Griffith Review 48 Enduring Legacies

https://griffithreview.com/

The modern world was shaped by the wars of the twentieth century. The centenary of Gallipoli provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies – human, political, economic, military – that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. The carnage of the world wars, and those that followed, gave extra meaning to the phrase 'lest we forget'. Beyond the commemorations, consequences still reverberate.

Exploring the consequences of Australia's involvement in war with a critical and inquiring eye, Griffith Review 48: Enduring Legacies assembles a team of scholars, non-fiction and fiction writers, journalists and broadcasters to pose hard questions about why we remember and what we forget. How did the wars shape Australia socially, economically and politically? How did they alter the understanding of Australia's place in the world and in our region? Did Gallipoli mark the coming of age of the new nation, or did that war devastate its potential?

I recently returned from a brief trip to Australia where the "BRANZAC" debate, the commercial exploitation of the 100th Year Commemorations of the Gallipoli landings, has been raging.  Australians, it seems. at least in the major dailies are keen to honour their fallen.  An that is perfectly understandable.  But the way it's gone about and the shunning of any deeper debate or inquiry is less than palatable.  In issue 48 of the "Griffith Review", a regular publication of Brisbane's Griffith University, tackles war through the Aussie lens.  In 21 short essays, nine memoirs, a work of prose fiction and one poem this journal seeks to explore the enduring legacies of war.  "The modern world was shaped by wars of the 20th Century.  The centenary of Gallipoli provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies - human, political, economic, military - that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions."  This is the standpoint from which we begin the journey.  Peter Cochrane, in "The past is not sacred", seeks to challenge the dangerous obsession with the myth of ANZAC, the connection with the returned servicemen's need to find honour and fulfilment from a time of futility and waste and the rhetoric of politicians like Tony Abbott who send troops to modern day Iraq under the banner of "The Spirit of ANZAC." He dissects the reasons for Australia's need to go to war in 1914 and how that has been overshadowed by the spectre of 'sacrifice'.  That's a common theme here too, in New Zealand.  Raise a conversation about how our troops were duped by incompetent British commanders and a false dream of adventure and you'll be knocked back by aghast listeners who will immediately reply "My relative died in that war, are you calling them naïve and stupid?"

Cochrane notes with despair how the Australian press have  whipped up the Commemorations into a untouchable and sacred edifice.  He quotes the Australian from 2013 on the nation's perceived response to any in-depth academic analysis of Gallipoli.  "They (academics) must recognise that the current intellectual zeitgeist is at odds with the spirit of Anzac (note the lower case spelling, now a noun not an acronym). It recognises neither the significance of a war that had to be fought nor the importance of patriotism.  Honour, duty and mate ship are foreign to their thinking.  They may be experts on many things but on the subject of Anzac, they have little useful to say." It is this very message that Cochrane tears down, as does the rest of this editing of the Griffith Review.  In her introduction Co-Editor Julianne Schultz reminds us that the Great War did not "make" Australia and the myths of Baptisms of Fire or Freedom from Bloodletting are very naïve attempts to curtain the historical motivations of the time.  In New Zealand, I'm sure we all argue that we were a nation of settlers obsessed by the superiority of England and all things British.  But in Australia, barely a nation, more a collection of states and colonies, the people were more independent and divided.  This was also a social laboratory and a world leader of what colonisation could achieve, indigenous segregation and their poor treatment aside.  In several places the questions of why Australian needed to flex it's muscles and prove its worth when it was already so far ahead are asked time and again.  Because it was this driver that encouraged so many young men to enlist - to prove Australia (and here too, in New Zealand) could cut it on the world stage. 

