Anzac Day 2552/2009

[Kan Win]

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place: and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

The following is an explanatory excerpt from the Australian War Memorial's website:

The Flanders poppy has been a part of Armistice or Remembrance Day ritual since the early 1920s and is also increasingly being used as part of ANZAC Day observances. During the First World War, the red poppies were seen to be among the first living plants that sprouted from the devastation of the battlefields of northern France and Belgium. Soldiers' folklore had it that the poppies were vivid red from having been nurtured in ground drenched with the blood of their comrades. The sight of the poppies on the battlefield at Ypres in 1915 moved Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae to write the poem In Flanders Fields. Flanders poppies also featured prominently in several other literary responses to the carnage of the Western Front. In English literature of the nineteenth century poppies had symbolised sleep or a state of oblivion; this symbolism was carried into the literature of the First World War, but a new, more powerful symbolism was now attached to the poppy - that of the sacrifice of shed blood.

An American, Moina Michael, read McCrae's poem and was so moved by it that she wrote a reply and decided to wear a red poppy as a way of keeping faith, as McCrae urged in his poem. Michael worked for the American YMCA and at a meeting of YMCA secretaries from other countries, held in November 1918, she discussed the poem and her poppies. Madame Guerin, the French YMCA secretary, was similarly inspired and she approached organisations throughout the allied nations to sell poppies to raise money for widows, orphans and needy veterans and their families.

The poppy soon became widely accepted throughout the allied nations as the flower of remembrance to be worn on Armistice Day. The Australian Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League (the forerunner to the RSL) first sold poppies for Armistice Day 1921. For this drive, the league imported one million silk poppies, made in French orphanages. Each poppy was sold for a shilling: five pence was donated to a charity for French children, six pence went to the league's own welfare work and one penny went to the league's national coffers. Today, the RSL sells poppies for Remembrance Day to raise funds for welfare work, although they have long since ceased to import them from France.

Lest We Forget

Passed by the Donrak Cemetary on the main road in Kanchanburi today and the Army lads have put up two tents up for this year's ANZAC Day.

Yours turly

Kan Win

Lest We Forget

[Kan Win]

from The Age

Fight free of Anzac, lest we forget other stories

Marilyn Lake

April 23, 2009

I have been pondering the Anzac myth. Clearly it continues to exert power. It taunts and troubles us. It looms larger than ever in Australian historical memory — with the generous help of the Australian War Memorial and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But this business of memory-making demands analysis from historians, not cosy collaboration. A schoolboy selected to join the Government's annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli said he wanted to see the place where Australian history really happened. Really? To see the sites of Australian history you have to go to Turkey? Popular memory and scholarly history are clearly at odds here.

The observation that Gallipoli was a military disaster is beside the point. Anzac serves as Australia's creation story: in proving their manhood, Australian men proved our nationhood — a nation was born on that day of death. So the legend ran. And it ran like wildfire among anxious colonials seeking British approval. As the British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett reported: "These raw colonial troops … proved worthy to fight side by side with the heroes of Mons, the Aisne, Ypres and Neuve Chapelle."

The myth will remain our creation story until the nation is reborn, until we have the courage to detach ourselves from the mother country, declare our independence, inaugurate a republic, draw up a constitution that recognises the first wars of dispossession fought against indigenous peoples. Thus we can truly make history in Australia.

The Anzac myth has become more significant in recent years, having been mightily subsidised by the Howard government. War stories have figured ever more prominently in our culture, our schools, on our TV screens, in our bookshops — but they do not usually tell of the "perpetual state of warfare", as one colonist described it, entailed in the colonisation of Australia.

Rather, modern Australian history has been defined by the exploits of the expeditionary forces sent to engage in military operations overseas, which began with the Boer War in South Africa.

Before 1996, there was no historical commemorations program. Rather, there was a war graves program to "commemorate, individually, the sacrifice of those Australian men and women who gave their lives during, or as a result of, their service to Australia and the Commonwealth in war, or who were prisoners of war, and to maintain these commemorations".

Since 1996, the Department of Veterans Affairs has spent millions on inculcating history lessons to "ensure that Australia's wartime heritage is preserved and the community better appreciates the significance of wartime experiences to our development as a nation".

When participation in foreign wars becomes the basis of national identity, it requires the forgetting or marginalising of other narratives, experiences and values. The Anzac myth requires us to forget gender and racial exclusions, the long history of pacifism and anti-war movements, the democratic social experiments and visions of social justice that once defined Australia; to forget that at Gallipoli we fought for "empire" not the nation, symbolising our continuing colonial condition.

Anzac was a celebration of race and manhood. The Australians, proclaimed the Argus newspaper, "have in one moment stepped into the world-wide arena in the full stature of great manhood". Aboriginal men were legally barred from enlistment — many enlisted anyway and were denied repatriation benefits. Later attempts to include women in the Anzac legend — as nurses, servicewomen, Land Army girls, as grieving mothers and widows — should not prevent recognition that the myth seeks to locate our national identity in the masculine domain of military warfare.

