War Memorial told to modernise Christian Dawn Service
The RSL and the Australian War Memorial (AWM) have been warned they’re out of step on the Canberra Anzac Day Dawn Service that has been likened to church, after a complaint that the service amounted to discrimination against the growing number of irreligious people in Australia.
Si Gladman, executive director of freethought organisation Rationalist Society of Australia wrote to the ACT Human Rights Commission (HRC) last year, asserting that the Christian-dominated ceremony “risks alienating many people and turning many people away, especially veterans and current service personnel”.
Nearly 64% of ADF members now have no faith, according to Defence statistics (compared to 40% of all Australians). This number is expected to increase. Yet the hymns, dedication and benediction at the AWM Dawn Service are Christian, and the ceremony is officiated by a Christian chaplain, said Gladman, adding that religion is forced on attendees at other commemorations across the country.
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Yet the ACT HRC shut down his complaint in November, after the territory’s RSL refused to participate in a conciliation process to resolve the matter. The veterans organisation stressed to the HRC in a letter three months earlier that the content of the service had been well-known and broadcast for years, that attendance was voluntary, and that there were alternative ceremonies. The AWM wrote to the Rationalist Society just before Christmas, explaining that the commemorations accommodate a vast audience, with changes having been made over the years to fit shifting societal norms, and reiterating that showing up to the Dawn Service was a choice.
Gladman is now calling on the nation’s memorial to take full responsibility for more inclusive commemorations.
“Anzac Day belongs to all Australians, and all Australians should feel welcome to attend Dawn Services,” he told Crikey. “But the imposition of Christianity at the Dawn Service at the Australian War Memorial, turning it into something more like a church service, makes many people feel alienated and puts up barriers to them attending.”
The Rationalist Society will be seeking a meeting with the AWM director in the coming weeks. Gladman has also raised concerns with the RSL in other capital cities, and said that he’d be taking the matter up with them again after an unsatisfactory response. Gladman added that the society planned to raise the issue in a submission to the upcoming UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review, and that there was a change.org petition in the works.
Veteran Sam Proctor told Crikey that Brisbane’s service was now slightly less Christian after he wrote to organisers every year of his nine year of full-time service in the army, objecting to the religious content. He said it still included “hymn karaoke” with a “choir from the St Something-or-other Christian College sing five to six hymns, and the words up on screens all around the place in an attempt to get the crowd to sing them aloud”. He added: “Not that I’ve seen a single soul doing so, but they certainly give it a red-hot crack.”
Proctor, who served in the Royal Australian Corps of Signals in Brisbane, said in a submission to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide in 2022 that the Defence Army Ceremonial and Protocol Manual 2014 detailed an order of service “dripping with prayer, hymns, invocations, scriptural readings, benedictions, requiescats and more”. It included no less than 12 separate prayers, a bible reading and between two to five hymns, he said.
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“The only thing that [stopped] me walking off in disgust was sheer good manners,” Proctor told Crikey. Other veterans have also said they’re personally put off from watching commemorations because of religion.
Gladman said the AWM should look to the example of the Melbourne Dawn Service at the Shrine of Remembrance, hosted by RSL Victoria, which does a wonderful job of delivering a meaningful event that was welcoming for all.
Former AWM principal historian Peter Stanley, now a professor at UNSW Canberra’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, told Crikey that accepting that Australian society has changed and its national rituals need to do the same was “beyond the imagination or the courage of the RSL and the AWM”.
“Anzac Day may ultimately be fated to be regarded as a relic of old Australia,” he said. “That slide into irrelevance could be arrested if it became more representative and less the property of a small and exclusive minority.”
The RSL and AWM were “out of touch” on many other issues, he said, pointing to the acknowledgement of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, the representation of the Frontier Wars, and the federal government’s half-billion AWM redevelopment.
Dr David Stephens, editor of the Honest History and Defending Country websites, said that the failure of the two groups to budge on the issue showed that “despite all our rhetoric about modern multicultural secular Australia, we still have the old God-fearing, male, Anglo-Celtic Australia lurking and ready to throw its weight around — or simply to defend the status quo”.
RSL Australia would not comment. Both the ACT RSL and AWM did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Crikey. The HRC said that no-one was available to respond and the ACT HRC said it was not something that it would speak about. The Australian Defence Force did not respond to a request for comment.
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