With vigour and creativity, prominent Aussie academics and four Kiwis, including military scholar Chris Pugsley tackle 20th Century Wars and the dirty secrets that lie under the surface.  These go further than WWI, stretching right up to Afghanistan but dwell mainly on the earlier, where rightly distance of time allows subjective, at least in part. Pugsley's "Breaking Ranks" essay has to be the most thought provoking, after Cochrane's.  It's a fascinating breakdown of the official reporting of Gallipoli loses and of four controversial memorials erected at Gallipoli.  He also looks at the legacy of the losses on Massey's post war government (97% of New Zealanders were hurt or died on the peninsular, compared to 22% of British troops).  New Zealand poet Rosetta Allen writes about Japanese Kamikaze pilots in "Dear Mother" - "I am your sacred cherry blossom /that falls in the spring... I kept my daughter's dollhouse close/Pinned to the steel of my cockpit."  It's a moving essay from the pilot's perspective, perhaps an attempt to understand...ultimately unanswered.
Fred Dagg (aka John Clarke) writes of his neighbour in "A remarkable Man", a simple memoir of a time in war, but well balanced, and a response to that age old adage of regret "we learned to cope!"   

The Griffith Review won't be the only voice of debate in this commemorative year but it might be the most sane to date.  I've read many books already that tackle different aspects of the war but nothing is as poignant or a well informed, travelling between high level political and socioeconomic to individual and very personal accounts and critiques.  For all this it proves the sheer capacity for us all to think.  It's just a shame that our leaders and politicians don't read this before they act.

https://griffithreview.com/store/enduring-legacies/

Annie's War - A New Zealand woman and her family in England 1916 -19. Edited by Susanna Montgomerie Norris with Anna Rogers

This is an extraordinary, and personal book.  There are plenty of diaries from this period floating around, especially from soldiers themselves.   But rarer is the first hand account from the perspective of a family caught up in the turmoil of war.  Viewers of the Downton Abbey series would have had a glimpse of life during wartime, through the thickly glazed windows of the Crowley's country seat.  But that was fiction, interpreted history.  This book is the real deal. 

War has broken in Europe.  Annie Montgomerie has two sons, Oswald and Seton sign up as pilots in the Royal Air force.  This means the whole family must up sticks and relocate to London.  That, in itself is a remarkable thing!   London is a million miles from Godzone.  London endures Zepplin attacks, shortages and endless news of the horrors of the Great War.  Whilst her sons are serving Annie billets Kiwis coming over to enlist.  She packs them off with a bit of cheer, knowing that some will not return.  Oswald falls to the influenza epidemic that comes by the end of the war.  There are plenty of other trials. too.  This is a very rare insight, from a Kiwi point of view of the UK at this time.  I wonder as I read it, how Annie felt about this place that all subjects of the Empire called "Home".  After all settlers left Blighty to escape the Empirical vices and squalor less than 50 years prior.  Now the spectre called them back like a horrific drug addiction demanding their very lives.  How strog was the pioneer spirit that people like Annie could allow their sons to not only go off to slaughter - all in the name of a King who was so distance and ethereal he was simply a vision on a postage stamp.  For a Kiwi like me, looking back at the delusion of Empire, that tricked an entire generation to support a war that was such an incompetent farce it all seems so bizarre that a mother would voluntarily support such a risk as to let, nay support her sons to take on such a wild, daring ad hair brained activity. 

Susanna Montgomerie's archives are exceptional.  There are many family photos, reference points of their trips.  Annie's had some means to document her trip in both words and pictures.  Also, letters and other documents illustrate with a real sense of reality.  Helping to paint the full picture is Anna Rogers' foot notes and asides, which a necessary to get a full picture, and sometimes to simply help the reader to understand what is happening.  Because Annie, I think was only writing for herself.  Diaries at this time were not intended as anything else but as a personal conversation between the writer and God.  In that sense we are prying, perhaps uninvited into a life that was not meant to be revealed.  None the less this is an extraordinary journey, perhaps not really understood - except to say that a mother will always do what they think is right by their Sons.  And in 1916, moving to London to support a foolhardy adventure to fly over the Western front was a seemingly legitimate pursuit.

