Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  I come from good old Woop Woop and me monicker’s Gus

  Headers

  An’ I joined the _)/4th Light … ’orse out at Broad … Meadows,

  I brings along me own old prad, and shoves the claim in ’ot,

  But the … vet ’e crools me pitch, an ’arf was all I got.

  I gathers in the … cash and gets off on the spree,

  And th’ CO ups and passes me a week’s C … B

  GORSTRUTH!!12

  Funny? No, not to us, now, even if we still used slang like ‘prad’ or ‘crools me pitch’. It’s black humour, only funny if you’ve suffered the same.

  Another trench paper, The Dinkum Oil, grew out of a shipboard magazine called Snipers’ Shots. Major Thomas Blamey, the 1st Division’s intelligence officer, was concerned about false rumours (known as ‘furphies’ after the brand on the army water carts that soldiers used to gather around to swap stories and rumours) in the trenches. He asked Bean early in June 1915 to ‘get out a “furfies [sic] gazette”, with these furfies so exaggerated as to laugh them out of court’. The result was The Dinkum Oil13, handwritten, hand-drawn and stencilled on one side of a foolscap sheet, and lasting for fifteen issues. It may or may not have stopped inaccurate rumours, but it was full of black humour. It included ads like, ‘To Let – Nice dugout on the skyline. Owner leaving for field hospital.’ Other newspapers would follow in France, while copies of still others may never have made it home from Gallipoli.

  * * *

  One of the most telling examples of the mix of gallows humour and larrikinism is the slang that grew up in the short Gallipoli campaign. They included:

  Anzac soup: a shell hole filled with water and bits of dead body.

  Anzac button: a nail to hold up your trousers.

  Auntie: a Turkish broomstick bomb, as in, ‘Look out! Auntie’s coming callin’!’

  Axle grease: butter, usually rancid.

  Banjo: a shovel. Playing or swinging the banjo meant digging a hole.

  Bellyache: a major body wound, usually fatal: ‘He got a bellyache and ended up in the stiffs’ paddock.’

  Body-snatcher: stretcher-bearer.

  Bumbrusher: any officer’s servant, from batman to those who served in the officers’ mess.

  Doing the Gallipoli gallop: diarrhoea

  Luna Park: Cairo Hospital, named after the fun park in Melbourne.

  Outed: dead, killed.

  Stiffs’ paddock: soldiers’ graveyard.

  To throw a seven: to be killed. When you play with two dice, seven is supposed to be the most frequent number called.14

  * * *

  Read any diary or collection of letters from those days and you’ll find more humour: mostly laconic statement of fact (though sometimes poetic), with no self-pity, a great deal of irreverence and extraordinary and matter-of-fact courage.

  The legendary lack of respect for officers is also likely to be accurate, a function of the land the men came from. Australia did, and still does (to a limited extent), have a class system, but nowhere near as integral a part of everyday life as in Britain, where a cap had to be doffed to those of a superior station, and marriage between two people of different classes was if not unthinkable then at best unlikely. Class mattered in 1915, but it mattered far less to the Australians. Nor had they had as much formal training as their English counterparts by May 1915, which included showing respect for an officer, even – or especially – when you didn’t feel it. While the wealthy in Australia expected respect, many were also uncomfortably aware their parents or grandparents had been convicts, squatters or members of the notorious New South Wales Rum Corps – or even all three – with a fortune based on good luck or shady dealing, not on illustrious ancestors. Even today Australians enjoy scything down tall poppies.

  The most common offence committed by Australian troops was the charge of impudence to an officer or refusal to salute. Nor did they have the spit and polish of British troops. On leave in London from the Somme in northern France, Brigadier ‘Pompey’ Elliott would be arrested by military police for impersonating an officer – they couldn’t conceive that any officer, much less a brigadier, would look so shabby. English troops polished their boots; Australians held mock horse races and bet on rats. Both mirrored life back home: the boot blacking of a servant in a large house or farm labourer on an estate, and the bush races held wherever you could get three horsemen, or women, together.

