Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, April 21, 2004
SANDS OF GALLIPOLI SACRILEGE
WHEN I visited Gallipoli four years ago, my companion unwisely collected a pine cone lying among the war graves at Lone Pine with the intention of bringing it home to Australia as a memento. I did my block. “This a cemetery, for God's sake, a shrine, a sacred place - put that down at once!” Yes, I carried on. The way I felt, removing anything at all from Anzac Cove and the steep ridges where 8000 Australians were killed in 1915 was a desecration, a sacrilege. Later, I was even more outraged to see the Australian cricket side, led by Steve Waugh, wearing slouch hats and playing a mock game of cricket for the cameras at Shell Green, another site of Gallipoli war graves. It looked tasteless and disrespectful. Would they play tippy-run among the graves at West Terrace Cemetery using Vic Richardson's headstone as a wicket? Yeah right. Now we have the Sands of Gallipoli - a range of fundraising mementoes being flogged by the RSL as lapel pins, key rings, medallions and wall plaques. “...each containing grains of sand recently collected from Gallipoli, allows Australians to own and hold a piece of Gallipoli in their hands,” says the RSL. Frankly, I would have expected better. A “precious piece of preserved history from Gallipoli” the spiel continues. No, it's not. Outside Gallipoli, they are just worthless grains of sand. Gallipoli is not some theme park to be picked-over and plundered for merchandising gewgaws and fundraising gimmicks. On the day I walked down from the Turkish HQ to Anzac Cove, I did it in silence, caressed by a soft breeze, and reached the bottom overwhelmed by a vivid sense of national honour and pride. Isn't that enough? A couple of other Anzac Day thoughts:
* Picasso's Guernica commemorates the Spanish Civil War raid by the German Luftwaffe, in the first use of air power as an instrument of massacre, which destroyed a defenceless town for no other reason than as an experiment in psychological warfare. A large reproduction of Guernica hangs in an ante-room of the UN Security Council, the same room that was used to make official statements to the world's media about the impending war in Iraq. Guernica - the definitive image of the brutality of modern warfare - was discreetly covered by a blue curtain at the request of the Americans, who thought it was an inappropriate backdrop for the cameras. Source: London Review of Books.)
* At the beginning of the 20th century, 90 per cent of war casualties were soldiers; at the beginning of the 21st, 90 per cent of casualties are civilians.
* When I was a kid in the 1950s, the World War I veterans like my grandfather were not much older than I am now - old but not yet gone to seed. Now they are gone. We shall remember them again next Sunday.