Susanna Montgomerie Norris was born in 1940 and brought up on the family farm, Taukoro, near Wanganui. She qualified as a teacher and spent two years teaching in London, then travelling in Europe and North America. She later trained as a children’s librarian. Susanna, who has a lifelong interest in history, especially that of her family, has spent many years transcribing and working on her grandmother Annie’s diaries, which were discovered by her cousin, John Montgomerie, who has also supplied a large number of the photos used.

Anna Rogers has spent most of her working life as a fiction and non-fiction book editor. She is also the author of eight books, including While You're Away: New Zealand Nurses at War 1899–1948 and illustrated histories of the West Coast and Canterbury, and is a regular book reviewer.

http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/booksauthors/2014/annies_war.html



Gallipoli in Minecraft® - Fri 24 Apr – Sun 11 Oct 2015 / Auckland War Memorial Museum

Anzac Cove, Gallipoli in Minecraft created by Alfriston College students.
Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

Come and explore the Gallipoli campaign in an exhibition featuring the interactive world of Minecraft®. This hugely popular online game is about breaking and placing blocks. Since its inception players have worked together to create all sorts of incredible and imaginative things.
Over the past year students from Alfriston College have re-created the landscape of 1915 Gallipoli in Minecraft®, block by block. Working with the Museum’s staff and utilising our First World War collections, the students have learnt about the experiences of the New Zealand soldiers in the 1915 campaign.
The Gallipoli in Minecraft® world will be available to download from 25 April.

The Anzacs: An inside view of New Zealanders at Gallipoli - Author: Auckland War Memorial Museum - Published by Penguin

The Gallipoli campaign was one of New Zealand's darkest and most dramatic, one that resulted in a devastating loss of life and cultivated a lasting legacy of sacrifice and nationhood.

This carefully chosen selection from the Auckland War Memorial Museum's extensive catalogue, with many images never published before, sheds new light on New Zealand's Anzac story. Through soldiers' amateur photography – candid, unassuming, revealing and, at times, haunting – The Anzacs charts life for those who served in Gallipoli: from leaving New Zealand and encountering an unexpected landscape to the realities of combat and dealing with death and loss. It is a book that casts an unstinting eye on the history – and the men who lived it – presenting events as they unfolded through the photographic lens.

'There is an air of expectant calm; no evidence of artillery fire or shot and shell, just a scene that suggests a successful landing . . . " writes military historian Chris Pugsley, in the introduction to this remarkable boo. "...all of that would change by the afternoon, and the keen young men in these photographs would end the day fighting for their lives.'

Barges of men towed to shore, Gallipoli, 25 April 1915.
Auckland War Memorial Museum - Tāmaki Paenga Hira. PH-ALB-382p7-3.

And this sentiment s reflected in Damien Fenton's essay of the campaign, which opens the first chapters.  He skilfully covers the main points from the botched landing at what became Anzac cove (the intended position a 1/4 mile further on) to the final retreat.  He also reflects on the demise and resurrection of the ANZAC day parade in the Kiwi psyche and what that means for us today and into the future.  This is one of the most chilling parts of the book because as I reflect myself on what inspired all those young men to eagerly join up, how they were so easily duped by the flimsy propaganda devised by Empirical nationalism, I wonder how easy it would be to involve us all again in new war simply by reintroducing those elements: the axis of evil, the need to protect and the promise of glory.  Today, as in virtually every theatre of war since New Zealand was first colonised, Kiwis have been the first to sign up and get involved.  Our urges of FOMO (fear of missing out) seem insatiable.  You see it here in the early photos of these ghosts - young men and their supporting families, as they embark for the 'great adventure'.  These are photos almost exclusively taken on rugged and bashed box brownies, owned by soldiers who could barely find their way to the toilet, let alone fight as a crack garrison against the desperate and fanatical Ottoman army.  Many of these photos are taken in the quiet moments, but you can just imagine the smells, the heat, the sounds of continuous gunfire, explosions and shouting.  Most of these photos are of men at rest.  It would be very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to capture fighting in action, given dangers of the close quarters trench warfare.  Stick your head over the parapet to take a snap and you'll instantly lose it. There's a couple of particularly desperate images taken in June 1915 of men wedged into a trench on Quinn's post, the most notorious outpost of the peninsular.  It's the newly arrive troops from the Otago regiment.  In the background  spotter has just seen a trench of 20 Ottoman troops and is in the process of directing his snipers towards it.  The business is as soulless and clinical as pouring concrete on a building site.  It has to be.  No room for emotions here. The look on the faces of the kiwis is brave in the face of complete terror.  This is likely a situation that they will not survive!

