Teaching history of our region is also important

By Jack Waterford (complete text, written for Eureka Street 22/8/06)

John Howard probably doesn't deserve the general cynicism he is attracting from his usual critics over his efforts to get history back into the curriculum, or for his view that it ought to focus rather more on facts and narrative than on themes and flights of fancy. But he, or Australia, has much more to worry about than the future world view of young Australians. He would be doing just as well by looking at how history and local world views are shaping the regional and international environment in which we live.

Arguing with an educated and articulate young Indonesian, or Syrian, or even, increasingly Papua New Guinean or Frenchman reveals amazing gulfs in how people view the world, about how, where and why they think different matters important, or which particular pieces of history they think significant. Religion and broad culture are only a part of the chasm.

But if we think that too many people, including young Australians, are ignorant about our history and our world view, we pay all too little attention to how ignorant we are of the world view and the stories, as seen by themselves, of others.

Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking, a calculated act of Japanese Army mayhem and havoc after its troops took over the town from the retreating Chinese Army in December 1937. Over the next few weeks an orgy of killing and raping of the mostly civilian population occurred – probably 350,000 people were murdered. It is often said that there was, at first, little Japanese embarrassment at the systematic slaughter, since it was hoped and expected that it would create such terror as to make China think that resistance to Japanese might was useless and would only intensify horror.

Though one would have to be 80 or more to have any personal memory of the events, and, from the Japanese point of view, to be 90 or more to have had any involvement, the Rape of Nanking is a continuing powerful point of tension between China and Japan – indeed between North and South East Asia and Japan. It surfaces every August, as it did this week, when senior Japanese figures, commemorating the end of World War II visit shrines for Japanese war dead, including shrines to some of Japan's war criminals. And it also comes to a head regularly with the publication of fresh Japanese history texts which gloss over or completely ignore Japan's role in the war, which began for China in 1937, four years before Pearl Harbour, the invasion of Malaya, or the systematic brutalities visited on Allied prisoners of war.

It's not quite the argument about an apology – an essentially sterile one. Japan has apologised, in all manner of ways, to almost everyone. Nor is it a matter of blaming the present population of Japan of having any responsibility for events, or harbouring a suspicion that, deep down, the Japanese want to visit their aggression upon us again. Japan has demonstrated in many ways that it has learnt its lesson, and, indeed, has over the past 60 years been very diffident about doing anything which might manifest its military strength.

Rather the argument is about acknowledgement, and fervent belief that the Japanese should never forget the barbarity, the brutality, the conscious cruelty and the dishonour which it visited upon the Chinese, the Filipinos, Allied prisoners of war and others during that terrible decade which began 69 years ago. In exactly the same way, of course, is the determination that Germany must never forget its horrors – indeed that we ourselves occasionally turn our minds to ours. From that knowledge might come not only a renewed, perhaps unnecessary, resolution to avoid any repeats, but some understanding of what it did to others, some appreciation of the continuing chasms which exist and some appreciation of the reservation and suspicions that still exist. And, perhaps, for some at least, some atonement – if not as an admission of a continuing blood guilt on new generations of Japanese but as a reflection of the fact that Japan rose from the ashes of defeat and national humiliation to again become a rich and powerful force in the world.

As the years roll on, some of the Japanese resistance to a thorough examination within its community, and some of the obeisance paid to former, disgraced, national leaders, seems to some to be acquiring an appearance of defiance and calculated insult. Japan is by no means the only country which has found it embarrassing an inconvenient to look at its past: France and many of the occupied countries of Europe have still to confront many of the skeletons, but it shows more and more appearance of being bored about being the scapegoat and increasingly unwilling to be blamed for what occurred, at other hands, long ago. As John Howard might say, ‘Get over it’.

John Howard, probably, would not say, ‘Get over it'', because he, while well sensible about the difference between modern Japan and its present leadership, grew up under a shadow cast by the war against Japan. And his belief that people should know their history, and in an ordered, narrative form, rather than disorganised and unintegrated set of themes, is perfectly sincere, and, so far as I am concerned, quite convincing. He is right too in fearing not only the guff that passes for history but the fact that fewer and fewer young Australians are studying any history, guff or good, at all.

