The ANZAC Tribulations at Gallipoli in Recent Australian Children’s Literature

Generations of Australian children have been presented with iconic fi gures and values associated with the events of 1915 at Gallipoli and involved in the ritual practices of remembrance exemplifi ed by Anzac Day ceremonies throughout a corpus of children’s literature which ranges from picture books for pre-schoolers to young adult fi ction. This paper aims to broadly identify the narrative strategies at work in a selection of recent stories of brave animals helping the Aussie boys under fi re or paeans to the duty of personal and communal remembrance and to examine them in a larger context of national self-representation. From 1916 and the fi rst commemorations of the Anzacs’ fruitless deployment on the Gallipoli peninsula a few months before, to the current remembrance eff orts, there have been important fl uctuations throughout the past century in the way these World War One events have been acknowledged and appraised by the Australian public as well as by its political leaders and the country’s intellectual fi gures. In the context of the current centenary events program, the children’s book industry has been especially active in Australia (and in New Zealand in a smaller capacity). While the Australian federal government was allocating generous funding to the production and circulation of educational resources supervised by the Department of Veterans’ Aff airs, the corpus of local children’s literature dealing with various aspects of the Anzac myth was also signifi cantly enlarged, with illustrated texts, Young Adult stories, graphic novels, and a sizeable delivery of picture books – a category which will be the main focus of this presentation. A similar publishing endeavour can be observed in Britain, concentrated around the poppies of European battlefi elds as visual symbols of remembrance. However, with a distinct ritual practice organised around Anzac Day each 25th of April, a few themes and images connect the creative strategies of several dozen Australian picture books: this article will concentrate on the animal protagonist as a narrative and emotive proxy, and on the collective memory mobilised through dawn services, veterans’ marches and artefacts.

From 1916 and the fi rst commemorations of the Anzacs' fruitless deployment on the Gallipoli peninsula a few months before, to the current remembrance eff orts, there have been important fl uctuations throughout the past century in the way these World War One events have been acknowledged and appraised by the Australian public as well as by its political leaders and the country's intellectual fi gures. In the context of the current centenary events program, the children's book industry has been especially active in Australia (and in New Zealand in a smaller capacity). While the Australian federal government was allocating generous funding to the production and circulation of educational resources supervised by the Department of Veterans' Aff airs, the corpus of local children's literature dealing with various aspects of the Anzac myth was also signifi cantly enlarged, with illustrated texts, Young Adult stories, graphic novels, and a sizeable delivery of picture books -a category which will be the main focus of this presentation. A similar publishing endeavour can be observed in Britain, concentrated around the poppies of European battlefi elds as visual symbols of remembrance. However, with a distinct ritual practice organised around Anzac Day each 25 th of April, a few themes and images connect the creative strategies of several dozen Australian picture books: this article will concentrate on the animal protagonist as a narrative and emotive proxy, and on the collective memory mobilised through dawn services, veterans' marches and artefacts.

Animal Figures as Fighting and Remembering Proxies
First, if this picture book selection is slightly extended to include the Anzacs' later service on the Western front, one can discover a whole menagerie. The donkey of John Simpson Kirkpatrick in Gallipoli is the most famous creature in this group, whether he is called "Abdul," "Murphy" or "Duff y." Similarly, Roly the Anzac Donkey and his work with the New Zealand Medical Corps has been celebrated by Kiwi author Glyn Harper. A donkey also leads the farm animals to go and pay tribute to Simpson's four-legged companion in Only A Donkey. On a superfi cial level, one can imagine that cute animal stories will be an easy sell to a juvenile audience. For Australian federal departments, this has translated for the last two decades in a series of publications such as 2009's M is for Mates -Animals in Wartime from Ajax to Zep, a large-sized album based on traditional illustrated alphabet books. "G is for Gallipoli donkeys," with a double page telling the much-repeated story of Simpson and his donkey in the most noncommittal way possible. The 2014 Anzac Day Media Style Guide (published by Monash University and the University of South Australia) fi lls some gaps in the standard version of those events from April-May 1915, and underlines its historiographic attraction: Historians argue that Simpson's story has been used for propaganda purposes. Claims that he rescued 300 men from the battlefi eld in three weeks are unlikely and unproven. Still, there is agreement that Simpson showed courage under fi re, even if his life was less heroic than his