A First Place

by David Malouf

  The play makes a clear distinction between the real Diggers, who have nothing to say because their experience is beyond words, and those who were never there but are full of the legend and its windy rhetoric. It is very much aware, as people were in those days, of how the men who came back were betrayed by broken promises, and that the Great Depression, which in the early fifties was still close in most families, had been more destructive to many of the returned men – because it was unheroic and humiliating – than the war itself.

  The One Day of the Year is very much a play of its time. Full of the cautious questioning of the late fifties, the hostility to suburban values that goes into the early work of Barry Humphries, the breaking up at last of that comfortable, self-protective, timid and sleepy world that some nostalgics among us look back on as the true Australia – a time of mythical wholeness that was already, in fact, under pressure of change.

  The One Day of the Year is very accurate in its feeling – its mixed feelings, I’d put it – about family, about fathers, about maleness of the stereotypical Australian kind, and about the pieties of Anzac. But looking at it again, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for its rather priggish hero.

  Hughie is a bit too full of his own moral superiority, too personally aggrieved; not at all sensitive to shades – as we tended to be back then, and as the young often are. He misses an important point, as Seymour himself does I think, and as I might have missed it too, in 1959. It is that the disjunction he makes so much of between the ceremonial dignity of the first part of the day, the Last Post, the Dawn Service, the words of solemn remembrance, and the disreputable orgy, as he sees it, that follows – the grogging on, the brawling drunkenness and rowdyism – may not be a disjunction at all, but two sides of the soldier’s world that are linked, and even necessary to one another: the position of attention – battle and all that goes with it of psychological tautness, of fear that has to be mastered, and the possibility of instant extinction – and the relaxation from that into the bacchanalian celebration of restored life. A classic pairing, we might think, and very human.

  Perhaps what we need, if we are to comprehend that, is a more complex and contradictory view than poor Hughie can come up with – one we were not ready for in the fifties, though it is worth pointing out that the Diggers themselves had already grasped it. Intuitively, and with no need for a classical justification, as a response to brutal experience.

  The 1950s is itself a period now that belongs to history, as 1915 did then. To be considered from this side and that, and interpreted and argued over. For a younger generation, the original experience of ‘the Day’ no longer involves their fathers and uncles, or even their grandfathers or any living persons they know and might resent or be in rivalry with. It is neutral ground.

  It belongs now to a period – the early part of the last century – that is just beginning to pass out of first-hand human experience, and develop the glow of a reality softened, relieved of the rich contradictions through which personal witness challenges and contradicts received views. It has about it now an aura of mystery that we cannot penetrate and which, precisely for that reason, has a strong pull on our feelings.

  Hence the cult – and I use the word with no suggestion at all of slight or condescension – of our remaining First World War veterans, old men now, most of them well over a hundred, who are I suspect rather bemused, in these last years of a life of ordinary works and days that till now went unnoticed, to find themselves the subject of national interest and large and general affection. For some of them, there is embarrassment too in that their actual deeds in the war were undistinguished. They feel, some of them, that the aura they have acquired belongs to other and braver men. Their achievement is survival itself.

  And in fact that is the source of our awed affection for them. That they survived the battles, but also the more ordinary dangers of war – flu and fevers and all the other accidents that young men are prone to. That they survived the years after the war; the bitterness of betrayal that so many returned men felt, the soldier’s Resettlement schemes that went bung, the long years of the Depression. Australians generally have begun to have a clearer sense now of how hard the first part of the twentieth century was for their parents and grandparents. The tribute we pay to these few survivors is in some ways a tribute to all those men and women who lived through that rough patch in our history – a way, I mean, of recognising history itself as lived and accumulated experience; of recognising that we have a history, and that it is of this lived and personal kind; that the time behind us as Australians is not short but begins to be long, and that our roots in it are deep, not shallow.

  That the lives of these old fellows we see on television, and whose names we now know, go back more than a century, touches us – and it may add to the power they project that they are not especially heroic and do not represent themselves that way. Do not posture or make use of any of the rhetorical clichés, but are modest survivors of the ordinary circumstances and perils of living. Very young people, I suspect, who find themselves living in a dangerous and chaotic world and with their own lives fearfully before them, feel a special affection for these old fellows who have indestructibly battled through – and even a small sense of reassurance.

  There is also what these old men once touched back there, when, as young men – just seventeen some of them – they responded to the call to dangerous service (adventure is how many of them thought of it) and discovered horror and sacrifice.

  The tragedy of doomed youth continues to hover around the First World War as it never has around the Second. In these days when we know so much, and are so visually sensitive to what we know, there is a kind of horrified fascination with the wholesale slaughter of the First World War battlefields, and how some men endured it, and came back, when they did, to ordinary lives.

