Douglas Newton

A shade over 110 years since the Gallipoli landings, Anzac Day is a day of mourning for many. Respect is due. And more. If we listen to the original Anzac voices, we may recognise voices of warning – relevant today.

The Anzac story warns us of what may happen to a small country that offers unfaltering loyalty to a great power. That loyalty can degrade to servility. Those in uniform pay the price.

The voices at the top remind us: war can incite recklessness. Our leaders may debase themselves before our allies and spend carelessly our young people’s blood.

A handful of examples must suffice. In November 1914, the defeated federal Liberal leader Joseph Cook told a crowd in Mosman that Australia must send not 20,000 men, but rather 100,000 men, because “we are engaged in a war of extinction”.

In December 1915, after Gallipoli, prime minister Billy Hughes circulated an extraordinary “Call to Arms”. He claimed that “had the number of our forces been doubled… the Australian armies would long ago have been camping in Constantinople, and the world war would have been practically over”.

In April 1916, Hughes spoke in London’s Guildhall: “The British race has found its soul. The war has saved us from moral and physical degeneration and decay. We were in danger of losing our greatness and of becoming flabby… The war has enabled us to find ourselves.”

His booster, Keith Murdoch, lamented that Australian troops only narrowly voted for conscription in December 1917. Race to the rescue: Murdoch told General Birdwood it was because they were fighting “against an enemy who is not to them nearly as great an object of enmity and dread as the Japanese”. Hughes was enraged that Australians had twice voted down conscription. He howled to Murdoch: “And war weariness … war weariness in a people who have escaped all the consequences of this awful war!”

We may praise Australian military endeavour. But we should not forget that our generals urged the government to change the law, so they could execute at the front. General Sir John Monash himself told his wife in July 1917 he had argued for firing parties “in some clear case of cowardly desertion” in order to “stop the rot”.

How very different are the actual Anzac voices! Through recorded interviews, held principally at the Australian War Memorial, these men speak to us. We can hear the fervent egalitarianism, the fierce democratic instinct, and the radical mutuality.

Some remind us bluntly: it’s mostly low-paid men who fight. Private Jesse Palmer told his interviewer why he enlisted: “Well … there’s so much unemployment… It was a case of having three meals a day, two changes of raiment, and five bob.”

The big-noting of Anzac repelled some. Private Frank Molony of the 1st Field Ambulance was revolted by the guff in the Anzac Bulletin. He had “terrible nightmares” after reading of “a successful, Christ, successful”! – a successful, God the word shivers horror, bombing of enemy hutments and billets.” He treated men with self-inflicted wounds. He hid them. “They shoot for cowardice, and award for heroism, and everyone has come to know the vague invisible dividing line.”

Scores described shell-shock. Private Eric Abraham remembered one officer who “got a direct hit… His hands were shaking violently … He was a pitiful sight, completely broken. With every shell blast he ducked and eventually tucked himself in the corner cringing…”

Some denounced the war-at-any-price politicians prolonging the war. In October 1916, Private Ted Ryan from Broken Hill, a shell-shock victim, wrote to Ramsay MacDonald MP, praising his stand for peace-by-negotiation: “Why shouldn’t we know what terms of peace we are fighting for, why shouldn’t we discuss what terms we are supposed to accept?” Facing a death sentence at his court martial in 1917, Ryan explained his dissent. He had enlisted to defend “the ideals of humanity and civilisation”. But Britain was insisting on crushing Germany, so “it was no longer a war of resistance”. Ryan was one of a great throng. The total number of courts-martial in the Australian Institute of Fitness is estimated at 23,000 for the 331,000 enrolled.

The men’s sympathies ran deep. Sergeant Eric Evans recorded in June 1918 an attempted suicide in his unit. “A chap cut his throat yesterday in the wood at the bottom of the camp.” He had been “very depressed and threatened to do it”. He was found “lying naked, covered in blood” – and was saved. Evans refused to condemn him.

Many extended their solidarity with suffering to the enemy. In October 1918, Private Charlie Mance escorted German prisoners to a dressing station. “One bloke showed me his wife’s photos… Well, when you look at it, when we got down there … and you see a lot of Germans, wounded, and blokes was reading the last rites on them, they’re just the same as you. Young blokes! I could see a couple of our blokes laying there. No different!”

Stan Nixon of the 16th Battalion remembered the Germans in retreat in late 1918. He was sickened by what he saw, “day after day. It is just this murder”. He resolved “to fire at their legs”. Why? “They got a woman and kids at home, just the same.”