  Six-shilling tourists and the great adventure

  So if they cared so little for their English superiors, why were the Anzacs there? The obvious answer is ‘for their country’. But the nearest German territory to Australia was in New Guinea, and that was taken under control by the Australian forces before Gallipoli. The speeches of the time emphasise saving the motherland – England, not Australia. Even ‘true dinkum’ Australians spoke of England as ‘home’, even if neither they nor their grandparents had been born there, and they never expected to actually go there.

  Politicians’ speeches do not necessarily reflect the mood of those who enlisted, yet there is no doubt that Australia was electrified with patriotism, and the often-spoken desire to show the world what this new nation of Australia could do. But there was also adventure. In the first year war was even spoken of as the ‘Great Adventure’ until, perhaps, uncensored letters began to arrive home. European Australians were descended from adventurers – or criminals – who had crossed the world to get to the furthest habitable point from their own homes. The land itself was an adventure, its floods, droughts, fires, snow and lonely wildernesses.

  From Australia it was expensive and time-consuming to travel anywhere other than New Zealand, so this was probably the only chance most volunteers had to see the world. Australian was a land of born travellers, trapped on an island nation. In many case the vast distances meant that labouring men or farmers would never even get to the nearest large town, much less the capital city.

  Now they could – and they would be paid six shillings a day to do so. They even had a phrase for it in 1915: the six-shilling tourists.

  And then they faced the enemy.

  The verdict of hindsight

  The Gallipoli campaign failed. The British Royal Commissions reporting in 1917 and 1918 described the operations as ill-conceived and ineptly executed, with thousands of lives needlessly squandered.15

  Were the British authorities who had engineered it more incompetent than was usual for the time? Might the campaign have been won if the Turks had a leader less determined than Mustafa Kemal? Was calling Russia into the war with the promise of hunks of the Ottoman Empire victory enough?

  If the Gallipoli campaign had been successful it might have been seen as a triumph of strategy. And, yes, mistakes led to the death of thousands, but this was nothing unusual in the wars of that time: troops were known as cannon fodder. How much was true ineptitude and how much the accepted tactics of the time on both sides is still a matter of intense debate.

  Gallipoli still matters. The images of the soldiers at Gallipoli reflected the way Australians thought about themselves then: tough, determined, loyal. Just as you might talk of ‘the spirit of the bushman’ you’d also talk of ‘the spirit of Gallipoli’, and your listener would know what you meant: determination, self-sacrifice, larrikin humour and courage. The images of Gallipoli are used by politicians, filmmakers, songwriters and novelists (of whom I’m one).

  No, it’s not the whole truth. Nor is it ‘nothing but the truth’. Filmmakers and novelists have added much to the image that is now taken as history. But truth is there. Australia gave Gallipoli strong, fit men, used to working and fighting together under tough conditions, who did their best, and stuck it out. Gallipoli gave us back an enduring legend.

  * * *

  The battle of Lone Pine

  The battlefield of Lone Pine was called after the lone Turkish pine tree that stood there at the start of the fighting. The battle plan was only to divert the Turks away from the real aim being undertaken by
a separate unit: to capture the ridge of Sari Bair and Chunuk Bair, one of the higher points along that ridge.

  The Turkish position was so strong at Lone Pine that none of the Turks expected an attack there. It seemed an insane place to attack - there would be incredible loss of life. The commander of the Australian 1st Division, General Walker, tried to argue against it, but General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British commander, insisted that the attack go ahead.

  Walker did his best. There were ninety-one metres between the Allied trenches and the Turkish trenches, the latter about 200 metres wide. Walker ordered the men to dig tunnels till they were only about thirty-five metres from the Turkish positions. Then for three days the Turkish trenches were bombarded with rockets and gunfire to give cover to soldiers who ran through the smoke and confusion to cut much of the barbed wire between the trenches.

