Australian literature: themes, contexts, and major works

¶ … Australian Literature: An Anthology of Writing From the Land Down Under, by Phyllis Edelson. Specifically, it will contain an analysis of "The First Days in the Trenches" and the section on WWI in the introduction.

WORLD WAR I

World War I was a crucial time for Australia, and Australian independence. Australia gained independent status in 1901, but they were still under the protective wing of Great Britain, and many Australians liked it that way.

The Australians always seem to "get along," no matter where or what they are doing. They have an easygoing attitude that is charming and disarming at the same time. This attitude prevails in the stories about World War I. Only once does the author really berate the British, and that is when the officer insists men risk their lives to recover the bodies in "No Man's Land." The author says "I was disgusted to think that life seemed to mean nothing to this man" (Edelson 139). He still does not look at it as an ethnic problem between Australians and the British, he sees the officer as simply a man without feeling. In other areas, he praises the British shelling, "They read our signals well - on only a few occasions did we get shelled from our own" (Edelson 135), and he commends the men who kept shelling after their ship was hit by a torpedo. He never speaks out against the British, or the fact that the Australians were in a more desperate position than the British at Gallipoli. It is not that he is ignorant, he simply does not worry about the inequities, he has more important things to worry about, such as staying alive.

It was later, after the fighting was done, that the Australians realized what a poor position they had occupied, and how the British used them to cover themselves. From the descriptions in "The First Days in the Trenches," it seems that the Australian trenches were the first the Turks encountered from their own trenches, and so the Australians had the heaviest casualties. "The Turks had to come over a small rise and our trenches were just below this..." (Edelson 138). The officer did not have to say, "What is a few men?" The attitude of the British is clear. The Australians are not as important as the British are.

As the author notes, individual Australians were "comfortable" with their status as a colony of England, but others were not. World War I really made Australians aware of themselves as a separate country with separate ideals. After the terrible fight at Gallipoli, where 7,600 Australians were lost, the country looked differently at Britain, and at their own identity. They began to see they were expendable to the British, used almost as a buffer to spare British troops. "At the same time, that sacrifice shook Australian confidence in the wisdom and dependability of London. British planning had, after all, caused a heavy loss of Australian blood" (Edelson xxv). This made Australians feel more unified together, and made them feel much more of a separate nation from England.