I am fresh from having attended an adept and thought-provoking rendition of Geoff Allen’s SISTER ANZAC play by the Hawera Repertory Society. The play provides a snapshot of the lives and loves of four nurses aboard the hospital ship MAHENO during World War 1. It offers a lot more to think about than the trite platitudes being trotted out by politicians at ANZAC day parades up and down the country.
Therefore I have experienced a blinding flash, watching Nicola Willis at the national ANZAC service holding forth about the men and women who gave their lives – when Nicola Willis is probably too young to even have had a parent who went to war, or to have been deeply affected by the return (greatly changed) of those who survived, or the heartache of grieving without a body – “closure” for those who did not.
It is a matter of some confusion to me that while there are very few left who were either directly involved or directly affected by a child or a husband or a sibling going off on a big adventure that was quickly to become a horror show, we should continue to celebrate the way we do. I wonder why we send contingents to Gallipoli every year to continue to tug the collective forelock despite the clearly and incontrovertibly chronicled evidence that the ANZACs quickly became the cannon fodder that an arrogant and sometimes incompetent commanding cohort seemed to experience minimal squeamishness about squandering.
So, the blinding flash is fury. It is driving me to the temptation to clamber aboard the coracle of conspiracy and wonder out loud whether or not this mindless ongoing celebration of the two great wars is simply a monstrous whitewash promulgated by the establishment to divert the attention of the great unwashed from the equally incontrovertible fact that there continues to be multiple “theatres” across the globe where conflict still rages and atrocities even more unspeakable than those committed by any side during the first two world wars are occurring on a daily basis?
All this make the choreographed platitudes by Nicola Willis and her colleagues across the country about something that none of us who were not there (and that is now most of us) can ever comprehend precisely that. Platitudinous. Especially in the knowledge that the world powers appear to have learned nothing from the sacrifices of our men and women because those sacrifices are still happening. They are just wearing different fatigues.
I hear the sharp intakes of breath from those among you who would accuse me of oversimplifying the situation, and/or trivialising the sacrifices our men and women made. Quite the opposite in fact. There is something obscene about the huge amount of energy and expense poured into ANZAC celebrations while elsewhere people continue to die, families continue to be torn asunder, women and children continue to be raped and slaughtered, and historic landscapes continue to be desecrated and decimated.
There is not much civilised about that in the twenty first century. Despite the ready availability of all the wisdom of hindsight; not much appears to have been learned.