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Short Blacks
The One Day
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 … One result of this was that the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it.
In the century since the Gallipoli landing, Anzac Day has taken on a different tenor for each succeeding generation. Perceptively and evocatively, David Malouf traces the meaning of this 'one day' when Australians stop to reflect on endurance, service and the folly of war. He shows how what was once history has now passed into legend, and how we have found in Anzac Day ‘a truly national occasion.’
In the century since the Gallipoli landing, Anzac Day has taken on a different tenor for each succeeding generation. Perceptively and evocatively, David Malouf traces the meaning of this 'one day' when Australians stop to reflect on endurance, service and the folly of war. He shows how what was once history has now passed into legend, and how we have found in Anzac Day ‘a truly national occasion.’
- GenresNonfictionEssays
64 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2015
About the author
David Malouf
84 books334 followersDavid Malouf was a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work had garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf had taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he drew on both Australian and European influences in his work. He was widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and had been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
Malouf had taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he drew on both Australian and European influences in his work. He was widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and had been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 20, 2022
David Malouf is one of the writers I'm in the process of reading everything they wrote, so when I saw this short little book, really just an essay, I grabbed it up. It's about his discussion of Anzac Day, an Australian national holiday and how it has changed. He remembers back in the 50's that it was a day to honor the men who fought in the trenches of WWI and Gallipoli but with the passing of time it has become less about the war. Some of the points he brought up about the men who fought in the war were that they had served because they felt a need for service to their country but the reality was that they were sent into slaughter. The war claimed 62,000 Australian lives in the war out of a total population of 4 million in the country. Another interesting point is the fact that not one Australian survivor of the war ever wrote a book about it, neither fiction or poetry. All of the books written have been by people who were not there. A very short but quite interesting read by the great David Malouf.
April 18, 2024
In The One Day, David Malouf writes about Anzac Day, about what it used to mean, what it means now, and how it's changed.
To understand what it used to mean, it helps to know that 'the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it. They had kept diaries [...] But they produced no account, either in fiction or poetry, of what they had seen and suffered'. This silence 'was a deeply established tradition' that excluded 'virtually everything introspective or inward'. Malouf thinks this silence was part of a deliberate attempt by veterans to give their wartime experience 'a legendary value and sacred aura that would put it beyond criticism or challenge'. I think this is nonsense, and I think that it betrays Malouf's limitations as a thinker. The appeal to a conspiracy of silence is the beginning of an explanation, not the end of one, and it likely has its roots in the kind of deep history that this book is ostensibly about. Malouf does talk a bit about the origins of the masculine ideals of the time, for example when he discusses journalist C.E.W. Bean's influential portraits of the classic Australian man, who was stoic, tough, irreverent, loyal, fair. And he does write that the veterans' association, the RSL, viewed the kids who were coming of age in the post-war period, who were 'the very first generation of young men and woman in Australia to get to the university in large numbers', 'the first generation in Australia of a noisy and articulate youth', he does say that the RSL viewed them as 'a direct threat to Australian values'. But Malouf doesn't explain the RSL's 'great Australian philistinism', and his reference to them amounts to little more than a restatement of his thesis that there existed in Australia at that time a vast conspiracy of silence about the war and its effects on those who fought in it. Which means that, except for one passing reference to the stifling effects of trauma, Malouf doesn't seek to explain, even in broad strokes, why Australian men of that era engaged in a mass silent protest while their fellow veterans across the water wrote such timeless masterpieces as All Quiet on the Western Front and Storm of Steel, each of which explored and reveals a very different national character. Where is our exploration of our national character? I think it's notable that Australian men were silent while men of other fighting nations were not. And I think it's probably that the model German of the time was in many ways identical to Bean's model Aussie (except for the irrevence), and yet they produced an Ernst Junger and we did not. Unravelling this mystery would likely go some way to explaining the meaning of Anzac Day, which is the purpose of this book. Yet Malouf spends no time on it at all, and we're left none the wiser about what Anzac Day meant to those it commemorated.