legend. His role as a medic -rather than a killer -has contributed to his popularity: his story has been used to convey the Anzac legend to children in particular. Referring to Simpson's story requires careful handling, in order to ensure accuracy. For example, in the 1920s he was called an imperialist; today, a patriot. Neither claim is true: Simpson expressed hatred for the British Empire. (14) How does all this translate in a popular picture book like Simpson and his Donkey, fi rst published in 2008? First, it takes the reader a third of the book to approach Anzac Cove "on a moonless April Morning"; in the meantime, author Mark Greenwood and illustrator Frané Lessac describe how John "Jack" Simpson Kirkpatrick, born in Britain, became the quintessential Australian bushman (the fi gure celebrated by Banjo Paterson and others in The Bulletin in the late nineteenthcentury). The naïve gouache artwork of Frané Lessac and its palette go from slightly muted in the English scenes to more contrasted in Simpson's Australian adventures, and culminate in a monochromatic explosion of orange-beige on the Turkish peninsula where his legend was born. War horrors are toned down for young readers: the wounded are all quietly sitting or lying, with all their limbs still attached; only one tiny fi gure is seen fl oating face down in the sea, surrounded by a very faint beige halo in the middle of the blue; and, on the next double page, the sea takes an ominous salmon-pink hue. For the rest of the book, Simpson and Duff y's brave rescue operations, until Simpson's death and burial, take place in a hilly countryside that, in the visual style of the illustrator, emulates children's drawings but also clearly hint at Aboriginal painting designs, with wide swaths of ochre for the land and strong primary colours, up to the red sky of the funeral scene, refl ecting the poppies mentioned in the text and drawn among the soldiers' graves. On the same double page, the hills have also taken an unnatural black tint which serves as an inverted canvas for the repetitive accumulation of men, tents, trees, bushes echoing the fi eld of aligned crosses. This image, and the wellordained patterns of vegetation and fi ghting positions all along the previous pages, also evoke Aboriginal dot-painting motives.
Less original is the narrative treatment of Simpson's story, with the last double page mentioning that "Jack rescued over three hundred men during twenty-four days" before concluding the narrative with the traditional injunction, "Lest We Forget." These words are placed just opposite a recycled visual trope of Simpson's legend which the authors are using no less than three times in the whole book: Simpson walking alongside his donkey and supporting a wounded soldier sitting on the animal. Based on a few photographs from 1915, the scene has been memorialised at diff erent commemorative sites around Australia, on medals or on stamps. In 2004-2005, as part of John Howard's conservative government's new National Framework for Values Education: [federal Minister for Education Brendan] Nelson designed a poster of the values "and over the top of it," he said, "I've superimposed Simpson and his donkey as an example of what's at the heart of a national sense of emerging identity." The story of the unarmed digger and his donkey rescuing wounded soldiers at Gallipoli was the essence of our national character, said Nelson, "and he represents everything that's at the heart of what it means to be an Australian."  The lofty but vague notions evoked by the Minister are echoed by the contrasting impressions and images present in another picture book re-using the Simpson visual package. Titled Only a Donkey, it seems to confl ate the Anzac myth with redemption stories from the Old and the New Testaments. In the book, the Australian icons ultimately change the destiny of a small farm donkey fi rst bullied (literally) by the other animals: All the other animals were happy at the farm, except the donkey. "You're useless." The dog barked. The goat said, "You're weak." "Donkeys have ears like wings," bleated the sheep. And the animals laughed. Especially the bull. (2-3) The story takes a metaphysical turn when, sleeping in his stable, the donkey sees a path to magic in his dreams. With the manger and night-sky background, it is not a stretch to think of Joseph being visited by the Holy Spirit before the Nativity. The next day, the donkey gets on his way, followed by inquisitive, sceptical and still verbally abusive animals. When the little group ends up in what looks like the grounds of Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, their encounter with "The Man with the Donkey" (a 1935 sculpture by Wallace Anderson) is a kaleidoscope of biblical references. It feels like a paradoxical Exodus (are they really fi nding the Promised Land in the middle of a modern metropolis?), and the gathering around the statue seems to mix the episode of the golden calf and the scene of the grumbling Hebrew crowd challenging Moses to draw water from the rock. And, lo and behold, the bronze donkey speaks -in fact recites a poem about the friendship and trust between man and beast that led to the rescue of "over 300 men." The humbled animals then "all see the magic" of care and compassion (the fi rst value listed on Nelson's poster) on their way home, and "all the animals were happy at the farm -especially the donkey -THE END" (30-31).
