ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Historian and biographer Ross McMullen, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2013, for this multi-biography Farewell, Dear People, Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation.  It’s a book I chose to dip into, for a commemorative post on Anzac Day.

For Australia, a new nation with a relatively small population, the death of 60,000 soldiers during World War I was catastrophic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians evaluating the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus primarily on the numbing number of losses ― on the sheer quantity of all those countrymen who did not return.

That there must have been extraordinary individuals among them has been implicitly understood, but these special Australians are unknown today. This book seeks to retrieve their stories and to fill the gaps in our collective memory. Farewell, Dear People contains ten extended biographies of young men who exemplified Australia’s gifted lost generation of World War I.

This is a book that celebrates achievements that took place before the war that claimed these men’s lives. Their stories tell us that we should let not let the manner of their deaths overshadow the lives they led beforehand.

These names will not be known to most people, but I list them here from the Table of Contents:

• Geoff McCrea: the creative allrounder
• Tom Elliott: Australia’s Kitchener
• George Challis: the footballer
• Ted Larkin: the administrator/politician
• Clunes Mathison: the medical scientist
• Robert Bage: the engineer/explorer
• Gresley Harper, Winifred Harper and Phipps Turnbull: the barrister, the farmer, and the Rhodes scholar
• Carew Reynell: the winemaker.

Robert Bage, photographed by Frank Hurley.

Robert Bage’s name is in Bold, because it is his story that I chose to read first.

Readers with good memories may remember my fascination with the Heroic Age of Exploration and my review of Douglas Mawson’s 1915 The Home of the Blizzard. Bage (1888-1915) was the astronomer at the Main Base during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

In some ways, Robert Bage led a life of privilege, but his father died when he was only three, and his paternal grandparents died shortly afterwards.  However his Uncle Charles Lange was a doctor with good connections both social and professional, and so Robert was able to attend Melbourne Grammar where his father and uncles had all been educated. He was an excellent student, winning prizes and matriculating at the age of only 14.  However, he stayed on to prepare further for university with study in the sciences, achieving honours in physics and chemistry, algebra and geometry.

While Bage’s friends had prominent and successful fathers, he did not.  Ted Bage had been prominent and successful many years earlier, but he had been absent for practically all his son’s life.  Bob was accustomed to this state of affairs, and it did not hold him back.  He and his sisters exuded capable, practical self-reliance. (p.329)

A scholarship enabled him to enter Trinity college and study engineering. He was active in university sports and with friends he went adventuring, hiking in the hills around Melbourne.  He travelled further afield in outback South Australia, and between terms, to Canada as a supernumerary engineer on the Moana.

After graduation he took up work with Victoria’s State Rivers and Water Supply, and then with the Queensland Railways.  It was there that he volunteered for the militia and came under the influence of Kitchener of imperial fame.  Bage decided to join the army as an engineer, taking leave of absence to join the explorer Douglas Mawson (1882-1958) on the Antarctic expedition that made his name.  

McMullen recounts the ins and outs of Bage’s activities on the expedition, described in 1928 as the greatest and most consummate expedition that ever sailed for Antarctica.  

Some 20,000 miles of coast had been explored for the first time.  The expedition had accomplished significant research advances in geology, cartography, meteorology, biology, magnetism and oceanography.  Radio communication in Antarctica was successfully pioneered. (p.372)

The exalted position among other Antarctic expeditions’ was in part because of the southern sledging party led by Bage.

They ‘accomplished even more than I had anticipated’, Mawson acknowledged.  It was one of the most arduous trips undertaken by any sledging party,’ wrote Charles Laseron; it was ‘a tribute to their endurance and determination that they pulled through at all.’ Bage, Webb, and Hurley still retain the record for distance covered in a day’s sledge-hauling, and it is inconceivable that it will ever be broken. (p.373)

But as those of us who have read The Home of the Blizzard know, some of these accomplishments were overshadowed by the tragic loss of Mertz and Ninnis and Mawson’s heroic struggle back to base alone. McMullen shows how these events impacted on Bage and other members of the team.  When Mawson had not returned by the time their supply ship had to depart before the ice froze over, a rescue team had to stay and overwinter for a second year.

For the half-dozen named, though, this was a dismal prospect.  They had been anticipating with relish their imminent return after a year of isolation in this windy wilderness.  Moreover, staying a further year had other consequences.  Bage was concerned that it would cost him his military seniority; Madigan was concerned that it would cost him his Rhodes scholarship.  But they accepted that some expeditioners had to stay.  Mawson was now a week overdue.  It was increasingly likely that a serious mishap had befallen his party: ‘we are all extremely anxious about him,’ Bage wrote. (p.364)

They had a bleak and dreary time during this second year, but they did their duty… arriving back in Australia 1914 to great acclaim and a round of after-dinner speaking engagements.  McCullen notes that after living cooped up in a hut in an all-male environment, half the expeditioners married soon after their return.  Bage became engaged to Dorothy Scantlebury* shortly after the outbreak of war in September, but since he was a member of the regular army, he was subject to immediate mobilisation and his company left for Egypt later that same month.

In May, he was killed at Gallipoli.

As McMullen says in the Introduction, these premature deaths represented a significant post-war loss for their nation because of their outstanding pre-war accomplishment or their outstanding character or both.  His purpose in resurrecting the stories of the men in this book is not to eulogise their deaths as mattering more than any others, but to show that amongst the thousands who died, there were exceptional men whose rare potential should not be forgotten. 

*Dorothy came from a notable Cheltenham family in the bayside suburb of Melbourne.  In 1919, Dorothy was teaching at Clyde school Mt Macedon, and went on to become Principal of Toorak College in 1942 ‐ the Scantlebury girls ‘old school’. (See Cheltenham’s Scantlebury Family 1889-1923)

Image credit: Robert Bage by Frank Hurley – State Library of New South Wales, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14751010Australasian Antarctic Expedition: 

Author: Ross McMullen
Title: Farewell, Dear People, Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation
Publisher: Scribe Publishing, 2012
Cover design: “by Scribe”
ISBN: 9781921844669, pbk., 600 pages, including Maps, a Bibliography, Notes Acknowledgements and an Index. The text runs to 531 pages.
Source: Personal library, purchased from Readers’ Feast, $45.00