To understand what Anzac Day came to mean to future generations, it helps to know that our literature of the First World War 'was written out of the imagination by a later generation' who had no firsthand experience of it. Malouf writes that 'one of the uses of art is that it allows us to re-experience what has most deeply wounded us, at an imaginative level where it might also be healing'. Later generations used art to do what their soldier parents could not, which was discuss and try to understand the trauma of war. Art is essential to any national conversation--it's how a generation talks to itself, how it comes to terms with its past, how it dreams of its future--and the play Malouf chose to talk about reveals a nation wrestling with intergenerational trauma. Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year is about an angry young man who thinks he sees 'the real picture of the heroic Digger, as a drunk sprawled in the gutter and covered with vomit'. It's easy to hear in this caricature the voice an entire generation of youths reacting to their absent, drunkard, PTSD-afflicted, war veteran fathers. Malouf holds that, for this reason, Anzac Day became the 'focus of bitter argument about Australian aims and values', that it 'drew to itself the usual conflict for place and influence between the generations', and that this 'was essentially an argument [...] that the old idea of what it meant to be Australia, and especially an Australian male, was too narrow'. The old idea was based on C.E.W. Bean's image of the rugged bushman and on the stoic image of the Digger. But both ideals were forged in times of war, one in the war against a hostile continent and a pre-industrial Indigenous population, the other in modern war proper. Neither had anything to say about masculinity and identity in peacetime, which meant that neither were fit for a post-war world. All of this led naturally to the creation of works of art, such as the explosive The One Day of the Year, that expressed an entire generation's frustration at the impossibility of living up to old world ideals. All of this led naturally to the reimagining on a national scale of what it meant to be Australian. This is what the Anzac meant back then.
And lastly, to understand what Anzac Day means now, it helps to know that 'there are no surviving Gallipoli veterans and only a handful of First World War Diggers', and that they're memorialised by unknowing but reverent descendants who parade their medals and photographs like 'tribal relics or fetishes'. This state of affairs is inevitable: when the past gets old enough, 'it begins to have about it an aura of mystery that we cannot penetrate and which, precisely for that reason, has a strong pull on our imagination and on our feelings'. Now that the old men have died, and now that the 'noisy and articulate youth' who first criticised them have themselves grown old, Anzac Day has become a more metaphysical affair. We have nothing to suffer in silence, and no silence to violently articulate. Perhaps all that's left is the cultish holding aloft of the fetishes of men long dead. Perhaps it no longer serves a real purpose at all. Perhaps, and this is in direct contradiction to idea that Malouf opens this book with, perhaps Australia Day, and all the controversy that surrounds it, is truly our nation's "one day" because of that fact that it still inspires controversy, because even if the date is changed, Australia Day is alive. Which is something that, despite this book's argument to the contrary, I can't say of Anzac Day.
To understand what it used to mean, it helps to know that 'the men who had actually lived through Gallipoli and the trenches did not write about it. They had kept diaries [...] But they produced no account, either in fiction or poetry, of what they had seen and suffered'. This silence 'was a deeply established tradition' that excluded 'virtually everything introspective or inward'. Malouf thinks this silence was part of a deliberate attempt by veterans to give their wartime experience 'a legendary value and sacred aura that would put it beyond criticism or challenge'. I think this is nonsense, and I think that it betrays Malouf's limitations as a thinker. The appeal to a conspiracy of silence is the beginning of an explanation, not the end of one, and it likely has its roots in the kind of deep history that this book is ostensibly about. Malouf does talk a bit about the origins of the masculine ideals of the time, for example when he discusses journalist C.E.W. Bean's influential portraits of the classic Australian man, who was stoic, tough, irreverent, loyal, fair. And he does write that the veterans' association, the RSL, viewed the kids who were coming of age in the post-war period, who were 'the very first generation of young men and woman in Australia to get to the university in large numbers', 'the first generation in Australia of a noisy and articulate youth', he does say that the RSL viewed them as 'a direct threat to Australian values'. But Malouf doesn't explain the RSL's 'great Australian philistinism', and his reference to them amounts to little more than a restatement of his thesis that there existed in Australia at that time a vast conspiracy of silence about the war and its effects on those who fought in it. Which means that, except for one passing reference to the stifling effects of trauma, Malouf doesn't seek to explain, even in broad strokes, why Australian men of that era engaged in a mass silent protest while their fellow veterans across the water wrote such timeless masterpieces as All Quiet on the Western Front and Storm of Steel, each of which explored and reveals a very different national character. Where is our exploration of our national character? I think it's notable that Australian men were silent while men of other fighting nations were not. And I think it's probably that the model German of the time was in many ways identical to Bean's model Aussie (except for the irrevence), and yet they produced an Ernst Junger and we did not. Unravelling this mystery would likely go some way to explaining the meaning of Anzac Day, which is the purpose of this book. Yet Malouf spends no time on it at all, and we're left none the wiser about what Anzac Day meant to those it commemorated.
