Catching up with the Anzac myth

Press, 4 August 1987, Page 15

Catching up with the Anzac myth

Ruth Zanker

on television I

Alan Bleasdale is doing it again. Percy Toplis in the “Monocled Mutineer” looks as though he is going to join Yosser and Co. of "Boys from the Blackstuff’ in the small crowd of great English working-class anti-heroes. We know, by now, that Percy Toplis hasn’t a show of winning against the powers that be. But the spectacle has us firmly in its grip. This isn’t a picturesque historical tale set in aspic. The first episode knocked me over. I wasn’t prepared for the ferocity of Bleasdale’s troop’s-eye-view of trench warfare.

Is the self-congratula-tory antipodean myth of the wild-colonial-boy-with-nits-and trench-feet-but-still-cocking-a-snook-at effete-English-officers in danger of a potent British rival?

The pointless, ignoble execution of a young officer was physically and morally nauseating. Percy Toplis’s charming, roguish pragmatism offers us no moral comfort either so far.

Last Friday the horrors continued. The exhausted troops have entered Staples training camp. Everyone knows their chances of living past “going up the line” are slim. The “Redcap” trainers are sadists who flog them in the “bullring,” force them into gasfilled sheds, isolate them from women and ordinary life in the local town. The camp is a powder-keg which drunken, insubordinate Aussies ignite. Toplis throws himself into the spontaneous mutiny, casting about for further opportunities. The establishment English press accused Bleasdale of creating Left-wing propaganda in his interpretation of Toplis’s story. But this is no simplistic history dressed up as a socialist lesson, nor is Toplis a simple workingclass lad.

It seems likely that the brouhaha was stirred up partly by pro-Thatcher factions gunning for the 8.8. C. (At least this makes a pleasant change from attacks by the. Left wing on the 8.8.C.’s “establishment” bias.) And, of course, any attack on the received history of English class-relations stirs up

a lot of local angst (witness “Days of Hope”). In fact, it was the 8.8. C. itself which stirred things up by billing the series as a portrayal of true characters and events. This meant that the historical nit-pickers could have a field day and deflect attention from the script’s main argument. Bleasdale himself said that if he got it right dramatically he “could say something about the bleak times we live in now” and show “that cannon fodder is cannon fodder however much you are told that things have

changed, be it in the Falklands or on the dole queue.” The amazing fact is that Bleasdale’s Toplis is in no sense a Left-wing leader. He is an opportunist As he says, “Don’t get angry, get even. And you’ll never get even.” This is the voice of city punk not socialist brotherhood. The Fleet Street reaction was inanely simplistic. Anyway, the programme doesn’t feel veryextreme to this antipodean. I was brought up on histories which told me that World War I was a gigantic bungle where

“lions (Anzacs) were led by donkeys (upper-class English).” It’s interesting to compare the dramatic licence taken by Bleasdale with that of Peter Weir in “Gallipoli.” Similar charges were made in English reviews about the historical misrepresentation of the English elite. Weir’s creative concerns were antipodean myths: mateship, manhood proven under fire, and the severing of ties with “Mother England.” That the English fools who persisted in sending men to slaughter

were shown in an unfavourable light wasn’t much disputed by those of us brought up in families of Anzacs. An incontestable statement about the war was being made in the film. It’s worth remembering too that those Australian history books were based partly on digger reports which were smuggled out through the British military censorship. The man who risked his journalistic career to tell the Australian Government of the digger’s plight was Rupert Murdoch’s father.