TheBanyanTree: ANZAC day, 2006

[Peter Macinnis]

ANZAC Day (and note the capitalisation please) is how Australians, and 
to a lesser extent, New Zealanders, celebrate a glorious defeat that 
happened to them in Turkey in 1915.  Assorted Allied forces (Indians, 
Welsh, Irish, English, Australian and New Zealanders among them) were 
sent ashore on the Gallipoli Peninsula in a stupid attempt dreamed up by 
a pretentious clown called Winston Churchill, who fancied himself as a 
military genius.

He conceived a scheme to force the Dardanelles, to open up a warm water 
port through which the Russians could be supplied with munitions. 
Nobody thinks to recall now that it was idiot Churchill who 
single-handedly offended the Turks, forcing them to side with Germany, 
and nobody seems to remember that Britain did not, for most of the war, 
have enough materiel for their own needs, let alone being in a position 
to supply the Russians.  Nobody knows that the attack plan was drafted 
sixty years earlier, when the British were in the area, fighting with 
the Turks against the Russians.  Nobody realises that it was not revised 
to take account of advances in military technology in the intervening 
period.

The incompetence on the Allied side was almost, but not quite matched by 
incompetence on the Turkish side, where one man, Mustafa Kemal, known to 
history as Kemal Ataturk, won the battles and turned back the attacks 
that ran from the landings on April 25 to December, when the Allied 
forces crept away, losing not a man in the retreat.  Would that they had 
attacked with equal skill.

This was a time when trench warfare was well-developed: it is no 
coincidence that three days earlier, on the Western Front, Germans used 
poison gas for the first time, trying to break the stalemate in the 
trenches.  Time after time, Turks or assorted allied troops were 
slaughtered when their stupid commanders sent them out of the trenches 
in frontal assaults against the other side, sheltering in trenches 
behind barbed wire, and armed with machine guns, rapid-loading steel 
artillery, breech-loading rifles with magazines — and more barbed wire. 
  All of them invented since the Dardanelles attack plan was drafted, 
all ignored.

Out of that appalling mire of disaster, Australia and New Zealand became 
aware of their status as nations, and Ataturk would come to a position 
where he could take over the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, the 
heartland that is modern Turkey.  Louis de Bernières (his grandfather 
fought there) tells the story well in 'Birds Without Wings', tracing the 
way hatred and division were fomented, and ethnic cleansing became a way 
of life in much of the old empire.  There must surely be less costly 
ways of founding new nations!

Australia suffered less lasting damage than Turkey, but the ANZAC 
tradition left a lasting impression.  There were 26,000 casualties 
including 8000 deaths, but the legend of the Australian as a mate with 
the ability to make do, became part of our national psyche.  They had to 
stick together and be ingenious, because the idiot leadership was 
killing them, and leaving them deprived of what they needed.  In my 
youth, I could not understand why there were so many elderly unmarried 
ladies, but they also were victims of Gallipoli and the stupid men who 
let it happen.

Letting the troops down was a theme that would continue in World War II, 
in a place called the Kokoda Track, where craven brass hats, snug and 
secure, thousands of miles away,  failed repeatedly to match the grit 
and common sense of those who were fighting, and completely failed to 
provide them with food, ammunition, blankets or anything else — and 
complained that not enough of them were getting killed!  That is true, 
but it is also part of our mythology.

The 'Australia and New Zealand Army Corps' is the name that gave us 
ANZAC: the troops from the two nations were sent ashore at what the 
Turks now call ANZAC Cove and fought side-by-side.  In 1916, on April 
25, people met to commemorate their glorious dead, their glorious 
maimed, their glorious wounded, their glorious crippled, their glorious 
blind, their glorious barmy basket-cases, their glorious choking gas 
victims (albeit from later campaigns), and it has gone on ever since.

