Comment

Stan Grant
My grandfather’s war

He sang “Danny Boy”, my pa. He would stand straight, shoulders back with his chest puffed out and his lips all mushy and sticking out, and from his body would come the sweetest tenor.

But when ye come and all the flowers are dying, If I am dead, as dead I well may be, You’ll come and find the place where I am lying, And kneel and say an Ave there for me.

I barely knew my grandfather; he died when I was young. Everyone said he loved to sing. I can feel the rough of his face on mine and I don’t know whether it is a memory or imagination, but I am grateful for it in any case.

Pa is more legend to me than touch or sight. He was a bull rider and shearer, a fruit picker and rabbit trapper. Cecil William Henry Grant was Black with a good streak of Irish, the Dreaming and the blarney. He kept by his bedside the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. He loved words and God.

Cecil was a Rat of Tobruk. With his comrades he helped turn the war when they all dug in against Rommel’s overwhelming force in North Africa.

The German radio propagandist Lord Haw-Haw called them “rats in a trap” – they were dead men walking – but the Australian soldiers adopted the name as a badge of honour. Rats became a symbol of their resilience.

Pa was in his 30s when he signed up. My grandmother was scared and furious. She had three little kids and they lived on an Aboriginal mission in a remote New South Wales town. They were locked out of Australia. Why would he fight for it? What has this country done for us? she asked him.

Because it is our country, he said.

There was something more. I reckon he owed a debt to his brother. His older brother Ivan fought in World War I and was killed in battle. Somewhere on the fields of France a Wiradjuri man lies still, his spirit never to come home.

Three years Pa was gone. He nearly died when he contracted mumps on the boat over to the war. I have read his war records and he went AWOL a few times, played up a bit, as they all did, but fought when he had to.

There’s a photo of him and his mates, all rough and battle weary, kneeling in the desert trenches. They wear their uniforms like work clothes. They look like tough bastards with a sense of mischief and adventure and I can’t help but envy them. In the middle is a dark face, Pa.

He always said no one looked at the colour of your skin when the bullets were flying. He must have felt so free there. Funny thing to say, that you can be free in war, but I know a little about it.

I have a modest but deep and profound experience of war. I have covered conflict in many parts of the world. I have seen more than my share of human misery and suffer still the nightmares of it all.

The bonds I forged with those closest to me in the hardest times are unbreakable. War was exhilarating. That’s the shameful truth: I never felt more alive. The adrenaline, the camaraderie, the danger made me feel untouchable. All my senses tingled. Food never tasted so good; music never sounded sweeter.

Then you can’t come down and you can’t sleep and you are constantly vigilant and a slammed door sounds like a bomb going off in your head and you forget how to love those closest to you. My wife, who held me through it all, said to me my eyes turned dark and she prepared every day for what she feared might happen.

But I am here. And it has been hard. A couple of my closest mates are no longer with us. The rest of us live somewhere between our simple, life-affirming daily chores, what joy we can snatch from it all, and our memories.

I don’t lay claim to a soldier’s torment; that’s on another level. Journalists observe, but we should never think we participate.

I can only imagine what darkness Pa brought home with him. I do know he found solace in God. I also know his battles did not end in Tobruk. He came back to the Australia he left, the country that my grandmother scoffed had done nothing for us.

I have heard a lot of stories and I don’t know which are true or which apocryphal. Family myths are like that. Certainly he faced discrimination and hardship. Beyond the reach of Rommel’s guns he was now not so equal to his digger mates. Some of my family say it started the moment he arrived back, when he was blocked from boarding a train home in his full army uniform because he was Black.

He raised his family in a tin humpy with a dirt floor by the bank of an irrigation channel in the Riverina. He got a job working on the council – dirty work but he came home every day to wash up and put on a fresh white shirt to have his dinner.

The little dignities mattered to him. He’d earnt that white shirt. I read something he wrote once when he campaigned to be elected as the Aboriginal representative on the Aborigines Welfare Board. Each candidate made their pitch in the Dawn magazine that was distributed among Aboriginal communities in NSW.

If I may say so, it is a remarkable document that eschews the now fashionable language of politics or rights or recognition to appeal to something more fundamental and universal: the question of what a human is.

I’ve heard the Aborigines question discussed at various levels – from the man in the street, to shearing sheds, in army camps and at meetings of the Federal Advancement for Aborigines Organisation. To me, they present one fact and that is that anyone claiming that Aborigines are not humanly equal to other people seem to lack knowledge of the common ingredients of which all human beings are made. We are humanly equal and should be regarded as such.

That’s why he fought in a war for a country that had “done nothing for us”, because it isn’t for any nation or any person to bestow or deny our human dignity. He believed that came from God and Pa would fight in a war and work in the dirt and wear a white shirt to eat his evening meal because he was equal to anyone.

Pa never marched on Anzac Day, not until the final year of his life. I don’t know what changed in him, but he stood with his mates that day. Afterwards he went to have a drink with some of the men he fought alongside and the local police sergeant blocked his path. You know you can’t come in here, the copper said.

Pa stood his ground and his mates came and they stood around him and they walked in there together.

That’s the Australia he fought for. That’s the Australia he left me. That’s the Australia I still want to believe in. I don’t pretend we are there yet, but Pa did not fight for what our country had done for us, or what it was, but for what it might be.

When he died I got his medals. My cousin who served in Iraq has them now; he’s earnt them and he’s been struggling a bit too because what he saw won’t let him go.

On Anzac Day I stand in the darkness before dawn with my fellow Australians and in that shared sacred space we do not glorify war but honour the sacrifice of those who believed some things are worth fighting for.

In that moment, maybe just that moment, the colour of our skin or our faith or our politics does not matter.

I give thanks for my Uncle Ivan, lost somewhere in France; for my cousin, still lost in the memories of his own war; and for Pa, my grandfather. I kneel and say an Ave there for them all.

Lest we forget.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 25, 2025 as "My grandfather’s war".

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