Two thoughts struck me looking at these photos.  One: How did these men so blatantly snap away?  Weren't there military restrictions or issues of intelligence and secrecy?  It appears things were less regimented back then.  It would have been relatively simple to carry a camera into battle.  Troop's postcards and letters were censored but not their access to a camera it seems.  Some photographers like Kiwi John Burnet Davis, were likely officers, who were able to take in personal affects like phonographs, to the trenches.  Davis spent time in Egypt, at the training facilities, and like many early ANZACS were amongst the bored and restless who were initially in reserve to the main action in Europe.  He took shots of the men sightseeing and hanging around in camp.  At that point it was a lark of sorts, but for the venereal disease and gambling vices of Cairo.  All that was soon to change!

Harvey Maitland Crystall was another 'correspondent' with wide access - he and his four brothers were all volunteers, Crystall himself was in the Royal Engineers both at Galipoli and at the Western Front, so carrying a camera would have been a part of his job, or at least permissible.  He was also away from the firing line for some of the war.  Of course the engineers were also those responsible for building the telephone networks and restoring bridges and trench fortifications so they spent periods of time in the thick of it. 

The interesting thing about these photo collections, which make up this book, is that all photographers made it back, and on the whole lived until their 70's.  What happened to the photographers that didn't make it?  What happened to their work I wonder?  The book has a few insights on this, but  really wanted more back ground to these photos - and about the people in the photos.  Much of the accompanying dialogue is about the situation of the photo but not the detail.  Of course, it might not have been possible to interview the photographers - some in their later years of life, and perhaps understandably unwilling to part with the painful details.  It reminds me to talk to my relatives about my only family collections and quiz them in detail about the individuals in the photos - lest they fade to the graveyard of history and be forgotten.

About the Auckland War Memorial Museum Pictorial Collection

The Auckland Museum is an authoritative source of images depicting New Zealand and Pacific culture and history with a particular emphasis on the Auckland region including photographs, prints, drawings, posters and paintings.  The photograph collection in particular is a major New Zealand Collection.

The Museum holds one of the nation's most important pictorial collections - a wealth of historic paintings, rare watercolours, photographs and other artworks. Selections of these are periodically exhibited in the Pictorial Gallery along with other touring pictorial exhibitions.
The Museum's pictorial collections are truly world class.  Most of New Zealand's greatest photographers are represented here, while amateur albums of family snaps and soldiers mementos are a hidden treasure for descendants and social historians.
The Polynesian Photograph Collection in particular is one of the most complete collections of Pacific "pre-arrival" photography and imagery to be found anywhere in the world.

For more go to : http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/collections-and-library/collections/documentary-heritage-collection/pictorial-collections

 

Many thanks to the Auckland War Memorial Museum and Penguin Books for an advance copy of this book.

The Conch Trumpet - David Eggleton

David Eggleton is a Dunedinite and author of 6 previous books of poetry and short fiction.  He's tackled many topics before but this one is the most ambitious.  The Conch is an ancient Maori symbol of heraldry.  A loudhaler from the past and a metaphor for now.  He uses it to call to the scattered tribes of Aoteaoa - the anciet tangata whenua and the recent arrival; those with guilt of iperialism and those withthe ambitions of commerce and betterment.  But these are not poems that always explore possible melding of cultures.  Instead they begin to  tread on the familar territories of land, home and sea. Every Kiwi knows about this.  In that sense I was a little disappointed.

