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ANZAC Day: We who mourn

Jacqueline Pham looks at women’s role in wartime remembrance and finds we are excluded from this defining characteristic of Australian history.

April 2007

The ANZAC day dawn service began in 1927 when five old diggers, walking home from the pub, saw an elderly woman laying a sheaf of flowers on the Cenotaph in Martin Place. So moved they were by the scene, the men joined her in silent prayer until dawn. The subsequent meeting of the Australian Legion of Ex-Service clubs decided that a wreath laying ceremony would be held at the Cenotaph every Anzac Day. The following year drew one hundred and fifty people and the numbers grew as the years went by.           

It is darkness. There is the low murmur of a waiting crowd and still more are filing in from Wynyard station. They walk close together because really, there isn’t enough room on the footpath, but it is a quiet marvel to see the unspoken connectedness these people feel to the people — in front of them, behind them, beside them — who they don’t even know. What happens next in Martin Place is the annual great shaking of a nation’s soul.

They don’t know it but each one in the assembled hundreds brings with them — in their pockets, in the folds of their wet raincoat, in the short whirl of the warm breath that leaves their lips — the sediments of a still young and premature nation that is often said to have been born entirely in 1901 and then come of age in 1915.

It is not yet 4am but here they are. It is an annual performance and to attend it is to perform being Australian, which is not to suggest the respect, the recognition and the sadness is any less real. But it is a performance with all the trappings and gendered roles of any other kind of performance to will the nation into being.

When we commemorate the fallen of Gallipoli, we talk of the ordinary men, who, in the words of NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, ‘unexpected and unprompted, defined the spirit of a nation.’ Iemma said in his ANZAC Day address: They were ‘Ordinary Aussie Blokes…Who stood up and showed the world what its newest country was made of.’

But in contrast to these Ordinary Aussie Blokes are the grieving mothers, widows, sisters and daughters, half a world away, who are assigned the role of mourning for them. As part of the performance we sometimes mention they baked Anzac biscuits and knitted socks. But that feels like the extent of their participation. We seldom mention in this annual performance their contribution on the home and war front.

The digger is the single most defining image of Australian-ness and yet women are excluded. What to make of it? The ANZAC narrative feels like it is part of an old Australia. It is a narrative that speaks to us only until about 1950. It doesn’t account for all that has happened since then, nor does it seem to notice our multitudes. After all, the digger image excludes Indigenous Australians, migrants and males who do not conform to this brand of masculinity as well. And for some of us, while there is admiration and respect, this feels like a shallow performance.

Back in Martin Place, ninety one years later, the crowd falls completely silent when the lights of the clock tower turn off at 4:10am. An address is made by a Rear Admiral, prayers are said by the Principal Chaplain, hymns are sung and the wreaths are laid. The president of the War Widows Guild of Australia is the last to lay a wreath. Perhaps there is something maternal in the way she bends, in the way the wreath leaves her hands and the momentary pause before she steps away and walks back to her seat. She is a woman who wears her husband and father’s medals.

An Able Seaman, the only woman in uniform with a part to play at this service, sings the anthem. She sings both the New Zealand and Australian anthems in a wonderful soprano that seems to float above hundreds. And then the official party leaves, the masses slowly disperse, looking for coffee and breakfast. The annual national performance has ended. Under a grey Sydney sky the clock tower reads 4:45 and its lights are turned back on to illuminate Martin Place and the sacred Cenotaph.