Thousands of Australian families handed their stories down

The fight against COVID-19 has made this year’s Anzac Day especially moving. Across the country thousands of Australians have paid their respects despite coronavirus restrictions, and found strength in the values of courage, endurance, sacrifice and mateship celebrated by the Anzac tradition. If you want to understand where this all began I highly recommend Joan Beaumont’s 2013 award winning book Broken Nation: Australians and the Great War. I love how she explains her personal connection to Joe Russell’s War:

This is only one of some 330,000 stories of Australian men and women who served overseas in the war that soon became known as ‘The Great War’. Thousands of Australian families endured the aftermath of this massive conflict, and handed their stories down from one generation to the next. Joe Russell’s story starts this history only because he was my great-uncle. Lydia was my grandmother; Ernest my grandfather; Edna my mother. As a child, I heard the story of Joe’s white feather and lost leg many times. As a child, I took little notice of it—except for the macabre details of his nightmares and his falling out of bed. Only now do I recognise that Joe is one of the reasons why I have written this book. His war service was reluctant, short and ineffectual, yet in its own way it was courageous. Had not he, and millions of other men, been willing to fight—whatever their reservations and fears—the armies of 1914-18 could not have fought World War I for more than four terrible years.
— Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians and the Great War

Acknowledgement: Photo by Victoria Tronina on Unsplash

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