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MEMORY LANE
Unable to cope with modern research methods, the Sunday Age’s Terry Lane returns to a trusted source:
My childhood overview of our history was formed by a book I was given for Christmas 1946 ...
UPDATE. “I love this,” emails Imre Salusinszky. “Lane’s first post-disgrace column is an attack on John Howard for placing too much emphasis on facts!”
How will we teach about Gallipoli, the PM’s favourite historical event? Was this Australia’s coming of age in the blood of heroes or was it the cream of the nation’s young men sacrificed to Churchill’s vanity? Best just stick to dates.
How about just telling the facts of the story (including the dates) and letting people draw their own conclusions. Typical of a brain-frozen lefty to believe that history must be taught from a certain perspective.
My childhood overview of our history was formed by a book I was given for Christmas 1946 ...
Yeah Terry, I got that one too, but in my version of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” the horrible mean troll ended up dying.
Posted by Vanguard of the Commentariat on 2006 08 12 at 01:55 PM • permalinkI dunno how old Mr Lane is, but I’m 63 and I undertand he’s about my age or older.
I knew from at least the age of three that Australia was not involved in a glorious victory at Gallipoli.
Every 25 April, we had all this crap about “the only nation that celebrates a defeat”, the “coming-of-age” cliche, the loss of our “best and brightest” cliche; etc., etc.
Maybe Terry Lane was educated in a madrassah in Pakistan, because for sure as fuck he didn’t go to school in Australia.
Given Terry Macbeth Lane’s reputation for accuracy, honesty and integrity, can we really be sure he had this book in 1946? Or that he knew how to read it? Maybe he had someone read it for him this year for the column…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 08 12 at 03:34 PM • permalinkThey have put Terry into the journalist’s equivalent of a sandbox and given him a few tonka toys to play with, what a pathetic article. Tellingly no mention of the iraq war in the whole thing, surely the temptation must have been there - you know Gallipoli = Iraq.
O/T - talk about there goes the neighbourhood…
It’s people like this who are in charge in education and set the curriculum (and not only the modern historians).
The barbarians are not at the gates, they’ve been running the joint for years.
Posted by David McBryde on 2006 08 12 at 03:52 PM • permalinkHow very odd.
As a young (we’re talkng teens, here) American studying High School history—even I knew the Turks won that particular skirmish in the broader war, and that Churchill’s “soft underbelly of Europe” strategy was proven to be flawed.
I didn’t see the movie, either, until much later.
Was US curricula that much wider in scope? Its teachers less agenda-driven? I don’t know for sure, maybe not.
(I do know one thing, if my nine year old doesn’t start bringing some real homework home—instead of these “conceptual”, make work projects, I’m gonna march right over to that school and teach them about reeling, writhing and fainting in coils. I spend 10 hours a week teaching her Maths because the school doesn’t)
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 12 at 04:43 PM • permalink#12, #13. Just as well Kmart have a range of home-ed activity books, don’t you think?
I’ve already got a nice collection here for the 4 year old. I figure that “school” can play babysitter while I go earn a crust, then we’ll do the real study of an evening and on the weekends.
I have zero, zip, nada, faith in our edumacation system as it currently exists.
Especially here in Brackistan.
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2006 08 12 at 05:50 PM • permalinkObviously, the fact that he and his family ever even once celebrated Christmas means that he’s a hate-filled rabid-right-wing-deathbeast type radical reactionary wingnut Christian, and therefore absolutely unqualified to opine on ANYTHING, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME!!!
How dare he even continue to breath! The arrogance!!!
Posted by nofixedabode on 2006 08 12 at 06:15 PM • permalinkOh, I should add that another reason that people like Lane demand interpretation rather than facts and dates is that his precious myth of Churchill sacrificing young Aussie heroes is undermined when the dates of Churchill’s actually being in charge and the arrival of the Australian forces at Gallipoli are known.
