Identity
When I was choosing my HSC subjects, I really REALLY wanted to do history. I'd topped Modern History in year 10, and had had great joy in reading and learning about the Vietnam War. Great joy is probably not the right way to describe it, but I think you get what I mean. Anyway, I wasn't allowed, because I desperately wanted to keep playing piano, and to do that I was told I had to music for the HSC. So I did music instead of history. The history teacher approached me, devastated, because her potential top student had changed preferences. But I was stuck.
I'm kind of glad now. I'm busy learning history bit by bit - now it's just a joy to read different history articles, and I also get to play the piano, which has also turned into a lifelong love, as well as a very useful ministry. So really it's ok now.
History is also something that I associate with my father. When I was choosing my high school subjects, I really wanted to do history, but my brother, mother and sister all did geography. I did history. I found out that my Dad was a big history buff, so that made me feel less like a leper and helped me to connect to him. I'm so proud of my Dad now, because he's studying history at university, just because he wants to.
My love of modern 20th century history isn't shared by many of my good friends, but I do have one friend who's a history teacher and sometimes I send articles to him, like this one. It challenges the mythologising of the ANZAC, and I think this is particularly the case as we are leading up to the 100th anniversary of ANZAC Day next year.
It's a challenge for Australians, I think. We don't have a Civil War to forge our identity, we've never really had to defend our homeland (apart from the short time in World War II), we were settled peacefully by a treaty. We did of course commit mass genocide of our indigenous peoples, but that's not exactly an identity making situation in any sort of positive light at all.
It makes me think: When we put on our identity, based on a bad decision, from a foreign government, to attack a heavily fortified Turkish hillside, and then hit the wrong beach, what are we saying we are? Blind followers? Turk haters? Being committed to a lost cause? How exactly do you get an identity from the ANZAC hillside?
That's the thing I love about being a Christian. My identity doesn't rest on a hillside, it doesn't rest on obeying another country's attack strategy, it doesn't require attacking embedded defences in a foreign country. It comes from God making me, knitting me together in my mother's womb (Ps 139). It comes from being rescued, being brought into the kingdom, being washed clean, coming from darkness into light.
So, as my friend said "We try hard to challenge that perception" of the mythology of ANZAC day with his school students, but ultimately we want those kids to have their identity in Christ, not in some quasi-mythological battlefield.
I'm kind of glad now. I'm busy learning history bit by bit - now it's just a joy to read different history articles, and I also get to play the piano, which has also turned into a lifelong love, as well as a very useful ministry. So really it's ok now.
History is also something that I associate with my father. When I was choosing my high school subjects, I really wanted to do history, but my brother, mother and sister all did geography. I did history. I found out that my Dad was a big history buff, so that made me feel less like a leper and helped me to connect to him. I'm so proud of my Dad now, because he's studying history at university, just because he wants to.
My love of modern 20th century history isn't shared by many of my good friends, but I do have one friend who's a history teacher and sometimes I send articles to him, like this one. It challenges the mythologising of the ANZAC, and I think this is particularly the case as we are leading up to the 100th anniversary of ANZAC Day next year.
It's a challenge for Australians, I think. We don't have a Civil War to forge our identity, we've never really had to defend our homeland (apart from the short time in World War II), we were settled peacefully by a treaty. We did of course commit mass genocide of our indigenous peoples, but that's not exactly an identity making situation in any sort of positive light at all.
It makes me think: When we put on our identity, based on a bad decision, from a foreign government, to attack a heavily fortified Turkish hillside, and then hit the wrong beach, what are we saying we are? Blind followers? Turk haters? Being committed to a lost cause? How exactly do you get an identity from the ANZAC hillside?
That's the thing I love about being a Christian. My identity doesn't rest on a hillside, it doesn't rest on obeying another country's attack strategy, it doesn't require attacking embedded defences in a foreign country. It comes from God making me, knitting me together in my mother's womb (Ps 139). It comes from being rescued, being brought into the kingdom, being washed clean, coming from darkness into light.
So, as my friend said "We try hard to challenge that perception" of the mythology of ANZAC day with his school students, but ultimately we want those kids to have their identity in Christ, not in some quasi-mythological battlefield.
I have to heartily disagree that Australia was "settled peacefully by a treaty". European invaders stole the land from indigenous people, committed wholesale genocide and intentional warfare to keep that land, denied Aboriginal people even existed let alone had a right to that land, and set about creating a "white" Australia. As you say, it's not "positive", but we need to embrace that part of our history. It is our story. Australian identity was not created in WW1. Writers like Bean helped to establish the rugged bushman as the national trope, thus excluding indigenous peoples, women, and the scores of immigrants who are a part of Australia, but not its identity. Australian history is rich, complex, and bloody. To deny that is to deny who we are, and where we have come from.
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