ANZAC Day – 25 April 2023
When I was a young boy growing up in Tasmania, where my family have lived now for 8 generations, it would be common for us to take the drive from Launceston to Devonport, the home of my mother’s family. Apart from visiting my grandparents there we would often call into my great aunt Sarah.
My memories of her and her home are very vivid. One of my central memories of great Aunty-Sarah’s home was the portrait in the living room. It was a striking photo of my great uncle Gordon Isles. Gordon had been killed in action on the 5th April 1918 behind Millencourt, on the Somme, and his loss was both keenly felt and honoured in my great aunt’s house. It was unavoidable every visit I made to her house. Yet, just six months before on 16th October 1917 the uncle of my father, Clarence Ranson, from Scottsdale in north-eastern Tasmania, had also been killed in action on the killing fields of Belgium. Only several months earlier he had been granted the Military Medal for rescuing a number of men from a gas attack on the night of the 7th June 1917 whilst he himself was suffering the effect of the gas.
These particular great uncles were only two of my relatives killed in the conflict of the First World War. Though I never knew them, of course, and neither did my own parents for that matter – every time I visited my great Aunt Sarah in Devonport, their presence became quite tangible to me. The memory of Gordon, himself, was unmistakable: his soldierly bearing watched me throughout that room in which we gathered in my aunt’s house. Yet, the memory of all my great uncles who were killed was never far away from my visit as a child to any of my older relatives homes. In some ways their memory acted as a gracious pall over the families who endured the grief of their loss, and the stories of their sacrifice would be honoured by a kind of hushed reverence.
There would not have been a family in Tasmania in the early 20th century who did not suffer a similar loss and who did not have to make sense of the sacrifice. With the population of Australia, let alone Tasmania, so small at the time and the loss of life in the First World War so great there was no family unaffected. It is almost impossible to imagine the shared grief amongst the people of those small rural towns in northern Tasmania. My grandparents’ generation were fashioned out of that grief. I often think, however, that it gave them a quality that was remarkably special.
My grandparents and their brothers and sisters were from another world. The memories of both the 1st and 2nd World Wars were very present for them, and they belonged to a world long gone – the world of horses and buggies, the world of the ice-man delivering ice for the cool box; the world of the sanitation man collecting the used toilet boxes, the world of milk vats in the local corner store, wirelesses and gramophones. In fact, my great grandfather, a one-time Mayor of the nearby township of Latrobe, was the first to have a car in Devonport. The older I become the more grateful I am for the time in which I grew up. The memories of another world were only a story away and the possibilities of the new world continuously stretched in front of me. Yet, the memories of a past world were always particularly poignant for me. They spoke of hardship, of simplicity, and yet of warmth of affection, home-made baking, red-soiled gardens, and simple joys around the kitchen table.
In the face of all that is modern, I enjoy an unashamed nostalgia for the testimony of that generation. It was a generation that knew how to watch, how to wait, how to endure. It was a generation that knew how to make the most out of very little. They were of a time in which the value of self-sacrifice was clearly pronounced.
Today we honour those who have died in war, those who gave their lives so that we might enjoy the freedoms we so easily take for granted today. However, I wonder whether we should also seek to honour the generation out of which these men and women presented, entertaining a genuine nostalgia for values that such a generation enshrined and lived out in so many countless and undramatic ways.
Of course no generation can afford idealisation. Each has its strengths and its limitations. But the extraordinary bravery of so many of our forebears emerged out of a generational spirit known for its self-sacrifice. And we can honour those who gave their live for our freedoms today no better way than considering again that generational spirit of self-sacrifice, and wondering how our own lives now reflect it or otherwise.
In this season of Easter as Christians we are celebrating the power of sacrificial love ‑ a love that gives itself over to something beyond ourselves, a love that is prepared to die so that something else, someone else, might rise. In the Resurrection of Jesus we are proclaiming the deepest possibility of such a sacrificial love. It is this love which alone triumphs over the entombment of egoism and fear, and which shines a light in the midst of our human darkness that no shadow can overpower.
It is a love reflected in the self-sacrifice of so many families upon which our nation is forged, families like my mother’s and my father’s, in the lives of Australian men like Gordon Isles and Clarence Ranson.
Lest we forget.