But Eggleton does a wonderful job of exploring the natual world and the spiritual world whilst nodding to other things later on.  His collection compresses history, the majesty of a harbour or a mountain or lake or river and occasional political satire,  He connects with Maori lore and legent many times connecting the complacency of discarded kelp, for instance with the ancestry of birds like the Petrel (in Ode to The Beach Wrecked Petrel) or the juztaposition of mountains and the eternal changing weather (in Cloud Piercer).  On that latter poem there are beautiful lines such as "On winter's serrated-edge glints/ snow's teeth, talons, feather-slick tints/ Nothing loath, prowled by air's current,/ great alps bulk above canopy."  These are the best moments, they conjour up for me those icons of sweeping mountainscapes from a helicopter at 1000 feet up.  Eggleton covers many subjects in this slim volume and not all of these are natural.  Towards the end politics and the state of the world bleed in.  There's an oddly creepy poem about the death of Gaddafi, for ezample.  And another that talks of modern day terrorism in today's life.  The lines "Praise be to the internet, now my mind is a search engine"  The terrorism he speaks of is more about the climate of info-fear.  He's almost saying if knowledge is power then when is there to much power?  What happens when we all know everything?  Is it better to be a little ignorant, if only to retain a little sketicism of the knowledgable among us!  He continues on with the best lines of the book: " ...humming under flags of convenience, seen through Google Glass smoked darkly."  

It's a collection that starts with the natural and ends up with the contrived.  It should work.  But I wonder.  If I could cut this book into two and select the later poems about potilics and social comment (New Zild Book Awards Considered as a Five-Horse Race, for example.  C'mon the title says it all - doesn't it Ellie Catton?), then I'd be happy.  Eggleton is clearly a better poet than I am a reader.  So, instead of dismissing the parts of this collection that I can't find comfort with I'm determined to re-read.  Like a cryptic crossword you need to think and ponder some of these awhile before giving up.  In the age of instant gratification Eggleton is a challenge worth taking.  

Die Again - Tess Gerritsen

Detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are back—and they’re going into the wild to find a killer. Die Again is the latest heart-pounding thriller in Tess Gerritsen’s New York Times bestselling series, the inspiration behind TNT’s hit show Rizzoli & Isles.
When Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are summoned to a crime scene, they find a killing worthy of the most ferocious beast—right down to the claw marks on the corpse. But only the most sinister human hands could have left renowned big-game hunter and taxidermist Leon Gott gruesomely displayed like the once-proud animals whose heads adorn his walls. Did Gott unwittingly awaken a predator more dangerous than any he’s ever hunted?
Maura fears that this isn’t the killer’s first slaughter, and that it won’t be the last. After linking the crime to a series of unsolved homicides in wilderness areas across the country, she wonders if the answers might actually be found in a remote corner of Africa.
Six years earlier, a group of tourists on safari fell prey to a killer in their midst. Marooned deep in the bush of Botswana, with no means of communication and nothing but a rifle-toting guide for protection, the terrified tourists desperately hoped for rescue before their worst instincts—or the wild animals prowling in the shadows—could tear them apart. But the deadliest predator was already among them, and within a week, he walked away with the blood of all but one of them on his hands.
Now this killer has chosen Boston as his new hunting ground, and Rizzoli and Isles must find a way to lure him out of the shadows and into a cage. Even if it means dangling the bait no hunter can resist: the one victim who got away.

I came at this novel completely uneducated on Gerritsen's writing.  This is actually Her stock and trade is not far from Kathy Reichs' model - an off beat, single, anti-social pathologist and a down-to-earth, rough edged, street wise but venerable cop.  Not far from 'Bones' Brennan Maura Isles has issues talking to people and she's obsessed with various minute facts and details.  But she's a watered down version of Temperance.  We get very little than a one dimensional throw away insight into who she is.  Her profile as a single,  quirky, nit picking, and insular.  Not original.  Jane Rizoli is not original either.  She has children.  She's a working mum.  Her parents are splitting up, and she's on the mother's side.  These are all titbits.  But again none of this is more than a passing comment on her life.  We learn very little more. 

