MARGARET Campbell’s dad wore a badge that said “rejected volunteer”.
It saved him from the white feather they gave cowards.
“Mum says it’s shameful he can’t fight in the war, but when dad stands on the beach, staring out over the sea, he’s like a prisoner of war at home.”
Softly reciting one of her poems included in her recently completed masters thesis, the 77-year-old Werribee author and historian reflects on how war has always been etched in her consciousness.
As a child of the World War II years, Ms Campbell lived through the Korea and Vietnam wars and worked at the Point Cook RAAF base. She has lived in Wyndham since doing her “rookies” in 1954.
Her Victoria University thesis – the latest addition to an impressive catalogue of fiction, poetry and Wyndham-based history books – is similarly steeped in the theme of war and explores the legend of the Anzac that looms large in Australia’s cultural psyche. “I’ve written a lot of short stories and a lot of poetry, and I didn’t realise how many were about war until I put them all together,” she says.
Titled Searching the Silences of War, her study is part theory and part young adult novel. Finding Sophie, set in Truganina in 1997, is told from the perspective of a teenage girl staying at her grandparents’ farm with relatives including a Vietnam veteran and an anti-war protester.
Ms Campbell delves into the “silences” of wartime legend – the actuality of war masked behind mythology, generational repercussions and the omission of women in the Anzac story, such as nurses on hospital ships anchored at Gallipoli.
“Nurses don’t count, they didn’t actually go to war” is the last line of another of her poems, in which a woman “wakes again to screams” and gun clatter as she tends to young men blown apart by landmines.
Ms Campbell says her thesis was heavily influenced by having war so inextricably bound to her life, along with oral history accounts from more than 160 Wyndham immigrants in her 2005 book, From Here to There.
She will don a cap and gown for her graduation on May 15.
