ANZAC The Play
An Epic on War and Peace in the 20th Century
by
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A Meeting of the War Committee FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY And gentlemen, If for this we fail, may the spirit of the men Who died in their great love and trust in us, Haunt ever our souls. And may that part of us That will most surely die, should this our Vision fail, still wander ghostly on this earth. Until our warlike spirits are all destroyed, Or tamed by some great world catastrophe, That will with tongue of fire and more Horrible presaging, cry to the worse Than plague infested world, that man must live In peace. The Weir - A picnic KATE I have this terrible urge Iris To do something with my life. When I grow old, I want to say I did something with my time on this earth! I left this world a better place In some small way. Oh, why was I not born a man! MADELINE Some are the laws of all creatures living, Mortal, bird and beast and flower, For ever and ever from the beginning When the dreamtime enveloped the earth. Before the mother of my mother’s mother Swam in the great creek of the orphan gods She was given the great stone of all fertility To travel out on the earth. The Home in Charters Towers MOTHER And if we bought the farm would you two stay And work it all your lives and build a house? Because for pioneers, the life is very hard. You have to live on dreams, my sons, dreams. When you are born as you two are In a land that’s free but young, You have to dream ahead, you have to dream, Dream of the farm completed and the trees All strong and tall and shady And the children underneath. And the dream will urge you forward to the end Of all your days, a shining beacon ever. For us, a dream’s behind us of a land We knew and loved so long ago and left To start again and struggle far away, Put down new roots and toil and toil And this is all I have of my old dream, A few things of silver and some candlesticks, But oh, the dreams I dream When I sit and look at them.
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About the Book
Most of the characters in this play are taken from real life. When war was declared in 1914, Charters Towers was a happy, carefree but tough pioneering town where all hands were needed on the land. However most of the young men go to war, traveling first to Gallipoli on the coast of Turkey. They were decimated there. The survivors and new recruits were sent to France. Before leaving, Pal , torn between love of country and the call to fight for liberty for all the world, meets Madeline, an aboriginal girl from the Dreamtime who decides to follow him through the powers bequeathed her by the great Earth Mother Eingana. Liberty presents herself to Pal during the war reviving him as the Eternal Soldier each time he is killed. Pal’s brother Fred also enlists and is killed on Gallipoli. In Charters Towers Fred’s love Jessica dies in childbirth. Mother, Father and daughter Millicent together with their friends, Kate, Ilene and Kitty try to go on with their lives. Young Pal, Fred’s son is raised by all these women but enlists in the second world war and is killed at Dunkirk but not before he and his English love Kathleen have conceived their child during the London Blitz. Kathleen carrying the pendant that Young Pal had made for Kate and returned to him upon his enlistment, travels to Charters Towers to deliver their baby with Kate. He is called Boy Pal. Pal, the eternal soldier, travels the world, receiving many visions of a global Eternal Justice who will eventually arbitrate the Peace and World Commonwealth who will preserve it. Pal returns to Gallipoli experiencing the continuing conflict between Death and Liberty. He secures the keys for Peace, returns to Charters Towers and gives them to Boy Pal and a young Madeline as they both receive the covenants.
About the Author
Rev. Mary Anneeta Mann, Ph.D., was born in Rockhampton, Australia. Her father was an original Anzac, having fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. He was severely injured in France in 1916 and 1917 but remained in the service until the armistice. Half of the eligible young men in Australia enlisted in that war and suffered enormous losses, but those who returned made up a significant portion of the generation that governed Australia between the two World Wars. They formed the Returned Soldiers’ League, taking care of their veterans and particularly the children of those who did not return. These were called Legacy children. It was the War to End All Wars and most of the country believed it, marching every Anzac Day and celebrating the heroism of those who gave their lives on foreign soil defending liberty for all. Mary was a child of this era but before her ninth birthday, with the onset of the Second World War she wrote her first poem and dedicated herself to finding out ‘why war’ and then finding out how to end it. The play ANZAC was written in the 1960s and later updated. Her other books include HUBRIS, the Construction of Tragedy, based upon Aristotle’s Poetics and his Science of Being Altogether, Poems of Woman, TWO FAMILY PLAYS, Maria and the Comet and The Round Table and Thugun and Natasha, a drama with rap, for youth and family audiences. She edited Mentoring Poems and co-authored Science and Spirituality. Anzac to Understanding contains this play as well as documentation for it and original war letters . The philosophical quest culminated in There Are No Enemies, A Practical Philosophy of Life, all available online and at her website www.maryanneetamann.com. Mary is listed in World Wide Who’s Who and the Marquis Who’s Who in the World.