The story mostly revolves a number of unsolved gruesome murders and a first person account of a safari in Botswana that goes horribly wrong.  The lone survivor narrates her understanding of what occurred and her need to hide from the perceived killer.  There is a continuous overlaps between the present - solving a number of unrelated slayings and the story of the trip into the real bush.  In Botswana a group of un related people all meet and they bond to a degree, as people do.  Our narrator is slightly outcast, for no real reason.  Her boyfriend is a high powered testosterone author, but really a wimp seeking action for experience.  He's a bit of a cardboard cut out, as are the Japanese couple and the two blonde South African girls and the limp-wristed Mummy's boy, whose death, and his father's death inadvertently create a loose connection in the plot.  That is clever. And so is the connection between a perceived serial killer and the identity of the real killer.  Gerritson remains economical on details until they just seem to naturally fall out and into place just when they are needed.  That is a great mechanism in a book that has too many cliché's at time.  thank goodness the plot and the main focus remains good.  So, a mixed bag for this one.  If you want a bit of depth with your murder mysteries, then you're out of luck.  Being predominantly for the American airport literature market this will never be high fiction.  It's not as gross as some or as creepy as Jo Nesbo or as political as Stuart MacBride but it is a good read.  A bit simple, but not trashy.  A good yarn, as my mother sometimes says....and maybe that's enough sometimes.

The Missing and The Dead - Stuart MacBride

The new Logan McRae novel from the No. 1 bestselling author of CLOSE TO THE BONE and A SONG FOR THE DYING.

One mistake can cost you everything…When you catch a twisted killer there should be a reward, right? What Acting Detective Inspector Logan McRae gets instead is a ‘development opportunity’ out in the depths of rural Aberdeenshire. Welcome to divisional policing – catching drug dealers, shop lifters, vandals and the odd escaped farm animal.

Then a little girl’s body washes up just outside the sleepy town of Banff, kicking off a massive manhunt. The Major Investigation Team is up from Aberdeen, wanting answers, and they don’t care who they trample over to get them.
Logan’s got enough on his plate keeping B Division together, but DCI Steel wants him back on her team.

As his old colleagues stomp around the countryside, burning bridges, Logan gets dragged deeper and deeper into the investigation.
One thing’s clear: there are dangerous predators lurking in the wilds of Aberdeenshire, and not everyone’s going to get out of this alive…

I utterly loved this.  Back were the whole gang of Scottish police nutcases, including Roberta Steel, McRae's old lazy as shite friend/boss.  She's larger than life and about as disgusting. MacBride has a macabre sense of humour.  He gets all the good guys into trouble.  McRae, at the opening of the book has just caught a paedophile but when the case finally comes to trial the weasel somehow gets off.  McCrae's bosses are livid and send him on a "Career Opportunity" in the boondocks of Scotland.  He's back in uniform dealing with a mysterious dead girl, missing persons, drug dealers and a hell of a lot of sheep on the roads. 

MacBride interweaves radio broadcasts, missed opportunities, interruptions and angst all together with tender moments around a mother desperately looking for her lost daughter (who might be the corpse in the pool - or not) and way too much police bureaucracy. Every time he opens his mouth, its shut by obnoxious, pipsqueak glory hunters from other 'more important' police units.  Yet somehow, despite throwing 'by-the-book' procedure to the wind McCrae manages to solve all the cases and get none of the credit, almost losing one girlfriend and gaining 'another' in the process. 

MacBride has really mastered this wonderful juxtaposition between humouring the trivial and the irritating against the dark matter of gruesome murders and taboo subjects like paedophilia and child deaths.  He makes no bones about either - everything is tarred with a thick coat of grime and left over pastry crumbs.  No wonder he's mobbed where ever he goes.  Book shops need security, yeah?

I loved this and recommend it above anything else you read this month!


Check Stuart's web site: http://www.stuartmacbride.com/books/missing-dead/