Great Anzac Stories

by Graham Seal

  Yes, and the Australians play baseball too. We think we have a monopoly on the game, but the first American units found out differently after being walloped by Australian teams. Before the Americans arrived not many Australians turned out to watch a baseball game—it was primarily a way for cricketers to keep in shape during the off-season. Now crowds of 10,000 turn out to see Australian and American service teams play—and they’re getting into the sport of our national game by yelling ‘Slay the bloke’ when the umpire pulls a boner.

  If you’re good at sports you’ll probably be more popular in Australia than by being good at anything else. One of the National heroes is Don Bradman, a stockbroker from Adelaide, who was the nation’s greatest cricket player—he rates more lines in the Australian Who’s Who than the Prime Minister.

  A good many Australian sports champions are familiar names on American sports pages. Bob Fitzimmons, who won the heavyweight title from Jim Corbett, was Australian-born. And American tennis fans have seen the great Australian teams in action—with men like Jack Crawford, Vivian McGrath, Adrian Quist and John Bromwich, who took the Davis Cup from us in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war. The Aussies also won the cup from us just before the last war, in 1914.

  And in golf, there is the famous trick shot expert, Joe Kirkwood, who is a familiar figure in American professional tournaments.

  Probably more people in Australia play some sport or other than do in America. There are a lot of good tennis courts and golf courses, in some cases provided by the municipal authorities, which are inexpensive to play on.

  But above all the Australians are the No. 1 racing fans in the world. Most cities and towns of any size have race tracks and some like Perth have trotting tracks which used to be lighted up for night racing before the ‘brown out’ (the Australian version of the black out). The big event of the year is the running of the Melbourne Cup, established in 1861, 14 years before our Kentucky Derby. It’s a legal holiday in Melbourne the day the race is run. There’s one main difference between Australian racing and ours. Their horses run clockwise.

  THE GAMBLING FEVER. As one newspaper correspondent says, the Americans and Australians are ‘two of the gamblingest people on the face of the earth’. It’s been said of the Australians that if a couple of them in a bar haven’t anything else to bet on, they’ll lay odds on which two flies will rise first from the bar, or which raindrop will get to the bottom of the window first. If an American happened to be there, he’d probably be making book.

  The favorite, but illegal, game among the Diggers is ‘Two-Up’ which is a very simple version of an old American pastime, matching coins—that is, it’s the favorite game after the one of putting a buck or two on a horse’s nose. The Australians wouldn’t approve of the Chinese who said he didn’t want to bet on a horse race, because he already knew one horse could run faster than another.

  Finally, the digger was described:

  YOUR OPPOSITE NUMBER, THE AUSSIE. You’ll have a good deal to do with the Australian people, probably, but you’ll sleep, eat, and fight alongside of your opposite number, the Aussie.

  American newspapers and magazines have been full of stories about the Aussies—in Greece, in Crete, in Libya, at Singapore, and in the Burma jungles. All Americans who’ve had anything to do with them say they’re among the friendliest guys in the world—and fine physical specimens of fighting men.

  So far in this war the Australians have been in all the hot spots—wherever the going has been tough. And they have the reputation for staying in there and pitching with anything they can get their hands on—and if there isn’t anything else they use their hands. During the early days of the threatened Jap invasion of their continent, Australian pilots fought off armored Jap bombers with the only planes they had—often just trainers.

  The Aussies don’t fight out of a textbook. They’re resourceful, inventive soldiers, with plenty of initiative. Americans and British have the idea that they are an undisciplined bunch—they aren’t much on saluting or parading and they often do call their C.O. by his first name—but when the fighting begins, there isn’t any lack of discipline or leadership, either.

  Officers most often come up from the ranks, and they are a young group. The average age of Australian generals today is less than 50 years—about the same as our own. The greatest Australian general in the last war was a civil engineer by trade, and one of Wavell’s best desert generals was Sir Iven Mackay who was a school teacher and who put soldiering under ‘recreation’ in his biography in the Australian Who’s Who.