This tale of epiphanic remembrance brings to mind the concerns of modern historians and teaching specialists. In History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom, published in 2008, Anna Clark thus comments on her discussions with high school students all around Australia about Gallipoli and the Anzacs: I did wonder whether their belief in Anzac wa s more like a form of spiritual nationalism than historical understanding. I got a similar sense of this national sentiment while reading Bruce Scates' study of pilgrimages to Australian war sites [at Gallipoli and the Western Front in 2002].
[…] Dave, a student on the trip, wrote that he'd learnt about Gallipoli since primary school: "To me, it's the Australian Mecca, a place where we can refl ect upon ourselves and what it means to be Australian." […] At a boys' school in Adelaide, Declan talks about his connection in similar terms: "Most people say that you shape your country with the way you fi ght your battles and what comes from that. People are always talking about Australia's freedom is because we fought at Gallipoli and World War II." (46) "The way you fi ght your battles" and the initial bullying in Only a Donkey may hint at a peculiar issue in the Gallipoli/Anzac legend: it is fundamentally based on a military failure, the kind that nonetheless inspires intense nationalistic discourses like the Thermopylae in 480 BC, the Battle of Kosovo for the Serbian nation in 1389, or the end of the Gallic independence from Rome after the Battle of Alesia in 52 BC. 2 The Australian human tragedy at Gallipoli has, at diff erent periods, been explained by the heartless incompetence of the British High Command, resulting in a massive waste of soldiers' lives, an interpretation central to the thesis of Peter Weir's Gallipoli movie of 1981. However, this supposed ill-treatment has to be measured against actual cases of bullying perpetrated by Australian soldiers, such as the deadly riot in the Cairo brothel district, known as the Battle of the Wazzir -or simply their participation in the invasion of a distant, unknown country.
Just as in Only A Donkey, a clear case of bullying also occupies almost a quarter of the pages of Belinda Landsberry's Anzac Ted. The tattered plush toy is described as "a scary bear" on the fi rst page, as scary as anything that explosive ordnance and ammunition can infl ict on a human being: "he is missing bits, his tummy splits, he only has one eye." A few pages later, his appearance triggers a panicked stampede out of a classroom, with visual echoes of a military position or a trench violently emptied of all human life: papers caught mid-air in the rush, like shrapnel or blown bits of landscape -or worse, with a kid's foot half-seen through a doorframe, visually disconnected from the rest of his body. Is it because of that initial scare ("I don't know why some start to cry but reckon I can guess") that all the kids then verbally lash out at poor Anzac Ted? He ends up marginalized and covered with ridicule. However, instead of only playing his part in a cautionary tale of social misbehaviour, this teddy bear ends up as a double proxy, that of the child and that of many a veteran of World War I and later confl icts. Published in 2014, Anzac Ted is designed as a safe fi rst exposure to the Anzac story, as evoked in its publisher's online promotional material: Coincidentally, the centenary for Australia's involvement in World War I and landing at Gallipoli was approaching, so Belinda saw this as a wonderful opportunity to introduce to our children the subject of war, the Anzacs and respect for those who serve. Of course, there are numerous picture books already doing this, but none has made it as readily accessible to children via such a powerful symbol of childhood: the teddy bear. 3 Thus, halfway through the book, the narrative switches to a fl ashback in sepia tones, fast-forwarding through the fi rst twenty one years of the narrator's grandfather's life to concentrate on his departure to the war, the teddy bear packed in his suitcase. The fi ghting in Turkey is sparingly shown: busy stretcher-bearers in the background at one point, and one scene of soldiers charging out of a trench under artillery fi re; during this whole ordeal, Ted the mascot becomes a hero, as mentioned four times by the narrator. Decades later, back in Australia, he is last seen in his tiny uniform jacket and slouched hat saluting the viewer, a young audience now enlightened as to the glorious legend -a budding awareness smoothly consolidated with the superimposition of the last line of text ("His name is […] Anzac Ted") on the stock image of the Anzac Day dawn silhouette.
