Paul Daley theguardian.com, Tuesday 29 October 2013
Tony Abbott has insisted that the phrase 'Known unto God' remain on the tomb at the Australian War Memorial – and though this is a secular shrine, he's right
New Zealand prime minister John Key (left) and Australian prime minister Tony Abbott lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
As an orator, in parliament and on the stump, Paul Keating was excellent when fuelled with the fierce partisanship that drove his politics.
Labor diehards still pore over the words of that infamous 1994 “fireworks” speech in which he evoked John Hewson as the fizzer skyrocket; John Howard as the flower pot that “promised a dazzling performance” but falls away to nothing, and Bronwyn Bishop as “the Catherine wheel ... they’d take off, spreadeagle the kids, burn the dog, run up a tree and then fizzle out going round in circles”.
And many Liberals still hate him for it.
Paradoxically, Keating was best when he pitched beyond the ears of the True Believers and spoke to the nation.
And so he delivered what are widely regarded to be the two finest speeches of his prime ministership: at Redfern in 1992, to acknowledge the grotesque injustice to Aborigines at the heart of Australian sovereignty, and on Remembrance Day 1993, to dedicate the tomb of the Australian Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Both speeches tapped sleeping national sentiments (of pride, of sorrow, of profound loss, of anger, guilt and burning injustice) about two very different stories critical to the definition of Australian nationhood. That both speeches are equally reprised two decades later by Keating’s legion of ideological foes – not least Tony Abbott – and his allies alike, speaks profoundly of the emotional insights he drew upon.
It seems somewhat ironic, then, that a recent plan to replace the traditional Rudyard Kipling epithet “Known unto God” on the tomb of the unknown soldier with words from Keating’s 1993 Remembrance Day oration, has earned the speech the controversy for which it was strikingly devoid at delivery.
So much that, according to a report in the Australian, Tony Abbott personally intervened to stop “Known unto God” being replaced with the first line from Keating’s 1993 speech – “We do not know this Australian’s name and we never will.”
Another inscription near the tomb – “He symbolises all Australians who’ve died in war” – may yet be replaced with Keating’s 1993 line – “He is all of them. And he is one of us." This, it seems, is a compromise, after the memorial council’s reversal, at Abbott’s behest to memorial director Brendan Nelson, of the decision to remove and replace “Known unto God”.
Since it opened in 1941, the Australian War Memorial has become the country’s foremost secular shrine. So it may seem unusual that Abbott – mirroring the views of many others – should be exercised to intervene in the name of God.
But “Known unto God” is the epithet that marks the graves of more than 200,000 world war one Commonwealth soldiers – including many thousands of Australians – who were so disfigured at death that they could not be identified.
When you walk amid the gravestones that punctuate the European western front, for example, where some 20,000 Australians were never found or could not be identified, the words of Kipling – whose 18-year-old son was killed in the Battle of Loos – carry a profound, deeply moving resonance. Such resonance translates with historic and geographic symmetry, linking the lost soldier in Canberra to the hordes of our unidentifiable dead on the old battlefields.
To the non-religious, the words might well say “Known unto him” – meaning, only to the soldier himself. But if they did, there would be just as little justification to remove them as there is “Known unto God”.
Nelson reportedly says it was his idea to have Keating’s words displayed in the Hall of Memory, where the soldier is entombed. He said the memorial council then decided to place the words on the actual tomb.
Regardless, he will now be more mindful of the cultural/political intensity of remembrance and the arbitrary taboos therein.
It is hard to think of a genuinely compelling reason for the council’s initial actions, especially when Nelson confirms that a plaque of the full text of the Keating speech will be fixed outside the hall (it was originally intended for inside – why not in the first place?).
Politics and commemoration are old but uneasy bedfellows. Politicians of all persuasions like to harness public sentiments surrounding loss, battlefield “sacrifice” and their purported reflection on national character. It is left to the historians, artists, journalists and writers to dissent and challenge – which will happen, with increasing intensity, as the centenary of world war one nears.
Plenty of questions will, for example, be asked about how the commemoration will take shape at the memorial (which is spending more than $30m to upgrade its first war galleries).
But revisiting the words on the tomb of the unknown soldier seems like an unnecessary digression that won’t service the remembrance of our dead under headstones “Known unto God”.