  Futility and the waste of youthful sacrifice, human folly on a scale almost unimaginable in these days of precision weapons, distant engagement, small losses – this is how we now see the First World War. But we also see aspects of it that we were unaware of fifty years ago, or unable to look at. Women, for example, as victims of war. Rape as an element of war – a fact that would have been seen, in 1950, if anyone had dared mention it, as an insult to fallen heroes and to the fathers and uncles among us who had come back. So too the reality, the ordinary human reality, of the enemy. Gallipoli is now a shared occasion between Australians and Turks. The dead seem inseparable, as on the spot their bones have always been.

  All this informs the way that Anzac Day, as an idea, has expanded and become more inclusive as it has passed out of the hands of its original custodians, the Diggers, the RSL, into general ownership, where we have remade it according to present understanding and present affiliations and needs.

  So what does Anzac Day mean now? What does it commemorate that so many Australians, and especially so many young Australians, feel that it is ours, that it is theirs? And how has what was once seen as a celebration of military virtues, even if it was in the context of a military defeat, managed to establish itself, and so strongly, in a period that is so passionately dedicated to the idea of peace?

  There is, first of all, the strong sense of the tragic – of the loss, the waste, of young lives: 62,000 in that First War, in a population of just on four million.

  A society that does not recognise and mark with awe the presence of death, that has no sense of the tragic, is a poor one. Dying is a solemn fact of life; it is something we all understand and must come to. There is for all of us a close and personal mystery in it that touches us darkly – even the young feel that. And the death of a young person, the brutal fact of a life cut short, brings the possibility poignantly home; and especially if the death happens in the chosen and public context of service.

  The idea of service is an important one to Australians. A good deal of what adds most to daily living in Australia comes from voluntary service – in bushfire brigades, surf-lifesaving clubs, in social and charitable or
ganisations like Rotary, the Lions, the Country Women’s Association, the RSL, and through what parents contribute, in the way of time and energy, to sports clubs and school tuckshops and fair days. All this is an acting out of neighbourliness, of what we share with those we live among; a bond that is stronger in the end, in everyday working Australia, than ethnic or denominational ties, and takes up much of the feeling that in other places goes out to extended family. Australia is a secular place. A dedication to voluntary service has become the good works of a secular religion among us. A dedication to neighbourliness is understood, if not quite proclaimed, as what holds the country together and makes us, loosely, one.

  Perhaps there was from the beginning something in the accidental nature of an accident-prone world in Australia that made this sort of mutual concern and obligation a condition of survival in the place. And of course the supreme form of service, because it includes the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice, is service in war. The solemn acceptance of dying in battle as the highest form of service – not chosen, but accepted if that is what it comes to – remains central to the idea of Anzac, and to the power we feel in the day.

  The fact is that Anzac Day has never been in any way triumphalist. The march is a civilian march, by men in suits, its keynote comradeliness, and a sorrowful awareness, as men walk in their platoons and battalions, of those who are missing. Increasingly, as part of its growing inclusiveness, it has become a family affair, with small children marching with a grandfather, or marching alone and carrying a grandfather’s photograph, or young men and young women marching in place of a relative who can no longer manage it, and wearing his medals. This reminds us that the losses were always losses to family as well as to the ranks, and as so many war memorials up and down the country remind us, to community. All this makes it easy for the community at large, and especially young people, to see the day as one for dealing in a very open and emotional way with loss, with communal wounds; it is a day for meditating on the waste of young lives, and of all – combatants and non-combatants – who die in war. For some, it is a way of meditating on the folly of war itself.

  The fact that Anzac Day is now in the hands of Australians at large, and their day to shape as they please, to make a focus of whatever feelings they need to express, privately or in common, means that what it is now is not what it is likely to be fifty or even twenty years from now. It has become a dynamic phenomenon, and in so far as it matters to us, in so far as we need what it can offer, will go on changing as we do.

  Perhaps, since I have done so much looking back, it might be best to pause there, at the edge of a future that will go its own way, and about which we can have nothing very useful to say.

  Already this year, there are no surviving Gallipoli veterans and just a handful of First World War Diggers. The numbers of Second World War survivors is thin. Quite soon, the largest numbers of marchers will be the descendants of the original Diggers, and it will be the photographs of long-dead soldiers and their medals paraded like tribal relics or fetishes that will endure to be the stuff of continuity.

  Official Anzac Day address

  in Washington, DC, 2003

  MADE IN ENGLAND

  AUSTRALIA’S BRITISH INHERITANCE

  A FINE CLEAR DAY IN early May. Outside, in the streets of Washington, sedate, uninsistent, half genuine neoclassical – the proper democratic style – half fake, there is no sense that we are at the centre of the world’s single great imperium; one, too, that is in the aftermath of a swift and seemingly successful war.

