Foolish boos marred Anzac Day and our remembrance of sacrifice. Michael Pascoe writes our most solemn day is a challenge, a reminder to be better, not national pride deserved.
Monday. It is a public holiday in NSW, WA and the ACT to compensate for Anzac Day falling on a Saturday. I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do, not sure it pays due respect to what, for now, is our real national day, a day with a solemn underpinning.
But a holiday it is two days after the event. Discarded sprigs of rosemary binned, flags furled. Actual flags packed or shoved away, metaphorical flags at least wrapped a little less obviously around those who seek to wear them, brandish them.
The stain on the day by a handful of self-important dickheads hasn’t washed off though and it won’t. The Sydney Morning Herald homepage still carries a fine interview with Uncle Ray Minniecon, former CMF member, descendent and brother of diggers who served in wars. It was the 75-year-old’s dawn service welcome to country that
a few anonymous fools booed in Sydney’s Martin Place.
It is the nature of news that the idiots’ stunt, copied in Melbourne and Perth, became the day’s headline. It’s the sort of stupidity likely to be repeated given the attention it gained the inane, worthless perpetrators, overshadowing the beauty and respect of myriad Anzac Day commemorations around the nation.
It is especially galling that the racists’ action is a complete contradiction and denial of the challenge Anzac poses to us.
Yes, we rightly honour and pledge to remember those who were prepared to pay whatever price service of our country demanded and acknowledge the tragedies their families suffered.
Echoes horror of military folly
And, far from glorifying war, remembrance teaches the horror of military folly. In a sane world, it warns against jingoistic nationalism.
But there’s also a direct challenge to those of us who’ve come later, for those recently arrived, for all of us.
That challenge was summarised for me in two brief lines from Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, a movie best known for its portrayal of combat and death.
The crux of the film though is in the final lines. For a couple of decades I have slightly misremembered the scenes as Tom Hanks’ character, Captain Miller, saying as he died to the eponymous Private Ryan: “Deserve this.”
Then, an aged Ryan standing before Miller’s Normandy grave, asks his wife: “Have I led a good life?”
Upon checking, Miller said “Earn this, earn it” and old Ryan says to his wife:
“Tell me I have led a good life.”
Wife: “What?”
Ryan “Tell me I am a good man.”
Wife: “You are”.
And that, without Hollywood’s swelling music, is the inherent challenge of Anzac Day remembrance.
Have we deserved this? Are we earning it? Are we good people?
The louts booing clearly aren’t. I’d wager they’d be spongers, selfish by nature, narrow of vision, self-entitled to ownership of a space they’ve never earned.
For all of us though, the challenge remains: Are we earning this incredibly magnificent, rich and, yes, lucky country?
The challenge is constant
Nobody did or does it for us. There is no inheritance of title. What our forebears achieved/sacrificed has not paid-forward for us, the challenge is constant.
What are we doing now to deserve this place, these opportunities, to help our nation realise its amazing potential, for Australia to be good, better.
The sour, mean streak increasingly permeating our politics is the antithesis of that challenge, of the spirit of sacrifice. It’s inevitable that those who most parade their nationalism on the stage, who ostentatiously wrap themselves in the flag, are the ones most likely to have a selfish view of what is “good”.
To love this country is to both love its glorious physical self and what is good about it as a nation, what good we collectively do. That love should not be confused with a self-preening pride. Tim Minchin may have put that best:
“I am not proud of being Australian. I am very glad to be Australian. Pride should be reserved for things you have achieved, not things that are the result of an accident of birth.”
We have good, very good.
Wouldn’t swap it for anywhere else on earth. Deserving this requires being good, seeking to make it better, seeking out our collective better nature.
That’s the debt we owe the past and the future. Deserve this.
Reform, say vets who know the horrors of war, yet most politicians say status quo
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.