The Anzac Badge

The garden beds in the St Kilda Botanical Gardens are black earth coloured on this autumn morning after a night of wind and rain, the newly planted poppies are small and fragile looking as if newborn in the cloudy morning light. The grass around the lake is freshly mowed and vividly green, the summer brown entirely vanished. The gardens are in autumn renewal, as if breathing almost joyously after the summer heat and wind.

We walk, Rocky and I, along the puddled, brown-pebbled paths around the garden beds and down through the rose garden, the rose bushes sparse-leaved, rose-free mostly but for the scattered roses that have managed to live well into autumn. They are in their final days, but somehow not forlorn.

When we leave the gardens, Rocky thinks we are going home and he starts to run, straining against the leash, head down, his tongue poking out of his open mouth, an old dog who can’t look in the mirror—like me—and see, to his surprise, that his face has gone grey, softened with age.

Much to Rocky’s disappointment—he stops running and slows to a crawl―we do not go home. Instead, we go down past the cake shops and the cafes and the not yet open bars and the empty shops, more of them it seems with each passing week, and past Readings, still there, miraculously, still open, having survived—for now― the virtual dismantling of this once lively and lovely beachside Melbourne Street.

It is Anzac Day tomorrow. Outside the entrance to the arcade that leads to the Woolworths supermarket, we are greeted by a man who is holding a tray with rows of Anzac badges. On the corners of the tray there are small Australian flags. The man has olive skin and wisps of brown hair floating across his almost bald brown head. He is slim and straight-backed.  He looks at me and then looks down at Rocky. Smiling.

We look at each other. The badges are tightly packed in the tray. He sweeps his hand across them. There are $2 badges, $5 dollar ones, $10 dollar ones and ones for $30 dollars.

He is softly spoken. When I ask whether the $30 dollar badges are different from the $2 ones, he shakes his head smiling and says, no, the badges are all the same. It’s whatever you can afford. His hand hovers over the tray.

The badges consist of a silver fringe around a silver capital A with the words Anzac Appeal, below. I will buy a badge—I am not prepared to say what I paid for it lest I be accused of trumpeting my generosity—but I do not know that I will wear it.

I buy the badge. We stand together there, the man and Rocky and me. I ask him how many days he has been there outside the arcade selling the badges. Five days he says. People are mostly generous, young people he says, especially young people.

I find myself putting on my reporter’s mask. Did you serve I ask? In Vietnam he says. He was conscripted, his birthday drawn from the conscription lottery barrel in 1967 when he was 20, a young man who had not ever dreamt that one day he would be a soldier.

He did nasho for two years. For eight months of that time, in 1968, he was based in Vietnam.  From the time he returned, he has been involved in the RSL. He volunteers at the Shrine of Remembrance where he escorts school children through the shrine, buses of school kids who, he says, ask questions about war and sacrifice and remembering and are given straight answers that do not sugar coat war in any way.

Had he told his children about his time in Vietnam? Not much he says, his eyes looking down at the tray of Anzac badges. He had been lucky. He had not suffered like some of his friends had suffered when they came back. It was hard coming back. It was hard seeing the moratorium marches, hundreds of thousands of people marching against the war.

Some of them, he says, held signs supporting the Viet Cong. Friends of his had died fighting the Viet Cong. How could he talk to his children about his time in Vietnam? What could he say? That he had fought so that they would be free?

But all that time has passed, he says. He is not angry or disillusioned, has not been for a long time. It’s not that he is proud of his service, that’s the wrong word he says, but he is satisfied that he did the right thing, serve when it was required of him, go to Vietnam when it was required of him. And for half a century he has done the work that he thought was his destiny to do, to honor his mates, some of whom died in Vietnam and some who never ever got over it and some like him who went on to lead a life with love in it, for wives and children and now grandchildren.

I want to tell him that my birthday was in that barrel in 1967. I was 20 years old, like him. I was at university, at least I was enrolled at university, but did not spend much time there.  I want to tell him that I could have applied for a deferment until I finished my degree but for some reason, I did not do that.

I want to tell him that I cannot quite remember now—it was more than a half century ago― but I think I might have decided that if my birthday was drawn, I would maybe do my two years of national service. I want to tell him that in June 1967, a few months after the barrel draw in which my birthday was not chosen, when war was imminent between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries, Egypt and Syria in particular, I went down to the Zionist organisation headquarters and volunteered to go to Israel to do whatever was asked of me  at this time of existential crisis for the Jews. I want to tell him that my birthday was not drawn from the barrel when his birthday was drawn, and I want to tell him that the Israel-Arab war was over in six days so there was no need for me in Israel.

The path not travelled. I look at the tray and I see that the little flags are drooping in the windless morning. His hands grip the sides of the tray. Perhaps he wants me to move on. Perhaps he thinks I am obstructing sales.

I step away. Rocky rises and stretches. We start to walk away. I hold the badge in its clear plastic and cardboard wrapping. On the cardboard is a photograph of a sailor blowing a bugle. The man takes one hand off the tray and waves at us. I am not sure, but I think he silently mouths `wear the badge.’