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| ISBN-13: | 9781742242286 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | NewSouth |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2016 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Armenia, Australia & the Great War
By Vicken Babkenian, Peter Stanley
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Vicken Babkenian and Peter StanleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-228-6
CHAPTER 1
FROM ARARAT TO BALLARAT
'DAMN YOU AND YOUR PRIEST': EUREKA
Colonial Australia was an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic community, with over ninety per cent of its people coming from the British Isles or with parents or grandparents from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales. During the gold rushes of the 1850s, however, gold-seekers from all parts of Europe and beyond journeyed to Victoria and New South Wales to seek their fortunes. Men (and a few women) came from France, the states of Germany, from the still-divided Italy, from North America and Hungary, and from a remote and obscure province of the Ottoman empire: Armenia.
On 10 October 1854, in the bustling Victorian mining town of Ballarat (then known as Ballaarat), Johannes Gregorius, the Armenian servant of the Roman Catholic Father Patrick Smyth, had his visit to a sick neighbour interrupted by shouts from James Lord, a trooper. Lord was hunting for diggers without licences. He demanded that the 'damned wretches' leave their tent and produce a licence, his anger fuelled by a contempt well known to the many 'foreign' diggers on the Ballarat fields. Trooper Lord evidently had forgotten – if he had ever known – that the law requiring miners to obtain licences exempted ministers of religion and their servants. Gregorius, who spoke little English and suffered a physical deformity – a hunchback – replied that he worked for Father Smyth, at which point Lord remarked, 'Damn you and your priest.' According to a group of eyewitnesses, the constable treated Gregorius in an 'unwarrantable, cruel manner'. The servant was 'trampled upon' and arrested. It was an inauspicious beginning to the documentary record of Armenians in Australia; their later history in this country was to be more positive.
Many miners expected the assistant commissioner, James Johnston, to drop the charges against Gregorius and charge Lord with assault. To their disappointment, Johnston maintained the original charge and accepted £5 in bail money from Father Smyth when his servant appeared at the police office the following morning.
Next day, Johnston fined Gregorius £5 for nonpossession of a licence, then recalled him and withdrew the charge: someone had realised that Gregorius was lawfully exempt from carrying a licence. Then, in a move that would infuriate the miners, officers charged Gregorius with assaulting Lord. The presiding magistrate found Gregorius guilty of the assault charge. Historian John Molony summed up the fiasco as follows: 'So the £5 which had begun as the property of Smyth first became bail money, then a fine for nonpossession of a licence, and finished as a fine for assault upon Lord.'
Gregorius's unjust treatment became one of the final triggers for a rebellion against colonial authority by Ballarat miners – known of course as the Eureka rebellion. At dawn on 3 December 1854 British troops and Victorian police attacked the stockade. The ensuing battle left twenty-seven people dead, mostly insurgents. Although the government quickly quashed the rebellion, the Eureka battle gave impetus for democratic reforms and better conditions for the miners.
Thus, the story of one of the earliest known Armenian settlers in Australia is intertwined with a landmark event in Australian history. Johannes Gregorius's birthplace is unknown, but it is likely he hailed from one of the scattered Armenian colonies of India or South-East Asia. Gregorius was part of the trickle of Armenian settlers who came to Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Armenian periodicals Azgaser Araratian of Calcutta and Scholar in Singapore both urged Armenians to migrate to Australia. They portrayed the Australian colonies as places of potential wealth and prosperity – exactly as hundreds of thousands of migrants saw Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. The 'Armenian Gully' and 'Armenian Reef ', named by an Armenian prospector in 1855, can still be found today in the former goldmining town of St Arnaud in Victoria.
Individual Armenians began to filter through to Australia from all over the world, though they remained very few. The first historian of Armenians in Australia and New Zealand, Aramais Mirzaian, identified as Armenian 'a certain Mr Malcolm', an unlikely sounding name for a man from New Julfa, Iran. Mr Malcolm was not alone. In the absence of a clergyman, he held Sunday services for Armenian worshippers at Port Phillip. Like many migrants from small communities, Malcolm and his coreligionists gradually assimilated into colonial Australia, lost to history among the more numerous Scottish Malcolms.
Migrants like Johannes Gregorius and Mr Malcolm were unusual, though, even in cosmopolitan Victoria. Armenia and the Armenians were virtually unknown to the majority of the colonies' people. That ignorance would end as the century closed.
'A THOUSAND AND ONE CHURCHES': THE ARMENIANS
Johannes Gregorius and Mr Malcolm were descendants of an ancient people who had inhabited the highlands surrounding the mountainous region of Ararat – where Noah's ark supposedly came to rest – since prehistoric times. The Urartians (also known as Araratians) lived there between the tenth and seventh centuries BC, founding a kingdom around the lake of Van. Their ruined castles and palaces still exist today and figure in the tragic story this book tells. Urartu for a time rivalled Assyria for supremacy in the region, but in the turbulent 'Fertile Crescent' no power lasted long. Urartu fell to the Medes in the early sixth century BC and soon after to the Persians.
