Ben Roberts-Smith and Hugo Throssell: a tale of two VCs

It is a matter of public record that for much of the past decade Ben Roberts-Smith has had a coterie of powerful men looking after his interests. Most conspicuous among them: media baron Kerry Stokes, who bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s unsuccessful defamation case against The Age, The Canberra Times and The Sydney Morning Herald for their reportage of his alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

During the trial, Stokes called for the SAS to be “applauded and respected” and condemned “scumbag journalists” for their reporting on Roberts-Smith. All the while, Roberts-Smith remained employed at Stokes’ Seven Network.

Since Justice Anthony Besanko’s verdict, finding that on the balance of probabilities the Nine papers had established the truth of their reporting, Stokes has been joined by much of the commentariat at News Corp, who have been swift to remind their readers that the verdict did not meet the criminal standard of proof and that many in “mainstream Australia” still supported Australia’s most decorated living soldier.

Retired military figures have been wheeled out to emphasise Roberts-Smith’s “exceptional bravery”. Roberts-Smith did not attend the final days of his trial, instead sunning himself in Bali. Upon his return, he told the media that he had nothing to apologise for.

The level of institutional support behind Roberts-Smith calls to mind the very different experience of another Victoria Cross recipient who publicly fell from grace.

Like many others who served in World War I, images of Hugo Throssell — whether caught on film, on commemorative cigarette cards, or in George Lambert’s pencil line portrait — have a quietly stinging quality. The smile housed in that broad jaw is melancholy, unsure; his large clear eyes slightly spooked.

Throssell, a Western Australian premier’s son and champion boxer, was instrumental in the birth of the Anzac myth, being awarded a Victoria Cross for his “conspicuous bravery” at Gallipoli in 1915.

Hugo’s son Ric described in his memoir the adulation that engulfed his father on his return to Australia: “His exploits at Hill 60 were told and re-told with romantic embellishments.” He returned to Australia between deployments and his celebrity was put to use in an army recruiting campaign. Privately he was deeply anxious and guilty about encouraging more young men to volunteer for a war whose futile horrors he had witnessed firsthand.

He returned to Australia in late 1918 — “out of work, but never so pleased to lose a job in my life” as he put it — and married author and communist Katharine Prichard.

By this time, Gallipoli was already being solidly put to work, a senseless military calamity pupating near instantaneously into a founding national myth. Official war historian Charles Bean went so far as to say that on April 25 1915, the “consciousness of Australian nationhood was born”.

Prime minister Billy Hughes, addressing soldiers during his push for conscription during World War I, spoke of the “sweet breath of sacrifice” of the soldiers at Gallipoli, and when campaigning for reelection in 1917 attacked his former colleagues in Labor for their refusal to extend Parliament and allow the Nationalist government to attend the Imperial War Conference, thus ensuring, he argued, “The voice of Australia, this country whose sons have dyed the rocks and sand of Gallipoli and the great battlefields of France with their hearts’ blood, will be silent”.

It was amid the apparent adulation due to those who returned from that blood-soaked soil, and the legitimacy political leaders claimed on their behalf, that Throssell gave a speech at the Peace Day celebrations in his hometown of Northam in July 1919, where he announced that he was a socialist and a pacifist.

“You could have heard a pin drop,” Prichard wrote to a friend afterwards. She had not realised, her son would later write, just what this announcement would end up costing. Throssell was condemned by his family and the military establishment, both of whom blamed his new wife and ostracised him “mercilessly”.

The Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB), Australia’s internal security agency in the inter-war period, instantly placed Throssell and Prichard under surveillance upon its inception in WA in November 1919. A report prepared for the CIB claimed Throssell’s war injuries had “affected his mind”. His job at the Returned Soldiers’ Land Settlement Board was “dispensed with”, something Prichard always believed was down to their politics. None of this is mentioned on his Department of Veterans Affairs page.

Increasingly isolated and financially ruined, he eventually committed suicide with his service revolver in 1933. At this point, his son would later write, “the army reclaimed its hero. The Union Jack covered the Bolshevik”.

What Throssell might have given for a Kerry Stokes, or a national broadsheet, in his corner.

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