Anzac Day

Anzac Day is the subject of a school project that leads Jodie Bigelow to ask her father, Jimmy Bigelow, what the war was like. The exchange becomes a small but revealing scene about commemoration: the expected account of service and sacrifice gives way to a bugle performance, while Jimmy insists that there is little to tell. Through this moment, the novel places public remembrance beside a survivor’s incomplete, inward sense of the past.

A school assignment becomes an encounter

When Jodie is in high school, she asks Jimmy to help with her project on Anzac Day. He initially says there is not much to tell, describing his wartime experience as only this and that. Jodie presses him, and he returns from his bedroom with an old bugle. He wipes the mouthpiece and makes comic noises to amuse her before finding real notes and playing The Last Post. The shift from humor to a martial bearing gives the instrument a solemn force that his explanations do not. When Jodie asks whether that is all, Jimmy says it is all he knows and about all anyone needs to know.

The encounter offers no extended account of campaigns or battlefield events. Instead, the project elicits a gesture and a piece of music: the bugle becomes the medium through which Jimmy can approach a past he does not narrate directly. Later, when Jodie asks what the music means, he calls it a mystery and suggests that its meaning grows with the mystery. The exchange leaves remembrance unresolved rather than turning it into a complete, easily transmitted story.

The private limits of remembrance

Jimmy’s response to Jodie belongs to a larger pattern in his life. He is described as absent through much of her childhood and, in a later reflection, as someone who recalled less and less even while public interest in memory expanded around him. What remained for him included particular fragments: jokes, stories, the taste of a duck egg Darky Gardiner gave him, and the hope and goodness he associated with the men he had known. He remembered Wat Cooney’s kindness at the cookhouse, where Wat waited for the last man and kept food for him, but not the march north to Three Pagoda Pass or its attendant cruelties. His memory preserved human care while losing—or refusing to count as the truth—the surrounding suffering.

The same tension appears in the camp when cholera rules require Rabbit Hendricks’s sketchbook to be burned with his possessions. Dorrigo Evans waves the sketchbook away and orders it burned; later, he tells Bonox Baker that everything is forgotten in the end and that it is better to live now. Bonox answers by invoking the words of remembrance. Set beside Jimmy’s encounter with Jodie, the exchange shows that remembering is neither a simple duty nor a reliable recovery of events: it can preserve a comrade’s kindness, confront loss, or give way to survival.

Commemoration and what it leaves out

The novel also sets personal recollection against official forms of memorialization. At Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, steam locomotive C 5631 is displayed alongside the Book of Souls, which lists more than two million people who died in service to the Emperor of Japan between 1867 and 1951. The shrine’s memorial framework is described as granting absolution to those enshrined, including 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after World War II and executed; some had worked on the Death Railway and been found guilty of mistreating prisoners of war.

The plaque before C 5631 says nothing about the railway’s construction or its dead. The novel stresses the scale and uncertainty behind that absence: approximately 60,000 Allied prisoners of war were only a fraction of the laborers, alongside a quarter of a million or more Asian workers, while estimates of deaths among those laborers range from 50,000 to 200,000. Their names are forgotten, and there is no book for their lost souls. This account does not make Anzac Day identical to the shrine’s memorial practices; rather, it broadens the question raised by Jodie’s assignment. Commemoration can summon the dead, but the forms through which the past is remembered can also leave people unnamed and suffering unrecorded.