Greek and Persian sources mention 'Armina' and 'Armenians' from about 500 BC. The Armenian language, a branch of the Indo-European tree of languages, is considered to be one of the oldest recorded members of the group. Armenia grew in military strength and political influence during the reign of emperor Tigranes II (95 to 55 BC). Under his rule, Armenia extended from the Caspian Sea right across the Middle East to Syria and the Mediterranean Sea, until his empire fell to the Romans. Armenia's fate until living memory has been to fall repeatedly under foreign rule. It has the misfortune to lie at the intersection of competing empires.
During a brief period of independence in the first decades of the fourth century AD, Armenia adopted Christianity, arguably the first country to become Christian by decree. This, perhaps the defining moment in Armenian history, became a source of its ordeal for centuries at the hands of believers of other faiths. A century later, the Armenian alphabet was devised by the scholar priest Mesrop Mashtots and within a short time the Bible was translated into Armenian. This event ushered in a 'golden age' of Armenian literature, a flowering of religion and culture that Armenians would be forced to defend against persecution and oppression, another persistent theme in their history.
Invasions continued. In the seventh century, Muslim Arabs conquered the country. Another brief interlude of independence saw Armenians build hundreds of churches, many of them innovative in their structure and artistically sophisticated, with decorative stone carvings and inscriptions. Ani, the capital, was said to have a 'thousand and one churches'. In 1045, another conqueror, the Byzantine Greeks, arrived, and within a decade the nomadic Seljuk Turks swept in from Central Asia and Iran. The final blow came in 1071 at Manzikert near Lake Van, where the Seljuks defeated the remnants of Armenian and Byzantine forces.
Although many Armenians remained in their heartland around Lake Van and the mountains of Ararat (the region known as 'Greater Armenia'), the Seljuk invasion forced others to move south, towards the Taurus Mountains by the Mediterranean Sea. There in the late eleventh century they founded the kingdom of Cilicia ('Lesser Armenia'). Christian Cilicia became a base for the European quest to recover the 'Holy Land' during the crusades, and by the late twelfth century an Armenian–Frankish alliance linked Armenia and Europe. The Armenian King Levon II befriended Richard the Lion-Heart and helped him in the third crusade. While in the thirteenth century the Armenians prospered in Cilicia, those living in the historic heartland to the north witnessed the invasion of the Mongols. Cilicia would be the final Armenian kingdom before it ended with the invasion of the Egyptian Mamluks in 1375.
After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 most of Armenia gradually became incorporated into the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans were originally a small Turkic tribe who emerged in Anatolia (the western portion of today's Turkey) during the breakdown of the empire of the Seljuk Turks in the thirteenth century. They became the arbiters of the Middle East for 400 years, conquering an empire stretching from Arabia and Egypt to the Caucasus, invading Europe far as Austria and holding Greece and the Balkans.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century, Armenia again saw conflict, this time between the Ottoman and Persian empires. The Armenians suffered heavy losses in a bloody conflict that lasted off and on for more than two centuries. The territory of Greater Armenia was split into two, an event with repercussions for Armenians today, and one central to our tragic story. The western part fell to the Ottomans and the eastern part to the Persians.
The rise of yet another aggressive empire in Central Asia – the Romanovs of Russia – introduced a final change. By 1830 most of Persian Armenia had been annexed by the Russians during their southward advance into the Caucasus. By the end of the nineteenth century, Armenians had become dispersed across the borders of the Russian, Persian and Ottoman empires, with outlying communities in Britain's eastern empire. In the western world, the region of Greater Armenia was frequently portrayed as the boundary between civilisation and barbarism or between Europe and Asia. It was also perceived as a religious borderland, the meeting place of Christianity and Islam. For a thousand years and more, the Armenian people had suffered defeat and conquest, becoming the subjects of half-a-dozen empires as they rose and fell. Throughout – remarkably – they retained their language, religion, literature, culture and identity. They had suffered greatly, though never as much as they were to suffer as the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began.
CHAPTER 2THE 'ARMENIAN QUESTION'
'THE LOYAL MILLET': ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Armenians became part of a multinational, multilingual and multi-religious realm: the Ottoman empire. Because the ruling dynasty was ethnically Turkish, the empire was also commonly referred to as Turkish. While the Ottomans' Islamic political system required the protection and toleration of the 'People of the Book' – meaning Jews and Christians – non-Muslims faced discrimination, including extra taxes, judicial inequality and a prohibition on bearing arms. The Ottoman state imposed upon Armenian (and other) communities the devshirme or child levy, which forcibly removed mostly Christian boys from their families. The boys were brought up as Muslims and the ablest were trained for the service of the empire. Despite official discrimination against non-Muslims, peaceful relations among Ottoman subjects largely persisted from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century and the Ottoman system worked relatively well for much of its history.
