I was going to do a short teach-in at the EcoFair today, (along with selling my Eco Jewelry) but i’ve got a mucked up arm.
More on that later. Short story, I didn’t go.
But today was also ANZAC Day, sort of an Australian, Canadian and New Zealand version of Veterans Day.
Veterans day here commemorates the end of the war.
ANZAC day is the first engagement by Australian and NZ troops under Aussie and NZ officers (also Canadian and Irish) at a place called Suvla Sud al Bar at Gallipoli… against the Turks.
To put it mildly, it was a straight up fuck-job.
They got mauled.
So did the Turks, because that’s what war is all about.
The British Army had decided to put the “colonials” into the fight right there…
With an amphibious invasion. One which they quickly learned they didn’t know how to run.
That was the guys at the top, like Winston Churchill. He resigned his command and took a field posting.
Remorse, yes, shame, yes… didn’t bring back the kids who were, as the song says
“in five minutes flat, we were all blown to Hell,
Nearly blew us back home
to Australia.
But the band played “Waltzing Matilda”
As we stopped
To bury our slain
We buried ours,
and the Turks buried theirs…
Then we started all over again
and some of them were kids.
The oldest surviving ANZAC died in 2002, while the Liberation Violent Takeover of Afghanistan was going on.
He was 102.
When he joined the Australia-New Zealand Auxilary Corps of the British Army he was 14.
He was 15 when he went to Gallipoli.
Some of our Young Friends who say we unnecessarily pick on the Devilpups and Young Marines and JROTC and Boy Scouts, which ranch-raise the kids to become Cannon Fodder, should contemplate that.
Their leaders will probably wire them up to call us Hate Speech Propagandists for pointing that out.
Screw their leaders.
I was going to sing the songs “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” “Gallipoli” and “Green Fields o’ France” and play the pipes lowly, actually my flute, and sing it too, Flowers o’ the Forest.
I’ve seen the smilin’
of Fortune beguiling
I’ve witnessed her pleasure
an’ found her decay…
Sweet was it’s blessing
Kind it’s caressing
But now ’tis fled,
tis fled..
Far away…
I’ve seen the forest
adorned in the foremost
wi’ the flowers o’ the forest
most pleasant and gay.
Sae bonnie was their bloomin’
their scent, the air perfumin’
but now they are withered,
an’ a’ wae’ed away…
I’ve seen the mornin’
wi’ gold the hills adornin’
The dread tempest formin’
before parting day…
I’ve seen tweed silver streams
Glitterin’ in the sunny beams.
Grow drownly an’ dark
as they
Rolled on their way.
O, Fickle Fortune!
Why such cruel sportin’
an’ why thus perplex us
poor sons of the day?
Thy frown cannot fear me
Thy smiles cannot cheer me…
For the Flowers o’ the Forest
are all wae’ed away….
At the end of “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”
and the old men
still answer the call…
But as year follows year
more old men disappear…
Someday no one will march there
At all
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzin’ Matilda
you’ll go a-waltzin’ Matilda with me.
An’ their ghosts may still be heard
as ye march by that billabong…
Who’ll go a-waltzin’
Matilda wi’ me…
Waltzing Matilda is the unofficial national anthem of Oz-land.
The title refers to a backpack on a stick called a waltzing Matilda since it jerks about so much as you’re carrying it.
The song is about a homeless guy who stole a sheep (Capital offense in British Subjugated Australia at the time) and when the so-called “authorities” tried to take him prisoner he drowned himself instead.
They taught us part of the song, translated into American-recognizable speech, when I was in fourth grade.
Didn’t tell us what the song was about.
I didn’t get to do my teach-in at the EcoFair so I’m doing it here.
“The Flowers o’ the Forest” is funerary and memorial song.
At Scots and Irish funerals and their Canadian and ANZAC derivatives, they play it.
A lone piper usually.
The original was in Scots Gaelic and refers to Yet Another time the English marched into Scotland and massacred a whole bunch of Scotsmen.
Effectively wiped out a generation of young Scots.
They justify it on the grounds that the Scots weren’t a militarized, centralized, highly organized Fascist State thus it’s ok for the Militarily Superior British to do as they please with them.
Might Makes Right.
Where that connects to Australia is the British would round up Scots and Irish “insurgents” and “unlawful combatants” and ship them to Slave Colonies in Australia.
The homeless guy in Waltzing Matilda was a descendant of the deportees.
The “authorities” wanting to hang him after a “fair and impartial” Kangaroo Court hearing (where did you THINK the term came from?) were British Regulars working for the very rich, as usual.
If you want to do a music search on it or the other songs, they’re worth a listen.
You’ll also get links to the full stories behind them.
I mucked my arm pretty badly in November, had a slight accident involving my bicycle.
and the ground and my elbow making violent contact therewith.
I thought at the time that it wasn’t anything serious but now I have to go around with my arm in a sling until the orthopaedists check it out.
Means I can’t ride the bike, so I had to walk to the grocery store today.
I also use my cane for support, and with one hand on the cane and the other in a sling I go from being badly disabled to being downright helpless. Took a lot longer than it usually would and pretty much wiped me out for the rest of the day.
So I didn’t get to go down to the EcoFair.
Ah, well, more opportunities later.
Closing arguments will be heard this morning in the Ward Churchill trial and then the case goes to the (very young and earnest) jury.
This squad looks like they’re reenacting Colonel Chivington and his raiders freshly back from the Sand Creek Massacre. Perhaps they are retracing the victory lap the soldiers rode in Denver, festooned with the body parts of their victims, women and children, they exhibited as trophies of their victorious raid on the Indian encampment at Sand Creek.
Do YOU, for example, count Winston Churchill’s WWII England among your ancestors? Here is the invitation to the 2008 parade:
