Anyone who read my little Facebook blurb the other day on Georg - the former Hitler Youth member, must surely see that I have a complex view of who and what we are. As living, historical entities. As nations. As tribes and as individuals.
I tend to exercise my passive aggression each year around this time by maintaining the beer palace mantra of 'Lest we forget? We already fucking have!". I promise not to trot that one out today for the sake of retaining at least a few friendships.
I grew up steeped in the vestiges of war - from the exalted and sublime to the laughingly tragic. Together with a number of friends, my whole youth was geared towards joining the army after I left school, so that I might not only follow in the footsteps of the family heroes but more importantly remove the tarnish of my own kin who were not so very self-sacrificing. All of this, however, was not to be. It was on that fateful day at the army medical I learned something hitherto unknown to me or anyone else in my family which was, I was born profoundly deaf in my right ear. My world collapsed in those moments on Castlereagh Street.
My father was acknowledged by the the people of Leichhardt and the wider community as a coward and opportunist (albeit a very charismatic one, it appears) throughout WW2. His brothers, by contrast, were volunteers in the 9th which served so famously at Tobruk and elsewhere. My mother's brother was a coast watcher who was later captured by the Japanese army in New Guinea and subjected to horrific and inhuman depredation. Yet another uncle would put away more dexamphetamine as a navigator on PBY Catalinas out of Rathmines and forward bases, than any drug pig I've known on Civvy Street. Bear in mind that they were all no older than the age of twenty three by war's end. Jesus fuck, I was still trying to get laid and wasted at twenty three. Weren't you?
So... This day... It was Winston's idea and to all intents and purposes it should have worked. It was bold, it was a potential war-shortener. You know what? I want to digress for a minute. I hear people call it the Battle of Gallipoli. It was a fucking campaign. It wasn't over in a day. It was over eight fucking months in a hell that not even the devil's own could have devised. Eight months.
Why am I writing this? I suppose I want to know - need to know - what it is we must not forget? Were Ypres and Passchendaele more significant to the fundament of being the nation we are today? I believe the answer is yes. And I believe that I could win that argument hand's down.
Gallipoli was as much bloodloss and heartache for every British boy as son of Australia who fought for those scant miles too. It seems to me that the only thing that we must not forget is that Australian should hate the British. And the British should hate their own. And nobody should take combat orders from anyone who hasn't fired a shot in the last three decades which was so often the case on that shoreline. But if hate is the salient legacy, then I'm in favour of forgetting. Our involvement with seemingly every conflict after Korea (50-53) belies all good intent that had gone before and makes a mockery of those hallowed words that burn beneath the flame that should never go out.
Is this my advocacy for war? Don't be fucking daft. All sentient things war. I don't like it. You don't like it. But all living things war. I have unbound and open respect for friends who have served and serve yet in the ADF. I think they didn't 'join to kill'. Not most of the peers my age anyway. Perhaps they too did it for the most unfathomable yet meaningful of reasons. Is all this sour grapes from a failed wannabe solider? No. Almost all my ex-mil friends immediately became hippies, waxheads and tree-huggers of one kind or another. I got there first without the terror of the parade grounds tedium. Win.
Do I think we can rise above our base natures? For the most part, yes. Something infinitely better, more vibrant and alive - and life affirming, holding more and deeper promise invariably comes out of working together with the swords to ploughshares approach. Something that transcends flags and borders, commercialised memories and worn-down memes.
Uncle Bob, I'd raise a glass to your ghost. But you gave the bottle away. And so did I. So let the bullshit stop here.
For the rest of you, thanks for coming to amateur hour.
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