  Near dusk on 6 August the Australian 1st Infantry Brigade attacked, half of the men coming up through the underground tunnels and half forcing their way through the barbed wire. But the Turkish trenches had thick pine logs on top of them. Some of the logs were set alight, some bombed, some bayoneted into fragments.

  The Australians managed to take part of the Turkish line in the first couple of hours. But for six days after that there was a furious battle, mostly hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches or with grenades, as the Turks tried to take the few metres back. The Australians even used walls of dead bodies as barricades.

  Once the Allied commanders saw that Turkish territory had been taken instead of the fighting just being a diversion, reinforcements were sent to keep it. It was a victory - of sorts. About a hundred metres of land had been taken from the Turks, but only for a short while as Lone Pine, too, was deserted by the Allied evacuation. But the determination of the Anzac forces created a legend from disaster.

  That lone tree was the only remaining pine of a group that were cut down by the Turks, the timber and branches used to reinforce their trenches. After the battle a couple of Australian soldiers retrieved a few pine cones from the shattered branches and brought them back to Australia. Seedlings were grown from these cones and distributed to be planted as memorials. Lone Pine trees have been planted in parks, schools and people’s private gardens in Australia, New Zealand and at Gallipoli itself to commemorate those who died in the battle and the campaign in general.16

  * * *

  Our second Anzac legend: The Kokoda koalas who tried to save Australia

  In World War 2 Australia’s geography made us a target: a thinly populated land with the resources Japan desperately needed to win against the United States and control the Pacific region. Geography may also have saved us: the jungles and mountains of New Guinea to our north, making lines of supply and command almost impossible for the Japanese army.

  Australia’s landscape, and the social conditions it had created, certainly influenced the capabilities of its soldiers at Gallipoli. But was this still the case in World War 2, and in the iconic struggles that have become known as ‘Kokoda’?

  The taxi driver and the tree on the wall

  I met him on one of those choking Sydney days, when the exhaust fumes mingle with the smell of melted bitumen and it seems as though cars have taken over the world. As the taxi lurched to a stop at another red light, he said, ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Araluen,’ I said, and waited for the inevitable next question.

  Instead he said, ‘Yeah, I know Araluen.’

  I turned to look at him. He was small, one of those shrunk-monkey men, with a big chin and bigger nose.

  ‘I went there after the war,’ he said and I knew from his grey hair he meant World War 2. ‘I reckon that valley saved my life.’

  Then he told me his story.

  He enlisted in the militia on his eighteenth birthday in 1942. The militia was not supposed to serve outside this country, but the Japanese were heading down to Australia and New Guinea was designated ‘Australian territory’. It is often claimed that the average age of the militia boys was eighteen and a half, but many were older. They had been in reserved occupations or simply hadn’t enlisted before. The militia had little training, and were desperately badly equipped. But they stood between Australia and invasion: or that, at least, is what they believed.

  The enemy they faced, the Japanese army, had not had a major defeat since invading China in 1936. They had even brought down the seemingly impregnable British stronghold of Singapore and destroyed most of the United States Pacific navy in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. They were experienced jungle fighters, ruthless and disciplined, with expert tactics.

  ‘I knew I was going to die,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t just the bullets …’ The taxi swerved to avoid a semitrailer. ‘It was the suddenness,’ he continued. ‘The enemy came out of nowhere. All you saw was green leaves and then the bloke beside you died. It was the mud and the rain and heat. It was the smell, too; of things rotting, leaves and trees and flesh, so you knew it would be you next …’

  The world narrowed till that was all that was left: death and the fear of death and the smells of things decaying, and there seemed no room in the world for anything more. ‘I knew I was going to die,’ he repeated. ‘I knew it from the first week there.’

  He didn’t say, ‘I was fighting for my country.’ He didn’t say, ‘But you can’t let your mates down.’ He didn’t say, ‘If the Japs had conquered us they’d have made us slaves, as they did in other nations they had conquered.’ He didn’t say that his sister might have been a comfort woman, his mum working in a factory for a ration of rice.

