26 August 2025
Chief of Army Symposium 2025 Keynote Speech
‘A Brief History of National Conversations’
Good morning. Welcome to the Great Hall of Parliament House, the home of Australian democracy, and the warmest of welcomes to the Chief of Army’s Symposium 2025. It is a great privilege to be with you all here today.
This Symposium is always an important event in the Army’s annual calendar … an opportunity to gather, reflect, engage, and analyse in depth a topic of collective importance.
This Symposium has been running for over a decade in its current format, and its predecessors for many more. The themes have been relatively consistent. Adaptation. Modernisation. Recapitalisation. The evolving role of land power in the Indo-Pacific in the 21st Century.
Last year, however, our focus as an Army shifted decisively. The National Defence Strategy directed us to return to ‘fundamentals’, to take a ‘first principles approach’ in transforming the Army for the challenges of our time.
It demanded a comprehensive response. Over the last 28 months, we have adapted every dimension of our Army: our concepts, our command and control (in the way we are organised), our capabilities, and indeed our culture.
The central idea behind our transformation is ‘continual adaptation’, as we strive to judge the contemporary balance between war’s enduring human nature, and its ever-more rapidly-changing character.
The Symposium last year followed this trend of fundamentals, examining the ‘Human Face of Battle’ and the very foundations of the Army profession. We considered our Army in its three principle dimensions: a national institution, a profession, and a fighting force.
This year we take the next logical step. We examine the ‘Army in Society’, turning our attention to our connection and relationship with the society we exist to serve.
Your Army is ‘An Army in the Community, An Army for our Nation’. We exist only in the context of our fellow Australians. As I have noted in some recent addresses on the Army profession, it is society that defines the nature of our ‘jurisdiction’: that is, the unique service that we provide as our nation’s experts in land combat.
The Army draws both its soldiers and its legitimacy wholly from the society we serve. The health of the relationship between the Army and society is therefore the wellspring of our institutional strength.
The foundation of any good relationship is communication … and I have long considered it part of our Army’s obligation to help foster a healthy dialogue – a national conversation, if you like – between our Army and the society we exist to serve.
This reflects the reciprocal nature of the ‘contract of unlimited liability’, where soldiers volunteer their lives … if required … on behalf of our nation, and the nation agrees to care for the soldiers, the veterans, and their families in return.
These next two days are part of meeting our obligation. We will connect you with a broad range of experts, diverse thinkers and eminent Australians, and international colleagues … each of whom will provide a perspective on the Army’s role in society. It is designed as a respectful contest of ideas, one that makes us all better.
We will hear views from across the nation, from abroad, from leaders in the academy, industry and the public service … and importantly from those who are educating our next generation. I am very grateful to you all for being so generous with their time, and with your wisdom.
To get us started, I plan to invest my time with you this morning examining how national dialogues have taken place throughout history: to draw us into a topic not routinely considered, but one that is important both in the Army profession and in our national character … to citizens and soldiers alike.
The questions of how we go about holding a heathy national dialogue should invoke a shared fascination between the soldier, the citizen and the state, in support of our shared obligations to the defence of our way of life.
Like most things, what we are seeking to do here is not fundamentally new. The history of national conversations reflects the history of nations itself, stretching back more than two and a half millennia.
I will briefly examine three of the most prominent historical methods. I’m doing so, I owe a debt of gratitude to some great contemporary thinkers on this topic … Hal Brands and Charles Edel, Eliot Cohen, and Henry Kissinger to name but a few. It is thanks to their dedication and scholarship that we can map the history of national dialogue so well.
So let me begin in what is perhaps an obvious place for a keynote address, with oratory itself.
The spoken word has been the cornerstone of national conversation for thousands of years; perhaps the oldest method of dialogue.
One of the earliest examples is also one of the best. In 431 BC the Athenian General and statesman Pericles stood at the public cemetery in Athens and delivered the annual funeral oration to fallen Athenian soldiers … a practice somewhat akin to a modern Anzac Day commemoration.
431 BC was no normal year. It marked the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, the catastrophic contest between Athens and Sparta that eventually destroyed both great powers.
Predicting the long war ahead, Pericles departed from the tradition of valorising the fallen. Instead, he extolled the virtues of Athenian society: democracy, justice, education, and economic prosperity. He celebrated the citizens who made Athens what it was. And he remembered proudly those who willingly sacrificed themselves in its defence.
The intended audience for Pericles’s funeral oration in 431BC, however, was neither the fallen, nor their families … it was instead those who would inevitably be needed to make the ultimate sacrifice in the war’s long future. ‘Take these as your model’, he exhorted to the crowd, ‘and judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valour, never decline the dangers of war’.
It was the strength of the relationship between the soldier and society, Pericles argued, that would defend Athens in the war that would surely follow. Yes, the soldier must be willing to give their life – what we understand today as ‘the contract of unlimited liability’ – but society must equally be willing to carry the weight of that sacrifice.
The families of the fallen must be cared for … the offering by society of (as Pericles put it) ‘a valiant prize, as the garland of victory in this race of valour, for the reward both of those who have fallen, and their survivors’.
