Help! I have lost my blue tie

We were uniformed reminders of something of which the veterans did not want to be reminded

It is a strange sensation to have lived a lifetime in which, successively, Australia has fought against the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Indonesians, the Vietnamese, and is now fighting against who we are not sure — it is difficult to know who the enemy is, but it seems very much like a rerun of the crusades. Only the Japanese have ever posed a direct threat of invasion; yet the bones of Australians lie across the world.

I have a faint memory of Americans in uniform in Melbourne. I was in the local milk bar when VJ Day was proclaimed. I knew nothing of war itself, except my father was periodically away in the Navy.

Armistice Day was my first memory of a city street completely still when the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month came. It was a time when every man took off his hat — as they did when funerals passed. The sole noise that day was the clacking of high heels as a woman walked by, seemingly oblivious of the one-minute silence.

At school, I remember that every Anzac Day there was a service and recitation of the dead who had been at the school and “laid down their life” for their country. As a young cadet, I remember a sodden day being part of the schoolboy honour guard — in slouch hat, Victorian era blue tunic, woollen khaki pants, gaiters and ill-fitting boots, but bearing a .303 rifle. We were lining the road leading to the Shrine where the veterans of two World Wars marched and a few survivors from the Boer War were being wheeled. There must have been some Korean War veterans but they merged with the World War II returned soldiers. They were all in mostly grey suits and ties, and most wore hats … marching under banners. Almost none were in uniform. Those who had anything to say to us were derogatory. We were uniformed reminders of something of which they did not want to be reminded — war. They just wanted to be with their mates, the survivors, to drink those memories away and play two-up.

The year I lined the route was the same year that Alan Seymour’s play One Day of the Year was produced, with the hostility it aroused by questioning the heroic basis of those vested with the raiment of “mateship”.

My first vacation job was in the old Repatriation Department, assembling the medical files of the warriors. I think I was on the cusp of my fourteenth birthday, but was somewhat surprised when most of the desks emptied at lunchtime. I was told that the public servants were enjoying a training run to the local pub, the Maori Chief, and would be back later — in time to clock off. This afternoon’s sojourn was a form of reparation, as most of these “runners” were ex-servicemen.

In between those two official days of commemoration, nobody talked much about the war, least of all those who had been involved. My father never did. As a doctor and lawyer, he spent much of his post-war years looking after damaged servicemen, defending their entitlements.

Now we are New Age pilgrims in all the areas where Australians lie buried, except North Korea. The Kokoda Trail has become a must-do if you are so inclined. April in Gallipoli is a must. France has a number of watering holes on the way to the war graves. Most of those returned soldiers who experienced combat when I was young are dead. Of those who remain, very few are under 90 years of age and I dare not interpret their deepest memories — especially when they see politicians, epitomes of solemness, at a drop of a blue tie, laying a wreath, stepping back to the safety of men in braid, bowing their heads as if in prayer.

We have reached the end of 2015 — we have another three years to run before we finish the World War I memento mori. There are 16 sites on the Melbourne Shrine wall that denote battles where our forefathers were embroiled in that war — and these are only those of us with Anglo-Celtic origin. Just imagine if we introduced multiculturalism into the mourning cycle.

There are a great many wreaths waiting to be laid. In fact, the laying of flowers has spread across the nation as the aftermath of death, especially of the young. The image of floral tribute is constantly reinforced in the media and when driving along the roads, where violence is often the companion of death.

It is symbolic that the First World War had very few great leaders, or even competent ones. Sir John Monash was the star in the Allied firmament, although the Americans would say “Black Jack” Pershing was not a bad leader. He famously said “A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while on the contrary an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops”.1

For much of the time in World War I the Allied Forces, under which so many Australians died, were led by incompetent men — perhaps a metaphor for what has been happening in this country, where the population has increasingly yearned for somebody to actually provide a presence — a sense of purpose — not one engaged in faux mourning and putting out the constant warrior metaphor to describe day-to-day political activity.

Politicians have bickered over their expenses and they constantly design tricks and strategems to make the country ungovernable, egged on by the demands of the 24-hour media cycle while, at the same time, teaching a new generation of political advisers-cum-politicians to perpetuate this dysfunctionality.

As we get older, we are prisoners of our reminiscences, but there is a certain clarity in knowing people of purpose — who wanted to get things done. I was around when Australia, 45+ years ago, endured that internal political destructiveness played out against a background of war, where young men were submitted to the ultimate “Powerball game”. It was a time when local warlords termed “premiers” were strutting their stuff in some of the states.

The man of purpose, Whitlam, came — he overreached, but he defined leadership that gave this country purpose if, along the way, the country suffered pain.

We have a Poppy Wall at the National War Memorial but out in the “dusty, dirty city” there is a culture designed to continually revile the tall poppies.

In Melbourne, we have a Shrine where, if we want to remember the past heroes, it is there to visit and contemplate. It was not constructed until well after the war. The greatest proponent for its construction was probably one of, if not the, greatest of Australians after Howard Florey — Sir John Monash. The greatest opponent of its construction was another great Australian, Sir Keith Murdoch.

But in a way, Murdoch had a point — building tombs to the dead has a long history of diverting a civilisation from its real task of constructing a society for the living.

We should not have to wait for Armistice Day 2018 for the obsession of wreath laying to end and for this country to get leaders genuinely willing to change their blue ties — but then it may not matter. It may be a woman who gets this country to move on from its state of faux mourning, somebody who understands that grief is something we all experience at some time, cherish the memory and, if the memory is worthwhile, continue with the tasks of the dead, both of which are never-ending.

In the interim, during the writing of this “reflection” Australia has changed its Prime Minister, but the challenge set out above remains.