Fly Away Peter
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Australia is a relatively young country compared to the rest of the world and places such as Europe. Before the First World War Australia struggled to give itself a lasting identity, the war united the Australian people together for the first time as a nation, and created the ANZAC legacy and the Australian way we know today. The years surrounding World War One helped build our identity, and David Malouf expresses this issue in the novella Fly Away Peter.
In 1914 Australia was just a newly federated country, only 13 years into its nationhood. Australians in this time had no identity of their own and were dependent
on their mother country, they saw themselves as British people in a new land, and their loyalties were very strong to Britain. Even though Australia had been seen as a new land, it is still clear that the British social values and attitudes about class and gender were exactly the same as the new Australian way. This can be seen in the differences between Jim and Ashley, Ashley is rich and well educated, while Jim is his inferior employee. They are from the same small area in Queensland, but are as culturally different as could be possible.
Although Australia was so closely related to Europe, it was also very cut off, the war was something Australians had not yet heard of, and when they did, they were the last to learn about it, “the echo of a shot that had been fired months back and had taken all this time to come round the world and reach them”. War is something Australia has not yet experienced, and most of the Australians were “filled with excitement” and the streets were “filled with an odd electricity”. They had “entered a different day,” Australia was going to become a part of the bigger picture, and Jim felt that it “made him bold”, ready to try and experience new things.
Young Australians were eager to join the war to help England and to be involved in the excitement, they did not want to miss out on such an excellent opportunity. But they did not know the horrors that lay ahead of them, the trench warfare, disease, lack of food and just plain filth which was unbearable, “the smell of damp earth walls and rotting planks, of mud impregnated with gas, of decaying corpses”. But it wasnt just the trench life that was bad, but there was also the constant loom of death, many thousands of Australians died in World War One, many in the first mis-landing at Gallipoli. Stories and reports of everything happening in the war made their way back to Australia “news had come of the landings at Gallipoli and the slaughter of the following weeks. Peoples attitude to the war was changing.” The ANZAC spirit that was keeping the troops at war going was starting to affect the people at home too.
The ANZACs