Songs as historical markers: Martin Simpson's Jackie and Murphy and the Anzac legend

The myth of Anzac was promulgated to enable Australians to live with the otherwise unbearable carnage of WW1  
Marilyn Lake

Somethings never change Jackie/But perhaps they never will/While the bloodless fools in Whitehall/ They sit in judgement still/
Martin Simpson (final lines from Jackie and Murphy)

Martin Simpson's song Jackie and Murphy is not just a magnificent tribute to John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his donkey Murphy. It is a song that speaks forgotten truths about the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

In recounting the life story of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the song describes the horror and carnage of the Gallipoli campaign (where Simpson Kirkpatrick was a stretcher bearer for 4 weeks before he was killed).

The song also demonstrates the ways the history of the campaign and the terrible suffering of ordinary soldiers is used to serve political and military agendas.

When I was at primary school the story of Simpson and his donkey was used to indoctrinate us about the history of the Gallipoli campaign and to conceal the truth about Australia's invasion of a sovereign nation and the horror of war. We were schooled into an interpretation of Gallipoli that affirmed a contemporary and conservative view of Australian identity.

 

As Joan Beaumont argues, this emphasis on Gallipoli and a particular view of the Anzac legend is a distinctive and powerful part of Australia's political culture.

'The Anzac legend today serves particular purposes. One is to reinforce those values which court the Anzac legend such as endurance, sacrifice, mateship. Those values continue to be very important to Australian governments who are trying in a very materialistic and secular and individualistic society to still persuade Australians to be willing to volunteer for war or even to serve as police officers or fire fighters'

 Joan Beaumont also argues that constant commemoration of  Gallipoli and the ANZAC legend works to deflect debate about the legitimacy of war.

'This was very obvious during the Iraq intervention of 2003, when the then-prime minister John Howard made it difficult to criticise the war because it was suggested you would thereby be criticising those who chose to serve. With that goes a silencing of debate about the reasons that those soldiers are being deployed, and that is a concern to a number of commentators.'

Joan Beaumont's brilliant book Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War  challenges the way that Australia's war experience is presented as the predominant historical narrative. 

A review of the book by Marilyn Lake is here.

You can listen to a live version and explanation of Martin Simpson's song here:

Jackie and Murphy by Martin Simpson
(copyright Martin Simpson)

There's a statue of a donkey on Southshield sea front
He's a decorated donkey
and with him stands a man

and the man's name is Jackie he has no decoration

though he was a war hero.
 

Down on the sands Jackie sold donkey rides

His favorite was Murphy

and they waited on the tide 

to give rides to little children and flirt with the pretty girls.
 

And he's joined the merchant navy and he's off to see the world.

Well he sailed the wide world all over Jackie

till he came to Newcastle in NSW

he'd had enough of stoking coals, rollin seas and heavy gales.
 

So you changed your name to plain John Simpson

So you jumped ship and you rambled all down the shore

shearing, droving, larrikin and a new recruit for war.

Give a dog a bad name Jackie

Somethings never change 

a hundred years are almost gone

Not a medal to your name

Somethings never change Jackie

They give a dog a bad name

but your a hero still.

Well I signed up for this army Murphy

Thought I might catch a troop ship home

Maybe change my name again and never more to roam.
But we didn't sail to England Murphy

We sailed right into hell

Now I am a stretcher bearer in the bloody Dardanelles.
 

Now I don't like taking orders Murphy

That's not the way I am

But now we've got this job to do and I'll do the best I can.
You and me are mockers here Murphy

Down here on the sand

I'll whistle and we sing our songs and we'll march to the beat of the band.

Jesus you know I am tired Murphy

Breakfast wasn't ready today

They said they would keep dinner hot

Come on lads we are on our way

Down to shrapnel gully again

To the land of blood, flesh and bone

You have been there so many times

You can damn near fetch them on your own.

Did you hear the machine guns rattle?

Did you feel those bullets tearing through?

I pray that peace and quiet and dark are the last things you know

You saved 300 wounded men

You and Murphy on their own

You died to save the very last but Murphy fetched him back alive.

