At the time of writing, our pandemic lockdown is in week 5. We are not allowed to leave home except to go shopping for essential supplies, or to go to the doctor or chemist. We are allowed to exercise outside of our homes, by walking and biking in our neighbourhoods. We have bent the rules a tiny bit by driving to the local cemetery three kilometers away, where we can wander freely while still observing the requisite physical distancing mandated by the government.
One of the pandemic initiatives to spring up worldwide was to encourage people to put teddy bears in windows as a nod to the book 'We're going on a bear hunt' by Michael Rosen. While small children cannot even play on their local playground, they could go for a 'bear hunt' around their local neighbourhood.
As Easter approached, the Prime Minister assured children that the Easter Bunny (and the Tooth Fairy) was an essential worker, so was allowed to work over Easter - but added a reminder that he might be a bit busy, so might not make it to their house (and parents who hadn't stocked up on Easter eggs pre lockdown breathed a sigh of relief)
Easter eggs started finding their way into windows or in chalk drawings on footpaths and fences. A favourite in our very Westie neighbourhood was 'Happy Easter Egg" Unintentional, I'm sure, but amusing nonetheless.
Saturday was ANZAC Day, and in a time where gatherings of any sort are not allowed, people went to the end of their street at 6am for their own personal 'dawn service.' There were reports of a bugle being heard across the whole suburb playing Reveille. People decorated their fences and windows with poppies. The creativity was joy to behold, but do people really know what this all means?
I do not get up for dawn anything, and ANZAC Day is no different. The few years after my Dad died it became a necessary part of my grieving process, but the pain faded and the sense of duty was no longer there.
On ANZAC Day itself, Nyah and I went up to the local cemetery and visited the memorial there. It is always interesting to observe social practices, whether or not we choose to partake in them. I was drawn to an information board which talked about the construction of the memorial, and about some of the adjacent graves. The Browne family lost four of their five sons. It is a loss incomprehensible to us today.
Just over a week prior to lockdown coming into effect, we visted Te Rau Aroha - a museum dedicated to Māori contribution to the armed forces, and the heavy price they have paid. It was a solemn and contemplative place to visit. My eldest son is now eighteen years old - the age he could have been conscripted into the armed forces and sent into the unknown - and possibly to die - like so many young Māori men in the service of their colonisers. Like the Browne brothers were. Parents the world over have experienced this heartbreak. Here we are locked into our 'bubbles'* to fight a war on a pathogen, but we have each other and we have relative comfort and safety.
As ANZAC Day dawned, I felt the grief of humanity. Grief for the boys who never came home a hundred years ago. Grief for my own father's lost youth and what it took from my whole family. Grief for my own son who is safe but who I have not seen for over five weeks. I miss him.
We have no concept of the losses families have experienced through war - especially World War I. Maybe the nationalistic fervor, poppy imagery and silhouettes of soldiers with heads bowed are us trying to make sense of it all.
We cry, we sing, we get up at dawn, and in the middle of a pandemic, we put poppies on our fences instead of in our lapels.
*'Bubble' refers to the small unit of people we can be a part of during the pandemic lockdown - our own 'bubble' is myself, Nyah and my two youngest children who live with us half of the time. Due to their movement between homes, our bubble technically also includes my two eldest children, their father and his partner. Our bubble does not extend beyond this, and we are not able to see any other family or friends.
Showing posts with label ANZAC Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ANZAC Day. Show all posts
Monday 27 April 2020
Wednesday 25 April 2012
My strange ANZAC Day
I can only make assumptions about what most Kiwis (and Australians) do on ANZAC Day, as I feel like I'm not one of them.
ANZAC Day might be just a holiday, perhaps for some its about getting up early for dawn service, then heading home to spend it with their families.
As a child, and particularly, a teenager, I dreaded ANZAC Day. All that day meant to me was my ex-serviceman father leaving early in the morning, and returning home later in the day absolutely smashed off his face, and sleeping it off in the garage. As a child it was weird...as a teenager it was humiliating.
Of course, Dad coming home from the RSA drunk was nothing new, and was simply part of our lives growing up. I constantly worried about what other families and my friends would think of me.
In Dad's later years, as I became more aware, I started to understand the toll war had taken on him. Dad served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps for twenty years, and saw active service in Malaya, Borneo, and, perhaps most significantly, Vietnam.