But the problem is wider that. Just as we have a national interest in having our citizens – young and old, new and old – know our history, we have an increasingly important interest in having our neighbours know ours – and their own. It's not just Japan which is suspected or misunderstood because it fails to appreciate what it has done or how it is perceived; Australia is in much the same position so far as most of the nations of Asia are concerned.

In many cases that is even when we have a reasonable story to tell – certainly one that is better than the vaguely held theories about us. In other cases, once we are more conscious of how our own actions have affected people, or how they have been perceived, there might even be room for a bit more explanation, perhaps even self-criticism.

How come, for example, we have made a cult of the deaths of Australian prisoners of war in Changi and the Burma railroad, and the sufferings of survivors (including my father) and simply do not know or include in our histories that the capture of Singapore was immediately followed by the massacre of perhaps 20,000 local Chinese? Or that we have a great national legend of the simple kindly Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels in New Guinea but omit to mention our summary executions of scores of New Guineans for collaboration with the Japanese? Or that the gritty and difficult war in Burma waged by Field Marshal Slim was probably possible only because food and materials were husbanded for the effort, resulting in the deaths of a million or so Bengalis from famine. Perhaps we should be glad that the few who remember generally conveniently forget.

The overwhelming proportion of Indonesian people, including the overwhelming proportion of its educated elite, have no knowledge of Australian (or American) involvement in the war against Japan, and their own narrative of that war has very little in common with ours. Instead it is a part of their independence saga, a part of the process by which they got rid of Dutch colonisation, and must of what happened during the Japanese occupation has been elided into a broader story about how, in the aftermath of war, Indonesian nationals declared and won their nationhood.

There were ample Japanese atrocities against Indonesians, but, in many respects and many places, Japanese occupation, so far as the natives were concerned, was not only relatively benign but involved the collaboration of young nationalists, including Sukarno, the father of the country – another reason for glossing over some sticky issues. There is, in the histories ordinary Indonesians study, nothing about the battles fought by Dutch and Australian soldiers on Java, Timor, Ambon or Borneo, or the naval catastrophes in the Java Strait, let alone anything about the general war of attrition and blockade – fought largely in Indonesian waters – by which Japan's war-fighting capacity was strangled, far more conclusively than by the famous air, sea or land battles or, ultimately, by the atomic bomb. It's not their story; other than that great powers used the Indonesian archipelago for an away game, it was hardly about them at all.

Because they do not know our story of it, they have no sense of the Australian national trauma when, after the fall of Singapore, we thought ourselves naked and exposed, and how, over more than 100 years of our history, we have considered that any attack on Australia must come through Indonesia, if not from it. They do not understand our strategic closeness to the United States, considering it primarily as merely the preference of white colonial types for each other's company, somewhat the more disgusting for the manifest inequality of the relationship. Indeed, any sense of our own history and culture is submerged in a general narrative about the wickednesses or colonialism, and military and cultural imperialism.

Like the Japanese, Indonesians too have uncomfortable lacunae in their narrative, not least over the anti-communist purges of the 1960s and the systematic massacres of perhaps a million Chinese, but Australians, perhaps, are as ignorant of this as most Indonesians are. The overwhelming majority of Indonesians were not alive then.

If it is a major worry that Indonesians know so little of us and of our history, how much of a worry that we ourselves know so little of theirs – especially as they themselves see it, rather than as it footnotes into our own history.

One might say the same of most of our Asian neighbours – the old British colonies somewhat less, of course. But even nations with whom we have umbilical relationships – Papua New Guinea for example, are developing their own sense of their history which differs from our recollection or sense of what is really important. Likewise Middle Eastern countries – including Israel – are developing histories in which the ‘facts'' – as you would find them in our history books – are almost irrelevant compared with facts, moods and views they think are critical.

If John Howard is serious about history, he should be devoting as much time to having us understand the senses of history of our neighbours, and having our neighbours understand our sense of our own.
It's mostly virgin territory. It could sponsor, for example, the development in Australia of a great centre of study for ourselves and our neighbours focused not only on explaining our broad liberal culture, history and sense of ourselves but on helping us understand rather better the culture, history and story of our neighbours.