To understand what Anzac Day came to mean to future generations, it helps to know that our literature of the First World War 'was written out of the imagination by a later generation' who had no firsthand experience of it. Malouf writes that 'one of the uses of art is that it allows us to re-experience what has most deeply wounded us, at an imaginative level where it might also be healing'. Later generations used art to do what their soldier parents could not, which was discuss and try to understand the trauma of war. Art is essential to any national conversation--it's how a generation talks to itself, how it comes to terms with its past, how it dreams of its future--and the play Malouf chose to talk about reveals a nation wrestling with intergenerational trauma. Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year is about an angry young man who thinks he sees 'the real picture of the heroic Digger, as a drunk sprawled in the gutter and covered with vomit'. It's easy to hear in this caricature the voice an entire generation of youths reacting to their absent, drunkard, PTSD-afflicted, war veteran fathers. Malouf holds that, for this reason, Anzac Day became the 'focus of bitter argument about Australian aims and values', that it 'drew to itself the usual conflict for place and influence between the generations', and that this 'was essentially an argument [...] that the old idea of what it meant to be Australia, and especially an Australian male, was too narrow'. The old idea was based on C.E.W. Bean's image of the rugged bushman and on the stoic image of the Digger. But both ideals were forged in times of war, one in the war against a hostile continent and a pre-industrial Indigenous population, the other in modern war proper. Neither had anything to say about masculinity and identity in peacetime, which meant that neither were fit for a post-war world. All of this led naturally to the creation of works of art, such as the explosive The One Day of the Year, that expressed an entire generation's frustration at the impossibility of living up to old world ideals. All of this led naturally to the reimagining on a national scale of what it meant to be Australian. This is what the Anzac meant back then.
And lastly, to understand what Anzac Day means now, it helps to know that 'there are no surviving Gallipoli veterans and only a handful of First World War Diggers', and that they're memorialised by unknowing but reverent descendants who parade their medals and photographs like 'tribal relics or fetishes'. This state of affairs is inevitable: when the past gets old enough, 'it begins to have about it an aura of mystery that we cannot penetrate and which, precisely for that reason, has a strong pull on our imagination and on our feelings'. Now that the old men have died, and now that the 'noisy and articulate youth' who first criticised them have themselves grown old, Anzac Day has become a more metaphysical affair. We have nothing to suffer in silence, and no silence to violently articulate. Perhaps all that's left is the cultish holding aloft of the fetishes of men long dead. Perhaps it no longer serves a real purpose at all. Perhaps, and this is in direct contradiction to idea that Malouf opens this book with, perhaps Australia Day, and all the controversy that surrounds it, is truly our nation's "one day" because of that fact that it still inspires controversy, because even if the date is changed, Australia Day is alive. Which is something that, despite this book's argument to the contrary, I can't say of Anzac Day.
November 24, 2017
Skirted across the surface of insight but never really bit.
November 13, 2024
David is always perceptive of day to day and the real Australia.
January 6, 2017
Pretty cool to have come across this Short Blacks series. A good way to discover contemporary Australian authors.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews