by Julie Bell

Created on: October 27, 2008

A few days before Anzac Day, 2006, I sat in a Melbourne caf, reading the paper and nursing my latte. My eye fell on an article on the debate surrounding whether descendants of deceased veterans should march in the parades. The author took issue with requests from the R.S.L. that a dress code be adhered to, as a sign of respect. Then the words got too blurry to read further. I walked out of the caf, crossed the street to the train station and bought a ticket to Gundagai, population 2,500.

The journey through sparsely-treed, dry hills provided ample time to think of our ANZAC' and his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Us young ones never smelled mud and death. We never even had to live with a tortured veteran who attacked his own family when the inner torment got too much. Yet down through the generations, the ghosts of Gallipoli have touched us. His older children, with old-fashioned discretion, don't mention what isn't nice. After a couple of bottles of wine, the younger siblings, like my Dad, will talk about it. A little bit. Insights like, "He was a mean old bugger" and, "I'll never forgive my father for what he did to me."

The confessional of a night sky, curtained by the bush and lit by stars and the camp fire, yielded a few more details. "My father was yelling and I heard him slam out the back door. I came into the kitchen and there were my sisters lying about on the floor. I saw the blood seeping from their head wounds. I was 5."

When puberty finally lent my Dad the requisite height and testosterone, the crunch came. He witnessed his father stab his mother in the leg with a toasting fork. Years of pent-up fury fueled Dad's charge, which deposited his father through a window into the broad-bean patch.

I noticed that whenever my Dad or my Aunties talk about their childhood memories, their shoulders sag and they look down. They don't like to talk about it much.

Dad wasn't set up too well to be a husband and father. My own generation has not coped very well with the fall-out of that. One died of AIDS last year, one has Schizophrenia and the other is on anti-depressants. He says, "Our family is a complete tragedy." And then he looks down. Then there's me. I wrote an impassioned letter to our Dad when I was 20. We missed him. "Dad, how long is the Gallipoli curse going to continue?"

No reply.

We don't talk about it much.

April 25th finds me shivering at the Dawn Service along with a few score of Gundagai's residents. "Decent turn-out this year!" I hear.

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