"Drape “Anzac” over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct. History will not stand for that. In history nothing is sacred. History is open inquiry; politics is slogans."
- Peter Cochrane, Honorary Associate, Department of History at the University of Sydney.1
Dear Pop,
I imagine you as a bookish man, with a squarish head, surrounded by horse shoes and leather things. Granny told me that as you were dying, you said to her: "you're just so impulsive". She thought you said "repulsive" and she impulsively became angry with you. I imagine you were a bit quieter than her, your pre-war patience lingering gently through your stormy post-war grief and anger.
We are lots of grandchildren, and I was the first born after you died. But I like to think about how I saved your life, if only for a short time. The story I was told was that it was Ash Wednesday, 1983, and fires were roaring through farms on the shipwreck coast of Victoria's south-west. It was 40-something degrees in Mildura in the far north of the state, where Mum was three months pregnant with me. She called to tell you, the phone call getting you out of your chair where you had fallen asleep in the smoke. The farm didn't make it, but you and your horseshoe did.
A few weeks ago, I bought a piano accordion. Sometimes I imagine travelling around the country on a horse, telling stories about working in rural Australia and the people I meet. Everyone thinks this is hilarious. The accordion would probably be a bit too heavy to take with me. Even I'm not sure if I am joking or if it is my way of connecting to a life, a story, a movie I can never see but can only imagine. Your life. Mum told me how there weren't many gifts for her and her eight siblings when growing up on the Naringal farm. But you gave her a horse. And you gave her that emerald green accordion.
I'm rambling now. Stalling, because I don't know where to start. I went to an ANZAC Day service this year with your other grandaughter Nicole, and for the first time I wasn't marching as a Girl Guide or going to report on the event for work. I went for Granny, because I think she went for you. And I thought of you, and felt disloyal being there. Because I know you hated it. You refused to go to the RSLs, to talk about anything to do with the war.
Since I can't ask you about this, I can only write my version and hope you wouldn't throw this in the fire when you read it. I did not live this. You did. I did not live my mother's childhood or Granny's marriage. They did. So this is my thoughts based on stories as I have heard them.
The tragedy and cross-generational persistence of WWI and WWII trauma is not an unanswered question wrapped up in a bridal bouquet - it's not up for grabs. It runs deep, through layers and layers of trauma-fuelled emotion. The impact on the hearts and minds of those who were there, on their families and their children's families is unfathomable.
While my Pop was in and out of psychiatric care, Granny often faced the grief and loss of having their children die in childbirth, one run over and killed, and the loss of their farm in the Ash Wednesday fires, alone. Children would have to be placed in the care of other families, my mother once telling me she had her siblings pointed out to her at school one day. Neighbours came to help her with the harvest.
She was mad as well. Mad about him, mad at him, mad he was mad at her, mad from grief, mad about her children, about dancing, about swimming, ginger, violets, the colour green, toast with tomatoes, fish and chips with a bottle of lemon squash.
There are things I have heard about Pop and Granny that I cannot share. I never met him, though I wish I had. And I loved her. These things are too dark for a great-grandchild to read and know. They were too dark for their children to see.
But what our family keeps quiet from its great-grandchildren is something they have had to work through, each in their own time, in their own way. And some things just had to be forgiven.
But like my Pop, the soldiers who signed up and who were signed up against their will, to cross the world for wars they didn't fully understand because no one did, were not making the calls. They were just pulling the triggers. And sometimes they were so brainwashed, traumatised and scared they pulled those triggers without orders. Just like the way they would rear up or jump at the slightest hint of a bang! when they returned. They started out believing they were the 'good guys', because questioning this would twist and strangle their souls. Many did question it, and suffocated.
But emotionally-thick lavishes of sentiment about these events does not equate to a national identity. This is what politicians want us to 'festivalise' in order to justify a military past and legitamise its present and future without inquiry. The human toll of war should not render "ANZAC" a sacred, untouchable history. Telling stories of the past with accuracy is not un-Australian, it is integral to understanding who we are and who we want to become.