The Australian forces were used as part of the strategy of those who replaced Churchill and his strategy. Churchill’s “by ships alone” strategy obviously was not followed at Gallipoli.Kitchener takes over military planning of Gallipoli operation from Churchill and changes strategy from naval alone to large ground force in March 1915 (page 137 “First World War” M. Gilbert 1994), on 25 April 1915, the landings at Gallipoli begin (page 146 “First World War” M. Gilbert 1994).
Darn those inconvenient facts and dates always getting in the way of True History!
Posted by David McBryde on 2006 08 12 at 07:05 PM • permalinkLane: “an Aboriginal man carrying spear, woomera and shield. He is also heroic in his “noble savage” way — independent, muscular and naked.
There is also a photo of a young Aboriginal woman standing naked in a placid pool. The caption reads: “A civilised Venus.” It is explained that her hair is well combed with a natural permanent wave.”
So this is evidence of that dreadful ‘stolen generations’, racist era, Mr Lane, where children were taught they were a superior race to the subhuman original inhabitants??
‘Bolshie’ historians is spot on. So is Lane.
Can’t Lane find any evidence that supports his absurd claims?By the way, The One Day of The Year predicted that Anzac Day would be history in a decade from zbout 1960.
When I was twelve years old my mother solved the problem of telling me about puberty and sex to a little book, probably provided by some government health service. What it said wasn’t wrong, just incomplete. I managed to work it out.
Teaching children anything but the facts is propaganda, wrong whichever side’s propaganda.
The difference between then and now is our social evolution; something I thought the lefties were all about. Put simply, western society has moved on, people are better educated, people can determine their opinion themselves. People in this sense means our young as well. Of course, the fact that some societies are way behind in this social evolution is something the lefties can’t accept.
You could teach a lot about Gallipoli by going on and teaching also about how the Australians under Monash learned from it and went on to achieve great things on the Western front in France. There the AIF “smashed its way through France, used as shock troops in an amazing series of victories against the Germans - at Chignes, Mont St Quentin, Peronne and Hargicourt and breaking the Hindenburg Line.”
Teach History, Not DefeatismHis article coincided quite conveniently with this letter to the Editor in todays’ paper:
Still relevant
Thank heavens The Sunday Age did not make the mistake of accepting Terry Lane’s resignation offer. I enjoy and value his columns, and respect the grace with which he addressed his error — rare to see these days. And his point, contrasting the intensive inquiry into Private Jake Kovco’s death with the seeming disinterest in the deaths of so many innocent Iraqis, remains chillingly relevant.
KAYE MATTHEWS, Moonah, TasmaniaI wonder if we should tell ol’ Tezza a secret?
How will we teach about Gallipoli, the PM’s favourite historical event? Was this Australia’s coming of age in the blood of heroes….Is he aware that these Aussie heroes were actually fighting Turkish ...deep breath here Tezza… Muslims. That’s right Tezza, sometimes Australians fighting Muslims can be the good fight. Like we’re doing now and I suspect, a whole lot more of it in the future.
“The teaching of Australian history was so spotty that I was in my mid-20s before I discovered that we had lost at Gallipoli and I only found that out from the play The One Day of the Year. I spent a day in the Preston library trying to prove that it wasn’t true.”
Lane has said it all. What else can you say? He has admitted that he is probably the only person born and schooled in Australia for generations who thought Gallipoli was a military victory. And even then it took him a whole day in a library to learn the truth.
And he says the teaching of Australian history was spotty?
Good thing the internet wasn’t around when he was in his twenties. Who knows what he would have Googled up about
GallipoliA-yup, Australia… the only country to celebrate a defeat. Of course, I was told the same thing in school about the Alamo and my friend from England was told the same thing about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Hrm… you guys ever get the feeling that some teachers have no sense of world history and just want to make their own country look bad? .... Nah.
