Children and War: A Historical Anthology

4. Imagining Anzac: Children’s Memories of the Killing Fields of the Great War

Chapter Four Imagining Anzac Children’s Memories of the Killing Fields of the Great War Bruce C. Scates On Armistice Day 1921, a grim crowd of returned soldiers and widowed mothers huddled on the balcony of Sydney’s Soldiers’ Club. As 11 a.m. approached , the great city around them fell suddenly silent, the bells of the post office clanged to a solemn close, and traffic spluttered to a standstill. The company on the balcony bowed their heads in prayer. All seemed perfect reverence.“The silence,” one wrote,“was as of a Sunday”: Th[en came the] sound [of] laughter and giggling from the girls leaning out of the windows [next door]. A soldier, an old scarred man said,“Those girls, it cut me like a knife—I was at the Cenotaph in London last year!” The moment the ceremony was over, Dr. Mary Booth went down to “interview ” the young culprits. One of the girls was brought back “and sent . . . to the old soldier.” Then came the father: cowered with remorse he apologized on behalf of his children. By late that afternoon, even the old scarred soldier had regained his composure. The memory of Australia’s war dead had been honored and the thoughtless youth of the city called to order.1 The disruption of Sydney’s Armistice Day by children careless of its meaning suggests the major themes of this article. It highlights what cultural historians have called the selective and contested nature of collective memory. To those old scarred men who went to fight, and the women who waited for them, the Great War was a defining experience. Australia’s war 50 dead numbered 60,000, a crippling loss to a nation of just under 3 million people. They were buried far from the homes of those who loved them, on the killing fields of the Western Front, Gallipoli and Palestine. For veterans and bereaved alike,this was a sacrifice that could not be forgotten; the memory of Anzac (acronym of the Australian New Zealand Army Corps) was to be cherished, honored, venerated. The “giggling girls” belonged to a very different generation. For them, the memory of Anzac was less a sacred trust than a tiresome burden: the stuff of school speeches, sermons, and slightly ridiculous ceremonies. Their laughter signaled much more than casual irreverence : It actively renounced a dark memory many would sooner have forgotten.2 Dr. Booth’s determination to bring these children to task prefigured a wider movement in the culture of commemoration. Long before the war was over, Booth and her “Fellowship” had taken on themselves the duties of remembrance. From 1916 on, they had held commemorative services on Sydney’s wharves, strewing flowers and prayers at the place their men sailed away from them. They raised the funds for the city’s war memorial and marked the graves of returned soldiers with wreaths of wattle and rosemary. But by the early 1920s it was clear that commemorative services could no longer be centered on just the men who returned or their immediate families.3 There was “a danger,” Booth warned, of “Time obliterating the memory of Anzac,” of a new generation growing up with “no personal experience of war . . . [or] what our soldiers had achieved,” and that even Anzac Day itself (the much feted anniversary of Australia’s first major battle at Gallipoli) would become just another public holiday. The search was on for what Booth called “some more enduring form of remembrance .”4 The task which faced the Anzac Fellowship of Women, and of the commemorative bodies that succeeded it, was“to capture the interest of youth.” From the 1930s to the 1950s, Booth presided over the Anzac Festival, a series of competitions incorporating song, essay writing, art work, and dramatic performances. In the 1990s (as the wounds of Vietnam slowly healed),the tradition was revived.Working in close association with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the History Teachers Association of Australia fielded the Simpson Prize, an essay-writing competition in honor of Australia ’s best-known war hero. The records of both these bodies (along with interviews and questionnaires) offer a rare opportunity to reconstruct children ’s memory of war. They present what historians of childhood have called a child-centered view of history.5 Imagining Anzac 51 The Anzac Festival Established in 1931, the Anzac Festival Committee involved a radical departure in...