  The story is typical of the attitude the Anzac has toward the business of fighting. During some tough going on the El Alamein sector in Egypt, recently, a group of Australians volunteered to knock out a dangerous machine gun nest, manned by members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. As they were dashing in, one Aussie yelled to another: ‘Cripes, Bill, I tell you if the (censored) food in this outfit doesn’t get any better, I’m bloody well going to quit.’

  Australians are immensely proud of the record their men made in the last war—any country would be proud of it. You’ll see memorials to the dead of World War 1 all through Australia and they’re honored greatly by all the people.

  The Brisbane Line

  Was there a ‘Brisbane Line’ or not? Controversy about the existence of a line that would be defended to the death in the event of a Japanese invasion has persisted since World War II. Even the reality of the Japanese threat to Australia has been questioned by some historians. But whether the Japanese really did intend to conquer and occupy the Australian mainland or not, there was a strong belief in 1942 that this was likely. ‘He’s coming south’ screamed official posters and advertisements of the period, and Prime Minister John Curtin’s government (which had been elected in 1941) was so alarmed by the fall of Singapore and its implications that Curtin made his famous speech in which Australia turned away from Britain as its primary ally and looked towards the United States.

  What was the ‘Brisbane Line’—if there was one at all? It was an imaginary line drawn from Brisbane to Perth that represented the final line of defence against any Japanese invasion. Everything north of this line would be sacrificed to the invaders. These were dramatic days for Australia. In February 1942 Singapore had fallen to the Japanese who were rapidly advancing southwards. Darwin and many other northern cities were bombed, including Broome, Wyndham and Townsville. The Americans were forced to flee the Philippines and establish a Pacific base in Australia.

  After an Australian press briefing from the American General Douglas MacArthur in mid-March, 1943, the Brisbane Line was reported in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper, causing considerable public consternation. The issue was, of course, highly political and Curtin was forced to establish a Royal Commission to determine the truth or otherwise of claims that the conservative Menzies government had concocted the Brisbane Line policy when it was in power from 1939 to 1941. This accusation was strongly denied and the Royal Commission could find no evidence of it existing.

  Having coined the term ‘Brisbane Line’ and set the controversy in motion, MacArthur subsequently distanced himself from the idea. But in his reminiscences he claimed that, at one point, the Australian military authorities did have a plan to defend the country along a line stretching southwards from Brisbane to Adelaide, consigning the country’s western third to the possibility of foreign occupation along with the entire Top End. Whatever the truth of the Brisbane Line policy, it was eventually determined that the best way to defend Australia from the Japanese was to oppose them before they arrived, a decision that led to the fighting in New Guinea and the creation of a new Anzac icon, the Kokoda Track.

  Controversy about the Brisbane Line is still never far away in contemporary Australia. There are strong opinions held by proponents and opponents of its existence. Some point to the remains of tank traps and other defences in the Tenterfield area of New South Wales and elsewhere as tangible evidence of the plan. Others point out that such forti
fications are, of themselves, insufficient evidence. The Brisbane Line has become entwined with the larger issue of a potential Japanese invasion with stories about special ‘invasion currency’ being printed by the Japanese and maps in Japanese featuring southward-pointing arrows. These are in fact spoofs, and while the ‘invasion money’ existed, it was for use in Britain’s Pacific territories, not in Australia.

  One way to understand the Brisbane Line controversy is to see it as a projection of justifiable wartime anxieties reflecting some traditional regional rivalries and cleavages. The north of Australia, or the ‘Top End’, has always had a strong sense of its own identity and an occasionally well-founded distrust of politicians and almost everything else in the ‘soft south’. Similarly, the possibility of the Brisbane Line extending only to Adelaide reflects the traditional psychological and cultural distance between the east and west of the country, only magnified by the dividing immensity of the Nullarbor Plain. Like modern ‘urban myths’, such beliefs trade on often unspoken social fears and hidden conflicts and, true or not, are often found believable by large numbers of people.

