“They shall grow not old,
as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them,
nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
and in the morning
We will remember them.”
The Ode of Remembrance is a verse I have committed to memory since I was at least 6 years old. And as I sit and write this, mere moments from the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, it is echoing in my mind. Every year, I hear it read twice—once on Nov. 11, wearing a poppy for Remembrance Day, and once on April 25, wearing a sprig of rosemary for Anzac Day.
The former, which is celebrated in the United States as Veterans Day and formally known as Armistice Day, is a time to mark the end of the Great War, conceived at a time when it was indeed the “war to end all wars” (a cruel irony if ever there was one). But the latter is unique to the Antipodes—and it says a lot about how Australia has come to view itself, its fellow citizens, and its place in the world.
You see, in 1914, there was never any question of Australia, a faithful and loyal former colony, lining up in defense of Mother England. In droves, men lined up to join the fight, grouped into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC for short). The then–first lord of the admiralty, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, had derived a new way to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The ANZACs were to land at Gallipoli, on the coast of the Dardanelles (linking the Aegean and Black Seas), to attack the Ottomans in their homeland (now modern-day Turkey). So on the morning of April 25, 1915, men were piled into rowboats before the dawn’s first light to land on the rosemary-lined beach that became known as Anzac Cove.
It was a massacre. The shore was surrounded by cliffs and thick bushland on all sides. The Ottomans, waiting upon the crags overlooking the landing sites, spotted the ships from miles away. The ANZACs couldn’t navigate the thick scrub, finding themselves rushing headlong up steep hills into a sea of bullets. Those on the ground, with only a small beachhead camp, were refused evacuation, ordered instead to “dig yourselves right in and stick it out.” Indeed, amid this hellish landscape of fire and death, the ANZACs stuck it out for eight months before the order to withdraw finally came.
And so, every April (even during COVID-19!), we venture out into the brisk darkness at dawn services across the nation, which mark that first day of the Gallipoli campaign. We gather before dawn because they did, huddled in those boats in the Dardanelles, unaware of what lay before them. Wreaths are laid, speeches made, and the Ode read. The Last Post—the bugle call for the end of the day—sounds, and then, after a minute’s silence, the Reveille—the morning call: A night watch compressed into mere minutes.
If you think about it, Anzac Day is a pretty strange day for commemorations. Almost every other nation celebrates its great triumphs and the turning points of nation-defining wars. But Gallipoli wasn’t any of that. There was no victory—only an escape from a doomed position. There was no masterful stratagem—only a hopeless blunder that forced its strategist into the political wilderness. There was no impact on the wider war—only seemingly pointless human suffering that never halted the Ottoman advance. But to just look at generals, wars, and arcs of history is to ignore the greater context surrounding Anzac Day.
There are, for example, the stories almost every Australian school child learns, like the one of Simpson and his donkey. John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a 22-year-old ANZAC stretcher-bearer. His duty was simple—to bear the injured and the wounded from the front lines back down to the beachhead at Anzac Cove. As a young boy growing up in England, he had allegedly helped support his family by organizing donkey rides. At Gallipoli, unarmed and bearing a Red Cross armband, he would carry back countless wounded soldiers on donkey-back. He was eventually killed in May 1915, shot by an enemy bullet, after never so much as wielding a gun himself throughout the entire campaign.
Legends of mateship like Simpson’s—of those who gave their all to aid those around them—abound from Gallipoli. They speak of a duty borne less out of service to king and country, and more out of service to your mates. This Aussie devotion is something more than mere friendship. It permeates the national psyche—often considered a “secular [national] religion,” going beyond friendship and the bonds of family. It’s unconditional: a promise to be there for each other through thick and thin (it was, after all, your present president’s late son who famously declared that “You know when there’s an Australian with you. They’ll always have your back”). And it’s apolitical, a rallying cry of the trade unionist and business magnate both.
Such a collectivist ideal often seems alien to my American friends. More than one has suggested to me already that, if anything defined the United States, it would be individualism—a desire to be let alone, your highest duty being to yourself, your kin, or your country. It is an idea often seen as a national value—the birthright of the land that coined “live free or die.”
And yes, it’s true that Australia has likewise long prided itself on being a nation of battlers, eking out a living from the outback. Just as our Yankee friends idolized their cowboys and highwaymen, we idolized bushrangers like Ned Kelly (and his legendary last stand at Glenrowan), penning long folk ballads of their exploits. Hell, when we replaced “God Save The Queen” as our national anthem in 1977, the runner-up was a song about a bloke who drowns himself rather than surrender to the coppers! But perhaps because of the harsh beauty of our “sunburnt country … land of sweeping plains, / of ragged mountain ranges, / of drought and flooding rains,” camaraderie among strangers was far more ingrained in the modern Aussie mentality than the U.S. mentality. Where the Mayflower brought families, the HMS Supply escorted sailors and convicts. Far from family, in a land where every aspect of nature was utterly inhospitable to the European mind (never has the adage of “Hydrate or Die” resounded as much to me as back in Oz), is it any wonder that bonds of friendship (not self, family, or nationhood) took on deeper meaning?
The degree of accuracy about the story of Simpson and his donkey remains hotly debated, but its place in the national mythos says a great deal. After all, it is this story of a lone man on a donkey making his way up and down the cliffs of Gallipoli that has always, for me and many others, exemplified what mateship and the spirit of the ANZACs really means. It is not about testosterone-fueled military might or defeating an enemy old or new. It is not about the founding of a nation or about freedom or grand political views. It is not even only for Australians. It was the father of modern Turkey, Atatürk, who is often attributed as declaring of the ANZACs that “there is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours … after having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
Rather, it is a unique idea that Gallipoli has come to represent: the idea that you look after your mates before yourself. That unconditional love for all our friends is the least that is asked of us. This devotion is our highest ideal. And, this week, I invite you to take a minute to reflect on mateship itself. If my time in the United States has spoken of being unabashedly yourself, let me take this chance to ask you all to be unreservedly for others. Individualism—that fierce independence—is by no means a bad thing. But, to butcher two maxims, while a man’s home may well be his castle (just ask that other Aussie icon, Darryl Kerrigan), no man is truly an island. Be Simpson with his donkey, serving strangers sans expectation, witness, or return.
In short, always have your mates’ backs. Because they will always have yours.