Anzac Ted toys with the notions of mindless violence and ghastly mutilations. In this precise case, and with a whole corpus of children's books dealing with individual experience in the context of large-scale bloodshed, it is interesting to question the value and possible consequences of what may at fi rst glance look like an age-inappropriate literary onslaught of military nationalism. Even without any ideological agenda, what may arouse criticism here is "the question of reading books that deal with sober topics to young children at all" (76), as Ellen Handler Spitz formulates it in Inside Picture Books. In a chapter entitled "Please Don't Cry," she describes a situation that could be true for most Australian children of today: "Even in times of relative social calm, however, most children's lives brush up against death, occasionally death that is sudden" (76). She then explains how certain cultural and aesthetic experiences may be made relevant in the light of the larger world's realities: Books that survive for many years are often those that are high-spirited. Yet as authors on fairy tales have pointed out, long-lasting stories frequently deal with highly disturbing themes. Just as we adults go to the theatre to watch plays and hear operas that bring tears to our eyes, so children should be permitted to have experiences with art objects that are not all sugar and spice. Although children cannot be protected from loss, they can be exposed to it in ways that range from the sensitive to the callous, the inquiring to the hushed, the slow and careful to the swift, sudden, and overwhelming. With a beautifully crafted picture book and a measure of unhurried time, an attentive child and an engaged adult can accomplish important psychic work that may not involve gaiety but that can, in its own way, be considered to include other deep forms of pleasure. That is, if we count the communication of shared and meaningful experience as a form of pleasure.  Her demonstration is then articulated around a few picture books depicting young protagonists dealing fi rst with the death of a beloved pet (a fairly likely occurrence in their lives, and another instance of the attractiveness of animal protagonists in fi ction). She also comments on a few other books dealing with a more profound exposure to one's mortal condition through the decline and death of a grandparent, before analysing an American picture book dealing with past wars and their individual and collective memory. In Eve Bunting's and Ronald Himler's The Wall, a young boy and his dad visit the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C. to pay tribute to the boy's grandfather. The ritual remains subdued, diff erent groups of mourners gently come and go in the narrative, and the civic-duty notes of honour and pride are quickly countered by the boy's fi nal lament: "I'd rather have my grandpa here, taking me to the river, telling me to button my jacket because it's cold. I'd rather have him here" (30).
In The Wall, it is a simply-phrased anti-war feeling that imbues the remembrance ritual with a heartfelt authenticity, rather than any construct of national identity. On the title page, the authors utter a stern recommendation to their readers: "CHILDREN, LIVE IN SUCH A WAY THAT WE WILL NEVER NEED ANOTHER WALL LIKE THIS ONE." A similar injunction appears in Anzac Day Parade, when a young boy and an old veteran meet on the grounds of the Auckland War Memorial Museum; at the end of their discussion, the boy points at six words engraved in otherwise-blank marble panels of the Hal l of Memories: "LET THESE PANELS NEVER BE FILLED" (26-27). However, this simple heart-rending message comes after an exchange that started with the boy's abrupt question to the old soldier: "Did ya shoot them dead? […] Did it feel real cool to kill?" (10). Most picture books dealing with Anzac Day rituals of remembrance are positioned between these two opposites, with varying approaches and ambitions.

Anzac Day Commemorations in Children's Literature
After a period of decline from the 1960s to the early 1980s, the April 25 th annual commemorations have experienced an unexpected resurgence, from Prime Minister Bob Hawke's visit to Gallipoli in 1990 to the massive crowds at recent dawn services, parades, Anzac Day Clashes between the Collingwood and Essendon football teams at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, and drinking and gambling sessions at the local RSL (Returned and Services Leagues) clubs. As Anna Clark explains in History's Children: "It's clear that irrespective of party politics, Anzac Day is 'good politics' -it's a powerful public commemoration where national myth and Australian history have become inextricably entwined" (48).
