Many historians argue that the First World War is not yet over, and indeed, speaking personally, the conflict has always been part of my consciousness, for my Grandfather saw action in Belgium and France, and the framed photograph of the uniformed young man I could hardly recognise is one of my earliest memories.
Grandfather was lucky: nearly 40 per cent of the Australian male population enlisted, and the casualty rate ran at 65 per cent.
All these decades later a book has just surfaced from my motley collection. It was published in 1920, when Grandfather was rebuilding his life after his repatriation in 1919. I bought this book at a second-hand shop in Kings Cross, Sydney, in 1965, and gave it to him. So a note on the flyleaf tells me.
The book’s title is simply Aussie, and this copy is battered and stained, badly foxed; it has clearly been in wars of its own. It is a bound collection of ‘the Diggers’ own paper of the battlefield, wholly written, illustrated and printed in the field by members of the AIF’ There had been a precedent: British soldiers of the 12th Battalion Sherwood Foresters discovered a printing press in early 1916, during the battle of Ypres, and started to produce the Wipers Times: the BBC made a TV film about the paper in 2013.
But Aussie was different. It was edited by one Lieutenant Phillip Harris, who had taken a printing press with him when he went to war in November 1914. The press was used for various purposes, and then in 1918 began to print Aussie, which as Harris said, ‘was not a paper done for the Diggers, but by them. That’s why it reflects their spirit.’
The cover of each issue bore a pen-and-ink drawing of ‘Aussie,’ who wore the uniform, complete with slouch hat and a gun slung over his shoulder. But his head cleverly forms the map of Australia: his neck is Western Australia, while his chin is the Northern Territory, and his nose is Northern Queensland. In the Christmas issue of 1918, Aussie has flung his hat in the air, his rifle has gone, and he is looking upwards with a grin on his face. The drawing bears the message Next Year At Home.
Harris and his team, despite a multitude of difficulties, succeeded in bringing the periodical out every month of 1918, and it continued as a monthly until 1929. All proceeds in peace time went towards building what became the Australian War Memorial. Every issue of the paper is crammed with a variety of pieces: cartoons, drawings, poetry, tributes to Australian writers such as Banjo Paterson and C.J. Dennis, and jokes about the diggers being on leave in France: Grandfather said the only French he ever learned was for the girls: Voulez-vous promener avec moi ce soir? Sure enough, there is a cartoon about Voulay vous. And translations such as Tray beans, the Diggers’ version of the French for very good.
A soldier’s life is usually one of bursts of brief action followed by extended periods of drudgery and boredom, and never was this more true than during this dreadful war of attrition that dragged on apparently interminably. One huge problem is always that of the necessity of maintaining morale; Harris and his team succeeded magnificently in this, and were indefatigable in their efforts, travelling long distances in appalling circumstances in order to collect contributions, grappling with formidable distribution problems, and scouring bomb sites for paper and equipment: they once found ten tons of paper in an Armentieres cellar. Their reward came in the flow of contributions and in the paper’s popularity: circulation grew to 60,000.
Aussie seems very dated, inevitably, and often the contributions are clumsily predictable. One cartoon, for example, concerns the 1918 conscription referendum, in which soldiers had to vote. Returning Officer: In what State did you enlist, Private? Private: In a state of drunkenness, sir!
But none of this matters. What matters is that these soldiers, bearing terrible burdens, were able to celebrate and practise creativity in the midst of destruction. For a little time they could believe that the pen was mightier than the sword, and in doing so were able to hurl their own spears at death.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.