And the band played Waltzing Matilda

Then it is not so much that I remember as that I am remembered by it, the past not lying behind me in any decent chronological obedience but pressing in like some sullen lurker in a doorway, overlapping, voices and dust and heat and the long unbroken line of horizon folding into the sound of that tune which even now — though there is no band, no crowd, no quay, only the slow sag of evening and the porch boards beneath me — will not stop, will not quite finish, as though the note itself had been stretched across years and bone and absence.

Because I was young once — yes, that is how it begins, always that assertion as if it were sufficient explanation — young and moving, moving without destination, carrying the pack as though it were nothing, as though weight itself were a fiction invented by older men, crossing that wide country whose names I did not need to know because I believed I belonged equally to all of it, the river and the dust and the long breathing silences, waltzing, yes, though I did not think of it as a dance then, only as motion without consequence, without tally, without the sense that each step might already be counted against some future reckoning.

Until the voices came — not suddenly but as something that had always been waiting, gathering in the distance of things like newspapers and speeches and the looks men gave one another when they thought no one was watching — and the year fixed itself, 1915, not as a number but as a kind of command, and I who had moved freely found myself gathered, issued, named, fitted with objects that transformed me with a bright and dated valiance even before I understood how: the tin hat, the gun, the line of men who were no longer wanderers but units, bodies aligned toward a purpose spoken in words too large to examine.

And the ship, that slow tearing away from land as though the earth itself resisted, and the band — so help me, the band — playing “Waltzing Matilda” as if continuity could be manufactured out of brass and drum, as if a tune might bind together what was already loosening: mothers, sweethearts, men pretending not to fear, all of it dissolving into distance until only water remained and the sense — not yet admitted — that we had already crossed something that could not be uncrossed.

Gallipoli, though we did not know it then except as a destination, became instead a condition, a narrowing of the world to noise and light and the immediate fact of survival, that terrible day not one day but all days compressed, the sand and water indistinguishable beneath what we poured into it, and Johnny Turk — faces unseen, then suddenly too seen — answering us in kind so that it seemed not battle but a kind of mutual unmaking, as though two hands had grasped the same fragile object and, pulling, reduced it to fragments neither could use.

We buried them — ours, theirs, it scarcely mattered, the categories already blurring under the sameness of death with a thrifty capacity for finding the sermon under every stone — and then resumed, because resumption was the only form left to us, time no longer advancing but circling, each moment both repetition and erosion, until the weeks — ten, they said, though the number holds no weight — became a single sustained effort not to think, not to look too long at the accumulating evidence of what we were doing and what it was doing to us.

And then the interruption, which is how I must think of it, not as an end but as a violent rearrangement, the shell arriving out of that continuous roar and striking me out of it, so that there was a before — noise, heat, motion — and an after — silence, white, the slow intrusion of understanding that something essential had been removed, not taken cleanly but obliterated, and that I would continue, yes, but as something altered beyond repair, a man required to live in the space where his own completeness had once resided.

It is a strange knowledge, that there are conditions worse than death, stranger still that one learns it not through philosophy but through the blunt arithmetic of loss, lying there and knowing that the wandering is finished, not by choice or age but by subtraction, that the very act which once defined me — movement across that wide indifferent land — has been denied not only in practice but even in possibility.

So they gathered us, categorized us as they had before but under different headings now — the legless, the armless, the blind, the insane — and sent us back across the same water which no longer seemed merely distance but division, and when we arrived the absence was not only in ourselves but in the reception, the silence where there had once been sound, the faces that looked and then did not look, as though we carried with us something contagious, some visible reminder of a truth incandescent in the floodlights, with bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge the living preferred to keep at bay with the sinistral inertia of the established order at its most petty and impenetrable level.

I remember — or am made to remember — looking down, or to where down had been, and feeling not grief exactly but a kind of release that there was no one there to measure me against what I had been, no witness to the discrepancy, because how could one explain that the essential loss was not only of limb but of the self that had once inhabited that limb, the self that had believed in open horizons and uncounted steps?

And now — now which is not separate from then but merely its continuation in another register — I sit each April as though summoned by a calendar that has taken on the authority of ritual, watching the procession of those petals on a wet black bough who remain, fewer each time, their movement both enactment and defiance, carrying forward something that even they may not fully name, while the young observe with that mixture of curiosity and distance which belongs to those who have not yet been claimed by such histories.

They ask — what for, why — and the question does not offend me because I have asked myself the same question, ask it still, not expecting an answer but compelled by the persistence of the asking, because the band — though there is no band, though the sound is only memory or something that persists beyond memory — continues to play, the tune neither beginning nor ending, only recurring, binding together the young man who walked the long roads, the soldier who did not leave that shore whole, and the old man who sits and listens for something that may already have passed beyond hearing.

And the years continue their subtraction, taking one, then another, until the line will break entirely, the march cease not with a final note but with a fading, and yet even then — this is what I cannot quite relinquish — the sense that somewhere, in that region where memory and desire are no longer distinct, the movement goes on, the wandering resumed in a form that does not require limbs or even time, and the question — who will come, who will walk — remains, not to be answered but to be carried, like a tune that refuses its own ending.

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me? And their ghosts may be heard As they march by that billabong Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFzCmAyOp8