Writing Blog

20230426 ANZAC Day

April 26, 2023, 3:00pm

Yesterday (April 25) was ANZAC Day in Australia, when we commemorate those who have died in war, fighting for Australia. It is commemorated on April 25 as that was the day of the first landings at ANZAC Cove in World War I, where too many young men were killed on the whims of a bunch of English morons in London sending them to their deaths (Winston Churchill was one of them; he is not well regarded in this country). Yes, it was not just Australians and New Zealanders killed; thousands of UK soldiers were as well, plus members of other Commonwealth armies. But the Australians and Kiwis were sent onto the beach - the wrong beach - first, on open sand while Turkish soldiers were reinforced at the top of cliffs and hills with lots of weaponry.

(FWIW: ANZAC = Australia & New Zealand Army Corps)

Just a side note - please do not say, "Happy ANZAC Day," to an Australian. It is not a day of celebration, but a day when we remember young lives lost. It would be like saying to a United Estation, "Happy 9/11!"

Anyway, out of this conflict, Australians came to form a friendship with the Turks, who regarded our men as brave, and came to regard England and its rulers as morons, and we have never trusted them since. Many like the Royal Family, but the UK government - nasty bunch of morons. And Tony Blair with the Gulf War shows that things have not changed.

Anyway, I went to the local dawn service (3 of my 4 great-grandfathers fought in WW1, and one met his future wife in the war, as she was a nurse in the UK), both my grandfathers fought in PNG in WW2, my father was a conscript in Vietnam, so I go to the dawn service for them.

Well, this year, I had a nice surprise.

I wrote a free-form poem about the ANZACs a few years ago, and I gave a copy to my uncle who passed away last year. This year, his best friend read it out at the dawn service before the Words of Remembrance.

The Words of Remembrance, by the way, are from the fourth stanza of the poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

I received no money, and just a word that I'd written it, but maybe that was my proudest writing moment.

Maybe.