In The Antipodes talk of war is easy and fitting, as it is here as it was in the beginning, and with these words becomes the rhythm, the drumbeat and the gossip even after the blood is long ago drained away and replaced by the bronze of the Palaeolithic age, as if the electricity of a nation is forged in the furnace of news far away from these marsupial shores in the fields of Flanders and France and over there on Turkish beaches and over there in the jungles beyond the straits and over there in the paddy fields and over there on the streets of Bosnia and over there between the poppy fields and the family table where truth is crystallised into faith, and the flow of purity and hope is shared beneath a common belief flapping beneath an ensign over head for a greater good, a nation, a commonwealth, a family of communities all on the same page, speaking one tongue, forever enshrined in memory over there.

It seems true of many nations that their citizens gather beneath an understanding, a unifying standard measured in a total commitment to a doctrine, an edict, a religion or the landscape measured by war.

Citizens are routinely and subliminally reminded of battle and battles by date on the calendar, by a town’s name or suburb, a public park or the canon on the street corner, a memorial, a mausoleum or a museum, or a call to prayers in memory of enlightenment, a victory when good triumphed over evil and expressed through iconic words in the landscape of language and the propaganda of art, never in country though but common to celebrity, the culture, the commander of the battlefield perhaps even a battlefield itself on some distant peninsular in another country in another time that locals might never comprehend but for the tourist, the traveller the passive pilgrimage to a beach shared with Achilles and Agamemnon remains as potent in the minds of the citizens back home as the outrage in which to gather and remember the irrelevance of a relative they never met, a neighbour they never knew existed and share the ebbing reservoir of stories fixed in the loneliness of a nation that needs to be reminded with the help of iconic words from a global language fashioned by an empire of empirical leadership on a war ship none ever saw or understood, from an overtly aggressive island far, far away, and yet which remains enshrined as the one and only story a nation cares to tell with any surety and passion to resolve a character and a future, announcing again the birth of the nation and the survival of the fittest in country pronounced in virtuous tomes, rendered mythologically appealing to stand there alongside the myths and legends of an Olympic logic anointed over and over again by the theatre of pathos according to the will of the holy family, lest we remember.