An alternative reading of Anzac day

“This was our first act of nationhood in the eyes of a watching world” – Julia Gillard, Anzac Day Address, 2012

Was Anzac Day, as Julia Gillard put it, “our first act of nationhood” or a catastrophe for a young nation, one that would take us decades to recover from?

I was very interested to see Tony Jones’ interview with Australian Historian Ross McMullin on ABC’s Lateline on Anzac Day.  McMullin’s book Farewell, Dear People: Biographies Of Australia’s Lost Generation (Scribe, 2012) tells the stories of some of those who didn’t come back from WW1 and reflects on the outstanding potential that was lost to Australia and the world.  I haven’t yet read the book, but I will.  In his interview on Lateline it really seemed that a different reading of Anzac day was being proposed – perhaps a less idealistic and romanticized one than the version we are regularly fed by the media and our politicians. 

The 25^th of April, 1915 wasn’t the day that forged our national identity – it was a day when Australia’s potential was diminished, followed by many other days when even more of our youngest and brightest were killed, their potential ended and the potential of Australia as a young nation went with them.

If all those thousands of young men had not been slaughtered, if they had been allowed to live out their lives and reach their potential, can you imagine the society that they would have contributed to?  What would our society, our national identity, be like today?  In many ways Australia punches above its weight in various arenas, despite the decimation of our population in the early 20^th century.  Imagine what we might have achieved had these men grown to old age.  Would we have the chip on our shoulder, the tall poppy syndrome and the various other characteristics we have come to equate with our national identity?

I hope that by the time we get to the centenary of Anzac day that we as a nation might start to re-think this national trope of Australian Character forged on the battlefields of WW1, a sign of our warrior nationhood.  After 100 years, and still sending our youngest and brightest to war, maybe we can rethink how a war nearly 100 years ago shaped us as a Nation.  Perhaps we accept the reality that rather than strengthening and galvanizing us as a nation, that it actually damaged us as a country, crippled and brutalized and traumatised thousands and thousands of people, in addition to those that died, stripped us of much of the potential of the young century and set us back decades in terms of what we might, as a nation, have achieved. 

As Ross McMullin puts it, before WW1, “…we were on the way to establishing in Australia an advanced, progressive society that was seen widely elsewhere as an advanced social laboratory […] for other people to come, as they often did, from overseas, they crossed the globe to look at, scrutinise, assess, this advanced social laboratory. And the war blew all that away, and after the war we were no longer seen as an advanced social laboratory and there were no more such visitors.” (transcript of Interview with Tony Jones, Lateline)

The significance of our ‘National’ days has never sat well with me.  Australia day – the start of an ongoing disaster for Australia’s first people.  Anzac Day – a commemoration of brutal and arguably pointless slaughter.  Yet we chose to mark these days as days of celebration and commemoration.  I say this as the daughter of an army man.  My father was a career soldier;  the army gave him many opportunities and the chance at an alternative life to that of a poor, under educated dairy farmer.  But my father never joined the RSL, never in my living memory went on an Anzac day march.  Although it was never said aloud, war was not something to celebrate or commemorate – but rather something to try and move on from.  Not to forget, but not to remember either.  War is a truly terrible thing.  My father was deeply scarred and traumatised by his experiences in battle.  Having to kill someone is not something that would be easy to live with.  I remember my mother telling me about my father’s nightmares – 20, 30 years after he returned from active service he was still re-living the horror in his dreams. 

Nietzsche may have observed “That which does not kill us makes us stronger” but if it kills your sons and your brothers and your fathers and your uncles and decimates your community - only an incredibly over optimistic reading can make that in any way positive.   I am not proposing that we should all wallow in national self-pity for what might have been.  But perhaps on Anzac Day we can at least be honest and open about what we have lost.  And what we continue to lose every time some young, talented, loved son or daughter dies because of a war.

Symptomatic Creativity. And Sleep.

(illustration by Robin Cowcher)

Symptoms may include creativity

Jonah Lehrer

I found this article in The Age very interesting and also quite moving.  It reminded me how fleeting and precious creativity is - and life in general. And it also reminded me how important sleeping is... maybe that's why I feel that I have never had enough sleep?  Or maybe it's just because I HAVEN'T HAD ENOUGH SLEEP.

Happy - Sad ... and everything in between

Pictures by Freya, aged 4

It is hard to imagine these two pictures were painted by the same little girl on the same day:  the result of one of our holiday 'art sessions' at the kitchen table, with some paper and water colour pencils and water.  Freya seems to like drawing and painting in dark colours, often in black.  I find it a little hard to reconcile with the funny and generally cheerful little poppet, whose favourite colour is apparently pink.  Part of me is a little disturbed by the second picture - is she expressing some deep seated conflict, some hidden sadness? Am I reading too much into it?
As a parent of course I want to protect my babies from anything that could hurt or upset them but, of course, this is impossible.  So the next best thing I suppose is to help them find ways of dealing with the things that may hurt or upset them, and also ways of expressing these feelings.  Both of our children are highly emotional creatures and quite thin skinned.  Part of me wishes they were otherwise but I hope that as a parent I can help them find a way to be 'sensitive' without being too vulnerable to every little slight or challenge that comes their way.
Being a bit 'thin skinned' myself, I have often wondered if it is not such a bad way of being.  Is this part of what makes me want to write music or create things?  Is it the 'thin skin' that makes me more driven to try and express things in music that I feel unable to express in words?  Or that makes me more aware of those intensely moving glimpses of beauty and strangeness that are all around us?  Although my 'thin skin' has been the cause of much sadness and turmoil in my life, I don't think that I would wish to be otherwise.  And I hope that as our children grow into adults that they will be able to balance a healthy sense of self confidence with a sensitivity to the people and things that surround them, to be resilient but not impervious to the many experiences life will throw at them.
I hope Freya keeps expressing the amazing contrasts of life - the happy-sunny-flower-days and the big-black-gaping-mouth-days - and that she finds her own way of dealing with the ups and downs we all have to live through.