Posted by MikeTheLibrarian on 2006 08 12 at 11:15 PM • permalinkYep. Completely on our own about the celebrating of a defeat thing. Except the Alamo. The Charge Of The Light Brigade. Israel and Masada. France and Joan of Arc. Dunkirk was a great victory only if you blink and don’t think too much about anything but the evacuation. The Long March was the greatest retreat in history ...
#24 Mike - Teachers (and journalists) like the idea of ‘celebrating a defeat’ because it’s just not done to actually be patriotic, let alone to say war might sometimes be necessary.
So celebrating a victory is out, but celebrating a defeat is OK.
Posted by David Morgan on 2006 08 13 at 12:52 AM • permalink#Mentalfloss, read Hal Colebatch on Gallipoli in his recent article “The Real Case Against Mel Gibon” in The American Spectator Online a couple of days ago (Sorry no link but it’s easy to google).
Posted by Susan Norton on 2006 08 13 at 01:22 AM • permalink#20 - not to mention the biggest and hardest hitting of them all. 88th anniversary of it 5 days ago. Five Australian (50,000 troops) and four Canadian divisions crushed the Germans at Amiens and by any estimation considerably shortened the First World War.
Any estimation other than Terry Macbeth Lane’s that is. He’s still at the local library trying to understand Gallipoli.
Posted by Whale Spinor on 2006 08 13 at 01:56 AM • permalink#30 Susan. Interesting read.
I have always taken Hollywood history with a full cellar of salt, but Gibson’s efforts —well, a psychotic cop in Beverly Hills is truly his best crack at versimilitude.
Posted by MentalFloss on 2006 08 13 at 03:04 AM • permalink“Which leads me to the conclusion that no matter who writes or teaches history, once they go beyond the facts of date and place, the content will be subjective.”
On the 20th March 2003, the coalition entered Iraq to take out Saddam. After that I guess everything is merely ‘subjective’. After falling for a ‘fact’ exploded by pressing the ‘enter’ key on a PC, you might call this the ‘relativism of convenience’. The gob-smacking irony of such stuff seems not to have occurred to Mr Progressive - or the intellectual vacuity of its notions of history and interpretation.
“Facing the dedication is a photograph of an Aboriginal man carrying spear, woomera and shield. He is also heroic in his “noble savage” way — independent, muscular and naked.”
Isn’t this the myth of the noble savage so many of Lane’s fellow travellers have fallen for? A fantasy projection of the ‘Bolshie’ paradise they dream of inflicting on the rest of us? What damage THAT has done to aborigines.
“Canberra is compared favourably with Washington.”
No Lane piece is complete without the obligatory adolescent anti-american slur. At the time Lane’s book was written young Americans were losing their lives to help save our country from invasion. The US and Australia DO have a lot in common and most Australians feel not only a likeness of values with Americans but a deep gratitude that they helped spare us from the horrors of Japanese occupation.
” ... we should assume that the argument is all over and declare the White Hero theorists the winners.”
The shiraz- fuelled hyperbole of innner city dinner parties - or one of its sources. Howard intends no such thing but Lane’s writing thrives on melodrama. Lane is defending the conservative orthodoxies of the Henry Reynolds school of Australian history and teachers who feel that the notion of ‘education’ is a bourgeois ploy. No discussion to be entered into; Mr Howard,you have the ballot box, let us have the tots.
“The Age” could never sack Lane. They depend too much on the left tabloid he supplies to hang on to what remains of their readership.
Who’s volunteering for the Front Line to get stuck into Terry’s date?
#13 Waitll ya hafta visit y’local tutoring centre at 33 bucks an hour.Your kid will be amazed to find most of the class enrolled already.No surprise parents voting with their feet and running for their lives from the State Systems..Coincidentally I’ve just finished reading Churchill’s “The World Crisis” - once descibed as Winston’s autobiography of the First World War - in which Churchill makes a damn good justification of the whole Gallipoli business.
He rightly pointed out that there was no point in just chucking more and more men against the German barbed wire once the western front had frozen. A good hard knock out punch against Turkey which would have brought the Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians and Romanians onside while simultaneously opening a connection with the Russians and the wheat fields of Turkey was by no means a goal to be sniffed at.
