A poetic testament to the enduring myth of Anzac
A small man in a cloth hat shuffles close as we stand among 2000 citizens attending the Anzac Day service in Deniliquin, southern NSW, the sun blazing.
“I awoke this morning at 4.30, not sure of the time for the dawn service,” he says. It turned out to be scheduled for 6am.
“Well,” says Frank May, for that, he informs me, is his name, “I had time on my hands, so I wrote a little poem.
“Would you like to look at it?”
The poem is entitled Anzac Day at Orana 2019. Orana is the nursing home where Frank lives these days.
“The chill pre-dawn air awakens me,” it begins.
“An old bloke near ninety-three/I tumble out of bed, get dressed/And make a cup of tea.
“My thoughts go back many years/ When uncles and grandfathers rumble/ When out of the trenches, bayonets fixed/ Prepared for the foe, so humble.”
Frank May, nearing 93, wasn’t born until almost eight years after the First World War ended, and he was 20 when the Second ground to a stop.
It says something about the endurance of the myth of Anzac that a man of Frank’s age was born too late to serve in last century’s great wars, and finds himself moved to write a poem in his nursing home about grandfathers and uncles, all gone now, rumbling off to battle.
It says something, too, that 2000 people in a drought-struck town of 7600 would attend the day’s main Anzac service, and that 500 had already marched to Deniliquin’s cenotaph in the dawn.
The Edward River Concert band played hymns; the mayor, Norm Brennan spoke of how the town’s schoolchildren, seated at his feet, should know that courage, endurance, tenacity and mateship had always lain at the core of the Anzac spirit; and a lieutenant-colonel, Craig Johnson, declared that Anzac Day belonged to everyone and not to any particular interest group.
A choir sang the national anthems of Australia and New Zealand and the Last Post blew.
And then, with the sun high, the people of this dry, dry district drifted off to resume their own personal war with the elements, and with regulations that mean the Murray and Edward rivers flow strong nearby, heading to South Australia and the sea, while their farm-irrigation allocations have been slashed to zero.
For an hour or so, they had put their cares aside to remember men and women whose cares had been life and death itself.
And Frank May, almost 93, allowed that he might have a little nap during the afternoon. He had written a poem in the morning dark, and had stood all through the dawn service and the 11am service.
For all of those who went before, he said.