Giving Mark Latham a history lesson

During World War I, the Indian Army numbered 1.4 million, of whom 1.1 million served overseas. No fewer than eleven awards of the Victoria Cross were made: in October 1914, Khudadad Khan, a Muslim man from Punjab, was the first Indian to be awarded a VC. The award to Khanwas, incidentally, reportedwidely in Australian regional newspapers.

At Gallipoli, the 7^th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade included Punjabi Muslim and Sikh gunners. The 26^th (Jacob's) Mountain Battery, part of the Brigade, was the first and last of the artillery units on the Peninsula. In a recent ABC program on the Gallipoli campaign, Pakistan's Brigadier Muhammad Asghar read from a statement recorded in his regimental history: 'The Australian soldiers have accepted the mountain gunners, they have taken them to their heart.' This statement was also repeated in contemporary Australian newspaper reports on the campaign.

In his version of historical 'reality', Mark Latham dismisses these Muslim 'boots on the ground'. It is possible that Latham does this simply because he does not know the facts, or has not read Peter Stanley's research. More likely, the problem is a failure of imagination rather than a lack of historical knowledge.

Listening to Latham, I was reminded of an incident at my son's school when a boy gave a presentation on the Anzacs that appeared to present Gallipoli as a victory for Australia. The boy responded to correction with incredulity. For the boy, it simply could not be true that Gallipoli was a defeat for Australia, even if the facts pointed to that conclusion: the boy was unable even to imagine Gallipoli as a defeat, because if it were, he asked, why would we celebrate it?

His rewriting of our history is a corollary of a failure of imagination. There is every reason that we should revisit and even rewrite the accepted history of Gallipoli (and of the wider war in which it occurred) to 'deal with reality'. It is important to do this to honour the sacrifice of Muslims there. It is also important to do so to remember and honour the fraternity of ordinary Australians with them, Australians so like Pauline Hanson and Mark Latham in their origins but so unlike their narrowness of spirit and character.