|
|
|
Book Review
| Melanie Oppenheimer, Oceans of Love: Narrelle, an Australian Nurse in World War I, ABC Books, Sydney, 2006. pp. 272. $29.95 paper.Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006. pp. xxiv + 273. $39.95 paper.
|
| To stand in silence at Anzac Cove on Anzac Day, as once we did before the ceremony was moved around the corner, in the midst of thousands of young Australians is to experience pride and pain. Pride, I suppose, in the knowledge that thousands of Australians have made the somewhat arduous journey to the Peninsula, pain that they seem to have too little knowledge to make sense of the things they will witness and experience. |
1
|
|
In the day or so leading up to the ceremonies these young Australians will wander among the headstones at Ari Burnu and the Beach Cemetery, some might even make it further afield, and they will read the words and try to interpret. But words like Quinns and Courtneys, Lone Pine, possibly even the Nek, make little sense to them, do not summon up real battles fought by real men. |
2
|
|
How much richer their experience of Anzac day would be if someone would give a reading of the last few pages of Melanie Oppenheimer's moving and insightful book Oceans of Love. Listeners would learn that Australian women, Brewarrina women even, gave their lives for Australia in war. This war was not only, not ever, just a man's job. They would learn that an Australian woman could write, without any sense of immodesty, 'I've been a soldier'. They would learn that a woman, just like a man, could be so bonded to her mates that nothing, not even life itself, could drag her away from her sense of duty, while ever one of her mates needed her attention and commitment. They would learn, too, that a nurse who dies from her service at war is far less likely to be remembered than a soldier who falls on the battlefield. There is lesson enough in this book for all of us. |
3
|
|
It is travel, not war, that links these two books and Narrelle Hobbes, nurse of the World War I, was a better, more mature, more sophisticated traveller than many of the people Bruce Scates studies. Even in her last letter, written, surely, in the certainty that she was dying, Nurse Hobbes was describing foreign sights and scenes for her beloved family at home. 'The stinks', she writes of Suez 'are dreadful'. But she looks forward to 12 days at Colombo. Today's young Australian travellers to Turkey probably text and email, even phone, with similar sentiments. The smells, the people, the sights and the next place on the itinerary. |
4
|
|
They, too, probably, compare where they have come from with what they are seeing, just to put it in context, I guess, for the folks at home who may not have travelled so far away. This comparison for the folks at home is such a common feature of the letters of the soldiers whose battle sites today's travellers now visit. 'The Sydney G.P.O. clock is just as interesting as Big Ben to look at', one soldier wrote, 'and I suppose just as accurate'. Narrelle Hobbes wrote in similar vein. The plains of Rajasthan reminded her of Australia, around Narrabri or Moree perhaps, with its 'bare, parched plains, winds and dust'. |
5
|
|
Like the other soldiers with whom she mingled, Narrelle Hobbes was intensely proud of Australia and Australians and thought that the war had brought forth a more noble Australian spirit. Like other writers from abroad she never tired of lecturing her family about this new faith and predicted, with them, that the soldiers would bring a new spirit back home with them to make a better Australia. She did not live to see the collapse of those hopes, however, for Nurse Hobbes died on a hospital ship and was buried at sea in May 1918, four days from Australian landfall. |
6
|
|
Hers is an Australian story, which Melanie Oppenheimer tells with verve, sensitivity and pride. This is not a slight book but one which deserves a place in the libraries of those who want to explore the Australian experience and in the courses of those who teach it. It is a book to read from cover to cover for the rich insights it provides. I fear, though, that people who pick it up and might be tempted to buy or read may be put off by the slightly sentimental title and the awful decision to print the book in nearly unreadable ink. A shame, for this book tells of an important Australian journey. |
7
|
|
Might I quibble, in similar vein, with the title of Bruce Scates's book? He has written a fine, comprehensive account of battlefield touring, now always known as battlefield pilgrimage. But in almost every case Scates is not writing of a 'return' to a battlefield, much less so exclusively Gallipoli, but is writing, instead, of a first and possibly unique visit. At the heart of this engrossing book, Scates asks why it is that men and women and young Australians make these pilgrimages. Having led a dozen of these tours myself I was keenly interested to find out what Scates has discovered. |
8
|
|
He surveyed hundreds of travellers from every part of Australia and this 'Pilgrimage Archive' is now in the Australian War Memorial. He even allowed his then 11-year-old daughter space for her understanding of the trip she made with her parents, if my reading of the opening of chapter four is correct. Bruce Scates writes of his daughter's tears, understandable for one of such an impressionable age, but also of the tears of older Australians, among them Vietnam veterans, great nieces of the deceased, and these tears are harder to fathom. But they are real for all that. I have seen them too, time and time again, and I have always wondered. |
9
|
|
It would be silly to try to summarise Scates's complex arguments about pilgrimage here but he comes at his story in a comprehensive way, describing the making of the war graves, the earliest pilgrimages and the growing youth army of pilgrims. It has become, of course, vastly easier to travel to far distant battlefields now and that must be part (a good part?) of the answer. The yearning was always there though. A mother in 1923 wrote, as if to her son killed at Anzac on the first morning, 'if only I could see your grave I would die happy'. It may be that something of that mother's thinking motivates today's pilgrims. Or just the need to connect. |
10
|
|
Two vastly different books from two fine historians but the journey is the key to both of them, a journey that is still uppermost in many Australian lives. |
11
|
| | | | |
| Farrer, ACT |
MICHAEL MCKERNAN | |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|