A Minute’s Silence

“Silence was a deeply established tradition. Men used it as a form of self-protection; it saved those who had experienced the horrors of war from the emotional trauma of experiencing it all over again in the telling. And it saved women and children, back home, from the terrible knowledge of what they had seen and walked away from.”

– David Malouf

David Malouf argues in his seminal essay on the topic entitled ‘The One Day,’ that ‘ANZAC Day has established itself in the minds of Australians as the one day that we celebrate as a truly national occasion’.[1] Whether or not I agree with this definition, it is undeniable that the day has lodged itself firmly into our national psyche. History tells us that it was not always this way. Malouf again, explains that 50 years ago ‘it was pretty well accepted that Anzac Day was a dying institution’.[2] Today, more people than ever before are turning up to dawn service celebrations around the country, rising at ungodly hours to take part in this collective remembrance. For Malouf, much of his generation’s rejection of the day came down to the fact that it still seemed so close. He reminds us that ‘no generation of Australians after 1870 had at that point escaped the call to arms’.[3] Paul Daley confirms that ‘official commemoration is, arguably, at its most ideal when the pain is all gone’.[4]

On the graves of those killed, identified and buried abroad during World War I, family and next of kin were given just 66 characters to sum up a life. Such brevity seemed to define all mourning of the time. ‘ANOTHER LIFE LOST HEARTS BROKEN FOR WHAT’ reads one. ‘HOW MUCH OF LOVE AND LIGHT AND JOY IS BURIED WITH OUR DARLING BOY’[5] reads another. In their eloquence, and in the gaping silence that stands in between then and now, the question emerges of how these victims and the grieving survivors of their time would view today’s Anzac memorialisation.