Patrick Carlyon: If Sydney can have Mardi Gras, we can have Anzac march

It’s telling that Dan Andrews has not vowed to find a way for Anzac Day march to go ahead, when other states have striven to find a way.

We found a way last Anzac Day.

It was not the dawn service at the Shrine, where tens of thousands gather in the inky light.

It was not the St Kilda Road march, followed by timeless images of two-up rings and sudsy pots of beer.

Last year’s Anzac Day was another casualty of COVID’s perverse hold.

In its place we had Light Up The Dawn.

The buglers in suburban streets, and the candles at the mailbox, were innovative consolations for the usual bonds of reverie and mateship. A success, certainly. The best that could be managed in extreme circumstances.

It need not be this way again.

Ten weeks before April 25, the Victorian RSL cancelled this year’s Anzac Day march, citing the complications of restrictions.

At the time, 11 Australians were in hospital with COVID. Victoria was about to embark on another misplaced lockdown. Being together still demands, as the slogan goes, staying apart.

The RSL’s desire for certainty in such uncertain times is understandable. Yet the Australian Open tennis went ahead, with crowds set at up to 30,000 people, despite more tangles than an episode of Holey Moley.

Veterans march to the Shrine of Remembrance for the Anzac Day march in Melbourne.

The AFL hopes and expects crowds to attend matches again. As it should: the future, however blurred, seems brighter than 12 months ago.

Vaccines have arrived. The last lockdown was not extended. Life as we once knew it seems more likely than at any time in 2020.

But as the Anzac Day cancelling shows, we are no longer the can-do state.

Today’s Victoria is foreign to the vision of La Trobe or the pace of Kennett.

It is a fretful place, cramped in a defensive crouch, where the masses bow to the whims of health mandarins and optimism is to be discouraged.

Sydneysiders rightly mock us. Melbourne has been uncoupled from the rest of the country. Other states have striven to find a way on Anzac Day.

Sydney has a 500 maximum for its CBD march. The limit is beside the point. Sydney will have an Anzac Day march.

Events in Adelaide, Darwin and Canberra are planned. RSL South Australia Anzac Day committee chair Ian Smith promised to do his “level best” for an Adelaide march. In nodding to restrictions, four veterans instead of the usual six will march abreast.

Fears for the safety of 12,000-odd marchers were used to justify the Melbourne decision.

But the efforts of other states, their bold attempts at staging something, anything, reiterates the sense Melbourne cannot get things done anymore. Victoria has become a label for torpor and fatigue.

We have drifted from those states where everyday life has been preserved as much as possible. Victoria has abandoned the bearings NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian holds so fiercely.

She viewed the city’s Mardi Gras parade on March 6 as an “opportunity”, not a threat. Almost 5000 marchers will turn out at the Sydney Cricket Ground, a testament to the possible in contrast to Victoria’s preoccupation with the impossible.

Cancelling this Anzac Day march was a premature surrender. On January 26, thousands walked through the city streets as a show of protest for the so-called Invasion Day. The event was mostly marked for its uneventfulness — no arrests or cases of COVID.

Protesters were allowed to congregate at state parliament for the rally against Australia Day. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Premier Daniel Andrews has said little about Anzac Day. Victoria’s Veterans’ Affairs Minister Darren Chester said he was disappointed. Then he said cancelling was the right thing to do, alluding to the bureaucratic snarls of “ticketing” an event for more than 1000 people.

Not worth the effort? Too hard? Perhaps it is for the RSL, given the extraordinary demands placed by Andrews government edicts.

It’s telling Andrews has not vowed to find a way. It invites questions of priorities: the most poignant of events skittled when other occasions get salvaged?

Perhaps, as one newspaper letter writer suggested, Anzac Day organisers should call it Veterans’ Grand Final Day.

Vocal critics have suggested cancelling Anzac Day conflicts with the Anzac spirit. The critics are right at least to the extent that the perceived expedience (or cravenness) of the response hardly invokes Great War folklore.

One cannot imagine Sir John Monash, in planning the (successful) assault at Hamel in 1918, abandoning the dangerous attack because of the paperwork.

RSL Victoria chief executive Jamie Twidale said staging the march was “not in the public interest”.

Many Diggers, who are not all rheumy-eyed men being wheeled in a chair, and their families disagree.

They would understand if an outbreak forced a cancellation in the days before. But to yield to the fear that it might go wrong depicts a jarring lack of commitment to the most noble of occasions. Monash would not be amused.

There is some hope, given reports that talks continue between the RSL and government. There is chatter of age and crowd limits as a compromise solution.

Could anything less suffice?

As the cancelled plans for Moomba got lifted, so the powers-that-be should arrange something better, indeed, something bolder, than lying down for the threat of an unseen enemy for Anzac Day.

Lest we forego.

Patrick Carlyon is a Herald Sun columnist