Waltzing Matilda
One of the saddest films I've seen is 'Gallipoli' by Peter Weir and showcasing a young Mel Gibson as a naive young man who signs up for the excitement of the first world war and ends up as cannon fodder for a British led joke of a campaign that saw Australia lose more soldiers per capita than any other country in the whole disgusting four years of a world collectively waking up to both the horrors and the possibilities of modern warfare.
Every country has their veterans, their glorious dead to be remembered, so why is it that the Australian slain and permenantly maimed seem to stand out as tragically as they do? Part of it, for me at least, is that the Australians respect their veterans and honour what they went through more than a lot of countries, who like to sweep the soldiers and military issues under the carpet and out of the way once the war is over.
Eric Boggle's timeless classic 'And the band played waltzing matilda' is one of those beautiful pieces ever written about warfare, and like the haunting violin from 'Schindler's list' and the plaintive voice of the soldier telling his story in Billy Joel's 'Goodnight Saigon' it makes us stop and lower our defenses and suddenly find ourselves hit full force with the horror and utter waste of human life for no good reason.
Australia went from being a penal colony to being something very different. I often joke that if America had been settled by convicts or Australians, that it would be a much much better place. America was settled by lunatics kicked out of the UK for being annoying religious twats and here we are hundreds of years later with a bunch of religious twats still holding influence over the USA. But Australia was founded by people who knew how to enjoy a drink and who had lived the hard life, had either been in prison or worked with the prisoners.
Australia developed like a more sane and fun version of the USA but they couldn't put their colonial history quite behind them either and thus from paradise came the call to war from the old colonial ties and thus Australia (and New Zealand too, Anzac fans!) sent their eager young men to go fight for a flag that didn't care two shits about them.
And that's when the horrible reality first came to them. When most of the soldiers never returned, and those who did were maimed or broken inside. And there was no need for it. No need. This wasn't Australia's fight, they didn't have an empire. What they did have was a commonwealth and a reminder of that tie on their flag. Like a slap in the face or cold water dashed against their reality, the anzac veterans of all the wars tell s story of men and women who saw their allegiances as something more than symbolic and took it upon themselves to risk their own lives for what they saw as their duty or their duty to 'democracy'.
And that's part of why that movie always gets to me, and that song always makes me stop and think about war and those who died in it's pursuit. There's no need, no point, no end but especially in the case of Australia, which in many ways was the new beginning in actuality that America always thought it was. None of the diggers need have died. They could have left all that behind them. But some of them just couldn't or didn't realise that the war they had gone to fight was over a long time before.
Every country has their veterans, their glorious dead to be remembered, so why is it that the Australian slain and permenantly maimed seem to stand out as tragically as they do? Part of it, for me at least, is that the Australians respect their veterans and honour what they went through more than a lot of countries, who like to sweep the soldiers and military issues under the carpet and out of the way once the war is over.
Eric Boggle's timeless classic 'And the band played waltzing matilda' is one of those beautiful pieces ever written about warfare, and like the haunting violin from 'Schindler's list' and the plaintive voice of the soldier telling his story in Billy Joel's 'Goodnight Saigon' it makes us stop and lower our defenses and suddenly find ourselves hit full force with the horror and utter waste of human life for no good reason.
Australia went from being a penal colony to being something very different. I often joke that if America had been settled by convicts or Australians, that it would be a much much better place. America was settled by lunatics kicked out of the UK for being annoying religious twats and here we are hundreds of years later with a bunch of religious twats still holding influence over the USA. But Australia was founded by people who knew how to enjoy a drink and who had lived the hard life, had either been in prison or worked with the prisoners.
Australia developed like a more sane and fun version of the USA but they couldn't put their colonial history quite behind them either and thus from paradise came the call to war from the old colonial ties and thus Australia (and New Zealand too, Anzac fans!) sent their eager young men to go fight for a flag that didn't care two shits about them.
And that's when the horrible reality first came to them. When most of the soldiers never returned, and those who did were maimed or broken inside. And there was no need for it. No need. This wasn't Australia's fight, they didn't have an empire. What they did have was a commonwealth and a reminder of that tie on their flag. Like a slap in the face or cold water dashed against their reality, the anzac veterans of all the wars tell s story of men and women who saw their allegiances as something more than symbolic and took it upon themselves to risk their own lives for what they saw as their duty or their duty to 'democracy'.
And that's part of why that movie always gets to me, and that song always makes me stop and think about war and those who died in it's pursuit. There's no need, no point, no end but especially in the case of Australia, which in many ways was the new beginning in actuality that America always thought it was. None of the diggers need have died. They could have left all that behind them. But some of them just couldn't or didn't realise that the war they had gone to fight was over a long time before.