[ARCHIVE] 'He is all of them, and he is one of us' — Paul Keating's Eulogy to the Unknown Soldier, 1993
[ARCHIVE] 'He is all of them, and he is one of us' — Paul Keating's Eulogy to the Unknown Soldier, 1993
It's ANZAC Day in Australia and a chance to revisit a favourite podcast episode in which speechwriter Don Watson talks about co-writing Prime Minister Keating's Eulogy to the Unknown Soldier.
[ARCHIVE] 'He is all of them, and he is one of us' — Paul Keating's Eulogy to the Unknown Soldier, 1993
Here’s the re-release of the Don Watson episode: (Spotify hasn’t updated to show it, but it’s on Apple and Overcast.
Also on an Anzac theme, the wonderful Australian comedian Damian Callinan has shared a WW2 story to make you weep, especially if you’ve seen ‘Double Feature’, his live comedy show tribute to his parents love affair that is as beautiful as it is hilarious. It’s about the man pictured below, his ‘Shakespeare at Sea’.
Damian was the first ever guest on the Speakola podcast, talking about humour in eulogies. The story of his mother’s death is so tragic.
Back to Keating-Watson, here’s the earlier newsletter I wrote about Paul Keating’s Unknown Soldier speech.
11th November 2022
It’s Remembrance Day here in Australia (just), and it’s about to be the 11th of November around the world. My kids observed their minute’s silence at school, and we shared personal connections — my wife Tamsin’s great grandfather, Captain Franc Carse, died of his wounds on 2nd May 1917. He was 31 years old and an artilleryman. His second daughter, Marie-Louise, Tam’s Gran, was a one year old baby. She always told us she remembered him looking into her cot.
It’s generally acknowledged that the greatest Remembrance Day speech in these parts is Paul Keating’s Eulogy to the Unknown Soldier delivered at the Australian War Memorial in 1993. The occasion was the internment of the remains of one unknown soldier from the Western Front in France to represent the thousands who died there without proper burials or graves.
For years I’ve linked this speech on Speakola, but it was only last year that a friend of the site, Declan Fay, let me know that the actual video is now up online! Very exciting.
I attempted to host Mr Keating on the podcast to talk about the speech, but no luck so far. But I have had the next best thing. The man who largely wrote the speech, Don Watson, did do an Unknown Soldier episode of the podcast in November 2020.
It’s such a beautiful speech. Here’s how it begins:
We do not know this Australian's name and we never will. We do not know his rank or his battalion. We do not know where he was born, nor precisely how and when he died. We do not know where in Australia he had made his home or when he left it for the battlefields of Europe. We do not know his age or his circumstances – whether he was from the city or the bush; what occupation he left to become a soldier; what religion, if he had a religion; if he was married or single. We do not know who loved him or whom he loved. If he had children we do not know who they are. His family is lost to us as he was lost to them. We will never know who this Australian was.
Yet he has always been among those whom we have honoured. We know that he was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the Western Front. One of the 416,000 Australians who volunteered for service in the First World War. One of the 324,000 Australians who served overseas in that war and one of the 60,000 Australians who died on foreign soil. One of the 100,000 Australians who have died in wars this century.
He is all of them. And he is one of us.
There are many reasons to love this opening but here are a few.
1. The focus on the individual, the idea of one soldier’s actual remains being interred right now, rather than a broader brush opening about the tragedy of so much death, creates immediate focus. It’s a dead man. And we’re burying him — finally. The power is in the singular focus. And it opens like a eulogy.
2. Because we don’t know who he is, we have to imagine the possibilities. And because Don Watson is one of the greatest writers Australia has known, he makes a poetic repetition out of what we don’t know. ‘We don’t know … we don’t know.’
3. He moves from the impersonal to the personal in terms of the ‘we don’t knows’. Birthplace, address, and age are all relatively standard details. But then Watson (and Keating) up the emotional heft for the last of the ‘we don’t knows’.
We do not know who loved him or whom he loved. If he had children we do not know who they are. His family is lost to us as he was lost to them.
That reflective sentence is just sublime. [Is it chiasmas? I think it is. Tell me in the comments, rhetoric buffs.]
4. After the ‘we don’t knows’, the speech slides naturally into what we do know. “He was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the Western Front. One of the 416,000 Australians who volunteered for service”. Importantly, Watson keeps the beam on our one soldier. It’s still his eulogy, even while we traverse the scale of the national sacrifice.
5. ‘He is all of them, and he is one of us’ ends the section. It’s such a beautiful line, an embracing line, that creates a belongingness across time and space. And it has simple poetic heft —eleven single syllable words, five each side of the conjunctive hinge. The ‘all’ and the ‘one’ sit as perfect oppositional counter weights. There’s sublime harmony to the whole thing.
It’s such a standout line that Watson told me in our chat that he used to be ragged with it in the PM’s office:
‘It’s funny that because it used to get mocked around the office, Greg Turnbull used to do variations on ‘he is all of them, and one of us’ …. but yeah, that was the point I suppose …
The entire podcast episode is great, and there’s a section where Watson explains what they were trying to do, how they were attempting to lift it away from being ‘just another war speech’.
I guess what was difficult was to try and find something fresh in the Anzac legend that couldn’t just be reduced to platitudes — lest we forget and ‘oh he was a brave man’, and all that sort of stuff. Instead you ask, what’ve we lost through the war, and then what’ve we gained.
And what we gained was the legend. But I think before we get to the legend you hope you’ve put enough bones on what we’ve lost to see how important the legend is, and for that matter how fragile it is as well.
And the other thing about what we’ve lost is to make it concrete. People never respond to abstract language, they respond to concrete. So if you say what we’ve lost, then you include in those things, ‘his love for the country’. You take 60,000 lives, and another 120,000 who were crippled in one way or another, that’s an awful lot of very powerful feeling; as well as what’s lost in the nature of their work, or their genius, or whatever.
I’ll leave out some of the ‘bones’ here, for reasons of space. I’ll also leave out the fascinating personal response Watson has to the speech now — ‘I have some reservations, you know, about Anzac‘.
It’s definitely worth listening to the episode.
But here’s how Prime Minister Keating closed it out:
The Unknown Soldier honours the memory of all those men and women who laid down their lives for Australia.
His tomb is a reminder of what we have lost in war and what we have gained.
We have lost more than 100,000 lives, and with them all their love of this country and all their hope and energy.
We have gained a legend: a story of bravery and sacrifice and, with it, a deeper faith in ourselves and our democracy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian.
It is not too much to hope, therefore, that this Unknown Australian Soldier might continue to serve his country - he might enshrine a nation's love of peace and remind us that in the sacrifice of the men and women whose names are recorded here there is faith enough for all of us.
One of the greatest speeches in Australian history. 29 years on today.
The Unknown Soldier episode of the podcast was an adjunct to this even more incredible ‘Redfern’ speech episode with Don Watson.
Here is my personal Substack, Good one, Wilson
