Anzac spirit shining bright amid COVID-19 lockdown

GallipoIi, Villers-Bretonneux, Hellfire Pass and all Australian war memorials around the world are eerily quiet; likewise our towns and cities on an Anzac Day like no other. But in the absence of the traditional rituals — dawn services, the marches and the camaraderie in RSL clubs and pubs as veterans enjoy a few drinks and share memories of fallen mates and a few games of two-up — the Anzac spirit is burning as brightly as ever. Bunkered down across the long weekend, when socialising, sport, beach gatherings and cinemas are out of bounds, Australians have turned their attention to our Anzac history.

As Scott Morrison writes in our pages, we look to past generations this Anzac Day and ask “How did they do it?” and “What can we learn for our times?” The answer is in the values that underpinned their service: endurance, courage, mateship and sacrifice. Those values came to the fore most recently, the Prime Minister wrote, “as more than 6500 ADF personnel, including 3000 reservists who were called up, assisted Australians during the devastating Black Summer fires … and now more than 2200 personnel are working side-by-side with nurses, public health officials and local police, on the ground in our cities, suburbs and towns, supporting our national effort to combat COVID-19.”

Of the generations whose Anzac Days were spent in wartime, Depression, prosperity and peace, the people who would best relate to today’s predicament — anxiety, disrupted working lives, masks, shuttered cafes and the tireless dedication of medicos — are the original Anzacs and their compatriots. Out of a population of five million, of whom 60,000 were lost in battle, the first Anzacs returned home to face the Spanish flu. That raging pandemic, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, reached Australia in 1919, claiming 12,000 lives.

It broke hearts and larger-than-life spirits, such as those of Ballarat-born cartoonist Will Dyson, whose adroit pen captured the feats and fortitude of Australians on the mud and blood-soaked battlefields of the Western Front. Dyson, as historian Ross McMullin writes in Inquirer, drew “grief and grime, fatigue and fatalism, resignation and resilience, war-weary soldiers with distant gazes recalling a sunny homeland, or coming out dazed from the indescribable, barely able to keep moving”. As a war artist, he resolved to “never draw a line except to show war as the filthy business it is”.

His hardest battle arose postwar, however, when his talented artist wife Ruby (the sister of artists Norman, Percy and Lionel Lindsay) caught what appeared to be a cold after the couple was reunited in London in February 1919. Her condition deteriorated. Dyson, increasingly frantic, summoned doctors and nurses but Ruby died of Spanish flu on March 12, aged 33. “Her death came after the Armistice, when it seemed that we might dare to hope again,” Dyson wrote. His poem, Lament, berated the “griefless Gods” for ruining his life that “lacking her lacks all that gave it worth”.

Events such as wars and pandemics become historical turning points, as Dyson demonstrated in his famous cartoon on the Treaty of Versailles in 1920. That flawed agreement, his prescient drawing predicted, would cause children to weep 20 years later. Viewed from 2040, the strategic, economic and lifestyle changes triggered by COVID-19 are likely to be of intense interest. From today’s perspective, those potential changes are concerning, although Australia, through good leadership and medical guidance and community effort, is coming through far better than most countries. That good fortune must not be taken for granted. Nor should those whose lives have been lost, the grief of their loved ones and the hardship inflicted on so many be overlooked.

As Anzac Day dawns, 105 years after the Gallipoli landing, the phrase “Lest we forget”, as always, seems almost redundant. Australians never would. Those who gave their all are being remembered in suburban streets, in unit complexes and in farmhouses by those Lighting Up the Dawn, at altars in empty churches, and by families leafing through photographs and looking at medals won in hard-fought battles. The eternal flames flicker. All being well, the throngs of people, especially the young, will be out again next Anzac Day.