Almost 50 years ago historian Geoffrey Serle conjured a prescient description for the nationalistic hyperbole that had attached, limpet-like, to Anzac.



Anzackery. What a word.

“On Anzac Day, fire-eating generals would indeed tell us that Australia became a nation at Gallipoli, but went on to dwell on the glories of the Empire of which Australia was only a subordinate part and the inherent superiority of the Britisher over any other race,” Serle, riffing off his youth between the wars, wrote in Meanjin in 1967.



“What will the recent flowering of a sense of Australian history, the feeling for the bush tradition, Anzackery, and the rest amount to in political terms? How do our roots penetrate now?”



Serle’s answer might well be found today as the federal government begins spending at least $300m (states and territories will dedicate tens of millions more) to Australia’s commemoration of what was, globally, the first world war but which Australia chooses to see parochially as “Anzac 100”.



Anzackery. Is there a better term today to challenge political leaders, officials, national institutions and journalists who perpetuate the absurd proposition that nationhood emerged not amid 60,000 years of continuous Indigenous settlement or even at federation, but with 8700 Australian deaths under a British flag at Gallipoli?



As “Anzac 100” crescendos to the commemoration of November 1918, Australian institutions will dedicate exhibits to the “spirit of Anzac”, the “fallen” (never the dead) and their “sacrifice”. Some will run counter to the national narrative, highlighting the domestic and battlefield scourge and gross inhumanity that is central to war. Most won’t.



This is why it is so gratifying to see the state library of New South Wales initiate a project that helps to genuinely democratise Australian commemoration by placing guardianship of first world war stories literally (in an online sense) into public hands.



Since 1918 the state library (previously the public library of NSW) has collected more than 1,200 diaries, letters and journals of people who served in world war one. The collection’s significance was recently highlighted with inclusion on Unesco’s memory of the world register. Remarkably its entire 180,000 pages has been digitised and made accessible on the library website.



Now the library wants the public to transcribe the written words of a century ago.



The collection began when principal librarian from 1912 to 1942, William Ifould, advertised post-war for written records of personal experiences, offering “good prices ... for good material”.



NSW state librarian and chief executive, Alex Byrne, said it was extraordinary that Ifould felt able to return writings he considered sub-standard.



“If they didn’t think it was good enough they sent it back, which I find extraordinary,” Byrne explained.

He said Ifould sought writing that was descriptive, contemporary, evocative of authentic personal experience and observation, and that was not subject to the influence of newspapers or gossip.

He said the stories represent the “authentic voice of ordinary Australians – and they were ordinary. We talk much of their heroism, particularly when we talk around Gallipoli. And they were heroic. But they were like you and me. They were ordinary Australians who felt that they needed to do their bit”.

And now, that is what renders the library’s transcription phase so culturally valuable. For this is what the raw human material of war history looks like before it has been politically and culturally appropriated to serve contemporary nationalism.



Go online, find your serviceman, nurse, doctor or stretcher-bearer, and transcribe.

The words are in varied states of legibility, in pen or pencil, written on notebooks and sheet paper, some brittle and yellowing with age. Diction varies with education and birthplace. Handwriting, too, ranges from calligraphic copperplate to scrawl.



Some prose is elegant and polished, like this from George King: “The above three days march were through beautiful country – the wheat fields were ablaze with golden wheat, red poppies and blue cornflowers...”



Or chilling, like this from Walter Edward Gillet:

I stepped off (a duckboard) to allow a ... chap to pass, and found myself suddenly in a deep shell hole, full of snow. On recovering my equilibrium, I started to get out, and seeing something dark on the side, I came to the conclusion that another chap must also have fallen in, so caught hold of him to assist me in my endeavours to get out. What was my surprise to find that instead of the fellow going from me he came towards me, and to my horror I discovered it to be the dead body of a Fritz, frozen hard and stiff.

There are descriptions of crops, exotic streets, often the smell and sight of the dead. The words resonate with mortality’s dark spectre. It magnifies the simple joys – sunlight, pretty women, the taste of wine, a dry blanket, barely edible food.



Yesterday, I spent the afternoon reading the diary of Charles Baker, wounded in the leg in mid-1918. He spent late 1918 in England undergoing operations to save his badly infected limb. He describes the weather. The nurses. The food. The boredom. Laments dead mates and expresses constant fear at the prospect of returning home a cripple.



After a few hours with his diary, I felt a distinct emotional connection, and I was wishing, praying, for a positive outcome to his situation even though, rationally, I knew this was a folly. See how his story ends...



And that is the point of these writings. You can touch them, online or personally, read them and transcribe them without the intermediacy of those who’d spin them, culturally or politically, through the prism of Serle’s Anzackery.



They have intrinsic honesty that will be enriched for future generations by those who volunteer to transcribe them.



These are not the self-sacrificing heroes, the fallen, who comprise the spirit of so-called Anzac. No. They are everyday men and women (the good and the bad) whose writing exudes a modesty antithetic to all that nonsense.



Here’s Charles Baker with the crook leg, on Billy Hughes, our prime minister who did much to tie national identity to war: