Almanac Life: In Memory of the Fallen

 

 

When I was a kid it never occurred to me that they were anything important.  Mum had explained to me what the wrought iron words ‘In Memory of the Fallen’ meant, that it was about remembering soldiers who had died in two World Wars, but I was a child, and my world was safe, and all that was ancient history. So those pillars with the two brass plaques and gates became part of the landscape. We drove past them every day on the school bus, they were nothing special.

They were the gates to the footy oval at Paruna, a tiny dusty outpost on a railway line where the train would rumble in once a week to load grain, then drop the mail on the platform before it rumbled out again. It’s in the middle of mallee country where the debate about Goyder’s line is somewhat redundant because you’re pretty much standing on it, so rainfall is marginal. At best.

Over the railway line and just in behind the footy oval was the school, Brown’s Well District Area School, so named after Mr Brown who apparently sank an important well – because when you are in subsistence farming country a good well deserves some recognition. The classes at Brown’s Well ran from kindy through to Year 10, with all of us, at every age, shipped in on big yellow buses. The school’s colours were green and gold and the house teams were Paraweena (Green) and Milparinka (Gold).  The green team was the best of course.  No debate.

We had a small patch of school lawn with a concrete cricket pitch in the middle, and the greenkeeper was one of the farming dads who sometimes turned the sprinklers on and occasionally ran a slasher over it. But just on the other side of the school, with a tiny strip of scrub in between, was the well-tended footy oval with its perimeter fence, goal posts and fancy memorial gates. It had one light stand and a corrugated iron scorer’s box, and over on the other side were the netball courts. It was the home of the Bombers. The brown and gold Brown’s Well Bombers.

We had school sports days on the footy oval. Paraweena (yay!!!!) versus Milparinka (booo!) and we waved streamers and sang our war chants (Paraweena, Paraweena, ra-ta-ta. Paraweena, Paraweena, best-by-far) and we’d go home sun burnt and exhausted.  Our PE teacher, Mr Garrard, marked out the 100m sprint under the light pole, and the long jump was contested in the dirt behind the scorer’s box. The mums ran the canteen and there were cupcakes and honey crackles and there weren’t many dads because it was usually seeding time, but those who were there looked after the sausage sizzle.

The footy oval was bigger – and better – than the school lawn, so Mr Garrard walked us there for PE classes too. I remember him teaching us to play golf, then sending us into the perimeter scrub to retrieve the balls. (No risk assessment for snakes required in those days.) We did high jump and kicked soccer balls. The girls beat the boys at netball, and the boys beat the girls at footy. We smashed softballs with aluminium bats and belted each other with little fabric bean bags as we ran around using orange witches hats like megaphones.

In the early 1980s the footy club and the school combined forces to upgrade the clubhouse into a shared facility. There was enough money to build an indoor basketball court with a timber floor that was also marked up for volleyball. And badminton. Suddenly the PE choices were even broader. We called it The Complex, and we did a school sleepover when it was newly opened. We excitedly rolled out sleeping bags on the parquetry floor with the smell of estapol thick in the air while Mrs Hampel, the Librarian (and also a School Mum), cooked our dinner from the footy canteen.

The Complex had a stage at one end and the school officially moved in with the end of year concerts. Kids sat cross-legged on the floor while parents sat on plastic chairs lined up across the basketball court, with the tea urn and light supper in the adjoining footy clubrooms. When I was in Year 9 the P&F organised a Melbourne Cup luncheon with a parade of wedding gowns and, at age fourteen, I modelled old Mrs Freeman’s gown from 1920 something. I don’t remember the detail, but I know it was a perfect fit with lots of buttons and a fish tail train. Lustred satin.  No lace.  The following year I was a debutante in the same building and I danced The Pride of Erin (one lap traditional, one lap progressive), but this time the dress was all nylon and frills, paired with a bouffant hair do.

And then I was in Year 10 and schooling meant moving into Loxton. There was no more school bus and I had to swap my green and gold for a maroon blazer and tie, then stand at assembly alongside hundreds of other students, none of whom I knew. But Mr Garrard changed schools at the same time, so at least I knew the PE teacher. And his wife was my new netball coach. Plus my Art teacher ran the swimming club. From there I went to Uni and never gave much thought to those gates from my childhood, apart from the fact that they were just part of the landscape.

 

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On April 24, 2007, with no real intention other than it had suited the itinerary for this very short overseas holiday, we took our seats on the aluminium bleachers with thousands of other Australians for an all-night vigil at Gallipoli. It was uncomfortable, which was kind of the point, but also exciting. Thrilling. Definitely an adventure. But in the pre-dawn light with the sea in front of the me and the escarpment behind, the Defence Minister, Brendon Nelson, gave a speech that split my heart open. (He was far from my favourite politician, but he had a damn good speech writer.) His words had the intended effect and for the first time I understood a little of what the sacrifice meant. He closed the speech with ‘We are young, and we are free’.

In the early morning light of April 25, with all of that in my chest, I started to climb the escarpment and stood in Shrapnel Valley cemetery. Amidst the blue sky and the blue sea and the emerald green grass of the Dardanelles I put my hand on a headstone and cried. I don’t remember his name but he was 17 years old, and my one-year-old son was at home, safe in the loving arms of his Nanna. What if that was my boy in this cemetery? My two-year-old daughter, one of the nurses? Since that morning I cannot hear the notes of The Last Post without my heart being torn into pieces, and I have not missed a Dawn Service since.

I live in the Barossa now and a couple of years ago started a project about a group of women who compiled a cookbook as a fundraiser for World War I. The research was still preliminary, and it was electrifying but fun.  Several weeks before ANZAC Day I stood in the Tanunda Soldier’s Memorial Hall looking at the photos of the boys who had died – and some of them were definitely boys. My heart hurt, as it always does, but then with a sickening chill, I realised I was looking at the same surnames as the women who contributed the recipes. These boys were their sons, brothers, nephews, cousins. Suddenly I was once again standing in a foreign cemetery with my hand on a 17-year-old’s headstone and it felt like those women were handing me the baton. In that moment the project went from being fun to being vital.

The book about those women was launched in that building, with the photos of their sons looking on, which just felt so heartbreakingly perfect. The Soldier’s Memorial Hall which had hosted dances and concerts and meetings and fetes and Christmas parties and movies.  All the magical ways a community finds connection and all the things the book was celebrating. All the things their sons had fought for.

Since then the project has moved up a notch, because now I’m working on the stories of their sons. The soldiers. The boys who died but have left traces of themselves, like emotional fingerprints, right through our community. That ornate shopfront I walk past every day that belonged to Stanley Schroeder’s father, where Stanley worked before he was blown into a million pieces in a trench in France. The band hall where Carl Kindler played the trumpet, before he was blown into a million pieces in the trench alongside Stanley. The pub that Lu Schrader’s parents ran before he was shot through the pelvis by a sniper and taken to a casualty clearing station that had no medical facilities or pain relief, where it took three days for him to die. The Tanunda footy oval where Robert Botten booted goals from the forward pocket before he was promoted to Lieutenant then killed leading a charge on a German trench. And the Tanunda Club where Leonard Gurr’s father gave many formal speeches before he had to start writing formal letters, asking for a copy of the court-of-enquiry findings for his son, missing amidst a bombardment in a little gully just out of Lagnicourt.

This week I’ve started researching Edmund Hanckel, 22 years old, whose war record says he died of wounds to his scalp. I’m not sure I want to think about what that means.

And every year since 2007 I line up at the Dawn Service with a pocket full of tissues and that lone bugle tears my heart apart. My son is now 19 and I feel physically sick thinking about how it would feel to see him in khaki and to farewell him on a troop ship. But the research I’m doing also leaves me with some difficult questions. I wrestle with the epithets we use to describe what was otherwise a massacre – on both sides, and the way the story of our national pride has become so enmeshed with a soldier in a slouch hat, like we have no other qualities to celebrate.

Louis Hoffmann is one of my Tanunda boys. His name is on the timber Honor Roll, and his mother was one of those who passed me the baton.  I’ve traced his fingerprints and read his war diaries, this German-speaking Barossa lad who served in France and recorded that the battle of Pozieres was ‘like hell with the lid open’. I know the passages where he tells stories of stealing apples out of a tree, he and his mates knocking them down with a footy. Jumping off the train in full uniform, and boots, in the middle of Egypt and running alongside. Telling his family he has scabies when he’d actually been hospitalised with syphilis, and being such a repeat offender of going AWOL that he was locked up and denied pay. How we worship the larrikin Aussie ratbag. But there’s also the passages where he describes killing hundreds of Germans with a machine gun and how he ‘made such a mess of them, hung up in their own barbed wire, as thick as flies. Shooting and sniping all afternoon’. Then he called it ‘doing good work’.

I’ve read the accounts by Charles Bean. And Bill Gammage. And Ken Inglis. And Les Carlyon. And much from people who know a lot more about it than me. I know that ultimately the wholesale massacre of an entire global generation rests with the war-makers, not the soldiers, and how I’ve never stood in a trench watching my mates get blown up. But it remains unsettling: the irreconcilable contradiction between the words we use on ANZAC Day and what actually happened.

But mostly I don’t like the way our local boys have become lost in a national story. All those Tanunda names etched into the statue lit up at the Dawn Service, but nobody speaks of them, or if they do, it’s only of them as soldiers, not as sons or friends or community members. They were important, these individual boys who belong to this place and whose fingerprints are still all over our community. But they are lost and their names are silent, anonymously absorbed into a national legend.

This baton their mothers have passed me weighs heavy.

 

***

 

My Grandfather and his siblings were all born out in Eudunda, in the Barossa’s far-flung northern regions where the arid farming edge was already familiar. Our German lineage without question, and for their generation at least, the Lutheran faith deeply ingrained. My Grandfather’s older brother anglicised his name from ‘Friederich’ to Fred and marched off to the war, but he didn’t come back. There was no body to bury and he has no headstone: MIA somewhere near Messines. Fred’s name is on the Eudunda war memorial and I’ve been to see it. Multiple times. I stand with my fingertips on his engraved initials and think about his mother, my Great Grandmother, and how she might have felt. He was a shop assistant when he enlisted and I’ve walked up and down Eudunda’s main street, wondering which shop it was. Where can I find your fingerprints, Fred?

And out at Brown’s Well, where my Grandfather took up land straight after the war, with his older brother gone forever, the gates with the wrought iron writing still guard the entrance to the footy oval.

The Paruna community is now a fraction of what it was.  New farm machinery means the small family holdings have been absorbed into larger operations and the road that once held us and five other families now holds none. There is no need for a school bus. There is no need for a school. The scrub is moving in on the old play lawn and I wonder if there are still any golf balls to be found. But despite the loss of the school and the train and the post office, the Brown’s Well Bombers pull together enough players to field a team, and they drive in to the footy grounds through the gates.

The same gates I used to ride past in a yellow bus with my hair in pigtails and my socks pulled up to my knees, perched on the edge of a vinyl seat with all the other kids, and those billows of dust behind us. Travelling past them as if they were just part of the landscape. Young. And free.

I hope someone from my old hometown is polishing the brass plaques with the boys’ names.  And I hope someone is holding the baton.

May those gates stand forever. In Memory of the Fallen.

 

To read more by Sheralee Menz click HERE.

 

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