‘Where the rewards for merit are greatest’, Pericles closes, ‘there are found the best citizens’.
The power of oratory in national dialogue spans the ages.
From Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome, through the launching of the First Crusades by Pope Urban II in his famous sermon at the Council of Clermont in 1095, to Queen Elizabeth the First’s passionate rejection of the invincible Spanish Armada in 1588 … ‘I myself will take up arms’, she said, ‘I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field’), oration has been used to exhort the soul of nations in the face of adversity.
It was in the First and Second World Wars, however, that the role of oratory in national dialogue arguably reached its zenith. In ‘total war’, national defence was - and indeed remains - a truly whole-of-nation endeavour. Society and its military had no choice but to work as one.
Every wartime nation required its orator. Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Roosevelt, De Gaulle … all maintained a healthy dialogue with their nations through the power of the spoken word.
And Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest of modern orators, delivered three of the most powerful speeches in modern history in just twelve weeks between June and August 1940, unifying the British will to fight.
Oratory does not have to be lengthy in order to be powerful. Recall Australian Prime Minister William Morris Hughes – known as the ‘Little Digger’ – who carved a post-First World War identity for post-Federation Australia at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with the words, ‘I speak for 60,000 dead’.
In one simple phrase, he both honoured and demanded recognition for Australia’s sacrifice as an independent nation. Such defining moments are the foundation of national character.
The cautionary tale of oratory, however, is that it is by no means inherently moral. As Cicero observed, ‘eloquence without wisdom is the most dangerous thing in the world’.
Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric was as powerful as Churchill’s, driving nationalism and brutality to extremes, and ultimately setting the conditions for the Holocaust. The skilled orator must remember that with great power comes commensurate responsibility. The ability to stir the soul of society must be used with a clear moral compass, lest it signpost the road to barbarity.
My interest in the spoken word brings me neatly to the second method of national dialogue: the theatre. Another medium that spans the ages, theatre embellishes the spoken word and unlocks the power of imagination.
Theatre does not need to be grounded in the present, nor in reality. It can instead take a national conversation into the realms of the possible, and indeed into the future … inspiring us to envisage what might be, rather than what is.
The Ancient Greeks used theatre – and particularly the tragedy – prolifically in their national dialogue, when considering the pernicious effects of war on the ideals and the fabric of Athenians and Athenian society.
Each spring throughout the fifth century BC, as many as twenty thousand Athenians gathered to celebrate the harvest in a grand competition of tragic theatre. They produced nearly a thousand tales of hubris and trauma across that century, of which only a handful survive. Exemplars include ‘Oedipus Rex’, ‘Antigone’, ‘Prometheus Bound’, ‘The Persians’, and ‘Seven Against Thebes’.
For the Ancient Greeks, tragedy was more than just theatre. It was a call to action. By demonstrating to the citizens of Athens what could befall those afflicted with excessive pride and arrogance, tragedy encouraged society to acknowledge the flaws inherent in the human condition.
It implored Athenians to act to prevent the fall, before it became inevitable.
Tragedy reminded Athens that a collective sense of unity and humility were vital to avoiding catastrophe. It encouraged in them, as Charles Edel and Hal Brands have artfully labelled it, a ‘tragic sensibility’: a determination to see the world as it was, and not how they wished it might be.
Two millennia later, another playwright exposed the human condition in equally visceral, enduring and impactful ways. William Shakespeare was more than merely the voice of the Elizabethan age. His thirty-seven plays uniquely capture the enduringly human nature of society: the influences of inspiration, of power, of loyalty and betrayal, and of love, hatred and revenge.
The story of Henry V at the battle of Agincourt stands pre-eminent, at least for the purpose of considering national dialogue. This exploration of conquest, the ethics of war, and the relationship between king, state and soldier is timeless.
Few scenes resonate greater across the times than the famous ‘St Crispin Day’ speech, delivered on the eve of the battle of Agincourt.
Outnumbered and with his Army beset by low morale, King Henry makes a virtue of adversity, urging his troops to ‘wish not one more man from England’, lest the glory of eventual victory have to be shared amongst others.
The names of those on the field that day will, he assured, become eternal. Those that survive will ‘stand a tip-toe when the day is named’, their names as familiar as household words.
They will be, in that timeless phrase, ‘the few, the happy few … the band of brothers’.
The ‘St Crispin Day’ speech is fundamentally about patriotism, and perhaps exemplifies the soldier’s willing sacrifice … the ‘contract of unlimited liability’, and its reciprocal nature better than most.
It has endured as an often-used literary device for national leaders in the modern world. Churchill deliberately channelled it in his Battle of Britain speech of August 1940, when he argued that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’.
Both Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, speaking at the 40th and 80th anniversaries of D Day respectively, lauded those who fell on the beaches of Normandy as a ‘band of brothers’. Nearly five hundred years later, Shakespeare provides a lexicon for our discourse on society, war, ethics and sacrifice. His insight into humanity’s enduring nature was prescient, and his ability to communicate in a relatable and recognisable set of terms remains (in my view) unmatched.
