* Because I still have my Sydney Morning Herald weekly book reviewing gig, I am still reading a minimum of four novels a week. In several different ways it's the most wonderful education, and I think most people would be astonished to learn how many contemporary novels are, one way or another, about one or both of the two World Wars. In particular, the effects and after-effects of World War 2, like bruises from some gigantic, crushing injury, are still coming up and out and showing in lurid colours on the surface of contemporary consciousness, especially, but not exclusively, in Europe.
But the Great War gets its share of attention from novelists too, and I read another one only recently. That wasn't long after I'd sat down and figured out the details of what my paternal grandfather's battalion, the Tenth, had actually been doing during the war while he was in it, from 1915: too late for ANZAC Cove but in plenty of time for the Western Front.
They were shunted back and forth between two of the worst places, Ypres and the Somme, for around three years. Three years of wading through mud, disintegrating body parts and large well-fed rats. Apart from anything else, I can't help wondering what he was thinking as he watched his only son -- his only child -- set off at seventeen to join the Navy in 1944.
* If I read one more inane blog post, tweet (is there no-one who will save this woman from herself?) or op ed about ANZAC Day and its construction and commemoration written by someone who's never heard of either C.E.W. Bean or Alan Seymour but isn't letting their total ignorance of (1) the single fundamental fact about the creation of the 'ANZAC Legend' or (2) the first real challenge to it in Australian culture (New Zealand may have its literary or historical equivalent) get in the way of a good self-righteous rant, I'm going to break something valuable and then throw up on the shattered fragments. Yes some people glorify war. No others don't. Yes it's used to sell papers and get TV ratings. No that's not actually ANZAC Day's fault, you morons.
And yes, some of us have soldiers, sailors and air(wo)men in the family history and no we don't want to forget about what they endured. I habitually get through the worst times in my own life by thinking about what some of my ancestors had to go through. They are a massive well of strength to draw on.
* I think I've pretty much exhausted my own archival material in former ANZAC Day posts, which can be found here, here and here.
* The biscuits, they rock. My grandfather, famous for his approach to food (and why wouldn't you be, after three years in the trenches), was wont to say to my mother as he reached for whatever was left on any given serving plate or bowl: "I'll just clean this up for you, Kerrie." To this day my sisters and I say this whenever anyone reaches for the last cupcake or the dregs of the champagne, and then fall about shrieking. He would have eaten the whole tray and come back for seconds.
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19 comments:
"Yes it's used to sell papers and get TV ratings. No that's not actually ANZAC Day's fault, you morons.
And yes, some of us have soldiers, sailors and air(wo)men in the family history and no we don't want to forget about what they endured. I habitually get through the worst times in my own life by thinking about what some of my ancestors had to go through. They are a massive well of strength to draw on."
SNAP! However, as someone whose father spent most of WW11 as a POW and who came back very damaged (he may well have started out that way - who knows?) and used ANZAC Day to legitimise/excuse the releasing of his anger and violence upon anyone within range, and mostly it was his family, I do have VERY ambivalent feelings about ANZAC Day.
Nonetheless the gratuitous, saccharine and ignorant commentary, the commercial exploitation of ANZAC Day has that father's son ready to let fly with more than a dash of anger.
"Yes it's used to sell papers and get TV ratings. No that's not actually ANZAC Day's fault, you morons.
And yes, some of us have soldiers, sailors and air(wo)men in the family history and no we don't want to forget about what they endured. I habitually get through the worst times in my own life by thinking about what some of my ancestors had to go through. They are a massive well of strength to draw on."
Me too, PC. My great-grandfather was at the Somme and fought at the battle of Fromelles as a 16 year old (masquerading as an 18 year old). To think what he must have endured. There's no doubt, too, drawing on what Lord Sedgwick said, that being a soldier really damaged my great-grandpa. He had a drinking problem and used to get very angry too, apparently. He ended up dying many years after WWI because of shrapnel which was lodged near his heart.
My grandpa was a sapper in WWII in Borneo. He apparently used to wake in the night screaming because he'd had nightmares about the War.
No: war is not a glorious thing. Even for those who survive, it can severely damage them physically and emotionally. And that's not even thinking of the people who didn't come back. Now that I have my own kids, the thought of them dying on some foreign field for some far off war is hideous. For me, ANZAC day is about thinking about the futility and sorrow of war.
P.S. - that Deveney woman thinks she's funny and edgy, but she's not.
LE, I actually think there is something more serious going on there. I find her writing very disturbing.
I find her writing disturbing too. It makes me want to come out in hives with embarrassment on her behalf at times. She makes a fool of herself publically (thinking she's awfully clever) and her employers let her, cashing in on her foolishness and willingness to expose herself. It's almost a bit of a freak show, if you know what I mean by that.
"He had a drinking problem and used to get very angry too, apparently. He ended up dying many years after WWI because of shrapnel which was lodged near his heart."
LE, SNAP! again, however my father, who disappeared from my life in 1956 (in spectacular fashion) when I was barely into double figures, died some years after WW11 (at age 57) of issues related (unsurprisingly) to drinking problems.
