ruxton, the President of Victoria’s Returned and Services League, it denigrated Anzac Day. Ruxton went on to comment that he ‘could not remember a single poofter from World War Two’ (Y. Smaal, Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (2015), 172). It is curious to note just how much mileage this unfortunate denial has. Fast forward to 2015, and to an incident highlighted in the Introduction to Serving in Silence?, when the Defence LGBTI Information Service arranged to lay rainbow wreaths on Anzac Day. Their actions were ridiculed by a comment left by a reader of Gay News Network who remarked that ‘There were no gay Anzacs … There weren’t any homosexuals … Keep your fantasies in house and stop defaming the Australian Army’ (7).'  (Introduction)