Give a dog a bad name Jackie

Some things never change 

a hundred years are almost gone 

Not a medal to your name

Somethings never change Jackie

But perhaps they never will.
While the bloodless fools in Whitehall

They sit in judgement still

Songs as historical markers: Martin Simpson's Jackie and Murphy and the Anzac legend

The myth of Anzac was promulgated to enable Australians to live with the otherwise unbearable carnage of WW1   

Marilyn Lake 

Somethings never change Jackie/But perhaps they never will/While the bloodless fools in Whitehall/ They sit in judgement still/ 

Martin Simpson (final lines from Jackie and Murphy)

Martin Simpson's song Jackie and Murphy is not just a magnificent tribute to John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his donkey Murphy. It is a song that speaks forgotten truths about the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

In recounting the life story of John Kirkpatrick Simpson, the song describes the horror and carnage of the Gallipoli campaign (where Simpson was a stretcher bearer for 4 weeks before he was killed). The song also demonstrates the ways that the history of the campaign and the terrible suffering of ordinary soldiers is used to serve political and military agendas. 

When I was at primary school the story of Simpson and his donkey was used to indoctrinate us about the history of the Gallipoli campaign and to conceal the truth about Australia's invasion of a sovereign nation and the horror of war. We were schooled into an interpretation of Gallipoli that affirmed a contemporary and conservative view of Australian identity.

As Joan Beaumont argues this emphasis on Gallipoli and a particular view of the Anzac legend is a distinctive and powerful part of Australia's political culture.

'The Anzac legend today serves particular purposes. One is to reinforce those values which court the Anzac legend such as endurance, sacrifice, mateship. Those values continue to be very important to Australian governments who are trying in a very materialistic and secular and individualistic society to still persuade Australians to be willing to volunteer for war or even to serve as police officers or fire fighters'

 Joan Beaumont also argues that constant commemoration of  Gallipoli and the ANZAC legend works to deflect debate about the legitimacy of war.

'This was very obvious during the Iraq intervention of 2003, when the then-prime minister John Howard made it difficult to criticise the war because it was suggested you would thereby be criticising those who chose to serve. With that goes a silencing of debate about the reasons that those soldiers are being deployed, and that is a concern to a number of commentators.'

Joan Beaumont has a new book out Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War which challenges the way that Australia's war experience is presented as the predominant historical narrative. 

A review of the book by Marilyn Lake is here.

You can listen to a live version of Martin Simpson's song here:

Jackie and Murphy by Martin Simpson
(copyright Martin Simpson)

There's a statue of a donkey on Southshield sea front
He's a decorated donkey
and with him stands a man

and the man's name is Jackie he has no decoration

though he was a war hero.

Down on the sands Jackie sold donkey rides

His favorite was Murphy

and they waited on the tide 

to give rides to little children and flirt with the pretty girls.

And he's joined the merchant navy and he's off to see the world.

Well he sailed the wide world all over Jackie

till he came to Newcastle in NSW

he'd had enough of stoking coals, rollin seas and heavy gales.

So you changed your name to plain John Simpson

So you jumped ship and you rambled all down the shore

shearing, droving, larrikin and a new recruit for war.

Give a dog a bad name Jackie

Somethings never change 

a hundred years are almost gone

Not a medal to your name

Somethings never change Jackie

They give a dog a bad name

but your a hero still.

Well I signed up for this army Murphy

Thought I might catch a troop ship home

Maybe change my name again and never more to roam.
But we didn't sail to England Murphy

We sailed right into hell

Now I am a stretcher bearer in the bloody Dardanelles.

Now I don't like taking orders Murphy

That's not the way I am

But now we've got this job to do and I'll do the best I can.
You and me are mockers here Murphy

Down here on the sand

I'll whistle and we sing our songs and we'll march to the beat of the band.

Jesus you know I am tired Murphy

Breakfast wasn't ready today

They said they would keep dinner hot

Come on lads we are on our way

Down to shrapnel gully again

To the land of blood, flesh and bone

You have been there so many times

You can damn near fetch them on your own.

Did you hear the machine guns rattle?

Did you feel those bullets tearing through?

I pray that peace and quiet and dark are the last things you know

You saved 300 wounded men

You and Murphy on their own

You died to save the very last but Murphy fetched him back alive.