  For all its ‘magnificent distances’ and imposing monuments, Washington is unshowy, seems unpeopled, has none of the residual triumphalism of London: the clatter of the Horseguards each morning down Birdcage Walk, sword-hilts and breastplates flashing; the ceremonial changing of the Guards at the Palace to stirring march-tunes and an invocation of Lysander and Hercules. Washington, named for a revolutionary democrat, lacks altogether the colour and circumstance of empire. Freedom Plaza, off the Mall near the White House, is an austere space, all quotations carved in capitals, a reminder of how essential rhetoric is to the style of this country – and a particular rhetoric at that; one that insists, in a way that seems more European than English, on magnificent abstractions.

  The White House itself, almost within spitting distance across its impeccable lawn, is, compared with the Elysée Palace or the sort of extravaganzas preferred by the Saddam Husseins of this world, a very modest residence for the most powerful ruler of the day. And this is English. One thinks of Queen Victoria at the height of the British Empire referring to Buckingham House as ‘my little palace in Pimlico’.

  One also recalls, at this moment when the special relationship is at its closest, that in 1814 this same residence was burned to the ground by a British army of occupation.

  These observations on the play, in this New World, between British beginnings and their Transatlantic modifications, seem especially pertinent in an Australian context and at a time when the tripartite relationship between our three countries – General de Gaulle’s old fear of an Anglophone alliance – has assumed its most open and aggressive form under a new rubric, ‘the coalition of the willing’.

  With two fellow Australians, one a writer like myself, the other an art historian, I am four storeys below ground in the vaults of the Folger Library, one of the iconic monuments of our culture – I mean the culture that belongs to the language we speak and have our life in, English.

  A hundred metres away, soaring into the blue empyrean, is that symbol of worldly power and influence the gleaming white dome of the Capitol, its name suggesting republican or imperial Rome but its form a later reference, to Michelangelo’s St Peter’s. And here, in perfect balance with it, in the artificial air of a below-ground shelter, the world’s most complete collection of Shakespeariana: priceless quarto and folio editions from the days when the man himself was above ground and working, and later versions from every period and in every language: Pope and Dr Johnson and Malone’s editions of the Complete Works, prompt-copies once used by Garrick and Edmund Kean and the Kembles and Booths, and by Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the seventeen-year-old Mendelssohn’s piano-score of his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  The librarian who shows us through, and takes down from the shelves and handles some of the priceless books, and allows us to handle them, speaks of how, if there were some sort of biological or nuclear disaster, she would take refuge down here and survive along with the collection. For her this is the real centre of the city and what it stands for. The power of what is embodied here is what will survive should the surrounding empire, like so many before it, crumble and blow away.

  It is odd, uncanny, to be standing, eighteen hours’ flying time from where history has washed us up, in the light of this woman’s conviction and the real presence of these texts, which belong equally to all four of us because we belong to the language that produced them. Finally it is language we come home to, and nowhere seems more like home than here.

  Outside, because Britain, the United States and Australia all share it – not just the language itself but a particular habit of mind and all that goes with it – an affinity that has been hovering in the ether for more than a century, and has twice already become a power-field, has now broken surface in an actual alliance. Not so much a coalition of the ‘willing’ as, more exclusively, of those who have an insider’s understanding of one another because they inhabit the same language culture. Who, in their exchanges with one another, can take it for granted that a good deal of what is being left unsaid, or exists in shades and nuances under what is said, as half-heard echoes out of plays, poems, novels, or out of the obiter dicta of occasions great and small in a shared history – ‘once more unto the breach’, ‘Thy need is greater than mine’, ‘England expects’, ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’; phrases that contain whole worlds of experience and philosophy – will not go unrecognised, and may even be left to bear the burden of muc
h that is subtly intended.

  The close relationship with the United States that this embodies has for Australians been there from the start. Our relationship with Britain has always been one in which the third term, either open or unstated, is ‘America’. Any approach on our part to the one has always involved a shift in our dealings with the other, and our relationship with each has been modified over the years by their relations with one another.

  Of course we, like New Zealand and Canada, have always been minor rather than major players, as we are in the present alliance; but to be, on the basis of ‘family’, the member of a powerful club, even a junior member, offers incentives to ambition, and the opportunity to push them through, that you would not have, at the same weight and size, if you were not. The family link is the language we share. Though it is worth pointing out that a shared language is not necessarily the same language.

  All this, hovering in the air in those humming vaults on that peaceful afternoon in the midst of what was still an unfinished war, was the beginning of what I am writing here.

  The Rising Child

  The first fact of our being as Australians is that the colony was founded in 1788 not by the French or the Dutch, as was quite possible, or by the Spanish or Portuguese, as was at least conceivable, but by two small, damp, divided islands in the far northern corner of the globe – a mixture of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Norman French, plus all kinds of refugees and immigrants from other places – that just happened, by the end of the eighteenth century, to be the world’s major maritime power, and the richest, most politically stable and technologically advanced nation of the day. A large part of what we are follows from that, and how we have regarded the British at every point in our history has been determined by how we read that act of founding and how we value the society and culture of which we were, at least at the start, a translated re-creation.