The following interview was broadcast Monday, 12 February night on Australia’s National Broadcaster; the ABC.

Professor outlines Armenian connection to Gallipoli
Reporter: Mark Colvin

MARK COLVIN: What links the first genocide of the 20th century with the battle most often cited as defining the birth of Australia's national identity?

The genocide was the Turkish massacre of the Armenians; the battle was Gallipoli.

And what they have in common is that they both started on almost the same day, within a few hundred kilometres of each other.

Why don't we know this as a nation? That's the question posed in an essay by Robert Manne, Professor of Politics at LaTrobe University, in this month's issue of the magazine The Monthly.

He's discovered that Australian historians have hardly noticed the coincidence of the two events.

ROBERT MANNE: In 1915 the Ottoman Government began one of the first really systematic genocides in history, certainly of the 20th century.

And within a year or so, perhaps one million Armenians had been killed because they were a Christian minority in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which was in its point of crisis.

And there'd been persecution for a long time, but this was not persecution, it was the attempt to eliminate a people.

MARK COLVIN: And of course the Turkish Government throughout the 20th century denied that this ever happened, and denial is still going on. A journalist, Hrant Dink, was just murdered the other day for talking about the Armenian genocide. To what extent has it been covered up in history?

ROBERT MANNE: Well, I think two things; I think most people have a vague awareness now because the Armenians have been absolutely determined not to let it just fade out of history, but I don't think it's as well known as it ought to be.

The Turkish Government has always utterly denied that a genocide took place, although they admit that some massacres took place. But they largely blame the Armenians for that saying they were a rebellious, subversive element at a time of wartime crisis. But it's at the heart of Turkish identity is to deny the meaning and the reality of that genocide.

MARK COLVIN: And you say that Australian historians have effectively ignored it, and that's despite a really close coincidence between the genocide and a key event in Australian history.

ROBERT MANNE: That's right.

It seems to me the strangest thing. We have Anzac Day as April the 25th 1915 is remembered; the Armenians have April the 24th 1915 as their day of mourning, which they take to be the beginning of the genocide.

The two events not only coincided in territory and in time, but there is quite a lot of evidence that the genocide was pushed on because of the Dardanelle campaign of the Anglo-French forces in which the Australians were involved.

So despite the fact that the things happened at the same time and in the same place more or less, and they were even kind of connected with a causal link, I looked through book after book about Gallipoli, and there's no end of books that Australians have written about it, and virtually none of them mention it for more than a passing paragraphs or a couple of lines.

MARK COLVIN: What is the causal link? Tell us more about that.

ROBERT MANNE: Well, there are some contemporary historians, there's a wonderful Turkish historian, Tanner Akcham, who think that when the Gallipoli campaign began, or when the Dardanelles were first bombed by the Anglo-French in March 1915, that was the final moment of reckoning, and that the Turkish regime, which was run by two or three young Turks were the dominant figures, they set upon and decided on a systematic extermination of the Armenians, saying that at this moment of crisis, where Constantinople might fall, we can't afford to have a subversive minority within our country.

So, the Dardanelle campaign and the Gallipoli landings pushed on and maybe not exactly caused, but at least triggered the final events that led to the genocide.

MARK COLVIN: So why should Australian historians look more closely at it? Because our national myth says that we weren't really the strategic force behind the Dardanelle campaign, we were just the pawns, we were just the people who were thrown into the breech.

ROBERT MANNE: Yes, my point is not so much that they should, although I wish they had. My point is how strange it is that the event that's really by far the most important historical event in the national imaginary in Australia, which is the Gallipoli campaign, our historians have never thought to ask the obvious questions about the connection between the two events, or even to comment on the fact that the two events took place at the same time.

Apart from the poet Les Murray, I've not come across an Australian writer who's really thought imaginatively about the connection of the two events in whatever they've written.

MARK COLVIN: And you think that's not likely to change? You say, "in the Australian collectively memory of Gallipoli, the Armenian genocide simply has no role, I suspect it never will".

ROBERT MANNE: Yes, that's what I think. That is because, as I say, I don't think …

MARK COLVIN: Is that just your natural pessimism or do you think historians are simply unlikely to heed your call?

ROBERT MANNE: It's not really pessimism in so much as to think that history and collective memory are different things. And that Gallipoli, this event that's so important to Australians has never been an important event for historical reasons.

I think it was an important event at first because it was the point at which the Australian nation felt it was a nation, which they hadn't felt at federation, and where they felt they showed to the British and the British Empire, the kind of manliness that they possessed.

And I think always Gallipoli has been tied up with identity and almost never been really connected to a kind of interest in the history of the First World War, let alone an interest in the Ottoman Empire.

And so it's not really pessimism so much as kind of trying to identify the difference between history and myth, that I think it'll never become a matter of great interest in Australia, except perhaps for some intellectuals.

MARK COLVIN: But historians are supposed to be interested in facts not national myths, aren't they?

ROBERT MANNE: Yes, but the historians that move time and again back to Gallipoli, I think are driven by the interests of myth. Even if they want to revise the story, what they're doing is revising the myth. But they're not really interested in the kind of overall historical questions that are connected to it.

MARK COLVIN: Robert Manne, whose essay on that subject is published in this month's issue of the magazine The Monthly