Give a dog a bad name Jackie

Some things never change 

a hundred years are almost gone 

Not a medal to your name

Somethings never change Jackie

But perhaps they never will.
While the bloodless fools in Whitehall

They sit in judgement still

Australian history and ANZAC mythmaking

" This business of memory making demands analysis"
Marilyn Lake

As ANZAC Day approaches the new release section of my local bookshop groans under the weight of books on Australia's military history. I counted ten today and plenty more will appear over coming weeks. Most of the books have the word 'ANZAC' in the title.

I am currently reading two of these new books, each with differing perspectives on Australian history.

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds's new book What's Wrong with Anzac argues that the Anzac obsession distorts Australian history and identity. They argue that official sponsorship of the Anzac legend, through commemoration and education, has often been used to mobilise conservative forces for political ends. Their reason for writing the book was:

"We are deeply concerned about many aspects of the Anzac resurgence. We are concerned about the extraordinary government intervention in promoting Anzac Day, most of which has occurred without people knowing its true extent. We are also concerned about the misrepresentation and forgetting of our broader history. History runs counter to myth making. We write to encourage a more critical and truthful public debate about the uses of the Anzac myth."

Lake and Reynolds argue that the myth of Anzac continues to exert its power and looms large in our historical memory (thanks in part to the research and PR Departments of the Australian government and the Australian War Museum). It is also part of what they describe as the 'militarization of history'. Marilyn Lake has written on these issues before here.

Alastair Thomson in his book Anzac Memories argues similarly when he describes war remembrance as selective forgetting- forgetting of the horror of war, the atrocities, the horrendous deaths, the brutality, the centrality of killing.

Many of the new books revisit the history and myth making of the Gallipoli campaign. A new book produced by the Australian War Museum sheds light on a little known aspect of the history of that campaign. Gallipoli Revisited: In the footsteps of Charles Bean and the Australian Historical Mission by Janda Gooding, tells the story of the Australian Historical Mission (AHM) who returned to Gallipoli in 1919 to research the campaign and the battles. The AHM was led by Charles Bean (Australia's official war correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign), artist George Lambert and photographer Hubert Wilkins, and its task was to understand what happened at Gallipoli and to communicate that to Australians so they could comprehend what took place there. The Mission walked the battlefields to collect relics and recreate what happened through photographs and artworks.

The book contains hundreds of original photographs, drawings, sketches, artworks, diary notes and letters, and images from the time. Because Wilkins's photos of the battlefields and the Gallipoli Peninsula were taken in 1919, so soon after the campaign, they convey the scale and grandeur of the landscape and the poignancy of what took place there. Wilkins's photographs really are the centrepiece of this book. They are stunning.

Upon completion of their mission Bean and a number of his colleagues returned to Egypt by train through the heartland of Turkey. The book includes photos of the Turkish landscape and haunting photos of Turkish soldiers returning from the war.

Despite the wonderful presentation and the significance of this book, I am troubled by some aspects of it. There is a silence about the role that Bean and his colleagues played as 'propagandists', in conveying certain narratives about the Gallipoli campaign back to Australians, and ignoring others. Gooding's book, for example, does not explore the way that the history of the Gallipoli campaign , which was heavily based on Bean and his colleague's work, was (and is still) used by the Australian military and political establishment to create and support an idealized mythology about Australia's involvement in war.

Despite the brilliance of his achievement and his legacy, Bean played a role in legitimising an idealised version of the Gallipoli campaign and contributed to the creation of a mythology that accorded legitimacy to some truths and silenced others. This continues today, so that alternative narratives about Gallipoli (and Australia's past and current military history) continue to be marginalized- the foreign invasion of a sovereign nation by Australian troops; the exploitation of Australian troops by their Australian and British leaders; the pointlessness of Australia's involvement in the geo-political maneuvers of imperial powers; Australia's unquestioning involvement in an imperial war; the incompetence and callousness of military and political decision makers- both British and Australian; the horror, brutality and pointlessness of war; the atrocities perpetrated on, and by the Australian military; the bellicose attitudes to war and the political uses that military and political leaders make of the work of well intentioned journalists, artists and historians.