World 2.8 million USA 910K+ New York 270K+ New Jersey 100K+
US fatalities 50K+
Due to social distancing rules, Anzac Day services have been cancelled. With no Anzac Day march, dawn service, or public gatherings, people have marked the occasion and held private ceremonies at home. Standing in driveways, or on their balconies at 6am for a minute’s silence, many holding candles and listening to distant bugle calls and the sound of birds through a soft pastel coloured dawn light. I wonder if these private gatherings will become a common Anzac Day tribute in years to come.
I have the deepest respect for the sacrifices that our armed forces personnel have made, but I don’t commemorate Anzac Day. My grandfather, George Finey was in the ‘first bloodbath’ as he used to call it. He felt that Anzac Day glorified war, so he never attended an Anzac Day service. He joined up in New Zealand as an under-age private. Stationed in France, he drove a team of horses carting supplies to the front line and bringing back the dead and wounded. He was fortunate to survive the war and an attack of mustard gas and lucky to avoid contracting the Spanish flu.
After the war, not able to find work in Auckland, he arrived in Sydney in 1919 and quickly found employment as a political cartoonist and caricaturist. A talented artist, his work depicted the plight of returned soldiers, the suffering endured during the Great Depression and the horrors of the second ‘bloodbath’. He worked for a range of newspapers including Smith’s Weekly, The Labor Daily and The Telegraph. Later on, he gave many interviews about the difficulties of those years as well as the fun of the bohemian days in 1920s Sydney. He was a creative and diverse artist until the day he passed away in 1987 at the age of 92.
‘Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ George Santayana.
The Spanish Flu didn’t begin in Spain. It’s thought to have started in the army camps in France in 1916, spreading from there throughout Europe and the world at the end of the war as troops returned home. There were two waves of infection, the second was far worse than the first. We should heed the lessons of war and of pandemics. Lest We Forget.