A blueprint for a wholly Australian life

Although I became fascinated by First World War stories when I was a teenager – All Quiet on the Western Front was a favourite, well-read novel – it wasn’t until I started attending the Anzac Day dawn services as an adult that I decided to investigate General Sir John Monash, whose name is so often invoked there. The fact that he was Jewish – like me – was a point of pride, for which other Australian was both a war hero and so heavily involved in the community?

But as we approach Anzac Day this year, I wonder what Monash would have made of the antisemitic wave that has swept across Australia shortly after October 7, 2023, following the brutal attack on Israel by Hamas, and when locally we started seeing open hostility towards the Jewish community. How would he have reconciled the young and idealistic nation of his birth with the one in which synagogues have been attacked, Jewish businesses targeted, Jewish creatives ostracised, Jewish students made to feel unsafe, and then Jewish people targeted and murdered on the iconic Bondi Beach?

For most Australians, Monash features largely because of his spectacular success leading Australian troops on the Western Front in France, at famous battles including Messines, Hamel and Amiens. His leadership was exemplary, his preparation meticulous and his concern for those that served under him was legendary.

This was not his sole contribution to Australia. Before the war, he was a visionary engineer who worked on major projects across Melbourne including the Princes Bridge and the Outer Circle Railway. Post-war, he served as the first chairman of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria and he became vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne. He was also the driving force behind the establishment of the Shrine of Remembrance as a permanent memorial. These days, Monash’s name is everywhere. His face is on our $100 note. Australia’s biggest university is named after him. In Melbourne, we have the City of Monash and the Monash Freeway, along with schools, libraries, art galleries, research and medical centres bearing his name.

At the same time, there has never been more antisemitism in Australia, a country that once provided such safe haven to Jewish people that it enjoyed the second largest influx of Holocaust survivors in the world, per capita. That said, even in his time, Monash himself experienced antisemitism in various corners. Charles Bean, the official war correspondent of the Australian Imperial Force, wrote this about Monash during the First World War: “We do not want Australia represented by men mainly because of their ability, natural and inborn in Jews, to push themselves.” Punch magazine described him as “stout and ruddy with the typical Hebrew mouth and typical Hebrew eye”.