Abstract
The military represents itself in contradictory ways across the globe and the Australian case is no different. On the one hand, we are dazzled by the ANZAC spirit, our attention drawn away (at least momentarily) from the horrors of war and the consequences of organized killing, and toward an idealized Australian character. The celebration of national identity anaesthetizes, and camouflages, the collective unease with military adventure.
Camouflage: the ability to make things invisible altogether or to look like something which is not suspicious or obvious nature. (Dakin, 1947: 1)
Social historian Ann Elias in Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science and War, has produced an intriguing history of the relationship between the military and broader civil society, in particular the fields of art and science. It is a history about the development of camouflage – as a field of technical enterprise – its stakeholders and their interactions. But I also see a story about the military and its own forms of cultural camouflage; a story about the struggle of the military to place itself centrally in a modernizing democratic nation, in times of war and peace. It describes a military working hard to naturalize itself in the national psyche while engaging in activities unnatural to civil society, and the civilian camoufleur working hard to penetrate the hermetically sealed AIF in order to contribute to the war effort. Elias’s book can be read as a study of civil–military relations – the structured distinction between civil and military domains and their contested notions of what is right, what is valuable and what is legitimate in the national domain.
Ann Elias reveals the history of the cultural phenomenon of ‘camouflage’ in the Australian and global fields of science, art and warfare. This is her primary mission: to unmask the hidden or forgotten histories of the modern visual arts movement and its contribution to camouflage as an instrument of war, and its human struggles with war service during the period of the Second World War. On the other hand Ann Elias aims to contribute to a military history that has forgotten its historical intimacy with artists, natural science, civilian war efforts and the development of the burgeoning art – or science – of camouflage.
As a social history, it tells us of the changing nature of citizenship, Australian engagement in global affairs, and the modernities within which ideas and practices of camouflage developed. First, we are introduced to the characters of the camouflage movement: zoologist William Dakin, artist Frank Hinder and the Sydney Camouflage Group, including designers Douglas Annand and Robert Curtis, the leading Australian modernist photographer Max Dupain and the prominent art patron Sydney Ure Smith. These are the representatives of civil society in times when civil contribution to the war effort, through military service or civic enterprise, was paramount to good citizenship.
However, the relationship between the camouflage movement and its artists and designers – the camoufleurs – was difficult. They were regarded as pariahs by the military caste, while science provided the intellectual legitimacy for what was considered dubiously creative and counter to all things military. The role of art and science, and the professionalization of these fields, provide a case study of the mutual and contested grounds art, science and the military shared around this matter. Elias shows us how these professions were engaged in a claim for cultural legitimacy as much as they desired to save the nation. She also demonstrates the ways in which these fields transformed and informed each other, resulting in the evolution of the field of camouflage.
This history also articulates the prevalent cultural tropes of gender and race, and their centrality to ideals of nation within which camouflage developed. For the military, camouflage was a highly othered phenomenon: feminized through the attribution of qualities such as ‘subterfuge, cunning and guile’. Camouflage was seen as harking back to a kind of primitivism that encouraged the warrior back to the savage, to the wild. The Australian military, for example, regarded the expert use of camouflage by the Japanese in New Guinea as an indication, not of sophistication, but rather as proof that they were ‘the nearest thing in human form to a bush animal’. Through this, Elias provides an insight into the racialized character of Australian society, and the tendency of common wisdom to valorize white civilization through persistent tropes of primitivism.
Camouflage Australia is an eloquent work. But Ann Elias gives us much more than a hidden history of artists, scientists and soldiers. She tells us about the contest of knowledge in modern Australia, and provides an insight into the contested domain of civil–military relations. This history also implicitly describes the hegemony of white masculinity at this time, through the ways in which the military subordinated the civilian, the camoufleur, the enemy and the native as feminized and savage subjects. This book provides a lucid insight into the development of Australian society at this critical point in its history.