Theatre in the modern world has mostly transitioned to the silver screen, but the medium remains just as powerful. The cinema engaged the American public with the war in Vietnam in a whole new way, creating a visceral discourse that was both vital and challenging for citizen, state and soldier alike.
Films like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter and Born on the Fourth of July brought America to confront the realities of war, and to acknowledge the indelible mark it leaves on society. Traumatic as it is, such engagement is vital in a liberal democracy, where society must form a view on violence as a tool of policy.
In Australia, theatre and the silver screen have been leveraged intermittently in our national dialogue about war. Films such as ‘Gallipoli’, ‘The Light Horsemen’ and ‘Danger Close’ naturally portray as much the ‘legend’ as they do the reality. Perhaps this reflects the distance that can exist between the military and society … there are few playwrights among our soldiers, and few movie producers who have ever carried a rifle.
Maybe we could do some more here? By now, some of you may have seen the film ‘Bravery and Betrayal’, produced by veterans of the Afghanistan war. I welcome their voice and their story. It is important that our society hears from those who have served on their behalf … that our soldiers have the opportunity to tell the story of their diverse experiences, and in their own words.
Their story must be heard in an act of – and in the spirit of – the reciprocity that underwrites the soldiers’ ‘contract of unlimited liability’.
The third and final method of national dialogue I wanted to discuss this morning is that of ‘national memory’. This is a little more than just the idea of history, as in the recording of the events of a nation over time.
‘National memory’ speaks to how a nation understands and interprets its past, and what that interpretation means for the culture and identity of a nation.
Understanding this process – how it is done, and by whom – is central to an honest national dialogue, particularly when it comes to the trauma of war.
The years following the Second World War were perhaps the most profound for national memory and self-reflection, as nations grappled with the visceral impacts of the war.
Germany, for example, faced a great challenge. From 1949 onwards, under the leadership of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a divided and disgraced Germany sought to come to terms with its history, and to seek and earn its place among the European order once again.
Such a monumental task demanded historical humility not just in relation to the Second World War, but also to the three generations of German militarism. Adenauer used the context of the past to persuade his traumatised nation that their only future lay in a Europe where war was unthinkable.
By as soon as 1955 the Federal Republic of Germany was not only a sovereign state once again, but a participant in the European Community and a full member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. A remarkable feat of national discourse that profoundly reshaped German society.
Germany was the most prominent, but it was by no means alone. Every nation impacted by the war had to establish a relationship with its most recent history. The French under De Gaulle buried the ghosts of Vichy France under the banner of wholesale national resistance … perhaps an historical myth, but a necessary one nonetheless.
In Britain, Churchill’s own six volume history of the war dominated public understanding, solidifying the enduring narratives of the war as the country’s ’finest hour’.
Each nation’s relationship with its historiography is unique, including our own. We have our own ways of engaging with our history. The Australian Army itself plays a humble but vital institutional role. I count the Australian Army History Unit as the quiet achievers of our military historiography, thanks to the more than two hundred books of history they have produced over the years. I am very, very proud of the work they do to help keep our nation connected with their Army.
Many of us will also gather this afternoon at another great institution of Australia’s national memory: the Australian War Memorial. At the end of our dialogue there, we will stand together at the Last Post Ceremony - a daily act to remember sacrifice, and a place where oratory, theatre and history come together somewhat poignantly.
We would do well never to underestimate the importance of such acts, and the need to nurture them.
But as we face new challenges we must ask ourselves if our relationship with our national history needs to evolve in turn. The story of Anzac rightly remains the cornerstone of Australian military historiography. As Charles Bean wrote in his preface to his official history of the war, ‘what these men did nothing can alter now … it rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great hearted men; and, for their nation, a possession forever’.
Anzac is the foundation of the Army’s relationship with our nation and the society we serve. But it cannot alone define it. The Army of the future will need to tap the full surface area of our history, if the society we serve is to understand our comprehensive transformation.
The Army we are becoming draws many of its lessons from the Pacific War, arguably the Australian Army’s finest hour, and timely as we commemorate its 80th anniversary. We along with citizen and state need to understand this aspect of our history. To do so is to know the context of our Army’s transformation today.
And we must deliberately engage as a society with what I would describe as the ‘long shadow of the Afghanistan war’, if we are to better understand ourselves in contemporary terms, and if we are to care for the latest generation of veterans.
Caring for this generation must be part of our national dialogue, just as it was for the Athenians two and a half thousand years ago. It defines reciprocity in the ‘contract of unlimited liability’.
In closing, I extend the warmest of welcomes to this year’s Symposium. Oratory. Theatre. National memory. You will certainly benefit from some oratory these next two days, given the calibre of speakers who have so generously offered us their time, their wisdom and their insight. We will invoke our national memory, particularly as we reflect on the 80th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. You might even experience some theatre! But we will try to avoid subjecting you to tragedy … as best we can.
In return, I ask that you engage faithfully in the dialogue we are seeking to establish.
History tells us that a time of great challenge, or a beckoning crisis, both will often demand a whole of nation response. We have an opportunity here to explore one part of it: the story of your Army, and how it can best serve citizen, society and state. I look forward to our dialogue.
Thank you.