A DIGGER'S GHOST

A Digger’s ghost crossed my path this week. And, eerily, it was around the same time that Australia’s Nashos held their annual march to The Shrine to commemorate National Servicemen’s Day.

An acquaintance came up to me in my local pub and showed me a khaki, rough, canvas pouch from World War Two. I’m not, and have never been, a soldier but it looked like an ammunition pouch. He bought it at a disposal store for two dollars.

When he got home he opened it and found a letter from a country wife to a soldier husband in World War Two.

It made my heart ache when I read it this week nearly sixty years later.

She wrote about their baby teething. About sheep being sheared. And how he had saved so much money at the Army canteen that their combined savings “are now twenty two pounds”.

And she wrote about the weather.

“My darling husband. Well, we have had one of the worst days in history today. I’ve never seen such wind and dust and the dirt was so thick on the back verandah we could have planted plants on it.”

And the nine-page hand-written loving letter concluded thus:

“Don’t worry about us darling. We are getting on fine. I try to keep busy all day and it keeps from worrying too much and I find that time is just flying. Another eleven months and one week and you will be home. Take very good care of yourself and please darling don’t work too hard. Your ever loving wife".

That epistle from the wife of a Digger made me think, with Anzac Day looming again, of the sacrifices that Australian women made for the war effort in WW1 and WW2 even though they stayed at home.

In World War One (the war to end all wars) their husbands died by the thousands. Country towns were gutted. Stripped of their manhood. And back then war widows didn’t go out and dance and flirt and show passion and marry again. They were condemned to the same death their brave soldier husbands had faced. It just took them a lot more years.

For many Australian women, especially country women, even the crippled survivors of war didn’t, couldn’t, help their families.

They came home gassed and trammelled and tortured with nightmares nobody could imagine. And even though Basil Fawlty could make jokes in a TV series about “don’t mention the war” it was actually true.

Husbands became strangers and marriages became battle zones. I have friends whose tortured fathers could not ever mention what they had seen or what they had done. And many “turned to the grog” as they used to say.

The letter I read by fluke has really troubled me. I feel I have intruded on somebody but I also feel I want to tell their story. This is real. This is our history.

(Coincidentally, The Shrine is holding a series of lectures next month about World War Two in their new audio visual area. Go see it).

Two years ago I went to Gallipoli. I stood at Anzac Cove and thought: How did any Aussie or New Zealand soldier survive? I climbed the cliff. Marvelled at their bravery and fumed over the British military stupidity that not only sent them there but then, stubbornly, kept them there for useless, tragic, senseless bloody months.

Read Les Carlyon’s awesome, damning, telling book about it.

I have written before that one of my most treasured possessions is on the desk where I write this. It is a piece, a sliver, of railway track. It comes from Hellfire Pass on the Burma-Thai railway built under Japanese brutality with Aussie blood.

It was given to me by a man whose back was almost physically broken there then but like the other Aussie POWs, his spirit wasn’t.

Those of us who never had to go to war should thank whatever deity you believe in. There are women still alive in Australia today who did not see their husbands for four years! There are Australian women who did not know they were widows for months, even years.

We have seen emotional, and understandable, TV footage of young sailors heading off to the Gulf War and leaving their wives and children at dockside. Imagine, pre mobile phone and text messages, if you were not going to talk to a cherished partner for four years?

I keep harking back to the hand written nine-page letter from a country wife to her soldier husband.

It is so simplistic. So loving. So accepting. Her husband is at war and she writes about their son climbing out of his cot.

“Imagine our surprise when that young man came stalking back into the kitchen. He climbed out of his cot on to the bed, off the bed and out he comes…’

It conjures such a domestic picture. But the Dad is missing because he is off, risking his life, in our country’s service. It is a sad but real frozen frame of what happened back then. And why those of us who didn’t have to do it should respect and cherish those who did and do.

When I was a kid, the night before every Anzac Day, I used to cut some cardboard as a shield and polish my Dad’s war medals with Brasso. Every Anzac Day I used to play the drum roll to the trumpet’s Last Post in the school military band when we attended Anzac services at the cemetery and the Cenotaph. I would love to do it again.

February 13, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004