My self-centred humiliation about my father's behaviour on ANZAC Day, or any other day of the week where alcoholism ruled the roost, changed to contempt for governments who send young men to ill conceived wars to have them return battered and scarred, with wounds we cannot see.
As Dad grew older, I came to accept he was unwell, but putting up a jolly good fight to live life to the fullest in his post-Army life.
By the time he passed away in February 2010, we had made our peace, and I am satisfied that he left this world knowing his family loved him. On his final night, I remember feeling all the bitterness for how he had made me feel over so many years simply fall away.
On 25 April 2010 I attended my first ANZAC Day Dawn Service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum - the same place my father marched every year since the late 1970s.
I find ANZAC Day as the rest of the country sees it very difficult to understand . Rhetoric about the 'dawn of our nationhood' or how young men 'fought for our freedom' sounds hollow in a country where children are living in poverty, suffering third world diseases, public assets are about to be sold, workers are being starved into servitude to multi-millionaire employers, and huge tracts of land can be sold to the highest foreign bidder.
I am sure the young men who went to their all too early graves in 1915 - and in subsequent wars - believed they were saving us. I know my Dad did, even if the facts about the war he served in tell a different story.
So, ANZAC Day becomes my father's memorial. I do not hear Reveille and think of our 'nationhood.' I hear it and think of my father polishing up the copper coffee urn he would take to the RSA. I don't feel stirrings of patriotism when I hear 'Advance Australia Fair,' but remember his insistence on saying 'daance' rather than 'darnce' even when everything else he said sounded like a Kiwi.
I think its important to remember our lost soldiers, but perhaps I don't think of them in the same way as everyone else - I think of them more as pawns in the greater global scandal that is war, rather than heroes, conquering or otherwise.
The war made my father a shattered pawn. That despite all the damage war did, for the most part, he gave us a happy childhood, and that is what makes him a hero to me.
ANZAC Day might be just a holiday, perhaps for some its about getting up early for dawn service, then heading home to spend it with their families.
As a child, and particularly, a teenager, I dreaded ANZAC Day. All that day meant to me was my ex-serviceman father leaving early in the morning, and returning home later in the day absolutely smashed off his face, and sleeping it off in the garage. As a child it was weird...as a teenager it was humiliating.
Of course, Dad coming home from the RSA drunk was nothing new, and was simply part of our lives growing up. I constantly worried about what other families and my friends would think of me.
In Dad's later years, as I became more aware, I started to understand the toll war had taken on him. Dad served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps for twenty years, and saw active service in Malaya, Borneo, and, perhaps most significantly, Vietnam.
My self-centred humiliation about my father's behaviour on ANZAC Day, or any other day of the week where alcoholism ruled the roost, changed to contempt for governments who send young men to ill conceived wars to have them return battered and scarred, with wounds we cannot see.
As Dad grew older, I came to accept he was unwell, but putting up a jolly good fight to live life to the fullest in his post-Army life.
By the time he passed away in February 2010, we had made our peace, and I am satisfied that he left this world knowing his family loved him. On his final night, I remember feeling all the bitterness for how he had made me feel over so many years simply fall away.
On 25 April 2010 I attended my first ANZAC Day Dawn Service at the Auckland War Memorial Museum - the same place my father marched every year since the late 1970s.
I find ANZAC Day as the rest of the country sees it very difficult to understand . Rhetoric about the 'dawn of our nationhood' or how young men 'fought for our freedom' sounds hollow in a country where children are living in poverty, suffering third world diseases, public assets are about to be sold, workers are being starved into servitude to multi-millionaire employers, and huge tracts of land can be sold to the highest foreign bidder.
I am sure the young men who went to their all too early graves in 1915 - and in subsequent wars - believed they were saving us. I know my Dad did, even if the facts about the war he served in tell a different story.
So, ANZAC Day becomes my father's memorial. I do not hear Reveille and think of our 'nationhood.' I hear it and think of my father polishing up the copper coffee urn he would take to the RSA. I don't feel stirrings of patriotism when I hear 'Advance Australia Fair,' but remember his insistence on saying 'daance' rather than 'darnce' even when everything else he said sounded like a Kiwi.
I think its important to remember our lost soldiers, but perhaps I don't think of them in the same way as everyone else - I think of them more as pawns in the greater global scandal that is war, rather than heroes, conquering or otherwise.
The war made my father a shattered pawn. That despite all the damage war did, for the most part, he gave us a happy childhood, and that is what makes him a hero to me.
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