 Digger newspapers of the first world war Graham Seal's survey of first world war diggers newspapers |
Post-War Digger Publications
The sentimental strand survived the war and infused the air of nostalgic regret that increasingly permeated the few remaining trench journals. It was as if, mingled with the natural anticipation of homecoming, the diggers would miss the world they had themselves created - with some official support and sanction - out of the mud and blood of Gallipoli and France. So strong was the urge to continue this culture that the paper Aussie was revived in 1919 as a civilian voice for the returned diggers. Titled Aussie -the Cheerful Monthly, it tried to perpetuate the digger experience in peacetime, through a format, style and content similar to its trench journal origins. Its attempt at cheer was well- advised as the experience of the returned digger was often anything but happy.15Aussie and the other post-war digger publications, such as those issued by the Returned Sailors', Soldiers' and Airmen's Imperial League of Australia are full of complaints at the lack of jobs for returned servicemen, inadequate or non-existent benefits for widows and orphans, slow payment of gratuities and the other grievances, real and imagined, of former soldiers in a country that wanted to forget the war as quickly as possible. But many of the diggers could never forget. In their post-war publications their wartime sentimentality mingled increasingly with the inevitable emotion of nostalgia. Reunions, smoke nights and Anzac Day celebrations continually tried to re-create the culture they had made on the other side of the world. 16
Reunion publications often contained, year after year, selections of verse, stories, songs, even ancient furphies from trench newspapers that returned soldiers obviously kept in cherished places to remind them of a world that could never come again. The 1938 Australian Army Medical Corps interstate reunion in Adelaide produced a souvenir publication that contained great slabs of the Dinkum Oil and selections from the wartime Aussie. 17 It also contained a substantial number of digger songs. An annual publication produced for Anzac Day celebrations, the Delly Mel, also echoed the pattern and the content of the trench papers in much the same manner, as did the song-sheets and booklets knocked together for smoke nights at returned soldiers' clubs. 18
When Australia entered the second world war in 1939 , a new generation of diggers looked towards the example and the experience of the first Anzacs for an identity of their own. The title of one of the first world war trench newspapers, the Dinkum Oil, served as the name of both a second world war soldier publication, and a post-war veterans' journal. Second world war equivalents of the trench journals generally performed a similar simultaneous rumour-mongering/rumour-scotching function as those of the first war, and the term 'furphy' was still in use.19 In Vietnam the same rumour-mongering, humour and general irreverence provided the dominant tone of soldier publications like the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment newsletter, Ringo, and at least one piece of first world war digger slang -'gutser' -was still in use. 20
So the distinctive culture created by the first diggers, expressed through their trench and other publications, did outlive them in some important respects. A line of descent can be traced from Gallipoli through the western front, to the second world war and Vietnam. Further research into the expressions and publications of Australian soldiers will no doubt uncover more evidence of the continuing influence of digger culture, and of the tradition of popular communication and literature -'written in the trenches' -established by that culture.
 
|
This webpage © 2003 Simply Australia