The myth ignores the fact that participation in foreign wars has always generated opposition, and that many wars have been deeply unpopular. The Anzac tradition has been paralleled by an anti-war tradition, often marked as feminine, that embraces, among others, suffragists such as Rose Scott, the Women's Peace Army of World War 1 and Save Our Sons during Vietnam.

If the power of Anzac derives from its status as our creation myth, what about Federation? Clearly, if the nation was born at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, then Federation didn't do the job. The Anzac myth highlights its limits as a nation-building exercise in real and symbolic terms.

Unlike the American colonies — whose example of independence was implanted in historical memory and always before the constitution makers of the 1890s — the Australian federal fathers failed to achieve the heroic goal of manly independence. Absences can be illuminating. Australia has no equivalents of the American monuments to political liberty: the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial.

What this nation does have is war memorials. Our landscape has been transformed by war memorials, small and large, local and national, statues of diggers in the hundreds, obelisks, cairns and cenotaphs. The cult of Anzac has been naturalised in Australia, but, to a newcomer, the monumental honouring of war dead might look excessive.

What other creation stories are available to Australians? We also have a vision of democratic equality and social justice enacted by the Commonwealth and endlessly articulated by liberals, socialists, feminists, labour leaders and trade unionists in the decades before Gallipoli.

Before World War 1, Australia had an international reputation as an egalitarian democracy and progressive social laboratory, a place that legislated to secure the equal rights of women and men, state pensions for the aged and for invalids, the rights of mothers, the recognition and remuneration of citizen soldiers and citizen mothers, all paid from general revenue. Australia enshrined the idea that workers should enjoy better conditions and be paid a decent living wage. As an advanced social democracy, this country led the world.

As one contemporary said, we had "infinite potentialities".

In the next few years, as we prepare to inaugurate a republic, we have a rare opportunity to focus on that potential as we give birth to a nation committed to the values forged over many decades of activism in civil and political society, of democratic equality and social justice, joined by a desire for reconciliation and restitution. Our first independence day will honour Anzac as one of the many experiences that shaped the nation. But while honouring the past, we will know too that the time has come to transcend it.

Marilyn Lake is professor of history at La Trobe University. This is the edited text of a lecture given last night as part of a free public series held at Melbourne University's School of Historical Studies.

****

Yours truly,

Kan Win

[mackayae]

I will pay homage to the fallen on Anzac Day. It is the least we can do.

Lest we forget.

[Roadman]

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

[Jai Dee]

Lest we forget.

[kiakaha]

And one for the Maori Battalions :

(kia kaha starts singing)

Te Ope Māori Hīkoi kia toa

Te Ope Māori kia kaha ra

Te Ope Māori hikoi kia kororia ai

Mauria te hōnore o te iwi.

Ka hīkoi mātou ki te hoariri

Whawhaitia tae noa ki te mutunga

Mō te Atua! Mo te kingi! Me te whenua!

AU-E!, ake ake kia kaha e!

(kia kaha ends singing)

[PhilHarries]

With the greatest respect from this pom.........

............WE will never forget.

[MiG16]

Lest we forget

their bravery is celebrated and remembered.

[tim armstrong]

Lest we forget

their bravery is celebrated and remembered.

Yes indeed. I've never liked the glorification of war either, but whatever the politics, war is a terrible waste of humanity. Those who serve and die for whatever reasons deserve to be remembered with respect and dignity. Lest we forget.

[mrtoad]

Their bravery and suffering that they endured, for the many should never be forgotten.

[Roadman]

Bump....

[Lickey]

I saw on BBC world news tonight that again the Gurkhas have been refused settlment visas for there families in the UK, the Gurkhas have fought alongside the british and common wealth armies for 200 years, the pics of them old boys in their wheelchairs with rows of medals on their uniforms brought a few tears to my eyes,

God bless all who died for their country, wherever they were from, you wont be forgotten,,

[noahvail]

And one for the Maori Battalions :

(kia kaha starts singing)

Te Ope Māori Hīkoi kia toa

Te Ope Māori kia kaha ra

Te Ope Māori hikoi kia kororia ai

Mauria te hōnore o te iwi.

Ka hīkoi mātou ki te hoariri

Whawhaitia tae noa ki te mutunga

Mō te Atua! Mo te kingi! Me te whenua!

AU-E!, ake ake kia kaha e!

(kia kaha ends singing)

Thank you. Seems some have either forgotten, or didn't know, that the NZ in ANZAC stands for New Zealand.

Lest we forget...

[fezman]

long live the digger

[Nibor1945]

It's my duty and an honour to remember them, for the ultimate sacrifice they made for us.

[MiG16]

certainly not forgotten noahvail

but interesting point

i was watching the dawn service in France on TV. secretary of state for France spoke only of Australia's and France's ties, and how grateful France is to Australia and Australians. no mention of the kiwis?

wonder if thats purely because the cemetery there is an Aussie one?

but even then would have been worth mentioning the Kiwis too for sure.

in galliapoli though..both aussies and kiwis were mentioned and remembered.

lest we forget