Kenneth Slessor, the great Australian poet and journalist, resigned as official Australian war correspondent of the Second World War – 69 years ago – on 21 February 1944. He resigned before he was sacked.
Slessor was one of a distinguished group of journalists who fell foul of the Second World War information and censorship bureaucracy, and General Thomas Blamey in particular. Others included Damien Parer and Chester Wilmot.
The anniversary is a good excuse, if one was needed, to sing Slessor’s praises as a journalist and war correspondent. His descriptive power was that of a poet rather than a hard news journo, which makes it longer lasting and more relevant today. Here he is in Syria, after the campaign ended in on 13 July 1941.
Today the crickets are singing ion the trampled grass of the battlefield; corn is dancing on the skyline and farm-boys are winnowing the crops. The earth has received the scattered bones of war and forgotten them. Syria, too, in a few weeks of peace will forget, let us hope, the cloud which passed over its green fields.
Syria, sadly, has had to remember again.
I (re)published Slessor’s The Road to Ruin, an evocative piece on El Alamein written on 20 November 1942 in Eyewitness: Australians Write from the Front-line, in 2005.