As a journalism cadet, an editor instilled in me the importance of accuracy, of ethics, of believing in what you write, of making contributions you feel are worthy. Each week he had me climb down the stairs of the old newspaper building, into the 'dungeon', where a heavy door shut behind you and locked you in if you didn't put a wedge there or forgot to take the key in. There were all sorts of stories about what happened in that room. But kept in there were giant, fragile, bound copies of newspapers dating back more than 100 years. Each week I was to find the newspaper matching the day's date 100 years ago, 75 years ago, 50 years ago and 25 years ago. Then I had to look through all the stories in those newspapers and find the most interesting and significant ones and rewrite them for our 'historicals' page. It always took me longer than it was supposed to, as I would be engrossed in not only every story, but the way they were worded, imagining the characters in them, reading the advertisements, taking photos of the pictures of all the products and how they were pitched to the public. What it taught me, and what he told me, is that today's news is tomorrow's history and in every word you write, you are creating that history for your community and for generations to come. And so you quickly grasp a fluid and subjective meaning of what is truth, but also a deep sense of obligation.
So when SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre was sacked for tweeting a series of remarks about the grimmer aspects of Australian military history on ANZAC Day because they were considered disrespectful and inappropriate, I racked my brain to recall what we are actually supposed to be doing as journalists.
I am not sure what school of journalism the suit wearers at SBS went to, but I was taught scrutinising and criticising public bodies of power in order to keep society informed and maintain a democracy, was our actual job description.
Just like on our own soils now, 'our Anzacs' did not always act with humanity and kindness. Before being shipped to Gallipolli from Egypt, many Australian soldiers treated locals with absolute racist brutality.
On Good Friday, 1915, about 2500 Anzacs rioted in Cairo, terrifying locals, setting fire to brothels. More followed. They threatened, bullied, drinking and whoring, left bills unpaid, and beat locals because they were "niggers".
Australian soldiers in Papua New Guinea kept diary notes about using Japanese prisoners for "machine-gun practise", purely out of revenge and racial hatred.
Thousands of Japanese women were raped in the years after the war, some of them by our Anzacs.
This testimony was recorded from Australian officer Allan Clifton, who acted as an interpreter in Japan in 1946.
"I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by 20 soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. The hospital was in Hiroshima. The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians.
The moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep."2
War is not our national identity. Australians are more than this. It is not the identity of the men and women who served in them, who find themselves acting in ways contrary to their core values, who break promises to themselves and their moral codes. They are more than this. Soldiers who are still returning now, from Afghanistan and Iraq, are so much more than this. My Pop was so much more than this.
In the dark, angry, dispossessed world of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, silence is the enemy. Glorification of acts soldiers, sailors and pilots never want to remember, is a repeated blow to the head and a threat to self worth.
If we cannot talk about it, if we cannot acknowledge mistakes and atrocities and seek to understand, explain and forgive them, how can our Anzacs?
Perhaps a tweet on social media over-simplifies the complexity of war behaviour and the impact it has had on those who went. But we do not live in a dictatorship. It is not a crime to question the past. We must separate our thoughts and emotions about the acts of scared and traumatised soldiers from the decisions of the leaders who put them there. We must analyse, acknowledge and rectify mistakes of the past to keep clear eyes on the future. To do so is not to judge. To do so is our duty.
Today is Mother's Day. It's just a couple of weeks after Anzac Day, which was one day after the anniversary of Granny's death. I am sitting outside in the Autumn sunshine, amongst the fruit trees, with a dog at my feet and can hear the ice-cream van around the corner. Like all my aunts and uncles, I imagine you would have liked gardening and maybe even taught them how. You would have loved your horses, and sitting quietly in a corner with a book and a dog beside you. Maybe you would have been partial to apple pie.
I'm undecided about whether I'll go to an Anzac Day service again. Not because I do not love you. But because I do not want to celebrate or glorify what you had to go through.
Mum summed it up for me perfectly this week. When animals kill each other, they choose another species. They do so quickly and then eat each other. What we do to each other as humans is something else all together. Trauma and stress don't make us stronger or more resilient. They change our genetic code and behaviour and this DNA is passed on from generation to generation.
Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; children who grew up with abusive parents. They all carry with them more than just memories. Even after these experiences have been forgotten, the resulting residue of psychological and behavioural tendencies holds fast and is inherited.
For your sake, for Granny's sake and for the sake of my mother, my aunts, uncles and cousins, I wish I could have asked you about it all. I wish that you could have told me, and we could have told you it was okay. So now all I can say is that I am sorry you had to see what you saw, do what you did, and live with the thought you got away while your brother was taken prisoner of war among many other memories. I'm sorry for what it did to your heart and mind.
Thank you for your love, for the horse and the accordion.
Happy Mother's Day and lots of love.
xoxox
1. https://theconversation.com/the-past-is-not-sacred-the-history-wars-over-anzac-38596
2. https://theconversation.com/anzacs-behaving-badly-scott-mcintyre-and-contested-history-40955
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