The taint of history

My passing mention of the Anzac myth in a post earlier today has triggered a train of thought I can only quench (derail?) by writing. It’s perhaps the most powerful aspect of Australian heritage and tradition, its effects flowing down through Australian society to the present day. The Anzac myth is especially potent in my own family, where the echoes are felt even now.

Anzac heroism was a very real phenomenon, but Australian forces also exhibited their fair share of cowardice as well, something the national mythology has airbrushed away until quite recently. The convenient failure of popular history to deal other than in passing with the bombing of Darwin and the mass desertion that followed the first huge raid is a case in point, but World War 1 provides the example that impacts my own family most directly.

My maternal grandfather Denis Cadigan was one of five children who were orphaned when grand-dad was 10. Grand-dad and his brothers Cornelius and Andrew were sent to Glebe Boys’ Home in Sydney’s inner suburbs, while their sisters Martha and Kitty went to a girls’ home nearby. All three brothers enlisted in the First AIF as soon as they were old enough (in fact grand-dad, the youngest brother, lied about his age to enlist early), and were sent to France to fight in 1915-16.

The eldest brother, Uncle Cornelius (“Con”) , endured perhaps the heaviest fighting, eventually going AWOL for a week or so. The medical and military reports from the time, copies of which my mother recently obtained, speak powerfully of a man who had simply cracked under the unimaginable pressure of mud and death of trench warfare. Today we’d recognise an acute case of post-traumatic stress disorder and he’d be retired and hospitalised. Instead, he was branded a deserter and sentenced to 3 months imprisonment.

Returned to the front lines, Uncle Con soon afterwards participated in a large-scale mutiny of Australian forces, and was again tried, this time for mutiny as well as desertion, along with many others. He was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, and served just over a year. However, once the war ended his sentence (along with those of his fellow mutineers) was commuted and he was shipped back to Australia, returning in the same convoy as his 2 brothers.

On their way back to Australia, Con, Andrew and Denis discussed their two sisters. The younger of them, Kitty, was still a minor and still living in the Girls’ Home. The brothers vowed that they would meet at the Girls’ Home on a designated day after their demobilisation, get Kitty out and pool their military severance pay to support her until she could get work and look after herself.

Andrew and Denis arrived at the appointed time, and they duly rescued Kitty. Con never turned up. Grand-dad Denis refused to speak to Con or even acknowledge his existence for almost 30 years afterwards, until my mother insisted on inviting him to her wedding when she married my father a few years after the next world war.

Grand-dad, by comparison with Uncle Con, was the archetypal Anzac hero. Decorated numerous times for bravery, he had part of his head shot away in France, and spent the rest of his life as a TPI (Totally and Permanently Incapacitated) pensioner with a metal plate in his skull. He managed to father 3 kids including my mother, but he was never able to hold down a full-time job and apparently became quite a bad alcoholic at one stage. He spent a lot of time playing cards with his mates down at Bondi beach, and at one stage tried unsuccessfully to become a SP bookie.

My grandmother reacted badly, and took up with a series of lovers whose existence she made no effort to hide from grand-dad or anyone else. This was, of course, scandalous behaviour in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in the 1930s and 40s. Apart from anything else, it engendered in my mother a disturbing lifelong mixture of aggrieved petty snobbery and a paranoid fear that she might breed a child harbouring a hidden genetic inheritance of social shame.

When I got very drunk a couple of times in my teenage years, mum would go into a histrionic fit of the vapours lasting months. Convinced that I’d turn out an alcoholic like her father, she once gave me the silent treatment for almost a year, communicating only through others (“Tell your son that …”).

One of my sisters suffered an even more extreme dose of this treatment after she engaged in a minor bout of shoplifting with a couple of schoolmates at the age of 14. She was doomed to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Andrew, mum thought. Andy had become notorious in the annals of minor Sydney crime as the Crossword Bandit, and spent the majority of his adult life after WWI in prison. He was in the habit of doing crossword puzzles while casing premises prior to breaking and entering, and would always obligingly leave them behind for police to find.

Fortunately, Sue didn’t become a thief nor did I become an alcoholic, but the legacy of my mother’s war-generated obsessions affected us in a multitude of more subtle ways, and it still does. History and mythology are forces more powerful than most of us imagine, and their effects shape and taint us in ways we may not even suspect.