When I was a little girl, my grandmother gave me a book - a collection of poems by C. J. Dennis.
I treasured it then, and I still do.
Even as a child I could understand his words. There was a delightful honesty in them - a plain-speaking larrikin voice that felt like it belonged to the ordinary Australian bloke.
That same voice stayed with me into adulthood.
Dennis wrote during and after the Great War, not as a soldier at the front, but as someone who listened closely to the diggers and their families - and gave them a voice. He captured the spirit of the men who stepped up, not with grand speeches, but with the simple humour and quiet steadiness that came to define the Australian soldier.
A few days ago, one of our posters Paddy, put up a great poem from Rudyard Kipling. Tommy.
And, as you know, that gets me heading down rabbit holes of memory. Hence this article.
I started thinking about the war poets. Rupert Brooke, Sassoon and CJ Dennis. Even Breaker Morant and Banjo Patterson. Not that CJ Dennis ever served, much like Henry Lawson, who also gave voice to the Australian experience without ever wearing the uniform himself... but more of that later...
In The Moods of Ginger Mick and especially Digger Smith, he wrote about the larrikin who enlists, the long voyage, and the return home with scars that don’t always show. He wrote about the everyday courage of getting on with it - for your mates, and for the life waiting on the other side.
One of his later reflections, simply titled Anzac, ends with lines that still feel like a quiet benediction:
Sleep, comrades. All is well.
No fanfare. No soaring rhetoric. Just a calm acknowledgment that the job was done - and that something endured.
In A Song of Anzac, he celebrates the singing soldiers on their way to Gallipoli - the carefree lads who went off singing even as they sailed into the unknown. In Digger Smith, he follows the returned man, minus a leg, quietly helping others while carrying his own unseen burdens.
Dennis didn’t rage against the war.
He honoured the ordinary digger - the bloke who stood when it mattered, did what needed doing, and then tried to find his place again when it was over.
His poems speak of mateship, resilience, and that simple willingness to stand - even when the world back home didn’t always understand the cost.
As ANZAC Day approaches once more, I find myself returning to that old book my grandmother gave me. The words still feel honest. Close to home.
My favourite as an adult is this. It was obviously not in my treasured childhood book but these days it seems most relevant.
They remind us that remembrance isn’t only about statues or bugle calls at dawn.
It is about keeping alive the spirit of the men who showed up.
The quiet courage.
The loyalty to mates.
The willingness to carry on.
In a time when courage is still praised in memorials, but the signals we send to the next generation can feel uncertain, Dennis’s voice offers something steady.
A reminder, perhaps.
That a society which honours its soldiers in stone - but makes the living cost of standing too great - may one day find that fewer are willing to step forward at all.
Perhaps the best way to honour the Anzacs this year is to listen again to that plain Australian voice - the one my grandmother passed on to me in a now small, well-worn book.
Lest we forget - not just the sacrifice, but the simple, stubborn spirit that made it possible.
Mind you… I’m not convinced it ever really went away.
We like to think of it as something from “back then.”
Tidy. Finished. Safely remembered.
But every so often, you’ll spot a trace of it.
Not in uniform.
Not on a memorial.
Somewhere far more ordinary.
A familiar kind of bloke.
Carries himself like he knows the measure of things.The sort you could walk past without a second glance… if you didn’t know what you were looking at.