Beside the abundant teaching material provided to all school age groups by the federal Department of Veterans' Aff airs, commercial publishers have also been very active in this domain over the last 15 years, especially with the current centenary period. This output is partly constituted from fairly didactic eff orts such as Jackie  Metzenthen and Michael Camilleri, 2014). Finally, one can fi nd a whole series of more allusive works, sometimes tending towards poeticized abstraction while evoking the persistence of memory through man-made artefacts and natural manifestations, operating separately or in collaboration (The House that was Built in a Day: Anzac Cottage, Valerie Everett and Barbara McGuire, 2007;Do Not Forget Australia, Sally Murphy and Sonia Kretschmar, 2012;The Poppy, Andrew Plant, 2014;Lone Pine, Susie Brown, Margaret Warner and Sebastian Ciaff aglione, 2012;Memorial, Gary Crew and Shaun Tan, 1999;The Anzac Tree, Christina Booth, 2017).
The current intellectual and political debate on the meaning of Anzac Day is the latest phase of a na tional discussion started soon after the actual events at Gallipoli. In recent decades, the public commemorative fervour was at its lowest in the 1960s and 1970s, when the cultural tide was turning (with creations such as Alan Seymour's play That One Day of the Year) and when Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War soured this institutional duty of remembrance. However, while Anzac Day has progressively come back in favour over the last 30 years, it has managed to keep clear from various cultural and ideological storms: the controversial Bicentenary celebrations in 1988, the Mabo decision about native titles in 1992 and the 1997 Bringing Them Home report on the Stolen Generations, among many other issues related to the current situation of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. This black-armband-versus-white-blindfold dialectic also structures the debates around Australia's post 9/11 policies and attitudes, from the refugee detention crisis to the scepticism about inclusive multiculturalism (with extreme manifestations such as the much-discussed Cronulla riots in 2005).
During the Anzac Day celebrations of the last 15 years, recently retired soldiers and active combatants have marched together after serving as part of UN peace-keeping operations or in Afghanistan and Iraq. In A Day to Remember, Jackie French performs a delicate balancing act as she tries to convey the fi erce controversies and the still-horrendous realities of the world at large to her young readers: 25 April 2004 Australia had sent troops to join the United States, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait. More troops were sent to support the invasion by the United States to topple Saddam Hussein's regime.
Many among the crowds that lined the streets on Anzac Day, or who stood in prayer or silence at dawn, felt that Australia shouldn't have been in wars like these.
But still they came, and they remembered: those who had suff ered as the bombs of others dropped from the sky; refugees torn from their homes far away; children conscripted as soldiers for wars they didn 't understand. (26-27) On this double page where two confl icts are clumsily put together and then juxtaposed with the plight of refugees and child soldiers, as in other sections of the book, the author's intention to encompass a whole century of ceremonial remembrance may have been too ambitious for the picture book medium. Added to the neutrality she imparts to her narrative, all this turns A Day to Remember into an unsatisfying history lesson: too vague, and disconnected from its audience's sensibilities.
By contrast, My Grandad Marches on Anzac Day succeeds in its naturalistic approach to the Anzac Day ritual. The little girl's narration and the matter-of-fact, textured graphic rendition sprinkled with discrete visual cues eff ortlessly blend the communal Anzac Day experience in a familiar suburban setting with a summary evocation of past tragedies. With most of its illustrations either medium shots or close-ups, the book doesn't try to convey any sense of epic endeavour or immeasurable suff ering. The young narrator underlines some elemental aspects of the ritual: the cold of the pre-dawn hour, the gun salute that makes her "jump and scares the seagulls" (9), the shared sustenance of "chocolate and cake" (10), the badge on her dress (perhaps no more important to her than a school distinction); they all remain embryonic signifi ers of the events celebrated on this occasion. When her grandad fi nally appears, he poses as a fully-formed specifi c character in the middle of the crowd, not just one of the veterans marching. To his granddaughter, his "big moustache" is as distinctive as his "shiny medals," and her description of his behaviour ("he smiles," "he remembers," "he marches," "he is quiet," 14, 17, 27) shows that, beyond the tacit codes of the ceremony, it is with her very own grandad that she is sharing this special occasion, not with some transcendent idea of national identity made fl esh. The Gallipoli story is told in only one double-page of text and images, a brevity which allows the little girl's experience to feel deeply sincere but without excessive fl ourish or pathos. In the same fashion, when she expresses her commitment to assume her family's duty of remembrance in the future, it's on her own terms, as the thought comes to her while she is sitting alone for a moment.