We are ambivalent about war, many of us, but not about the ANZAC 
tradition.  That is engrained into us.  The mateship of ANZAC is lauded 
by the sly little weasel who is our Prime Minister, a man who has never 
served in any capacity, even as he plots to undermine his fellow 
Australians by making it easier for them to be sacked from their 
employment.  He fails to understand that mateship was a response of 
rural Australian men to the repression of unions and unionism.

We wave the flag, even those of us who loathe the inbred degenerates who 
are the British royals, who are represented on our flag by what is 
technically called a defaced British ensign.  We tell ourselves that the 
sacrifice of our glorious dead, maimed, wounded etc. was what made us a 
nation.  We share the dream and the ideals, and look to the future.

I was born three days before ANZAC Day, in a time of war, and as a boy, 
I knew ANZAC Day as a time when drunken ex-servicemen vomited in the 
streets, but as they grew older, and as my generation grew older, that 
began to change.  I can tell you more about my whereabouts on past ANZAC 
Days than I can tell you about where I was on various birthdays.

In 1986, I flew from Paris to London on ANZAC Day.  The two years before 
and the two years after, I was a scout leader, and we took our scouts to 
the local war memorial for a short march and a quick memorial ceremony, 
all they would stand for — kids today are a bit more willing.  In 1993, 
I was in Wales on ANZAC Day, in 2004, I was arriving in Paris, but in 
2002, I was just across the water from Gallipoli, at Canakkale.

Over the previous ten years, the Australian Diaspora, European division, 
and its New Zealand equivalent, had taken to arriving at ANZAC Cove, 
late on April 24, drinking and partying, before getting down to the 
serious business of marking ANZAC Day with a dawn service.  The past few 
years have seen the drinking and partying deleted, but still they come. 
  Back then, we attended the Turkish commemoration in Canakkale, 
instead.  We had our visit on April 24 instead.

The dawn services which happen all over Australia remind us that the 
first ANZACs landed at dawn, in an attack that had been successfully 
telegraphed by the incompetents in the Royal Navy.  They were following 
a plan written in another era, before machine-guns, breech-loading 
rifles and guns or barbed wire had been thought of.  They were slaughtered.

Still, at dawn, all around Australia, we Australians meet, and if the 
local Turks wish, they are welcome to attend, as we commemorate a stupid 
adventure that went completely wrong.  Today, I was one of them.

We rose at 2:45 am, and drove through the night to a ferry wharf, where 
we embarked on a ferry.  We were all rugged up, but the pre-dawn chill 
bit through.  Even so, the water in the harbour is at about 23 C, call 
it 73 F — when I swam in the Aegean at about that time a couple of years 
ago, I was minded of Joyce's term for such waters: 'scrotum-tightening'. 
  We were in a ferry, with bulwarks, windows and more.

Every so often, out of the gloom, we would pass racing boats: mainly 8s, 
a few 4s, and even a couple of single sculls.  All were headed in our 
direction, and most of us thought, quietly, of the parallel with the 
troops who were taken into the shallows in navy longboats.  They 
proceeded in absolute darkness as they attacked, but the girls and men 
who rowed were fitted with glittering LEDs to make them show up to any 
powerboats skipping through the dark

Sydney is a city of bridges — it's a matter of geology, but we are 
knee-deep in them.  One of the latest, a cable-stayed bridge in steel 
and concrete, was completed just in time for the 2000 Olympics, and 
dubbed the ANZAC Bridge.  One end features a statue of a World War I 
soldier, the towers fly the Australian flag at the eastern end, and the 
remarkably similar New Zealand flag at the other.  Each features a 
constellation we see each night, the Southern Cross.

At that time of the morning, we could see the floodlit flags with ease, 
and we could see the Southern Cross.  We could see the dark waters where 
the old swing-bridge lay open, under the new bridge.  Then the water 
began to sparkle as the boats began to arrive.

My cousin is in her last year as principal of a "rowing" school, a 
girls' school.  Her husband has been the active maintainer of the rowing 
tradition, and he or somebody had organised a visit from two schools 
from Christchurch in New Zealand.  The girls had come over — one crew 
even brought their own blades — for a week of tough competition and 
general fun, but then somebody noticed that they would still be in town 
for ANZAC Day — and the bridge was a mere two or three miles away, down 
the calm waters of the inner harbour, and so began the scheme.

