I wrote this note in 1998 about Anzac Day, the Day Australia and New Zealand commemorate their war dead. We have just marked the eightieth anniversary of Armistice Day (11th November 1918). Last night I talked with Teresa about poetry. I need to write poetry about this, my own need to dry the tears perhaps. But I cannot.

I have an issue with Anzac day; it is really deep in me and I have never managed to clarify it through counselling or conversation. I was a child in the fifties (born in 1948) and Anzac Day was a solemn religious occasion.

The Dawn Service at the War Memorial was a very special event. At High School I was drawn deeply to the poetry of the first World War, I did a special lesson on Gallipoli learning as much as I could about it. I was proud when my brother was in the catafalque party with the school cadets; yearning to be able to do the reverse arms myself. (but of course I was a girl) (In later years the man I married was in the Navy and had also been in the catafalque party.) So I grieved and fed my grief with the ceremony and the poetry.

Then boys of my own age were being called up to Vietnam. I remember walking across the hockey field after school one day and realizing that as a christian I should also be a pacifist. (yes I know there are arguments about this, but that was (and is) my position. Have the events of 1999 and East Timor changed this? Probably) But then I became a demonstrator. A very quiet and solemn demonstrator. (I didn't know Fred at the time; he was busy doing two tours of duty "on the line" in the Navy. I married him much later.)

And I stopped going to Anzac Day ceremonies. I remembered the ceremonies of the fifties and the solemn glory that surrounded them and I rejected them. (and I still fill with emotion as I write this).

In later years my family started to uncover the unsaid history of the family. The three boys who walked a thousand miles from Queensland to get back home to join up. One was killed in Gallipoli, I may even have seen his grave when I visited there, but that was before I knew. One died of illness just a few days after they all got off the peninsular. The eldest was left to go to France and disappear in the mud of Flanders. They were my grandfather's young Uncles. (He had died before I was born, there were no stories from him)

Last year I talked with his cousin.
They were her uncles too.

Uncles she had never known. But it was her mother who had borne the grief, who had fled to China as a missionary nurse to try to escape that grief. And suddenly the weight of this story as I heard it was very personal and real. These were untold stories in my family, but the weight was probably all the more because of the secrecy. (not so much secrecy; just unspoken.)

But to get away from my own story.
One Anzac Day I was giving communion in the Nursing Home. Old Poppy Th. was angry, bitterly angry! So angry that the nurses moved him out of the lounge while we had the service. The TV was on televising the march in Sydney. He had bayoneted a man in the trenches of Gallipoli and was angry that they still marched to commemorate it. Just like the Eric Bogle song: "And the Band played Waltzing Matilda."

A new note. October 5th 2006.
Inga Clenndining has written this month's "Quarterly Essay". Her experience of Anzac Day mirrors my own, but about ten years earlier. She did not have the Vietnam War to react against. Her analysis of Anzac Day is much gentler than mine.