Some dodged the killing altogether. Private Ernest Morton, a Gallipoli veteran, encountered a “mortally wounded” German officer in July 1918, “a young chap, be in his late teens”. He spoke English. “He prayed to me to kill him. Put him out of his misery.” Morton could not. From that moment he refused to fire his machine gun. “I’m not going to have anything at all to do with this.”

Many refused the consolations of victory. An interviewer asked Sergeant Jack Lockett: “What do you think the war achieved?” “Bloody well nothing,” he replied. “I couldn’t see much out of it. Some of these bloody heads [bigwigs] ought to be put in it.”

Some resolved never to fight overseas again. After four years service, Archie Barwick reflected: “Never no more for me, the only time I would fight again is in defence of my own country, I would never go out of ‘Aussie’ again seeking stoush, I have had my fill of it.”

Original Anzac voices – for Anzac Day. We should listen, and be wary of those who seek to hijack Anzac, sacralising the “Anzac spirit”, while promoting hyper-individualism, neoliberalism, widening inequality, privilege, and tax rorts. The Anzacs practised their radical collectivism – in war and peace.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/04/anzac-voices-voices-of-warning/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Morag Fraser

Monday

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the man who became Pope Francis, died just after the Roman dawn. The news reached Australia as the evening newscasts began. His death dominated every bulletin. It seemed anomalous, a rent in time, even though rationally expected.

Tuesday

Melbourne’s dawn was a bleak, grey void – almost a relief after Monday’s hectic coverage of the Pope’s death. I was reminded of the opening lines of one of the greatest poems to come out of the crucible of World War One.

The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid time as ever…

The poet, Isaac Rosenberg, was a member of Britain’s “Bantam Battalion” (its officers were all under 5ft 3”). His “Break of Day in the Trenches”, captures another “out of time” experience as, from his “druid time” dugout, Rosenberg observes a rat free-lancing between the English and German lines:

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German…

Rosenberg was killed during the German “Spring offensive” of 1918. His poetry lives.

On Melbourne’s Autumn Tuesday, looking for something more than talk or conclave speculation, I joined a small gathering for midday mass at Melbourne’s Newman College. In the tiny Lady Chapel, some young people — Muslim and Hindu — introduced themselves to me, a stranger. The Jesuit celebrant began by reminding us that one of Pope Francis’ early insistences was that, as a people, we should not be “sourpusses”. (Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium, The joy of the Gospel, Chapter 2, 84-85).

“Sourpusses” is not conventional papal diction, but it caught, perfectly, the humanity and zest of the man, and its drollery lifted the Passchendaele grey from the morning. Jesus laughed, I kept thinking. And so did Francis. Thank God for that.

Francis aligned “sourpusses” with defeatism, and he was clear about where defeatism leads:

The evil spirit of defeatism is brother to the temptation to separate, before its time, the wheat from the weeds; it is the fruit of an anxious and self-centred lack of trust. (Evangelii gaudium).

You don’t need to read the entire Exhortation to see that the pope was describing a state of world-being too familiar to us now: intractable divisiveness; manipulation and loss of trust between peoples; an impatient turning inward for one’s own defensive advantage, and an anxious closing out of ‘other’ people, in the name of supposed national or personal security.

The green wheat piles up in palaces while the weeds are deported to “another country”. If they wither and die there, we may never know.

Strip away the metaphors and you have the stuff of each day’s news. Tuesday’s evening bulletins were followed by an SBS program on CECOT, the El Salvadoran high-security prison where men have their heads shaved, dressed in ironic white with their tattoos exposed — like brands — and their humanity, perhaps even their criminality, reduced to a category of the unredeemable. They are “there for life”. The SBS journalist, Colombian-born Catalina Florez, fluent in the language of the overseer with whom she toured the prison, allowed the place to speak for itself. Kristi Noem, US Secretary for Homeland Security, also toured CECOT, and declared publicly that, “This facility is one of the tools in our toolkit. We’re going to keep on using it.”

Wednesday

Sunshine today, clear light, and how chastening — and invigorating — it is to be reminded of one’s own insularity. For nigh on three days I’ve been watching crowds milling in St Peter’s Square, so many people, smiling or crying as they walked out of churches, or crowded the streets of Buenos Aires, Manila, Dili, Port Moresby, and Indian and African cities with names I scarcely recognise, all honouring a humble man. I wonder at my own surprise at such a universal outpouring. There has been joy in it too, a heartfelt recognition of a complicated life lived well, in the service of others – the kind of leadership Christians espouse but often don’t practise. And when they do practise it, they are not always thanked. Losers…

There has been so much fog — of disillusionment — hanging over the past three decades of Australian Christian experience that it has been difficult to acknowledge, or even see, humility, simplicity and integrity in clerical authority figures (secular authority figures have experienced an analogous falling away of respect). The scandal of sexual abuse, and the halting, too-often self-defensive formal response has drawn a scrim over what once we took for granted – that there would be people of exemplary courage, virtue and kindness to offer leadership, encouragement and fellowship, men and women who would give embodied meaning to the word “pastoral”.