  Miss Luckman’s journal

  Just before and during World War II, Miss Grace Luckman kept a journal. It was only a cheap notebook that opened out to a bit less than an A4 page, its pages ruled for keeping basic accounts. In the notebook, Grace, a country girl, jotted down her thoughts and feelings and pasted in many clippings taken from the newspapers of the time. Most of these clippings are poems, some of her own homilies, ‘Thoughts for the Week’, and other uplifting creations, together with items on romantic love, including ‘My heart pants for you’ in pictogram form.

  The family was fully involved in the war. Private E. Luckman was in camp with the 11th Battalion, and Signaller H. Luckman was in the Signal School Base with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Middle East. Grace also recorded the birthdays of friends and family, including ‘Ernie’ who had turned eighteen the year before the war began. His address at C Coy, 2/2 Infantry Battalion, is carefully pencilled into the last page. Many other entries relate directly to the war and how it appeared to those at home.

  Scribbled on one page of the notebook are two homespun verses concerning the devastating loss of HMAS Sydney in November 1941 and the fundraising undertaken by the community for the families of the lost sailors.

  Here’s to the Sydney brave and true,

  Here’s to the men who manned her too.

  Ever in our thoughts they’ll be,

  This gallant ship and her company.

  Day by day they sailed the sea

  To keep beloved Australia free.

  So listen to the Lord Mayor’s pleas,

  Enclose a stamp for the new Sydney.

  ‘In Praise of Tanks’ celebrated the victories of tanks in New Guinea and the Middle East.

  Cast not in beauty’s mould your feature,

  Born of man’s inhuman brain;

  Yet we have learned your worth—you monstrous

  Product of a world insane . . .

  The poem went on to praise the tanks for the defeats of Rommel and the Japanese.

  Some items manage to combine both Miss Luckman’s romantic interests and the war, as in this poem about the ‘lovelorn blokes at Darwin’ who are ‘a sitting shot for me’.

  Put me somewhere near to Darwin

  Where there’s romance in the air,

  Where a score of eager suitors

  Answer every maiden’s prayer.

  For the wedding bells are calling,

  And there’s still a chance for me,

  On a balmy night in Darwin

  Where the moon is on the sea . . .

  One of the many newspaper clippings carefully pasted into the notebook also concerned Darwin and the visiting Americans.

  Life in the lonely desert country around Darwin was summed up by an American soldier on leave at Melbourne.

  ‘It’s this way, buddy. When you’re there a few weeks you find yourself talking to yourself. After that you find yourself talking to the lizards. After another couple of weeks you find the lizards talking to you. Then you find yourself listening.’

  Other entries reflect nostalgia for ‘old England’ and the need for Australia to answer the call and act in her protection, sentiments that also featured in World War I. Like many Australians, Miss Luckman had family in Britain. She kept her journal after the war and in a brief note about it written forty years later, she still signed herself ‘Miss Grace Luckman’.

  Laughter

  THE OLD SAYING that ‘an army marches on its stomach’ is a truism that could easily be matched by ‘an army survives on its laughter’. Military life is often difficult and dangerous and one way of coping with it is to laugh, especially about things that are not very funny at all. Anzac humour reflects the famous larrikinism and anti-authoritarianism of the digger, whether at Gallipoli, the western front, Tobruk, Kokoda or Vietnam.

  Lovingly told and retold, the peppery yarns of the digger never failed to raise a laugh at the front, in the pub or at reunions after the war. While some may have lost a little of their original bite as the years have passed, these brief snippets of humour are powerful expressions of Anzac attitudes, then and now.

  A million cat-calls

  In the 1914–18 war, the Anzacs were notorious among British troops for indiscipline and a casual attitude towards the military in general. They tended to address officers by their first names and, of course, rarely saluted. This was beyond the understanding of the disciplinarian British army and led to many confrontations, sometimes serious, sometimes amusing. One such incident occurred in northern France at a place called Strazeele. The Australians were camped across the road from the 10th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, as recounted by Fusilier Private C. Miles.