How pleased I was when my number didn't come up in the Vietnam War Tattslotto draw. There, but for the grace of statistical probability went I. Perhaps.
I can't remember which programme I was watching when this was said, 'If you kill someone and it lives with you then you're human but if you never think about it then you're a psychopath.' Possibly not the exact wording but it does mean that there weren't too many psychopaths in wars but a lot of human beings who were forever damaged.
Foolishly I clicked the Deveney Twitter link.
(Goldsworthy you fiendess you. I was Deveny Twitter virginal up until today! I demand you subsidise my hymen reconstructive surgery.)
She is, as LE notes seriously lacking in the funny and edgy department.
Up there with that raft of stand-up comedians who reckon lots of swearing and offensiveness equals riveting comedic repartee.
Swearing and offensiveness can and has been done well. Dotty Parker, Cheech and Chong and Lenny Bruce (before he sadly lost the plot) did that off a break.
Deveny (as she presents herself on her Twatter) is seriously embarrassing.
I view ANZAC Day in terms of damaged young men, one of whom was my father, so your post and the comments resonate.
I think Deveny imagines herself to be speaking for my generation. I wonder if there's any way we can convince her that she doesn't?
Lady Shelley.
Deveny. Omphalokepsis. Spot the difference.
Black Dog has An open letter to Catherine Deveny.
I won’t be waving a flag, but I won’t be acting like a fuckwit about it either.
Precisely!
Deveney's cheap shots diminish the fatal shots taken by far too many in real conflicts.
Something she appears not to understand.
Either because she really doesn't understand or because it would get in the way of a really cute contrarian smart arse stance.
Lord Sedgwick, many thanks on the status upgrade, I always fancied myself as a lady (alas always failed on points). I take your point or, at least, I think I do.
Oh, I'm guilty of reflecting on the commodification at the other place. I'm really sorry about that. Even though I'm not a fan of fancy things, the visual of you breaking them and vomiting on them is quite affecting. Eek. Again sorry.
It wasn't really my intention to diminish the true meaning of the day, but to be honest about that extra layer of meaning that I also contemplate on 25/04.
Also, to add to ancestral remembrances [I hope you don't mind]. My father was sent as a young [Jewish] man to a military training academy in Venice, I think he was only a boy when he formed part of a guard of honour at the meeting that took place there between Mussolini and Hitler.
Much later, having had the need to escape Italy, he was captured in North Africa [his family lived in Tripoli, Libya] and interned in an Italian internment camp. As he told the story to me, he was made to work in the laundry, which he dutifully did, until the day he dressed himself in one of the uniforms and walked straight out the main gate, and making use of his fluent Italian, he even managed to get given a ride by an Italian soldier. I have mo idea if my father gilded the lily with the latter story. But he certainly had photos that his father took at the meeting in Venice.
St Furious, it was the intemperate Ms Overington who set me off, really. I dislike the commercial and political uses made of ANZAC Day (looking at you, J. Howard) as much as the next person, anyway.
And what an amazing story about your father!
"* Because I still have my Sydney Morning Herald weekly book reviewing gig...."
Perhaps I am over-reading but the word "still" makes this reader frown - god help Spectrum if you leave it.
Talking on Sat to engineer chappie friend about the bewildering rise and rise of oi!oi!Anzac! Day - I described reading Seymour's play with some laziness as it all seemed so irrelevant in the mid 1970s. He didn't know of it. Perhaps it's time for a revival.
Not just a lot of good novels about WW1 but good non-fiction as well.
One of which is John Hamilton’s “Good Bye Cobber, God Bless You” about the story of the men of the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade and their charge on foot at the Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli.
Over a period of 45 minutes 4 waves of soldiers, 150 men at a time, attempted to storm an extraordinarily strong Turkish position. They were ordered to charge with unloaded rifles with fixed bayonets. The first wave of Light Horsemen were killed within seconds of leaving their trench by withering Turkish fire of at least 5000 rounds a minute. Three more lines went over the top, across the bodies of their dead and dying comrades, only to be instantly cut down themselves. 372 men died in an area about the size of 3 tennis courts.
Nearly 100 years later it is hard to comprehend the concept of duty to God, King and Country that inspired such futile acts of bravery and which sent young Australians off to die in foreign lands.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Yet our Government still sends young Australians to die in foreign lands.
Lovely post. Thanks Dr Cat. I think the commercialisation of ANZAC Day is quite-widespread in NZ too. I believe they were promoting roast lamb there this year as the traditional ANZAC meal. First I'd heard of it.
My father didn't fight in WWII: he finally got called up late in the war and only got as far as the training camp. But his uncle was at Gallipolli and never recovered his mental equilibrium. He was incarcerated to a mental hospital in the early 1920s, and finally died there in the early 1980s at the age of 92 - of gangrene. Oh, the irony! His poor wife, being a good Catholic, was unable to divorce him, so lived in a limbo state between married and widowed until she died in the 1960s. His only son, who never knew him sane, also died in the 1960s. The poor old bugger outlived both of them.
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