When the war is over: The limits of civilian storytelling

A new TV series reinforces the sentimental way Australia represents wars and military service.

Cate Carter,Richard Barrett

14 January 20264 min read

The Australian soldier is routinely depicted in the media as a local hero or a superhero, but rarely as ordinary. Despite the insight Australia’s military people can offer, military voices are often diminished in favour of those who speak on their behalf. Official war artists often take on that role, despite the fact that since the 1970s, those artists have been civilians who spend as little as two weeks in war zones.

The ABC’s recent television series When the war is overuses art to engage with Australian experiences of war and its effects on soldiers and their families. Yet the connection between the program’s guests and war is very much arm’s length.

The series claims to put “the power of art to the ultimate test, one artwork and one war at a time”. But the result is the television equivalent of comfort food, replete with nostalgic servings of familiar and sentimental war stories. With teary reflections about family members, host Rachel Griffiths is the empathetic medium. In Episode 2, as she makes her way through rubber plantations in Vietnam, we hear the voices of veterans who walked the same route, but we only experience their disembodied presence through her interpretative experience.

Griffiths observes that when Australian rock star Jimmy Barnes was singing about “the sappers round Khe Sanh” he “seemed to be one of them”. But he wasn’t. And neither were Peter Weir, David Williamson, John Schumann, Ben Quilty or most of the artists featured in the series. Playwright Williamson “was heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement”, Barnes was “running away from a different war”, and painter Quilty was “the only one not carrying a weapon”. There seems to be a collective relief among the program’s guests when, for various reasons, actual military service is not required of them.

It’s a privileged position these artists hold, but it creates a detached lens. The storytelling belongs more often to those artists who object to war rather than the soldiers themselves.

Not all military art is about war; it can also be about the routine, relationships and contradictions of working in a traditional institution in modern Australia.

In Episode 3, painter Ben Quilty asks young soldier Daniel Spain to look into the sun – to dazzle the sitter so the artist could “capture the human inside the uniform”. This oddly dehumanises soldiers and suggests the viewer needs an artist to translate their humanity. Quilty later says of the soldiers with whom he was embedded in Afghanistan for three weeks in 2011: “They were bound by a contract not to speak about their service, not even to discuss how they felt.” Whether this is true or not, vocalising it allows a selective story to be presented as an authoritative account.

In this same episode, we discover that sculptor Alex Seton’s work For every drop shed in anguish was commissioned “by the mothers of those who died by suicide”. In acknowledging the role of mothers, particularly in their traditional position as pacifists, the program overlooks fathers as equal participants in parental grief, and many women in modern militaries who are mothers; a representation that destabilises traditional pacifist characterisations.

The Afghanistan episode, like many of the others, seems carefully curated to tell a heroic story and maintain an acceptable distance between the armed forces and their grateful public. The interview with Kat Rae, however, collapses that distance. For the only time in the series, Griffiths interviews an artist who was also a soldier about her experiences of war and its impacts on her and her family. Rae speaks with her own voice, and through her own artworks, not through an intermediary. The public need for reinforcement of depictions of harrowing military experience is clear. Episode 4 engages with the ABC miniseries Changi (2001), which at the time was criticised for being too irreverent and humorous: “It just smacks of inauthenticity to me … Where’s the horror? The trauma of these individuals, their suffering?” Presenting war stories with solemn reverence and horror, as this series does, not only satisfies a public need for collective grief, but acts as a substitute for actual engagement with military people and ideas.

Sentimentality of the kind that pervades the series distorts our understanding of military careers. It also excludes the experiences of those who serve without going to war. Not all military art is about war; it can also be about the routine, relationships and contradictions of working in a traditional institution in modern Australia. It recognises the ordinary as legitimate and necessary and it sometimes questions the premises on which military life is based – power, violence, compulsion and obligation. Ironically, when Griffiths calls for “a new kind of war hero, one without weapons, just imagination”, it dismisses the modern Australian Defence Force professional. Everyone in the ADF has both.

The final episode is dedicated to “the Australian wars” along a theme of “resistance”. But in its depictions of resistance to oppression, colonialism or violence, the position of the series is subtly anti-war and somewhat anti-military, distancing the stories from the socially acceptable heroic Anzac narrative. Since 1973, Australia has had a professional military force in which half a million Australians have served. Theirs is the other half of the story. As Griffiths reminds us, “There is power in telling the truth to people who don’t want to hear it.” Maybe we need another series to do just that.

About the authors

Cate Carter

Cate Carter is co-director of the Military Organisation and Culture Studies research group and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of South Australia.

Richard Barrett

Richard Barrett is an artist and sculptor.

Topics

Australia Defence & security