Dumbo Feather – February 2019

The Yardstick

of Valour

WORDS: PIERZ NEWTON-JOHN

IMAGE: JASON LEUNG

y grandfather was a courageous man. A renowned

war correspondent, he was with the Australian

infantry during the fiercest fighting on the Kokoda

Track, and reported from the front lines of the American-

led invasion of Germany. He scaled the sheer rock faces

of the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains—in spite of

his terror of heights. Or perhaps because of it. Strongly

invested in the traditional notion of masculine bravery,

he despised his own fear, and overcame it by forcing

himself to sit with his feet dangling over the edge of

precipices. His early letters to my grandmother, written

at the start of the New Guinea campaign, before his first

experience of combat, are full of this ancient masculine

ethos, and his fear of falling short. He writes of a man on

the wharf at Port Moresby who collapsed in terror when a

Japanese fighter plane appeared in the sky. The sight of

this display of cowardice “nauseated” him. His greatest

anxiety was how he would hold up under fire. When,

finally, the first bullets tore through the trees around

him, he was gratified to note his own calm detachment.

Such is male identity; such have been its initiation rites

since before history was recorded. Even here and now,

in a country untouched by armed conflict on its shores

since colonial times, every man is aware of his status as

a potential warrior. Every man wonders how he would

hold up if the gods of war were to come calling. We still

measure ourselves against the yardstick of valour, are

still ashamed of ourselves when we “chicken out” of a

bungee jump or a confrontation with a bigger man.

Yet what is remarkable, surveying the bloody history

of the species, is how brave the ordinary man is.

The fields of Europe, the savannahs of Africa, the jungles

of Asia and South America, are full of the bones of

brave, ordinary men who in peacetime were farmers,

fishermen, shopkeepers, bakers. Like the barely-trained,

rag-tag men of the 39th Battalion, whose extraordinary

courage my grandfather documented in his classic

account of the war in New Guinea, Green Armour.

It seems that when the chips are down, when the order

comes, this is what men do: they go over the top, they

charge into the rain of arrows or bullets, they throw

themselves into the breach. They die, and they kill.

The courage to die a violent death is a terrible price

for identity as a man. It is notable how reports of the

casualties of atrocities still often append the phrase

“including women and children,” as if death in such a

manner were simply a man’s lot. And the price is paid

not only by the men who end up on the battlefront. It is

paid by every man who is called a “pussy” for being

M

10 DUMBO FEATHER