Page 18 - Luce 2021

P oint of View

Remember honestly

Dr Powell’s final article for Luce is taken from a In our generation, we may
sermon preached in the Chapel of Trinity College avoid the personal cost,
and Janet Clarke Hall on Anzac Day 2021. but we are implicated.
Knowing what we know,
given how little we know,
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: how do we remember
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. them?
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them. * May I offer two stories
– not Trinity stories or
On Anzac Day, we tell ourselves, we will remember them. Janet Clarke Hall stories,
But remember them how, exactly? Most Australians with although there are plenty
direct experience of war now come, as migrants, and from of those – but stories of
other nations, their memories fuelled and darkened by two young men who went
other wars: from Timor Leste to Afghanistan; from Syria through Ormond College,
to Sri Lanka; from Cambodia to Macedonia; and from so one at the very start of
many other nations scarred by war. Some, fleeing war, are the Anzac legend, and one much closer to now.
imprisoned by our government, in our name, on arrival.
Many generations of Trinity students will remember their
Australia has changed a great deal since the time when our delight as the victorious coxswain was carried aloft into the
Anzac traditions were established. Then, we lived in what Dining Hall on the Mervyn Bourne Higgins Shield after the
was almost uniformly a Christian, Anglo-Celtic society, trying intercollegiate boat race. I doubt they knew anything at all
desperately to make sense of the sheer loss of the Great of the life of Mervyn Bourne Higgins, who was twenty-nine
War. Anzac was more personal, more problematic, more years of age when he was shot dead by a Turkish sniper on
contested. In the 1920s the young men of my own school 23 December 1916. An accomplished rower, and a student
sang: of French and German, he had progressed from Ormond to
Bailliol College, Oxford before returning to Australia to take
Red blood of youth calls from far distant Flanders up legal practice, enlisting, at the commencement of the Great
Calls o’er the sea from Gallipoli shore War, as a second Lieutenant in the Light Horse.
Loud rings the voice of the deathless departed
Honour the Work that we honoured of yore. ** Neither Merv’s father, Justice H.B. Higgins, nor his family, ever
recovered from Merv’s death. Justice Higgins spent the rest of
For that generation the ‘deathless departed’ were not an his life finding ways to remember his son, pursuing a dialogue
idea – they were the fathers, the sons, the teachers, the with his dead son who lived on only in letters, objects and
classmates, the brothers who never came home. finally through a visit to Merv’s gravesite eighteen thousand
miles from home.
Today, Anzac commemoration itself has become something
of an industry, retaining and recapitulating much of the form Justice Higgins’ unresolved, unredeemed grief became
and structure placed upon the day more than a century ago. all-consuming. He became the President of the World
Disarmament Movement and devoted the rest of his life to the
Yet then as now, we share a national history scarred by cause of peace. There was no glory in Anzac Day for him, and
the damage of war. Over the last twenty years Australia I wonder what he would make of the dead, forgotten memory
prosecuted wars continuously in Iraq and Afghanistan, with of the shield which honours his son, the young College rower
surprisingly little public contest or comment. Far fewer shot dead among sixty thousand Australians killed in the Great
civilians as a portion of society know those Australian War. ‘My grief,’ Higgins wrote, ‘has condemned me to hard
soldiers who have lost their lives during these conflicts, or labour for the rest of my life’.
the far larger number who have taken their lives afterwards.
Today, the damage is mostly hidden away. My other story is of Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Johnston,
who has kept up his friendship with me through his military
Then as now, ex-soldiers shared the burden through the service in Iraq, and then Afghanistan, and then Iraq once
humour and camaraderie of other ex-service men – but more. At an Ormond Anzac Service, he shared his own
seldom, or never, with their wives, mothers, fathers, or feelings about the legacy, and the legend of Anzac:
children. As author Judith Allen has noted:
Like many young veterans, I feel slightly uncomfortable on
The interpersonal brunt both of the First World War ANZAC Day. While I marvel at the crowds I am struck by a
and of the inadequacies of public provision for this delicate irony – perhaps most of the people who marched
population of disturbed young men fell disproportionately down Swanston Street today have never actually served in
on Australian women. Women’s bodies and minds war. Most Australians have never been more distant from
absorbed much of the shock, pain and craziness the soldiers who serve tonight in Iraq, Afghanistan and
unleashed by the war experience.*** elsewhere. Yet as a nation, we seem to draw solace – we
derive a sense of identity from pinning on medals earned
by our ancestors. We revel in an ANZAC myth, which is
18 LUCE Number 20 2021