Sidney Nolan, ‘Gallipoli’

Remembrance Day. In school assemblies, talk
of manhood achieved in the trenches of World War One.
At seventeen, the boy my father ran from home
and enlisted, falsifying his age. Gallipoli had begun.
Proudly he sat for his photo in the glib slogan
of his army uniform, before he sailed.
The other side of war re-shaped that soldier,
and the later pictures stare bleakly, exiled.

Yet fifty years have silted over the scars;
impossible for me to recognize my father
in either photograph. Time’s habit of movement, event,
long before my birth, wove in him a tidy shelter
of reunion, committee, club, appeal and agenda.
The stories that I grew up with of battles, and “Winter
in ’16” were scraps and relics, toys in an old shoebox.
In the R.S.L. he became a Life Member.

But wars do not finish: it is not over. I speak
of more than personal discoveries.
Gallipoli that was a selfish blunder in high places,
a battle fought for nothing or for polluted seas
of sodden corpses, is other than a ribbon: the errors
are not the meaning, finally. My father woke
struggling, one night, an old man in warm pyjamas,
into the pillbox concussion of old darkness, and it broke

into his age and stranded him. He stumbled past us,
his grown sons, a strange dead boy choking him silent
and spitting stale blood in the safe rooms of our home,
blind for a terrible reckoning, demanding atonement.
And we, in the comfortable bedrooms
taken for granted always, innocent,
were forced among the spaces of his acts and words
to where his gains burned through like punishment.

– Thomas W. Shapcott, ‘War’, in Inwards to the Sun: Poems (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1969), 59.