What would my father make of Anzac Day 2022?

Palestine 1940. My father, aged 26.

My father never talked about the effect fighting in WW2 had on him. He told us a few anecdotal stories, the most memorable being his escape from Greece in a rowboat, but never how it affected him.

The war was, quite simply, a topic he wasn’t prepared to discuss with me in any depth. It wasn’t for my lack of trying. It was just a no-go area.

While researching WW2 and his involvement in it for my novel, Painting the Light, I came to appreciate just how extraordinary that was.

Here was a man who went away as a 26 year old, spent 3 years training and fighting in Palestine and Greece, returned to defend Australia against a perceived threat from Japan in PNG and was discharged in the middle of 1944.

That’s five years of service.

Five years of 24/7, unrelenting training and battle. They had Leave but it wasn’t a holiday. It might have been time spent letting off steam or, in my father’s case, visiting galleries and museums, but it was a brief respite from unimaginable circumstances.

Along with the rest of the 2nd First Field Regiment, he spent the first 12 months of the war training in Palestine, living in extremely challenging conditions in a region he formerly knew nothing about, preparing to do battle in literally life and death situations. They had already been trained in Australia but the British Officials, to whom they were beholden, deemed them unworthy for Action. This was while Hitler was sweeping through Europe and Britain under threat. The frustration of being miles from home on the other side of the world, cooling their heels, marching around the desert playing “war games” while the real war raged within striking distance was debilitating.

When they were finally ordered into Action it was against an ill prepared, disinterested Italian Army.

That easy victory at Bardia was in no way a portent of what was to come. Four years later and after experiencing tragedy and horror on an unimaginable scale, my father was still fighting but he was a very different person.

If I pause and reflect on how this must have affected him, I think about the relatively insignificant events that framed my mid twenties. Some of those re-surface in dreams and thoughts. Some aren’t very pleasant but they pale into insignificance when I think of what my father must have contended with for the forty years of his life after he was demobbed. He never talked about those nightmares or dark thoughts. To anyone. He bore them in silence.

My father didn’t march on Anzac Day. Like many who sacrificed their twenties and thirties to a greater cause, he didn’t want to be reminded of the horrors he endured.

In my childhood, Anzac Day was best characterised by Alan Seymour’s One Day of the Year. It was a sad day, a day when quite a few ex-servicemen drank themselves into oblivion and stumbled out of pubs and clubs clinging to mateships made, putting aside memories of loss, all the while never acknowledging (or having acknowledged) the mental trauma they had endured for decades.

I convinced my father to march on Anzac Day as he approached the end of his life. I naively thought marching might help to heal old wounds. Older and wiser, I now realise it did none of those things, but it did enable him to farewell some old colleagues. He told me he was glad he did it.

When I look at lines of young people queueing to play two-up and get “on it”, it doesn’t seem to me that they are honouring anything very much. They are getting ready to party. Big time.

They do so and stumble out of pubs around the country whooping it up, unlike those who stumbled out of pubs in the Anzac Days of Alan Seymour’s play.

I know my father and many of his contemporaries would be appalled to see their sacrifice “celebrated” in such a way.

They would be equally bemused to see the appropriation of Anzac Day in everything from footy games to political opportunism.

There was no fun in those wars. None at all.

That is what we should remember.