Parents form the backbone of the rowing — many of them stay on after 
their children leave, many of them were former rowers — it is engrained 
in them.  One mother asked if I had rowed for my school — my accent is 
such that these poor dears think I am one of them (rather than being a 
state school boy), and I didn't want to spoil things for her, so I just 
said no, I sailed.  She told me she had managed as an alien, to row for 
England, and I shared with her my experience of rowing on the Cam in 
1986, the same year, with Duncan in a papoose on my back, and being 
eagerly snapped by earnest Japanese tourists, hanging from the bridges 
and banks, seeking scenes of the natives at their quaint activities.

I carefully did not comment on how England in 1986 accepted the Japanese 
as tourists, but Australia, a nation that had sacrificed much of its 
youth in the altar of British world dominance, was regarded as an alien 
nation.  After all, it had only taken perfidious Albion sixty years to 
turn on the Turks — we were lucky to have been given another ten. 
Still, it makes you wonder about the point of fighting wars.

Some of the fathers had competed to get an eight for themselves, but all 
of the rest were filled with Australian and New Zealand girls, and now 
they came glittering in out of the gloom, backlit by the lights along 
the shore.  Other fathers in "tinnies", metal runabouts, had dropped and 
buoyed a line, and the boats slid their bows under the line and 
clustered together, oars laid across to form the boats into a locked 
platform.

As dawn approached, cloud slid across the sky, hiding the Southern 
Cross.  We sang the interminable verses of 'Abide With Me', we listened 
to readings, we sang two national anthems, a girl played the 'Last Post' 
('Taps' to Americans) and 'Reveille', the boats left, the tinnies left, 
and then we left, passing the boats along the way.  The sky lightened as 
we had breakfast back at the rowing club as the girls hauled in their 
boats and cleaned them and stowed them, even as others were leaving.  I 
was impressed, having been around youngsters in yacht clubs for quite a 
few years, with the efficient way they worked.  The younger generation 
is OK!

Then a piper came out onto the deck.  First he played Scotland the 
Brave,  The Road to the Isles,  and Auld Lang Syne.  Then he gave us a 
medley of Waltzing Matilda and Amazing Grace, then paused before he 
launched into 'Flowers of the Forest'.  That is a lament, and if you 
have ever watched the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, this is what the lone 
piper plays on the ramparts.  It is a haunting melody, commonly played 
on ANZAC Day, but it had a deeper meaning for me, recalling a recent 
death in my family.  I am unemotional — that is engrained in me, but I 
found it hard to stay composed.

We were due to go walking after breakfast, but I noted with relief that 
the cloud was turning into showers, so we took a farewell from my 
cousin, and drove home over the Harbour Bridge.  As we came off the 
bridge, I noticed several cars were flashing their high beams.  Going 
the other way, there was a large convoy of taxis, all flying flags, 
carrying the old diggers into town for the march, later that morning. 
The convoy has grown each year, but soon it will begin to dwindle again. 
  I flashed my lights as well — respect for the ones who are left is 
engrained into us.

But then we have always known that those who remained would grow old.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Further reading: a feel-good ANZAC story about an old man, some younger 
men and an old tradition.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/for-frank-light-horse-rides-again/2006/04/25/1145861349897.html
or http://tinyurl.com/r38cx

suitable song: 
http://users.bigpond.net.au/kirwilli/songs/Waltz%20Matilda.htm

Pictures from Gallipoli:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/27399922@N00/
Ataturk:  http://www.flickr.com/groups/ataturk/



-- 

   _--|\    Peter Macinnis, Manly, the birthplace of Australian surfing
  /     \   feral word herder, also herbal remedies, bespoke fish
  \.--._*<--hooks, umbrellas mended and budgerigar requisites
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm