UNREPRESENTATIVE SWILL

Paul Keating is wrong, insultingly wrong, in his attack on Gallipoli which is effectively an attack on the bravery and mateship and sacrifice of Australians at war. He is painfully wrong – even though part of what he says is right. It is true that technically Gallipoli was a disaster. The World War One equivalent of Dunkirk. It is true that thousands of young Australians died in a hopeless venture in which their British –and Australian-- military leaders failed them. Men Like Churchill and Monash had unnecessary blood on their hands even if they did go on to redeem themselves in later battles.

But to deride the Anzac spirit and the self-sacrifice as ‘utter nonsense’ is unforgivable. Last night at a book launch he also scoffed at Australians who make that Anzac Day pilgrimage to what we see, quite rightly, as hallowed ground.

Keating says ‘I have never been to Gallipoli and I never will’.  Those of us who have are ‘misguided’. Well, this misguided Aussie went to Anzac Cove and stood at dawn on the rocky beach  and stared up sheer seemingly impenetrable cliffs. I imagined the Turkish machine guns dug in at the top and thought ‘The diggers didn’t have a hope in hell’.

And yet they got to places like Lone Pine and they held on. Sometimes the Anzac trenches and the Turkish trenches were only feet apart. They clung there in the mud and the flies amid the rotting corpses of friend and foe—and when told to go over the top again they did. And thousands of them died.

There were acts of bravery of such magnitude you can hardly imagine it. Obviously Keating can’t. Or he is oblivious to it. I hope somebody gives him Les Carlyon’s book for Christmas. Or maybe a collection of Charles Bean’s Anzac despatches.

Strangely, Keating once gave a moving speech about the Anzac spirit when as Prime Minister he welcomed home the remains of an unknown soldier from World War One.

He said that with the Anzacs ‘we have gained a legend; a story of bravery and sacrifice, and with it a deeper faith in ourselves and our democracy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian.’

Obviously, after being rejected by the voters and flung out of office, an embittered Keating has changed his mind. Pity. Paul Keating once called the Senate ‘unrepresentative swill’.  When it comes to his latest views on the Anzacs that term now applies to him.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008