But the crowds all around the world were not listing church faults or failures. Young and old, of all religious denominations and none, they were acknowledging a man, and a kind of principled, intelligent, down-to-earth leadership that included them, that exemplified a fellowship of exhilaration, of human strength and frailty, companionship in celebration and in trouble, in doubt, uncertainty and in hope.

Thursday

The Australian federal election grinds on. Our leaders and aspirant leaders are boxed in by demands for certainty. Journalists require guarantees: “Will you promise the Australian people that you will (or you will not) do this (add your own desiderata).” There is never room for truth in its complexity, or the startling impact of honesty. Witless questions produce witless, defensive answers. I am not discounting the value of rigorous, probing journalism — it’s essential for democracy — or the bracing impact of penetrating political rhetoric. But what politician would risk it now, even if they could find the words?

I thought about Bergoglio’s experience, as a relatively young man, of being placed in a position of power (as a Jesuit Provincial, or leader) in Argentina during very fraught political times. He had to learn the hard way that one’s best intentions do not always lead to right decisions, and the consequences of getting things wrong can haunt you. For him, the experience led to a period of isolation and reflection, and honed what was possibly innate in him – the humility to admit that you have been wrong, and the heart, the strength to go on.  Try to imagine Vladimir Putin admitting he has been wrong.

We live in an era of increasing abuse of power by increasingly authoritarian rulers. We’ve been here before and seen the consequences, then and now – the horror and human waste of our 20th-century’s wars, and the chronic instability and suffering of whole populations in this century. Rosenberg lived it:

…the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens…

I believe some of the worldwide response to the death of Pope Francis has been a kind of venting, a universal cry of relief at the recognition that there are other, viable ways of wielding power, ways that embrace all of humanity and which recognise the sacredness of the natural world in which we all live.

Friday

Easter and Anzac Day folded into one another. We mourned and celebrated. And remembered.

“The church is a field hospital, in which many have been wounded,” Pope Francis said. I thought again of Rosenberg and his poet’s vision of a no-man’s land of temporary peace in which a rat could roam free. And of Pope Francis, who dared to imagine a world in which human beings of different races, nationalities and beliefs could be reconciled. Fraternity.

Saturday

The funeral of Francis, again from 6pm Australian time, and strangely welcoming – like the culmination of a holiday, or in the word’s original meaning, a holy day. Yes, there was pageantry and splendour, and the world’s powerful people came. But they were subsumed in the geometry of ritual and security, just one dark, largely undifferentiated block (including the man who broke the dress code by wearing a blue suit, not the prescribed black). All were upstaged by the cardinals’ scarlet. Some bishops wore beanies. Everyone took photos on their phones, not even furtively.

The Dean of the College of Cardinals, 91-year-old Giovanni Battista Re, read his homily in an ascending crescendo. He described  the pope as “a resolute personality”. (The Murdoch press in Australia have a different take on what “resolute” might mean: they have disparaged Francis as “a disruptor”. Yes, he was. Like Jesus.) The Cardinal’s own oratory was resolute, and pointed: “Mercy is at the heart of the Gospel,” he declared. And “Build bridges not walls”. While he preached, the pages of the gospel placed on Francis’ casket blew gently in the wind. The symbolism, unintentional, was nonetheless irresistible: the gospel is never a closed book.

There were so many men assembled there. But the first reader to step up to the lectern was a woman. And then another. The voices of the (all lay) readers were a multilingual wonder: women and men speaking in their own tongues. And then came the Ecumenical Patriarchs and a plangent Greek chant.

Change in the Catholic church comes in many forms, some small, some subtle, some “disruptive”, all slow. Were these indicative signs? I hope so.

Finally, the coffin, called “simple”. It was plain, unornamented, as Francis insisted. But what is the “simplicity” of wood? I wondered as the cameras played across its honeyed surface, its knots and rippling grain, the careful, dovetail joints, the tensile and compressive strength of wood. How fitting that Francis should rest in a carpenter’s handiwork.

Above, the pines of Rome made a green frieze around the ritual farewell of a good man. And all the while, a fresh breeze blew.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/04/six-easter-days-2025/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         ATHEIST FOR PEACE