It is in the same position that the reader discovers the little group of senior high school students in One Minute's Silence. In the fi rst double page of that small group, they look rather unfazed, perhaps hopeful that this evocation of the Great War may be more "exciting" 4 than the unit on the 1901 Federation and the constitutional conventions, "so far removed […] with starchy old men in top hats" (as described in . They're looking away, not even interacting with their peers in the class. Some are even half-asleep. But when the title of the book becomes an injunction written on the blackboard, each of them is taken out of their immediate environment. They are mercilessly thrown into scenes of the landing and the battles on the Turkish coast, in a way that distorts the usual empathetic projection that a narrative authority may try to elicit from the reader. Their involvement in the fi ght, on each side of the battlefi eld, is marked by a peculiar in-betweenness. Some of them do fall dead, but it does not provoke any lasting impression. After all, the urge for them to "imagine" the circumstances (repeated fi fteen times throughout the book) does not take them very far. Stuck at the threshold of personal awareness, they are their own safe avatars, since the overall impression given by the pictorial narration remains that of an elaborate military action video game. The eight months of the campaign are sliced up into game levels: landing on the beach, climbing the hill, the fi ght at Lone Pine and the stealthy escape from the Cove around Christmas time. The weapons and explosive devices are drawn with a didactic precision that borders on the fetishist (with the same level of detail that one may encounter in any modern war game franchise like Call of Duty). The technological annihilation of human beings is evoked through cutaway diagrams of artillery shells and heavy machine guns, and through ballistic compositions of bullets and shrapnel balls fl ying towards their targets in a visual style that sits somewhere between the late nineteenth-century chronophotographs and the bullet time special eff ects a century later. Published in 2014, the book's target audience are the last of the Millennials still in high school, and they are natively immersed in the contemporary semiotic systems of military combat representation, a familiarity borne of the pervasive, constant discursive interactions between news media, institutional communication organs, the entertainment and the video game industries. Attuned to the background noise of the War on Terror since the beginning of the previous decade, they may ultimately be too familiar with these extreme realities to be manipulated either into radical pacifi sm or spiritual militarism.
More notable in One Minute's Silence is the representation of the Turkish enemy. Far from the tokenism still present in other recent books, the Ottoman combatants are described as determined to hold their positions to protect their farms and their families from the "slouch-hatted strangers swarming towards them with rifl es" (16). None of the ten students depicted together in the class at the beginning seems to choose where he or she lands on the Turkish hillside, and just starts shooting to save his life and that of his fellow soldiers around him. The only trace of any instinctive epiphany at the end of this minute of silence seems to be the exchange of concerned, even peeved looks between the students. Having read through the perfunctory chronicle of the Diggers' resilience to extreme adversity, the teenagers are ready for a constructive dialogue about what Anzac may mean today -an approach that many real-life students and teachers are happy to implement to avoid a one-sided veneration of the legend, as observed by Anna Clark in History's Children.
This critical caution is certainly what dictates the emotional and narrative ambiguity of the last pages of An Anzac Tale, a recent graphic novel covering the whole campaign in the Dardanelles. When a bitter Australian soldier casts one last look at the Cove during the evacuation in December 1915, he sternly silences one of his fellow soldiers: "Why would any Australian want to come to Gallipoli?" (63). The answer is given on the fi nal double page, with the depiction of a recent Anzac Day dawn service on the Turkish site. Thousands of spectators/ participants/pilgrims are turned towards the ceremony stage and the fl ags at halfmast. However, with a majority of teenagers and young adults attired in national teams' hoodies and beanies or draped in national banners depicted in the foreground, there is still a lingering doubt as to the way most recent children's books depict the Anzacs' fi ght in Turkey and its annual commemorations -somewhere between two conjoined rites of passage a century apart, and a civic festival with or without the nationalistic overtones denounced by many Australian historians every April 25 th .

Although it is called In Flanders Fields, it is not the famous poem by John
McCrae that was written during that period, but instead the book includes only a verse from that poem. 2 In "A Turkish Tale