Story and Photographs – Neville Cole.
Anzac Day has always been special for me. Not because I knew any diggers, not because of the annual Anzac Day clash at the MCG, and not because I have any real interest in the military. The reason Anzac Day has always been special is that my dad was born on Anzac Day, 1929.
Back in ’29, my dad’s parents Valerent and Mable, in a fit of patriotic ferver, named Dad’s older fraternal twin Anzac Victorius Cole. Later they changed it to Victor Cornelius. I always knew him as plain old Uncle Vic. Dad and Uncle Vic were sixteen going on seventeen when World War II ended. I’m sure they both considered it a strong possibility that the war would go on and they would be called up. I know my dad lost family members in Gallipoli and he had friends who fought and died during the Pacific campaign; but dad never really talked to me about war and fighting. I think in a way he felt guilty that he did not have to sacrifice. I think when heroes he knew came home and bragged about their adventures he was a little jealous. I’m sure he felt like the returning Anzacs were getting all the good jobs and all the pretty girls. I’m sure he sometimes felt like if the war had gone on just a little longer he might be seeing the world instead of working as an apprentice bookbinder in Kensington.
Dad’s parents didn’t have any money. Valerent and Mable pulled both boys out of school right after the war began and put them to work. Dad spent his weekdays in various factories around inner-city Melbourne and his weekends sneaking into the racetrack to watch the horses. By fifteen he had saved enough money to pay for piano lessons. Dad as young man loved music, girls, beer, gambling and sport. He wasn’t much of an athlete himself but he did once play on the same football team as John Coleman.
My brother Rob tells the story of going to his first ever game at Windy Hill. While he and dad were waiting outside to buy tickets, John Coleman walked up and shook dad’s hand and called him by name and then John Coleman shook my brother’s hand and said “G’day, young Robbie” and then the man whose name is on the award given to the league’s leading goal scorer, said “See ya later, Bill” and walked away like any other man. But dad knew better. “That man there” he said as Coleman disappeared through the club entrance “Is the greatest player to ever lace up a footy boot.
He never said so outright, but I suspect deep down my dad was a pacifist. He respected what his friends, family and others went through over there; but he never felt compelled revel in the glory of it. We didn’t go to war movies. He didn’t take us to the parades. He never took me to the Shrine of Remembrance or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Anzac day was Dad’s birthday not a day to think about the sacrifices of war.
Happy days after the war. Dad and mum are behind the big bloke in the middle. Uncle Vic and mum's twin sister Gladys are behind to the left.
Dad was, like most of his generation, deeply patriotic. He loved to watch Rod Laver and Roy Emerson dominate world tennis. He loved seeing Don Bradman destroy England to win the Ashes. He lived to see the Australian swim team win Olympic gold. The 56 Olympics were probably the best three weeks of his life. But dad preferred victories on the field of play over victories on the battlefield. Like the majority of the human race he didn’t have the hate in him to want to see other men dead. He was, it’s true, protected from the atrocities of Auschwitz and Burma. No one ever forced a gun into his hand and commanded him to shoot it. No one ever fired bullets at him. He was never imprisoned for his beliefs, his race or his religion. He was never beaten or starved or brainwashed. He was lucky man in a lucky country…and he knew it.
My brother Gary was the eldest son of a lucky man. When he turned 17 the Vietnam War was at its height. Gary saw boys not much older than himself on TV every night fighting and getting shot and coming home in body bags. Gary passed his HSC in 1970 and went on to ANU. Gary and his friends regularly hid out on campus, to avoid being drafted. Gary was a big supporter of Gough Whitlam. One big reason was Gough’s promise to end the draft. In late December ’72 when Gough made good on his promise, Gary dropped out of Uni, got in his Combi van and headed straight to the beach to spend the rest of the decade living the carefree life of a hippie surf bum.
If my dad saw the irony of he and his eldest son both missing the draft by a whisker he never talked about it. Neither did Gary. It must be like that feeling you have when a car screeches to a halt behind you and just misses plowing into you. If you are lucky enough not to be hit but smart enough to know how close you were to trouble…well, you’d prefer to just forget it ever happened. That seemed to be the way both my dad and my brother dealt with nearly having to go to war.
There was no draft as I came of age. I hardly thought about war at all. I was more concerned that there would be no jobs left when I got out of school. We figured if there was a war it would pretty much be over in an afternoon anyway. There would be a hailstorm of nuclear missiles and we would spend the next few months slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The idea that the army would draft us to actually go fight a war seemed about as insane as sending a bunch of Aussie and Kiwi kids to spend eight months trying to capture a beach in Turkey.
My youthful ideas about war and soldiering were colored by literature. I was drawn to distinctly anti-war voices of Maugham, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Spike Milligan. These men knew what war was really like and they really didn’t like it. I imagined somehow that should I ever be drafted I would declare myself a conscientious objector and go to jail for my beliefs; but deep down I knew that I would do what so many million others of my kind have done through the ages. I would grudgingly join the march and do what I could to survive.
My son will soon be old enough to go to war. I don’t think he will ever have to go – not the way wars are fought today – but I worry that he and others like him think of war as some kind of live action video game. I see them spend countless hours killing and maiming each other on TV screens every day. I want to be sure he has a healthy disgust for war. Maybe literature will show him the way as well.
And so it appears that at least four generations of us Coles will not have to go to war. I’d say we have been lucky; but merely avoiding war does not guarantee a long life. Dad might have missed out on the fighting in the Pacific; but he didn’t manage to miss that pothole that ended his life on the Hume Highway in ’83. Gary got to drop out of Uni and spend a good part of a decade on a surfboard; but those long days in the sun, no doubt, helped bring on the aggressive skin cancer that he lost the ultimate battle to in ’94.
That’s why, as Anzac Day 2010 draws ever closer I think about dad. He would have turned 81 on Sunday. I think about Gary riding the waves at Phillip Island. I think about Mum and my brother Rob gathering in Glen Iris to watch the Bombers together and share a few quiet memories of absent loved ones, me included.
Happy Birthday, Dad.
Hang loose, Gary.
Cheers, Mum and Rob.
God bless, diggers all.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 