To achieve this he recommended using the Navy to blast their way in through the Dardenelles, no matter what the cost and then let the army hold the ground siezed. This the Royal Navy signally failed to do, after losing some antiquated battleships to mines they scarpered and left the Poor Bloody Infantry among whom a good proportion were Anzacs to struggle ashore to do the job alone, the Navy weren’t entirely to blame as the generals also felt they could achieve the job.
Churchill also crticises the slowness of the generals once the army got ashore to push hard with the offensive at key points when the situation required resolution thus allowing the diggers and tommies to be slaughtered when they did decide to attack.
Now, a bottle of shiraz is affecting the conciseness of my summary and I realise I am in severely dangerous territory when discussing Gallipoli with Aussies, but I wonder has anyone else here read WSC’s account and whether they feel he was wrong and the whole damn mess was just a product of his “vanity”?
Posted by Harry Flashman on 2006 08 13 at 10:13 AM • permalinkHarry, Winnie was quite right on this. Recently the Brits have finally admitted that one of their admirals was cowardly and incompetent, retreating when he had the Turkish navy at his mercy.
But for him Churchill’s imaginative strategy might well have worked, he would have been a major hero of WWI, and he would not have been vilified for Gallipoli [also botched by the naval Brits], which wasn’t in his plan.By the way, WSC was probably the first politician to identify the Wahhabists of the Saudis as dangerous Islamofascists, in a speech in 1923!
It’s silly but expected to be that shallow, facile, callow and possessed of an overweaning sense of one’s own cleverness and rightness when one is in one’s twenties- how does someone manage to maintain that level of idiocy and blinkered adherence to ideology when three score years have passed?
I knew it was going to be ugly when the baby boomers started to enter their dotage, but this is really pathetic.
Maybe the advances in medical technology that have led to increased longetivity aren’t such a boon- we may have to listen to and read the inane blather filtered through a marxist/post-modern prism by the likes of Tery Macbeth Lane, the Phattus Phuckus, Bob “So sue Me- I’ve Got No money Anyway” Ellis, Germie, Helen Caldicott, Neville Dick et al; perhaps the answer lies in Soylent Green- after all, isn’t that the end result of the apocolyptic future vision they all share and promote?
2,4,6,8, Bog in, don’t wait!
(I think a lengthy marinade would be required, not only to tenderise the gristly socialist sirloins, but also to leach out the rather unpleasant, bitter taste of defeat; we could always just pack them into refrigerated containers and ship them off to the Third World as “aid”).
The real problem is that they did try to do it as a purely naval operation instead of a combined operation from the start. If the Brits had sent one division with the fleet initially (four were sent after the failure of the naval attack and more later) it is likely that they would have won. There was practically no force to defend the peninsula and two battalions of Marines with the fleet roamed all over the place before withdrawing with the ships.
The tactical problem was minesweeping. The sweepers were manned by fishermen not naval ratings and the Turkish artillery prevented them from sweeping. The battleships, with their flat trajectory guns, could not finish off the Turkish guns, although they came close. Some heavy howitzers on the peninsula could have destroyed the Turkish forts and allowed the sweeping to finish the job.
The US Marine Corps made an intensive study of Gallipoli during the interwar period and developed much of their amphibious doctrine based on their analyses of what went wrong there.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 08 13 at 09:19 PM • permalinkIt is at least arguable that if the Allies had been able to force the Dardenelles in one way or another they may have been able to prevent, or at least stop, the Armenian genocide.
If Lane really wants to show that he’s a brave and clever truth seeker who isn’t fooled by dominant paradigms or whatever, let’s see him kick that issue around a bit in one of his columns!!
Posted by Consuela Potez on 2006 08 14 at 05:59 AM • permalink
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What in the Christ…?
Has this poor sap entered into early senility or what?