The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
An Australian Hero
The blonde angel of Weir's film is not only a British image of Australian
wildness. Such an angel hails also from a tradition of consuming importance
to the British ruling class, the classical appreciation of ancient Greece. "You
will hardly fade away," wrote Sir Ian Hamilton in a preface addressed to the
soldiers of Gallipoli,
until the sun fades out of the sky and the earth sinks into the universal
blackness. For already you form part of that great tradition of the Dardanelles
which began with Hector and Achilles. In another few thousand
years the two stories will have blended into one, and whether when "the
iron roaring went up to the vault of heaven through the unharvested sky,"
as Homer tells us, it was the spear of Achilles or whether it was a 100-
lb shell from Asiatic Annie won't make much odds to the Almighty.'
And in Peter Liddle's book, Gallipoli 1915, there is a stunning photograph
of a vast group of slouch-hatted soldiers backed by the sharp silhouettes of
the Sphinx and a soaring Egyptian pyramid. The caption reads: "Outside
Mcna Camp. Australians before making their own history!"
A similarly
situated photograph of Australian women nurses on camels in front of the
Sphinx disclaims such history-making prowess. Its caption reads simply,
"Nursing Sisters Sightseeing." Not even their nationality is deemed worthy
of mention.
The British novelist Compton Mackenzie was an officer in the Gallipoli
campaign and has left us this sensual, indeed erotic, image of the Australian
soldiers there, an image which fuses their wildness, nudity, beauty, and
heroism into the figure not only of the ancient Greek gods but also (as did
General Hamilton) with the earth, in this case stained an attractive warm
apricot color with their blood.
Much has been written about the splendid appearance oi those Australian
troops; but a splendid appearance seems to introduce somehow an atmosphere
of the parade ground. Such litheness and powerful grace did not
want the parade ground; that was to take it from the jungle to the circus.
Their beauty, for it really was heroic, should have been celebrated in
hexameters not headlines. As a child I used to pore for hours over those
illustrations of Flaxman for Homer and Virgil which simulated the effect
of ancient pottery. There was not one of those glorious young men I saw
that day who might not himself have been Ajax or Diomed, Hector or
Achilles. Their almost complete nudity, their tallness and majestic simplicity
of line, their rose-browned flesh burned bv the sun and purged of all
grossness by the ordeal through which they were passing, all these united
to create something as near to absolute beauty as I shall hope ever to see
in this world. The dark glossv green of the arbutus leaves made an
incomparable background for these shapes of heroes, and the verv soil
here had taken on the same tawny rose as that living flesh; one might
have fancied that the dead had stained it to this rich warmth of apricot.
The blonde angel of Peter Weir's ostensibly anti-British film, Gallipoli, is
prefigured in this extraordinary effort of the British imperial imagination.
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