Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                                   AUSSIE CELEBRATION

 

                               Flinders Street Station when nobody is around

A month or so ago, we were holidaying in Australia. We stayed for nine days in Melbourne after escaping from five days in Sydney and, in a comfortable hotel, we became rather lazy. We woke up one morning in what we regard as late (about 8 a.m.), and we remembered that it was ANZAC Day. This was something of which we usually take little notice. But out of curiosity, we decided to see what was going on in the streets. We walked up Flinders Street in the direction of the great railway station. There seemed to be nobody at all on this major street – one of the essential arteries of the city. Trams were not running and there was almost complete silence – apart from the odd elevated train rumbling overhead. We wondered if all the action had gone on around the city’s large war memorial, far from Flinders Street, after some sort of dawn ceremony.

We kept walking in comparative silence… and soon discovered how wrong our guess had been. There were huge crowds on the pavements at the intersection between Flinders Street Station and the Anglican cathedral. The noise was top volume. To get a view above the heads of the crowd, we stood on the upper stairs of the railway station’s entry. The parade that followed took two hours to pass by – representing the armed forces - soldiers, sailors and airmen; ground control; shore watchers; women’s auxiliaries; nurses; representatives of allies – Gurkhas, Greeks, members of the French Resistance, Indians – and a handful of cars carrying very old men [they’d now be in their nineties at least], incapable of walking, who had actually fought in the Second World War.  Approximately every third group that passed by was accompanied by a band. But we couldn’t help noticing how many bands that passed represented schools – teenagers and other young people. In fact, far more young people were a part of the parade than the military. ANZAC Day has become a festival in what almost amounts to a sacred day. In both Australia and New Zealand there has, in recent years, been a resurgence of interest in ANZAC Day after years in which younger people were indifferent to the day or even cynical about it. I keep remembering the Aussie playwright Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year, written in the late 1950s, which was the first Aussie play to debunk the Gallipoli legend. A good play, it set the pace for negative views about ANZAC in general – but attitudes have changed since then.

While we were watching the parade, we kept hearing loud rowdy shouts and yells coming from the upper storey of a pub directly across the road from Flinders Street Station. I asked a woman in the crowd what that meant. Was it some sort of drunken riot or protest against the parade? She informed me that it was a game of two-up, the old Aussie soldiers’ gambling game, which is now illegal with one exception – it can be played on ANZAC Day. It’s there to mollify men who still remember the rough games soldiers used to play – a sort of tradition, but also an excuse for a booze-up.

All in all, the whole parade was very impressive, certainly larger than any Kiwi ANZAC parade I’ve ever seen – but then Melbourne alone has about the same number of people as all of New Zealand and the parade represented all Melburnians.

As I said elsewhere on this blog, I’ve never taken seriously the origins of ANZAC. The 1915 Gallipoli campaign itself was pointless, poorly conceived, led by an inept general and in its defeat giving Turkish forces their only major victory in the First World War. The notion that the campaign made New Zealand and Australia grown-up nations is nonsense – soldiers went off to war at the call of England and still thought of themselves as part of the British Empire first and foremost. It was other things that made Australia and New Zealand mature as nations.

If ANZAC Day was only about remembering a botched campaign from long ago, I would ignore it. But seeing ANZAC Day as doing honour to the dead in all wars is something that I can respect – a lament for all the fallen but also some pride in success in some wars.

 FOOTNOTE: After I posted this article, an  historian who spcialises in military history reminded me that the Turks won another major victory in the First World War, the Battle of Kut. My apologies for overlooking this.