<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/11/australia-citizens-spanish-civil-war-no-official-memorial>
"This Remembrance Day consider a photograph and the story it holds about
Australians whose war service has largely been deliberately overlooked or
forgotten by the tellers of this country’s martial history.
Held by the Illawarra Museum in Wollongong, the photograph was taken during a
parade for May Day (International Workers’ Day) in Sydney in 1944. It has not
been previously published.
It depicts a Wollongong steelworker, Jim McNeill, distinctive in a slouch hat
and his Second Australian Imperial Force uniform. He stands at the front of a
small group of men, all poised and ready to march. While McNeill is
distinguished by his Australian Army uniform, the others are all neatly
besuited. They wear neckties and some have pocket handkerchiefs and hats.
They are among the 70 or so Australian men and women who joined the
International Brigades to fight or serve as nurses or support workers to
bolster the Spanish republic’s bitter, bloody – but ultimately failed –
military resistance to Franco’s fascist forces from 1936 to 1939. I’ve written
previously and at length about them here.
This group of men, marching together back home in New South Wales for what is
believed to be the first and only time, had fought Europe fascism on the
battlefield when the conservative Menzies government of Australia, like many
others internationally, was still wedded to appeasement of fascist leaders such
as Hitler and Franco.
What renders this photograph so compelling and important is the consistency
that it depicts between the fighting of fascists during the Spanish civil war
and, in the case of McNeill, elsewhere in Europe later during the second world
war, for which he also volunteered."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
