This is one of several myths unravelled by historian James Robins in When We Dead Awaken. His début book follows in the wake of Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley’s Armenia, Australia and the Great War (2016), the first to detail the history not only of Anzac troops who witnessed the genocide but also of Australian and New Zealander contributions to the international relief effort, which culminated in the ‘Australasian Orphanage’ near Beirut. Ostensibly retracing the same story as Babkenian and Stanley, Robins puts greater focus on the series of political machinations that engendered the genocide and its subsequent denial, and supplements his narrative with research from New Zealand’s National Archives.

The story of the Armenian Genocide is intrinsic to that of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and thus the founding of Turkey. Robins traces the beginning of the end to the First Serbian Uprising of 1804, through the failure of the period of reform known as Tanzimât, imperial bankruptcy, and the 1876 Bulgarian rebellion. As Sultan Abdülhamid II’s empire crumbled, he began to fixate on the small number of Armenian political activists advocating for more autonomy and legal protection. By the 1890s, ‘an unresolved ethnic-religious animus and tension broiling up over the last fifty years’ had led to the slaughter of one hundred thousand Armenians, establishing a violent paradigm that became, among some up-and-coming politicians, a mania.

Among the early members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) were Mehmed Talât, Ismail Enver, and Kemal. The CUP initially aligned itself with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), together plotting the Sultan’s downfall. Alarmed by the CUP’s growing authoritarianism, the ARF leadership ended the alliance in 1912. By that time, the Special Organisation, which foreshadowed the Nazi SS, was already in operation.

Though not the first genocide of the twentieth century (Germany’s destruction of the Herero and Namaqua people of present-day Namibia takes that distinction), the assault on the Armenians was the world’s first modern genocide, defined by the CUP’s use of new communications and transportation technologies – telegraph and rail – to coordinate and expedite the killing. Robins details the orchestration of violence against the Assyrians and Ottoman Greeks as well, putting a greater emphasis on these concurrent genocides than do many other histories of the Armenian genocide.

Days before the war ended, Talât and Enver fled, officially dissolving the CUP while leaving its secret networks intact. From Kemal’s perspective, the British-led prosecution of genocidaires was part of their partition effort. As his Nationalists rebelled against the Sultan’s ‘collaborationist monarchy’, Kemal also attempted to annihilate the fledgling Republic of Armenia ‘politically and physically’, in his words, in a plan to unite Turkey with Azerbaijan. Once the new nation was established, former CUP officials took positions in its government.

Robins’s occasionally disorienting choice of present-tense narration is most pronounced in the interwoven retelling of two intimately connected events: the CUP arrest of Armenian religious, political, and cultural leaders, and the Anzac landing at Gallipoli. This propinquity highlights how lives among both groups were violently cut short at the whim of imperial governments, though only the invading empire was acting within the bounds of law. Robins’s narration favours fragmented sentences (‘Genocide demands a structure of destruction. A schematic of atrocity. An architecture’) and single-line paragraphs reminiscent of a James Patterson thriller, creating a breathy, dramatic tone and fast pace.

Throughout, Robins demonstrates how ‘the recalcitrance and apathy’ of Commonwealth and other governments before, during and after the war enabled the CUP to commit genocide with near impunity. The recalcitrance continues today. Like Babkenian and Stanley before him, Robins reveals that ‘almost every Anzac PoW held in the Ottoman Empire’ attested to the destruction of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. In some cases, Anzacs helped refugees survive, most notably in Urmia in 1918, when a small volunteer force including Stanley Savige and Robert Nicol helped more than sixty thousand Armenians and Assyrians escape annihilation. Nicol died in the effort. In spite of this:

Rather than consider openly and honestly what happened to the minorities of the Ottoman Empire … the New Zealand and Australian governments choose instead to suppress it and deny it, in favour of protecting one of the most sacred and revered days in the national calendar.

Robins frames the ‘Special Relationship’ that developed between the Australian, New Zealand, and Turkish governments in the 1980s as part of Turkey’s ongoing genocide denial effort. This relationship has led to genuine and meaningful moments, such as the reunion of Gallipoli veterans from both sides tearfully standing arm in arm. Yet a future in which Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks join in commemorative mourning is hard to fathom – especially while the veneration of myths prevents sober reckoning with historical truth.