Here’s . . . Eddie!
It’s Eddie Jones expanding on what he wants to be at the very core of the Wallabies’ renaissance under his stewardship.
“I think what always ties Australians together,” he said a fortnight ago, “is that Digger spirit, that is fighting for each other. And the question now is: How do you make that spirit relevant in a more diverse Australian society?”
Fascinating, yes? Or do you want me to pause so you can have a quick sneer?
To the latter, please settle down. Of course comparing mere footballers to actual soldiers is completely overblown, notwithstanding that many of our greatest soldiers and officers credit what they learnt from football about leading men as helping their subsequent military careers, and some of them were Wallabies. Lest we forget – and I don’t use that sacred phrase glibly – the late great Lieutenant Stan Bissett MC OAM, a Wallaby of the 1930s, was a hero of the Kokoda Track, where his brother Butch died in his arms.
And no less than Colonel Sir Ernest Edward “Weary” Dunlop AC CMG OBE – the hero of Tobruk, Changi and the Thai Burma railway – so respected his hard-won Wallaby jersey he insisted on being buried in it. For another one, look up Tom Richards, both a Wallaby and a Lion, who was at the Gallipoli landing, and magnificent thereafter.
The Digger spirit is dear to returning Wallabies coach Eddie Jones’ heart.Credit:Cole Bennetts, supplied
Either way, the point remains that, despite the odd sneers, many will get it: the “spirit of the Diggers”, at its best really is a magnificent thing, and if it can inspire the Wallabies to derring-do above and beyond, all to the good. Beyond everything else, it would honour Bissett, Richards and Dunlop.
So here you go, Eddie, here a couple of my own favourite yarns of the genre.
The first thing the spirit means is no surrender.
In the Boer War, some 300 Australians under the command of an Englishman, Colonel Charles Hore, endured days of pounding from Boer artillery and were surrounded by 2000 Boers, led by the implacable General Jacobus “Koos” De La Rey.
On the morning of August 9, 1900, a Boer emissary approaches under a white flag, with an offer. If the Australians agree to lay down their weapons, they will be allowed to escape with their lives. Otherwise, death. Hore, not unreasonably, thought it a good offer, and put it to his senior officers.
The first man to speak was Queensland’s Major Walter Tunbridge, his broad remarks clear: “You, Colonel Hore, can surrender if you must, and I cannot stop you. But we are Queenslanders and we don’t surrender. If necessary, though we only be a hundred, we will withdraw from your surrender, and fight our way through the Boer lines.”
Other officers felt the same. In the end, in the face of the united opposition to his proposal, Colonel Hore really has no choice and says to the emissary, “Even if I wished to surrender to you, and I don’t, I am commanding Australians who would cut my throat if I accepted your terms.”
The emissary is sent on his way, but only after one of the Australian soldiers also gives him a scrawled note to pass on to his Boer mates: “If de la Rey wants our camp, why does he not come and take it? We will be pleased to meet him and his men, and promise them a great reception at the end of a toasting fork. Australians will never surrender. Australia forever!”
The Australians hold out, and finally win the day.
A similar spirit was invoked at Tobruk where, for the first time in the whole Second World War, the German Army was stopped cold, despite the Australians on the perimeter and the Brits on the artillery being up against overwhelming force. How was it done? The great ABC correspondent Chester Wilmot gave the greatest evocation of the Digger spirit which I’ve ever seen.
“The spirit which has made Australia,” he wrote, “is the spirit which has held Tobruk. The inspiring and binding force in Australian life isn’t tradition or nationalism or social revolution. It’s quite a simple thing. Henry Lawson called it MATESHIP . . . the spirit which makes men stick together. In Australia by sticking together, men have defied drought, bushfire and flood. In Tobruk they’ve scorned hardship, danger and death, because no Digger would ever let his cobbers down. In Tobruk for the first time in this war the Germans were thrust back by a spirit that even tanks and dive-bombers could not conquer.”
Let me hear you say, “RAH!”
As to how to make this more relevant to a more diverse Australian society, that, too, is a fascinating question, and it goes a lot wider than just the Wallabies.
For that’un, I’d go with Prime Minister Paul Keating’s words, after kissing the ground at Kokoda in 1992: “The Australians who served here in Papua New Guinea fought and died, not in the defence of the old world, but the new world. Their world. They died in defence of Australia and the civilisation and values which had grown up there.”
Yes, Kokoda was a far more “diverse” battle than either of the aforementioned with the New Guineans themselves helping immeasurably with taking supplies forward and wounded Diggers back. But Keating’s point covered the fact that the world evolves and while the Diggers themselves may fight for an entirely different kind of world as the decades roll by, there really are certain values they have prospered by which are worth commemorating, celebrating and embracing.
I don’t pretend those values, or Eddie’s “spirit of the Diggers” are uniquely Australian.
But I do say that the record shows that Australians together in the fight of their lives, who live by them, really can achieve extraordinary things.
Twitter: @Peter_Fitz
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