Munduslingua
Talent Market
Dulce et Decorum Est
John Bartlett
Australia
English Version
Preview: When I was a child, I was the only one in my school who had an uncle with a hole where his wrist should have been, clean through like a keyhole, only bigger and if he held his arm up in the air you could see through it to the blue of the sky. Every time Uncle Frank came to visit I wanted to put my hand into that hole, to check it, to make sure it was still there —I was so possessive of my own holey Uncle Frank. I remember a song on the radio then that I used to think was especially for my uncle and me.
- « Put your hand in the hand of the man who stills the water
Put your hand in the hand, put your hand… »
When he came to our house he always wore a brown pin-striped suit and drove his brown box-like Anglia like a weapon, crouching low behind the steering wheel as he went round corners. He brought us ice-cream in cardboard waxed containers like heavy, cold bricks and sometimes on the back seat of his car there was a brown paper bag stuffed with tomatoes from his own garden. 'Uncle, can I put my hand in your hand? What does it feel like? Does it hurt?' I used to think that Uncle Frank had been born with his holey hand and that made him special for me. He never told me about the Somme.
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Reviews & Comments
I have long recognised the Owen poem " Dulce..." as one of the great artistic statements about the vacuity of war. In his imaginative take on the poem, and drawing on extracts from the brilliant Bill Gammage's " The Broken Years", John Bartlett has captured a new dimension to Australian mateship under fire in his short story " Dulce Et Decorum Est" while relating it all to the challenge we Australians still face in sorting out the mess that was our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan [ Ask the many PTSD diggers what it meant to them!]
Perhaps Bartlett's story is a timely reminder too for us to ask what we are doing with our Gallipoli commemorations. Maybe it's a lot easier to turn up for a 'service' in Turkey in 2015 than it is to thrash out what we mean by our ballooning Defence budgets. Anyway, this story did what all good art should: it takes the 'particular' - an Aussie bloke reflecting on HIS family's experience of war - and renders it UNIVERSAL, though time and space.
Perhaps Bartlett's story is a timely reminder too for us to ask what we are doing with our Gallipoli commemorations. Maybe it's a lot easier to turn up for a 'service' in Turkey in 2015 than it is to thrash out what we mean by our ballooning Defence budgets. Anyway, this story did what all good art should: it takes the 'particular' - an Aussie bloke reflecting on HIS family's experience of war - and renders it UNIVERSAL, though time and space.
- - Bernard P Ryan, Host "The Blurb", a books program heard weekly on Geelong community radio.
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