Larvatus Prodeo

My first full-on Anzac Day was April 25, 1966 – I missed Anzac day in 1965 through arriving in the country too late.

By then I’d started at High School, in a new Public Works Department standard high school a short, crowded bus-ride from the migrant hostel – where we lived in one half of a Nissan hut – in the morning and a long walk back in the afternoon. The Anzac day service consisted of an ABC Schools broadcast piped through to the classrooms on the tannoy. That year I heard the story of Simpson and his donkey for the first time.

The following year, we moved into a rented house in Melbourne’s outer Eastern suburbs and I started at Greenfields High School. The school had an assembly hall, and a cadet company, so the Anzac day service was a lot more elaborate. It featured a slow march up the aisles by four members of the cadet company, a sermon from one of the local ministers, nationalistic hymns of British provenance – like Holst’s I Vow to Thee My Country – and a bugler. I didn’t quite get it. I was used to a much less ostentatious commemoration of the dead of the First World War – the two minute silence on Remembrance Day.

Anzac Day was very specifically an Australian day. The Anzac legend wasn’t my legend, except by adoption. The war dead of my family – notably the uncle who had haunted most of my early childhood – had no part in this commemoration. That dead uncle, by the way, served as a tail-gunner on an RAF Bomber Command Lancaster. He’s buried in France, where his plane was shot down. Every time the extended Trotsky clan got together at Christmas, someone was sure to remark on how much young Gummo looked like his long dead uncle.

He didn’t leave any diaries or letters that I know of, just a tobacco tin of service medals, posthumously awarded. For all I know, in a few years time, a family will be going through the effects of a recently deceased aunt and find an old biscuit tin stuffed with letters from an RAF Flight Sergeant and realise for the first time why the old duck never married.

No matter – he didn’t belong to Anzac Day and Anzac Day didn’t belong to him. Anzac Day was for commemorating, or honouring, Australians who’d served and died in war, in a particularly Australian way – blokes like Simpson. My uncle’s death was just a routine, ordinary war death unmarked by any feats of conspicuous courage. A death no more remarkable than drowning in the boiler room of a sunken freighter in the Barents Sea or being buried in the rubble of a bombed factory – which would be worse than unremarkable if the factory were German.

A friend’s father has a particularly spotty war record. At the end of the Second World War he walked off the merchant vessel he was serving on, straight into the arms of two redcaps, waiting on the dock to arrest him for desertion. While he spent twenty-four hours in the brig, the army went through his war service records deducting one day’s AWOL for each day he had served in another service – the British Merchant Navy. Before the war the British Merchant Marine were regarded as drunken brawlers. During the war the North Sea convoys made them heroes. Immediately the war was over, they went back to being drunken brawlers.

After his service record had been checked, he was released and the word honourable was stamped next to the word desertion already stamped on his Army discharge papers. Sometimes, they also serve who go over the hill.

As usual, there will be two official commemorations in Melbourne today – the dawn service and the parade. In Saturday’s Age, Alan Attwood mounted a spirited defence of the dawn service in its original form, free of showbiz hype and celebrity appearances. Thinking about Attwood’s article, it was easy to imagine the first dawn service as a quiet, genuinely commemorative occasion and worth preserving in its original form. Particularly at Anzac Cove, which has become a must visit for Australian tourists overseas, some of whom – a small, unrepresentative minority, of course – honour the fallen by getting pissed and throwing up on the headstones.

The parade, however is different. Each year it looks to me less and less like a cortege, the funerary note overwhelmed by the sense that Anzac Day is a day of national pride and the deep-seated disconnection between the patriotic legend and the history. And the muddle-headedness that has always gone with the day – to the extent that this year, in Melbourne at least, the descendants of Turkish soldiers who served at Gallipoli will be allowed to march with the descendants of the Anzacs who fought them because, unlike the Germans, the Japs and the Italians, Johnny Turk was an honoured enemy. Yes, it’s a gesture of reconciliation but one framed entirely in militaristic values.

So this year, I’ll be saving any special thoughts of that dead uncle, and Granddad’s Blightey One, for November 11th. A contrived date from a contrived armistice to be sure and a little stuffed up, when it comes to remembrance of war, by certain events in 1975. All the same, that two minute silence at 11 am on November 11th remains the best time to my own family history and the personal connections it creates to the events of the two World Wars.