Lucy Carne: Why we must never let Anzac Day vanish into inconsequence

As the years pass, Anzac Day has become a day to have off work, but for me it is about the pain my family and so many others endured, writes Lucy Carne.

Why do we still want to remember? It’s a question I ask myself as I attempt to explain the concept of Anzac Day to my 6-year-old beyond biscuits and a day off school.

As an inner-city millennial who has never witnessed conflict and has no concept of loss and hardship, a national day for seemingly ancient wars should mean little to me beyond the minor annoyance that my local cafe will be shut.

And yet, I can’t help but feel a deep, undeniable need to stop and reflect.

I’ve never felt comfortable with the jingoistic notion of “celebrating” Anzac Day and the spectacle of synthetic sentimentality.

Patrons take part in a traditional game of Two-Up on Anzac Day. Picture: AAP Image/Joel Carrett

Watching my self-indulgent 20-year-old mates get hammered in honour of the “fallen” never sat right.

The remembrance industry, like promoting the sale of Anzac biscuits, whiffs of profiteering from a desperate symbol of home clutched by malnourished, shell-shocked men in muddy trenches.

I’ve watched sunrise over the Gallipoli Peninsula surrounded by Turkish and Australian families sitting together in gentle reflection, only for the silence to be broken by the cringeful chant of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi”.

And yet, I still want to remember.

My great-grandfather Percy Carne, a farrier and horseman, served in the Light Horse Regiment – first in the 5th and then the 4th.

Private Percy Carne, of Queensland, who served in the 5th and 4th Australian Light Horse Regiment in WWI. Picture: Supplied

He left his family in Queensland’s Gulf Country and together with his brothers set off for what they believed would be a great adventure with their mates.

His eldest brother Jack was blown up when a shell hit his trench in Belgium.

His second-eldest brother Bert lay disoriented in a shell hole in “no man’s land” in Belgium. Bert was never the same again, according to my family. For the rest of his life, he battled, like so many other returned servicemen, with what we now know was undiagnosed, untreated PTSD.

A photo claiming to show the Australian 4th Light Horse Regiment galloping towards the Turkish lines at Beersheba at dusk on October 31, 1917. Picture: Supplied

Squadrons of the 4th Australian Light Horse in formation on horseback at Gaza. Picture: Australian War Memorial/P03631.008

My great-grandfather Percy rode in the last great cavalry charge of modern warfare – the Battle of Beersheba.

Armed with bayonets against guns, he was ordered to charge or die trying as the Light Horse galloped on Turkish trenches.

Somehow, he survived, and at the end of the war returned to Australia carrying with him shrapnel embedded in his back alongside the deep pain of war.

He and his Light Horse mates refused to march on Anzac Day.

The packed pubs full of rowdy punters was a slap in the face after the death and destruction they had witnessed.

When the next war came, he begged his eldest son Roy not to enlist, but the lure of the RAAF was too hard to resist.

Having just turned 22, Roy Carne was killed serving as a navigator in Bomber Command over France.

My great-grandfather never spoke of his beloved son’s death. He never spoke of what he saw on the battlefields.

But there were days when my own grandfather returned home from school and was met on the front steps by his anxious mother who told him, whatever he did, he was not to enter the house as screaming wails of heartbreak came from his father’s room.

Four unidentified Australian Light Horsemen and their bivouac in the desert. Picture: Australian War Memorial/B02301

The flames of his war nightmare burnt to the very end.

Dying as an old man in hospital, my great-grandfather would call out deliriously to his Light Horse mates on the front line.

To him, war was a brutal disgrace that laid waste to so many he loved.

War destroyed his brothers, his son and his friends.

These men were not “fallen”. They were slaughtered.

And that is why I remember today.

I remember my family, and the countless others like mine, who suffered unquantifiable pain.

Sir Peter Cosgrove, in his final Anzac Day address as Governor-General in 2019, implored young Australians to be future custodians of the Anzac legacy, saying: “It is by our presence to say to the shades of those countless men and women who did not come home or who made it back but who have now passed and to say to their modern representatives, the ones around the nation who today march behind their banners: ‘You matter. What you did matters. You are in our hearts. Let it be always thus’.”

For Australia, a country that, along with New Zealand, proportionately lost more people than any other nation, Anzac Day must not vanish into inconsequence but remain a vital ceremony that underpins our history.

Not in a bombastic celebration of war glorification, but as a quiet, compassionate reflection of loss and damage left behind by wars.

“Never again” was not a guarantee. It was a hope.

That is why I remember.