Read Torill’s story of how her father and his brother crossed Finnmarksvidda to fight for their country in exile. It’s a well-told story with some beautiful imagery and it’s part of our history. I love this sharing of memories and stories – a whole blog in memory of a long-dead friend, or for writing one’s memoirs alongside day-to-day posts.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Norman
It’s much the same in Australia. There are so many tales from the war that will never be told. Tales of incredible heroism, devotion to duty, and standing by “mates” have never been properly recorded and will, in most cases be lost. The veterans I’ve known never talked much about it, and when they did it was usually in a dismissive manner.
Surprisingly, the best picture of the bitter jungle war in which Australian troops were involved is by an American academic, to whom our soldiers seemed to open up far more freely than they ever did for anyone else. I’d suggest there’s a need for younger writers like Torill, to corner the few surviving combatants, and extract as much as possible from them before it’s too late.
Jill
And perhaps a daughter or son is among the best equipped to tell these stories?
Norman
Perhaps, Jill, although from the Australian perspective anyway, I’ve found very few veterans prior to the Viet Nam conflict, ever seemed to tell their children very much about what happened, especially when it came to the W.W. I trenches of Europe, or the W.W. II New Guinea jungle.
I suspect that the more horrendous it was, the more you needed to have a well informed enthusiastic “stranger”, if you were to get them to open up.
torill
Which is the reason, I suspect, that we didn’t really learn much about the hardships of my father’s life. He wanted to protect us from his own past. He also despised people who whined. If you had to talk about your broken leg or your unhappy life, you had better turn it into a funny story.