A particular kind of aloneness

My six year old daughter was singing in the kitchen today and I told her what a good singer she was.  She asked “Did you sing as well as me when you were six?” And the answer is, I don’t know, and I no longer have anyone to ask.

I’m not sure whether you can really refer to yourself as becoming an ‘orphan’ once you are a grown up.   I’m very grown up, almost middle-aged by some people’s reckoning, but I still feel the particular impact of knowing that both my parents are now dead.  Although I have a half brother and sister from my father’s first marriage, they are a generation older than me and I did not live with them when I was growing up – I grew up as an only child.  And that is what makes me feel this newly conferred ‘orphanhood’ more acutely.  In a way I feel as though I have been severed from my childhood.  If I can’t remember something that happened when I was four, now there is no one else who can.  I relied on my mother’s recollections of my childhood, particularly for the years before about the age of 4.  Now that she is gone there is no longer a reliable witness to my childhood.  I know this comes to all of us but I think having young children makes me feel this absence more keenly.  What was I like at 4?  Is my 4 year-old similar or different to me at the same age?  If my 6 year old pulls a certain face, there is no longer any one to say - “you look just like your mother when she was your age”.  I’m not going to wallow in self-pity about my ‘orphanhood’ because in the scheme of things it is really not so significant. We all lose our parents eventually - some of us sooner than others.  At least I had one parent who lived to see me a happy adult and mother of my own children. But still, I think this particular type of aloneness will take a bit of getting used to.

A Birthday

Today would have been my mother’s 85^th birthday.   This time last year I had no thought that she would not be around for her next birthday.  I just assumed that there would be at least another couple of birthdays, although I’m not sure my mother was so convinced.

After some one much loved dies, I think it is the ticking over of that first year and the passing of ‘special’ days that can be most difficult to bear:  the first Christmas without them, the first New Year, the day of their birth and the day of their death.  I managed to cope quite well with Christmas and New Year: I steeled myself and held it together.  But over the last week or so I have been feeling an increasing sense of dread, the welling up of grief and a dissolving of my carefully maintained composure. 

The last two nights I have gone to bed and cried, missing my mother, wishing that she could have been around for a couple more years, wondering if there was anything we could have done to hold on to her for a bit longer.  All of these things are of course part of any grieving but it was her birthday that was my undoing.  Last night I tormented myself thinking about her last birthday and whether she had any inkling that it would be her last.  I went back and read my diary for this time last year and was relieved to recall that we were all there for her birthday – that she had her two cherished grand-daughters pottering around her house for a couple of days; I’m pretty sure we got a cake to celebrate.  So it wasn’t such a bad last birthday.  There was some consolation in that at least.  But I still miss my mother and although 84 and a half years was a pretty good run, I still feel the loss and the unfairness of losing someone who still had a bit of living left to do.

What was it all about?

I thought it was about time I revisited why I started this blog and what it was supposed to be about.  “A blog about creating things and the spaces between creating things”.  And herein lies the reason why my posts have been so few and far between.  I’m not creating things and the spaces in between seem to be jam packed with other, not so interesting, stuff.  I’m not finding those moments for reflection and refocusing and recharging.  What I AM finding is full-on child-focused summer holiday blur, following on from hellish year of great sadness and stress and business.  There was a brief period of energized activity between busy hell year and school holidays when I got the garage door replaced, a new skylight and attic put in and the garden brought under some semblance of control.  I could perhaps have spent that energy and time on starting a new piece or doing yoga but I chose to try and bring some outward signs of order to our physical space.  The garage door was so that we could put a CAR in the garage – what an amazing concept – instead of all the junk that we have been ‘storing’ in there. And that necessitated a bit of a purge of no longer used things thanks to our local freecyle group. The attic was because we were rapidly running out of storage space, particularly after taking possession of many of my mother’s things – furniture, papers, photos etc.  The skylight was to brighten a gloomy kitchen.  So all of these things have actually helped make me feel a bit better about the space I am in.  I am feeling less swamped and oppressed by stuff.  I feel slightly more in control.  And that is important to me. I find it hard to work in chaos, surrounded by boxes and no longer used things.  So although I really don’t have very much to report in the way of ‘creating’ things or inspiration in the spaces between, at least I am in a slightly better place than I was before.  So, as I get closer to the end of summer holiday craziness, approaching the start of what looks like a dog’s breakfast of a year, I shall take a deep breath and brace myself. And I will keep trying to find those spaces, between and otherwise, where I can do the things that I really need to do.

Something in The Age

Photo by Wayne Taylor

Thanks to Kathy Evans for the lovely piece in The Age today - a follow up to the premiere performances of EPIC by the Australian Chamber Choir.