I watched the Anzac Day ceremony on the news, while thinking about the point of reading Australian literature in these strange times. The image of the dignitaries on the balconies, standing under back lit arches, with the lone bugler playing to a deserted War Memorial unsettled me. Maybe it was the lack of crowds which drew my eye to the staging of these lofty generals of government, designed by someone, for some purpose.
The comparison between war and the virus unnerves me. They say a whole generation in Italy is being wiped out, not dissimilar I suppose to the slaughter of youth in that horrifying war over a hundred years ago. Talk of the second wave makes me anxious. We’re primed by all the novels, poems, films about Gallipoli we’ve consumed, obedience ending in monstrous sacrifice.
Our male novelists, playwrights, and poets never tire of Gallipoli. Christopher Brennan, Rex Ingamells, Douglas Stewart, George Johnston, Vincent Buckley, Alan Seymour, Roger MacDonald, Thomas Keneally, Les Murray, David Williamson, Thomas Shapcott, John Forbes, John Romeril, Ouyang Yu have all had a crack. The list of historians is even longer (and I don’t include Fitzy in that category). The legend grows and grows, feeding off all these different perspectives. I doubt it will abate. No one talks about the ‘glorification of war’ anymore. The poor exhausted critics gave up years ago.
In 2015, the year that marked the centenary of the battle, the first prescient analogy with an epidemic was used. As thousands flocked to Anzac cove, the craze had apparently ‘peaked.’ They were wrong. There are signs too of mutation. The flag draped yahoos have disappeared, and Anzac Day has finally become a symbol of unity. Nice looking families stood on their driveways at dawn this year, as instructed, thinking of all those dead men, apparently, in solidarity with their neighbours, while maintaining social distancing. Obedient citizens, each and every one.
Ironically, it was an Englishman who really lit the poetic Anzac flame. ‘Into the valley of death rode the five hundred … guns to the left of them, guns to the right of them ... onwards they charged the five hundred’ thundered Tennyson, approving of an earlier suicidal mission. Australians were still huge fans of both Tennyson and the Crimean War some decades later when our Christopher Brennan put unsteady pen to the Anzac slaughter in similar spirit:
Lions of war, our noblest and best
Who won the desperate beach and death-lashed crest
And looked on Fate’s most awful face unhid
Poorly our praise may match the things you did.
Brennan must have been drunk. ‘The things you did’? All a little vague. ‘Lions of War’ was published in the collection laughably titled A Chant of Doom, and Other Verses (1918) by Angus & Robertson, cashing in on the allies finally winning the war and Australia’s love of poetry. It wasn’t a great success, the collection singled out by Brennan’s biographer Axel Clark as containing ‘the worst poetry he ever wrote.’ http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/brennan-christopher-john-5345
Mary Gilmore was among the first to write about the home front:
He died a hero’s death, they said
When they came to tell me
My boy was dead.
But out on the street,
A dead dog lies,
Flies in his mouth, ants in his eyes.
Gilmore was a pacifist, international socialist and journalist. She was one of a party of utopian Australians led by William Lane who set up the ill-fated socialist colony in far flung Paraguay, the subject of Anne Whitehead’s fascinating history Paradise Mislaid. Gilmore was a hero herself to the Australian socialist cause, an entire edition of Overland, under the editorship of fellow traveller Stephen Murray Smith, was devoted to the writer on her death in 1962. She was well ahead of her time. It was not until they had run out of generals and eyewitness accounts in the 1990s that women on the home front became of interest.
In the midst of the monstrous sequel, Australian communists forged their own Pact with Australian fascists over their shared dislike of Anzac Day. Rex Ingamells saw the Anzac Legend as a delusion: ‘our boast that Federation made a nation/ our boast that Anzac proved it with our blood/ are tragic fictions’ he wrote in ‘The Gangrened People’. Ingamells was a ‘Jindyworobak’, an odd South Australian movement which fashioned ‘blood and soil’ out of First Nation legends and a mishmash of European modernism.
Ingamells was also a member of the fascist party Australia First, conscripted by his publisher PR Stephenson, who was far from the lovable old duffer his nickname ‘Inky’ suggests. Gaoled for his war-time defence of Japan and his senior position in Australia First, Stephenson was also virulently antisemitic, although in 1940s Australia no one cared about that!
The Anzac craze underwent a sudden dip in the 1960s when that killjoy Alan Seymour drove a generational wedge through the two up games with his play The One Day of the Year. Australia’s involvement in another imperialist, much less popular, war followed shortly afterwards, and Anzac crowds dwindled to a determined few. It looked indeed as if the craze was finally dying out.
The second wave took many by surprise in the late 1970s, although looking back Whitlam’s new nationalism was clearly to blame. At last we could stop pretending to be European! Nietzsche was out and everyone was ‘chundering in the old pacific sea’. The writers and film makers were hard at work. Roger MacDonald was first off the rank with 1915, peddling the Anzacs as regular good blokes. Having bored us to tears with Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir joined forces with David Williamson to tackle Gallipoli. ‘The left is attempting to make up lost ground’ crowed Gerard Henderson, now that everyone (apparently) agreed nationalism was a force for good. (Quadrant, July, 1983, p. 63). Later, there was a miniseries based on 1915, which filled the young heads of Morrison and Dutton with images of heroism and glory and sacrifice and slaughter …
According to Henderson, the left-wing (male) writers were ‘attempting to distinguish between the Anzacs as men and the cause for which they fought.’ Maybe, but the Legend was still a major problem for those 65 women protesting against rape in war who were arrested in Canberra on Anzac Day 1981, under special laws passed to protect the March. They had been trying to join the March not disrupt it! Strange to think that the national identity Australian writers had built excised half the population.
It’s their obedience that haunts me. It’s because they were union men, John Forbes argued in his poem Anzac Day: ‘they went over the top like men clocking on/in this first full-scale industrial war/Which is why Anzac Day continues to move us’. He was writing about the last of the living Anzacs: old, old shuffling men, ‘informal/straggling & more cheerful than not/ it’s
like a huge works or 8 Hour Day picnic’. It’s a nice sentiment from a very, very different time. I try now to imagine those last minutes as they ‘went over the top’ and all I see is Mel Gibson’s face. Ingamells was right. Anzac Day is a dangerous fiction.
- J.G.