As Australians this year celebrated the centenary of Federation many sought answers to the great questions of national identity: who are we, and what has made us who we are? A little over a hundred years ago, Australians were asking the same questions. In the 1890s we werent yet a nation, just half a dozen of Her Majestys colonies, the vast proportion of the population being Anglo-Celts. But talk of federation was widespread, and many sought the symbolic acts that could define the birth of Australia. Except for armed resistance from Aboriginal groups to White settlement, Australia was created peacefully. There was no cataclysmic rebellion or civil war to mark our birth. Many saw this lack of military history as a significant hole in our national psyche. What we needed, they believed; was a war. That opportunity came in 1899 when British forces took on the Boers of South Africa in a struggle for control of the Republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State. In response to a request from the Mother Country for help, the Australian colonies quickly mobilised their militia forces and shipped them to Cape Town. Then, on the first day of January in the year 1900, 27 year old Trooper Victor Jones was fatally shot in the chest during a skirmish with the Boers on a remote South African farm called Sunnyside. The young Queenslander, who had previously failed enlistment because of bad teeth, became the first of Australias 102,000 war dead. Episode 1 of Australians at War, Were on a long trek now, chronicles our involvement in the Anglo-Boer War. The conflict took thirty-one months to resolve, far longer than anyone expected. During that time the Australian colonies federated and our first national military force was formed The Australian Commonwealth Horse, and for the first time the upturned slouch hat and the rising sun hat badge became part of our military uniform. But the war became unpopular back in Australia. The hit-and-run guerilla tactics of the Boers, and the creation of concentration camps by the British to contain Boer women and children made it hard to find defining moments of national pride. Nonetheless, the Australians by and large performed well and exhibited admirable qualities of courage and resilience. Their actions at the siege of Elands River, for instance, foreshadowed the later exploits of the Anzacs at Gallipoli. We were awarded six Victoria crosses during the Boer conflict and at the same time, managed to create a myth from the murderer Breaker Morant. Every one of the 20,000 Australians who enlisted for South Africa is now dead. But many were diligent diarists and letter writers. In Australians at War, actors dramatise these writings and provide a compelling personal insight into the conflict. A chance discovery in the archive vaults turned up a priceless series of interviews filmed in 1973 with six veterans of the war. Their experiences of the war, recalled 71 years after its end, provide an appropriate transition of memory into history. The Boer War remains a little known part of our national history, yet its enlistment and casualty figures are as high as the later, and much more publicised, Vietnam War. Most significantly it established the Australian fighting man as equal to any in the world and ensured that we would be enthusiastically welcomed into the next great world conflict, a conflict that would provide the defining military moment that many Australians hoped for.

• published: 19 May 2009
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