  The Colonel decided that he would have a full dress parade of the guard mounting. Well, the Aussies looked over at us amazed. The band was playing, we were all smartened up, spit and polish, on parade, and that happened every morning. We marched up and down, up and down.

  The Aussies couldn’t get over it, and when we were off duty we naturally used to talk to them, go over and have a smoke with them, or meet them when we were hanging about the road or having a stroll. They kept asking us: ‘Do you like this sort of thing? All these parades, do you want to do it?’ Of course we said, ‘No, of course we don’t. We’re supposed to be on rest, and all the time we’ve got goes to posh up and turn out on parade.’ So they looked at us a bit strangely and said, ‘OK, cobbers, we’ll soon alter that for you.’

  The Australians didn’t approve of it because they never polished or did anything. They had a band, but their brass instruments were all filthy. Still, they knew how to play them.

  The next evening, our Sergeant-Major was taking the parade. Sergeant-Major Rowbotham, a nice man, but a stickler for discipline. He was just getting ready to bawl us all out when the Australians started with their band. They marched up and down the road outside the field, playing any old thing. There was no tune you could recognise, they were just blowing as loud as they could on their instruments. It sounded like a million cat-calls.

  And poor old Sergeant Rowbotham, he couldn’t make his voice heard. It was an absolute fiasco. They never tried to mount another parade, because they could see the Aussies watching us from across the road, just ready to step in and sabotage the whole thing. So they decided that parades for mounting the guards should be washed out, and after that they just posted the guards in the ordinary way as if we were in the line.

  The Pommies and the Yanks

  Rivalry between Australians and the British and Americans was often played for laughs.

  Two Aussies on leave from France were occupying a first-class non-smoking compartment of an English train, when an irascible old bloke blew in. The old killjoy got nasty because one of the Aussies was smoking, and without any preliminary diplomatic negotiations handed the cigar-puffer an ultimatum that he would have him removed from the compartment if he
didn’t stop smoking. This annoyed the Aussie, and he counter-attacked behind a strong smoke barrage. At the next station Mr. Killjoy called a porter and read out the Aussie’s crime sheet:

  ‘This man is smoking in a non-smoking compartment.’ He demanded that the Aussie should be removed. The porter told the Aussie that he would either have to stop smoking or stop travelling in a non-smoker.

  ‘Well, I plead guilty to smoking in a non-smoker,’ said the Aussie ‘but this old nark has no kick coming against me. He’s travelling first on a second-class ticket!’

  The porter demanded old Killjoy’s ticket and found that the Aussie’s statement was correct. Exit old Killjoy.

  ‘How did you know he was travelling wrong class?’ asked the second Aussie, later.

  ‘Oh, I saw the ticket sticking out of his vest pocket,’ replied the other, between puffs, ‘and it was the same colour as my own.’

  Sometimes these yarns involved the ability to understand, or not, the ‘great Australian slanguage’.

  THE YANK: ‘Say, Guy, how far to battle?’

  AUSSIE: ‘Well sonny, I guess it’s about five kilos. Just “pencil and chalk” straight along this “frog and toad” till you come to the “romp and ramp” on the “Johnny Horner”. Then dive across that “bog orange” field till you run into a barrage. That lobs you right there. D’ye compree?’

  Being able to speak the right lingo could mean the difference between life and death, as highlighted in an Australian yarn.

  The weary pongo [soldier of low rank] was wending his way frigidly along the duckboards when he encountered a sentry.

  ‘Halt!—password?’ The weary one carefully searched his thought-box, but couldn’t recall the required word. He remembered, however, that it was the name of a place in Australia, so he began to run through all the places he knew, in the hope of striking it: ‘Bondi, Woolloomooloo, Budgaree, Wangaratta, Cootamundra, Murrumbidgee, Wagga Wagga, We—.’