By the early nineteenth century, along with various other non-Muslim subjects, the Armenians were organised into religious communities known as millets. Each millet was to a large extent self-governing. By this time, the Armenian population had become heavily intermingled with Kurds and Turks (who were the large majority of Anatolian Muslims in the Ottoman empire). There are no reliable population statistics, but an Ottoman government publication suggested that in 1844 the empire included about 2.4 million Armenians. Most belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church, an independent national church theologically non-aligned with Roman Catholicism or Canonical Orthodoxy. Armenians earned themselves the title of 'loyal millet' because of their allegiance to official authority and their accomplishments in trade, commerce and craft. Survival, even prosperity, seemed secure under relatively benign Ottoman rule.
Armenians in the empire comprised several broad groups. First, the rich and influential men, Amiras, worked in government service and as bankers, architects and administrators. For instance, the Balyan family designed and constructed many major buildings, including palaces, mosques, churches and public buildings, mostly in Constantinople. The Dadians were 'gunpowder chiefs' and ran the state arsenal, the Duzians were in charge of the imperial mint and the Demirjibashians ran the shipyards. Next came the mercantile and trading class of Constantinople and the cities of Anatolia. Its members played a dominant role in the empire's modernisation. Third, and most numerous, was the peasantry, the class least encountered by foreigners. Lastly, there were the Armenian priesthood and higher clergy, who ministered to their adherents both within and beyond the empire.
Though the empire was a polyglot, multi-ethnic state, Armenians were highly visible, very different from their more numerous Muslim neighbours. At times they were required to wear special garb and to step aside for Muslims on the street. Armenians also placed great emphasis on education as a means of advancement and filled the learned professions out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, making them conspicuous. They were open to new scientific, political and social ideas from Europe and America, and some became affluent through trade and economic innovation. These differences were to become a point of great vulnerability in the late nineteenth century.
The Ottoman empire, once so dominant, began to decline through the nineteenth century. Communal relations within the empire deteriorated as it faced external threats – a series of wars with Russia – and rebellions by its European subjects in Greece and the Balkans. These nationalist movements provided a pretext for foreign intervention. During the 1820s a wave of 'philhellenism' swept Europe as the Greeks fought for independence. The war saw horrific atrocities on both sides – for example, the massacre of thousands of Greeks on the island of Chios in 1822. This captured the European imagination, conjuring visions of Turkish savagery that coloured western images of the Ottoman empire for a century. European observers idealised the Greeks as the originators of 'western civilisation' and their struggle for freedom attracted particular support in Britain.
By the time Britain had established colonies in distant Australia, its government had settled on a common attitude to the Ottoman empire. As the political and economic superpower of the day, Britain had a strong hold over the Ottomans and did not hesitate to wield its influence. Continued Ottoman rule was in Britain's interest, helping to contain Russian expansion and supporting Britain's supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman economy also created another market for British manufacturers. British opinion held that in order to secure the Ottoman empire's territorial integrity against nationalist movements and aggressive powers, the empire would have to reform. This ushered in the period of 'Tanzimât' or 'reorganisation', promulgated by the sultan and beginning in 1839 – an attempt to integrate non-Muslims more thoroughly into Ottoman society by enhancing their civil liberties and granting them equality. These reforms were at best a qualified success: Turkey came to be regarded, in one of the great clichés of the century, as 'the sick man of Europe'. Was its illness to be mortal?
'THE ARMENIAN SEAT OF WAR': NATIONAL AWAKENING
The rivalry between Britain and Russia over the Ottoman empire's declining power came to a head at the exact moment that Johannes Gregorius confronted colonial authority on the Ballarat diggings. In an effort to check the Romanovs' influence in the Middle East, Britain allied itself with the Ottoman empire in a war against Russia in 1853. The Crimean War was arguably the first 'modern' war in the age of mass communications – the first to be photographed, the first to use the telegraph and the first 'newspaper war', reported in detail around the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Armenia, Australia & the Great War by Vicken Babkenian, Peter Stanley. Copyright © 2016 Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Maps,Authors' note,
Prologue Saturday, 24 April 1915,
Chapter 1 From Ararat to Ballarat,
Chapter 2 The 'Armenian question',
Chapter 3 The first massacres, 1894–96,
Chapter 4 Murder of a nation,
Chapter 5 Deportation and death,
Chapter 6 Anzacs and Armenians,
Chapter 7 Anzac prisoner of war witnesses,
Chapter 8 Australians and the Armenian massacres of 1915,
Chapter 9 Friends of Armenia,
Chapter 10 Victory brings relief,
Chapter 11 From the armistice to Versailles,
Chapter 12 Relief,
Chapter 13 Smyrna and Chanak,
Chapter 14 Loyal Wirt's mission,
Chapter 15 James Cresswell's journey,
Chapter 16 Edith Glanville and Armenian relief,
Chapter 17 Australian women and the League of Nations,
Chapter 18 Armenia and the new Turkey,
Chapter 19 Orphans and emigrants,
Epilogue Friends tell the truth,
Acknowledgements,
Bibliography,
Notes,
Index,