With the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War upon us (this shy little column is commemorating it almost every day in the popular 100 Years Ago item) Dr Brendan Nelson the director of the Australian War Memorial is a very busy man. He can't be everywhere at once.
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And one of the places her can't be next Tuesday is at Canberra's public forum The War To End All Wars - Our Responsibility To Those Who Died.
Forum convener Dr Sue Wareham OAM tells us that, yes, Dr Nelson was invited to be there but that he was unavailable because of course he will be at Albany (WA) for the Albany Convoy Commemorative Event (ACCE). The ACCE will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the departure of the first convoy of ships carrying the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) to the First World War.
Wareham says, in the spirit of Tuesday's contrary forum, that it is typical of the nation's "official" commemorations of Australia's part in the Great War that we are making a big thing of the happy and healthy boys' glorious departure. But then, she's sure, "official" commemorations won't have anything to say about how so many of those boys then came home "disfigured and shattered".
She sees in "the flavour and the nature of the [coming] official war commemorations, the idea that war is a noble undertaking".
But the contrary forum is
"The war brought death to approximately 61,000 Australians and shattered the lives of countless others. The legacy of the war continues to this day. A century on, does our commemoration stop short of asking the hard questions such as how such a cataclysmic event could occur, what we learnt from it and whether that responsibility to learn has been lost amid the flag-waving?"
We wondered if there would be any speakers there to give a contrary, more khaki-coloured, more traditionally "patriotic" view? But Wareham says that the national discussion of these things is already so overwhelmingly weighted in favour of a celebratory Boys Own, Nelsonesque (our words, not hers) approach that she thinks it fair enough for dissenting folk to have so rare a platform all to themselves.
"It's easy to go and wave a flag and go to a memorial service. But we want a chance
The forum, a fine and intelligent and very Canberran occasion (because ours is a thinking city that takes delight in ideas) is at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, 15 Blackall Street, Barton, from 7.30pm to 9.30pm on Tuesday 4 November. Dr Nelson won't be there but ABC 666 presenter Genevieve Jacobs will be, because she is the occasion's MC.
And while on the subject of Big Ideas about war ... The sorts of thinking Canberrans who will mince along to Tuesday's event will be the sorts of Canberrans who listened to last Saturday morning's ABC Radio National Saturday Extra. It featured an interview with affable, scholarly Chris Walsh about his new book Cowardice – A Brief History.
On the rare occasions when the program's deeply irritating presenter Geraldine Doogue (one of The Ten Most Irritating People in Australia) let him get a word in edgeways, he was very interesting on the subject of what bravery and cowardice may be, when analysed. He toyed with the big ideas that sometimes it may take bravery to refuse to go war to and that sometimes going to war may be the cowardly thing for a man (it is always men, never women, that are cowards) to choose to do.
He was very good on the subject of how and why allegedly cowardly men who seemed not to have enlisted for the wars of the day were sent (almost always by women) white feathers and scathing (always anonymous) letters. Saturday Extra noted that the English pacifist and journalist Fenner Brockway boasted that he received so many white feathers during the First World War that he had enough to make a fan.
Feather-sending was a persistent feature of Australia's war time shenanigans at home. And the Australian War Memorial has just told me that, yes, it is a phenomenon covered in the soon-to-be-opened Great War gallery.
Australian men not in uniform were given (anonymous) hell by these damsels from Hell. To their credit newspapers seem, often, to have deplored the practice and to have published many letters (and even poems) deploring it as more cowardly than anything going on in the hearts of the senders' victims.
Melbourne's Truth condemned it in 1918 with a cautionary poem White Feathers by (the author's pseudonym will make sense in a moment) Serva Wright. The poem tells the story of how a scheming Aussie damsel sent her young man a white feather to drive him off to war because she was looking forward to the day when he'd come back and she'd look terrific walking out with a khaki-clad, medal-bedecked hero. But it all went horribly wrong. He went to the war but then:
"Then she heard an ugly rumour/Which filled her with dismay/Of a pretty tart in Blighty [England],/With a winning sort of way./And last week at Port Melbourne/She met the pommy brat,/With HIS ring upon her finger,/And HER feather in her hat!"
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