By Alexander Brown
The long shadow of war haunts Australia's history. We can see this in the growing number of Australians who attend ANZAC Day services each year. These solemn occasions are sometimes exploited by politicians and right-wing culture warriors who dress up the tragic waste of young life at Gallipoli in myths that obscure the causes of war, and cement dangerous ideas about the founding of a nation in blood sacrifice.
But the foundation of Australia’s culture of war memory was to remember the past so as not to relive it.
At the launch of the Australian War Memorial in 1941, Governor-General Lord Gowrie emphasised its purpose was not only to pay tribute to the bravery of those who fought but to remind future generations of the "barbarity [and] utter futility of modern war" and the need to find alternative means of solving disputes between nations.
Our failure to learn from the past about the causes of war and the path to peace is reflected in the latest the Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Last year 239,000 people died in armed conflicts in 49 states, including Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinians and the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Europe. Military expenditure rose for the 10th year in a row to $2.7 trillion dollars, bringing the global military burden – a measure of total world military expenditure as a percentage of GDP – to 2.5 per cent. This spending fuelled the profits of multinational arms dealers, with the revenues of the largest arms and military-servicing companies coming in at $632 billion in 2023.
To secure peace we must recognise that there are no glories in war and that atrocities are all too often committed by our ‘own’ side.
During the Asia-Pacific War, Australia’s allies deployed new forms of aerial bombardment against civilian populations in Japan and Europe. This year, local peace group Wollongong Against War and Nukes (WAWAN) commemorated 80 years since the end of the Asia-Pacific War by remembering the victims of atrocities carried out by the United States against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These unprecedented acts of mass violence killed somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 people, with thousands more succumbing to the effects of radiation in the weeks, months, and years that followed.
As part of the commemoration, WAWAN worked with Wollongong cultural institutions, the Wollongong City Library and Wollongong Art Gallery to organise a series of events that culminated on Saturday, 9 August (Nagasaki Day) with more than 100 people braving the rain and cold to join a lantern parade through the streets of Wollongong.
The parade featured large lanterns in the shape of a crane, a peace sign and a love heart – universal symbols of peace – as well as dozens of smaller lanterns created or decorated by participants. Many of the lanterns highlighted the contemporary genocide taking place in Gaza; another act of violence perpetrated by an Australian ally.
Hiroshima Day commemorations have been held in Wollongong since 1986, when the city won a national award for its contribution to the United Nations International Year of Peace. Wollongong City Council first declared the city nuclear-free in 1980 and reaffirmed its commitment to peace this year, as Wollongong Lord Mayor Tania Brown explained in her address to the parade. An earlier commemoration was also held on 6 August, the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, with a small public commemoration.
The lantern parade brought to a close a three-week residency at Wollongong City Gallery, as part of the Greetings from Wollongong exhibition.
Given the exhibition’s focus on artefacts from the culture of rebellion in 1980s Wollongong, the curators created a residency program to connect the gallery with contemporary activists. Over three consecutive weekends, our group hosted workshops including screen printing, badge making, a children's day, and a Beats Not Bombs concert in the Chambers Gallery.
The 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also remembered at Wollongong City Library, with WAWAN working closely with library staff on the Peace Movement Illawarra exhibition.
The exhibition chronicled Wollongong's history of peace activism with photographs, oral histories, and objects such as badges, flags, and t-shirts. Over 60 people gathered at the library on Monday, 28 July for a peace history talk held as part of the exhibition, which also launched a booklet chronicling the city’s peace history. At every Wollongong branch library, patrons could fold origami cranes to be sent to the Peace Park in Hiroshima. The library’s public program also included origami and textile workshops, and a Japanese kamishibai storytelling session about Hiroshima.
The gallery residency, library exhibition, and lantern parade marked three years in WAWAN’s campaign to revive Wollongong’s historic peace movement in opposition to the AUKUS pact and an east coast submarine base. As we witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we see a world descending deeper into fascism and war.
To build a culture of just peace, we need to remember war in all its horror and injustice but also the history of peace, and its expression through creative protest and coalition-building.
About the writer
Alexander Brown is a writer, publisher, and activist living in Port Kembla. He is the father of two children and wants them to grow up in a world free of war and nuclear danger. Alexander wrote extensively on the history of protest and cultural resistance to war and nukes in Japan and Australia as an academic working in both countries. Since 2022 he has been working in the community sector in Wollongong and writing about our rich local history and politics.
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