Nov 11 2008
Remembrance Day
The day of November 11 calls to Australians three times. On this day in 1880 Ned Kelly went to his death and in 1975 our elected government was dismissed with the connivance of England’s Queen.
The execution of a bushranger and the sacking of a Prime Minister have different interpretations across our diverse population but we all stop, on this fateful day, to remember the dead of the Great War.
Whatever these events mean, they have shaped the national psyche. And all three events have attained mytho-poetic status.
The Australian soldiers who answered the summons from Britain in 1914, boys from the bush a lot of them, superb horsemen and crack shots, never realised they were starting a legend. They became the ANZACs and when we recall their slaughter our minds turn first to Gallipoli.
On the Gallipoli peninsula lie the broken remains of 44,000 Allied soldiers and twice that number of Turkish troops. Not all the Turkish dead are troops, I met a Turkish man in Melbourne who ran from his home near Lapseki in 1915 to defend the cove of Gallipoli from “the Greeks”. He was 14 years old. My Uncle Victor, from the goldfields town of Bendigo, sailed off to Gallipoli at the age of 16 in the company of other boys scarcely older than himself. Images of them, conjured up from my imagination, make my throat tighten. Unbidden, unwanted images of their mothers bring me to tears.
Ghosts of the dead cry out from both sides of the Dardanelles.
Here, in the Hellespont as it was once called, a Greek armada of 1200 black ships came to destroy the town of Troy. Xerxes sent his army to ravage through Greece on a huge fleet of Persian war vessels over the straits from Hissarlik. Alexander launched his invasion of Persia across the Hellespont from west to east.
The Dardanelles have long been a strategic trade route. The Great War was about trade.
The English officer corps had grown up with the Iliad, their prestigious and exclusive schools steeped in the lore and language of Attica. General Sir Ian Hamilton addressed his troops before the bloody landing on Gallipoli ..
” ….already you form part of that great tradition of the Dardanelles, which began with Hector and Achilles.”
The glamourous myth of the noble Homeric Hero burst into full bloom to veil the landing at Gallipoli in clouds of childish sentimentality. Rupert Brooke wrote of the impending invasion of Turkey in colours from a glorious past
They say Achilles in the darkness stirred
And Priam and his fifty sons
Wake all amazed, and hear the guns
And shake for Troy again.
Brooke died from an untreated mosquito bite on 23 April, two days before the stupid, senseless invasion.
In just a few years after the Anzacs returned, their dreadful ordeal in the killing fields of Gallipoli had been transmutated into a brilliant legend of the valiant and courageous digger, a reincarnated Greek Hero.
Australian backblock heroes slain
with Hector and Achilles lie
I remember, we all remember, lest we forget.
Earlier posts
Canakkale, at the Heart of History
Anzac Day
Ned Kelly
Further reading
Poets of World War I: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide
Rupert Brooke & Wilfred Owen: Selected Poems
More Information
General Sir Ian Hamilton
All my life I’ve heard comments from other states about the unpredictable ‘Melbourne Weather’. Snide comments, and often uttered in complaining tones.
I have a friend who spends at least an hour each day “clicking” for charity. She says it feeds some children, somewhere. Apparently, if you click on a button some percentage of a cent will be forwarded to something, some group, some organisation (some church?) which feeds children.