  He just said, ‘We kept on going because we had to.’

  Finally he was wounded, as he knew he would be. He remembered nothing about it – not the shot, not even pain, just the rifle in his hand one minute and then the next there was white light, not green shadows, and someone whispering, ‘Sh, not so loud. There’s a boy dying in there.’

  He was in hospital. How many days had the Indigenous men they’d later call the fuzzy wuzzy angels carried him on a stretcher, unconscious, bleeding, to get to a small landing strip? How had one of those small planes that seemed to be made of cardboard and duct tape flown between the misty mountain crags into a small stretch of green and, somehow, miraculously, taken off again, and brought him and the other wounded down to Port Moresby?

  He said: ‘I thought, that’s me they’re talking about. I’m the one that’s dying. And then I thought, that means I’ll never go home again.

  ‘But, you know, it didn’t worry me. I thought, I’ll just open my eyes once and then I’ll go back to sleep again. So I opened them, and that’s when I saw it.’

  It was a painting on the wall beyond his bed, of a smooth green hill with a single tree, and smoky blue hills behind.

  ‘I thought, that’s home. All I have to do is live and I’ll get back there. Home hadn’t been real before that; it was like the jungle and the mud had killed it too. But now I knew that it was there, and I wanted to go home.’

  It took three weeks before he was able to ask a nurse where the scene in the painting was.

  She said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then she said, ‘I’ll have a look for you but.’ She turned the painting over and there was writing on the back. She said, ‘It says “Araluen Valley, New South Wales”.’

  ‘That was the first thing I did when the war ended – well, one of the first things, any road. I looked up Araluen Valley and said, I’m going there. I’m going to find that bloody tree.’

  ‘Did you find it?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It was easy. It was the tree on the hill in front of the pub. I reckon the bloke that painted it just sat on the veranda and painted away. I took my wife back there just after we were married. I took my kids back there too. It’s still there, isn’t it, the tree?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s still there.’

  ‘Haven’t thought about that place in years,’ he said. ‘Mostly go up to the beach for holidays. You ever been to Surfers?’

  ‘Ye
ars ago,’ I said.

  ‘I retire in three weeks,’ he said. ‘I reckon I’ll take my grandkids to see that tree. Has it changed much, the valley?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A few more houses. More peach trees. It doesn’t change much.’

  The taxi pulled up at the airport and I got out.

  Don’t get me wrong about that story. He wasn’t a hero, even if he had been heroic. Or was he? You need to know someone for a lot longer than a twenty-minute taxi ride to know them. He wasn’t a bushie, either. He was possibly the most city person I’ve ever met, weaving his taxi in and out of the traffic, the radio snickering away about the pet hate topic of the week. But that tree was a symbol. He did believe that if it had never been there, he wouldn’t have survived.

  It was, in a way, what he’d been fighting for.

  The chocolate soldiers

  The ‘koalas’ were the young militia men who fought in New Guinea in 1942 on what is now known popularly as the Kokoda Track, most often in the news when a middle-aged man trying to walk it has a heart attack. Back then there were many such tracks through the jungle, as the Japanese headed south towards Australia, with only the koalas and a few regular soldiers, to save us.

  The militia boys were also known as chocolate soldiers, or chockos. Chocolate soldiers melt in the heat of battle, although the name perhaps first came from George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man, all glittering uniform but no courage beneath.

  Koalas (the furry kind) weren’t meant to be exported or shot, and nor were these young men. They were for defence at home, until things grew so desperate that they were sent to New Guinea. You had to be twenty-one to enlist in the AIF17; the koalas could enlist or be conscripted at eighteen and a half. The Citizen Military Force (CMF) had begun as a volunteer organisation but now young men were being conscripted into it, although many, like my father, enlisted in the militia on their eighteenth birthday rather than wait another three years before they could serve overseas.