ANZAC Day

Today is ANZAC Day, a day commemorated in Australia and New Zealand as a day those countries somehow achieved nationhood.

I think it’s a day that has been hijacked by what I’ll call “white arm-banders”, the John Howard side of the so-called History Wars raging in Australia. It’s a day when you’ll hear people who weren’t there raving about respect for the flag, and thinly disguised (if disguised at all) harking back to the good old days of the white Australia policy. That is a version of ANZAC Day I find reprehensible and awful.

There are other versions of ANZAC Day: a pilgrimage by young antipodeans to Turkey, and Turkey’s respect for the area renamed for the ANZACs.

Since I’ve emigrated from Australia and now live in England, or the “mother country”, ANZAC Day has progressively become more important to me for reasons completely other than the jingoistic version.

We won’t ever know how many people died on 25 April 1915 as the Australians, British, French and New Zealanders attempted to take Turkey out of the blood bath that should never have happened: the Great War, that became known as World War I because of the second world war it eventually caused. For various reasons, that campaign failed. Historians and politicians have argued about it ever since.

Perhaps the only thing they don’t argue about is the extraordinary bravery of those men who stormed the beaches and rocks, and who dug in, and who generally displayed what defined the Australian (and New Zealand – but I didn’t grow up there and soak up their mythologies) colonial character. Myths based in truth like Simpson and his donkey, the more recent myths of Archie Hamilton running his last race in Peter Weir’s amazing Gallipoli (starring a very young Mel Gibson as Archie’s mate). It has become my tradition to watch the film every 25 April, even though it’s not actually about the landings, and not really historically accurate. It’s the feelings it evokes in me: anger and sadness of the futility of the real events. I wallow a bit, too, in the Aussie battler mythology, a mythology to which I have nostalgic memories of a childhood in country New South Wales with old uncles who lived it.

When I was growing up I thought ANZAC Day celebrated a tremendous, but bloody, victory for Australia. I was 13 when I first saw Gallipoli; I was 15 or 16 when I first became aware ANZAC Day commemorated an appalling defeat in a pointless war. The point of ANZAC Day and the memorials in every suburb and town in Australia (and the UK, and other places) was to remember the dead. To remember the dead in an effort to stop such slaughter from happening again. Of course, we have failed utterly in that, but it’s worth repeating the words intoned at dawn in various places on 25 April, words I’ve grown to appreciate more and more as I’ve grown older:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
Lest we forget.