The Water Diviner Discovers a Flaw in Australia's National Myth

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2015)

"The Water Diviner", Russell Crowe's first attempt at directing a film, opened the day after Christmas and within a week, Australian cinema goers made it the biggest grossing Australian film for 2014. Money talks, and the critics are grudgingly acknowledging its success. (It was popular in Turkey too) But their praise is muted.For exampleThe Water Diviner is far from perfect Its main failing is that it tries to be too many things it feels like you've watched three or four different movies.
I beg to differ. To me it seemed like the film was propagating a very simple yet radical view of Australian history. It's one that I have been thinking about for some time. It is a view whose expression will mark one out as mad, bad and dangerous to know. Unless, of course, you can wrap it up in a rattling good yarn, as Crowe and his writers have succeeded in doing admirably.
So I will start by mentioning my maternal grandfather. He fought in the first World War, in Europe rather than Turkey, before being wounded, sent home and conceiving my mother before the armistice had been declared.
My mother said he, like so many of his fellow soldiers, refused to talk about his war experiences.
Albert Facey, a survivor of the Gallipoli expedition and author of "A Fortunate Life", a best selling memoir, was rather more forthcoming about his experiences. However, when talking about his fellow Australians who were not there, he said (287), "Some men who did not go got a rough time, but we never said anything to them because we thought they had some brains. I would have stayed behind if I had known"
My grandfather had a few of things in common with Albert Facey. They were both wounded in the first world war, they both had their first encounters with the girls they would marry in the tea rooms in Boans, Perth's biggest department store and both of them outlived their wives.
The film opens with the Turkish army, advancing against the armies that have invaded their country only to discover that they have retreated after a bloody war that has achieved nothing other than to hasten the already inevitable decline of the Ottoman Empire. The post war Greek incursions into Turkey to take chunks of its territory for themselves forms the backdrop to the film.
So why were the Australians invading a country that was no threat to them in 1915?
There is a disturbing answer to that question.
When Connor (Russell Crowe) intervenes in a fight between the film's charismatic love interest, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and her brother, she remonstrates with him, saying that Australians involve themselves in other peoples wars for no good reason. Connor does it again, taking the side of the Turkish commander whose actions led to the death of his sons, against the invading Greek armed forces.
There is a great deal of cant, masquerading as history, taught to Australian school children, about Australia becoming a nation of the shores of Gallipoli.
The real reason the Australians were there was an ill-founded belief that the military might of the British Empire had to be defended at all costs, because Australia's very existence depended on that remaining the case. During World War II, when it became clear that this was no longer the case, Australia found a new master to serve - the USA. The nonsensical and disastrous post war military adventures of the USA, have all been aided and abetted, small part, with Australian troops. Or as Ayshe said, Australians involving themselves in other peoples wars for no good reason
During World War II, the Australian prime minister turned back the boats that were transporting Australian soldiers at the whim of the British prime minister (who had been the architect of the Gallipoli landing) to some foreign theatre of war, and brought them back to thwart the previously unstoppable Japanese army's southward progress through New Guinea. That should have been the cause for national myth building and solemn remembrance. That should have been the genesis of a proud and militarily self reliant Australian nation.
Canberra Times editor at large, Jack Waterford, wrote about an Australian senior Defence Department bureaucrat seconded to work at the US Pentagon. He jokingly asked the Americans with whom he was working what they thought of Australia. After the platitudes such as "old friends, steady and reliable allies, close companions who have stood along side us in tough times, etc", he asked them what they really thought. There was a silence, then one of them said, "we think you are an easy lay".(26 July 2014)
That is the kind of relationship a pimp has with his whores.
I have been critical of the way in which the nation state of Israel has conducted itself since 1967, but it has to be admitted that they have developed a proud and militarily self reliant national mythology in a way that Australia has failed to do.
So, far from trying to be too many things, The Water Diviner, has made a bold statement about the craven lack of self reliance that has infected the Australian national spirit. And it has done that in a way that has had Australians flocking to the cinemas to enjoy a rattling good yarn. That's something of a coup for Crowe and his collaborators to have pulled off, if you give any credence to my take on film.