The Great War had cost Australia 60,000 dead and 150,000 wounded in body and mind, with many families burdened with the consequences of wounds and trauma. Paradoxically, the war years had brought Dennis spectacular success with almost annual best-sellers, not to mention his marriage to Margaret Herron in 1917. Though often considered a facile popular versifier, Digger Smith (1918) especially demonstrated how Dennis understood how ‘The War’ challenged and changed the nation and its people.

But even then published poetry did not pay, and early in 1922 Dennis began his long association with the evening daily newspaper The Herald, contributing a daily column, spanning topical, pastoral, humorous, celebratory, and commemorative verse, an astonishing manifestation of his seemingly endless creativity. Producing over 3000 published pieces, Dennis can be regarded as Australia’s most fecund poet as well as its most loved, at least in the lifetimes of his readers.

‘Anzac’, the word encompassing Australia’s experience of the Great War, formed a staple of Dennis’s output, and he often returned to it. Dennis became not just the poet laureate of Anzac, but the conscience of commemoration. In 1922, soon after joining The Herald, he published ‘A Digger on Gallipoli’, in which he reminded readers who had cheered patriotically when seeing men off to war that ‘a Digger out o’ work’s a Digger yet’. ‘Have we forgotten?’ he asked in ‘Anzacs’ in 1923, a question he asked repeatedly.

Dennis often returned to the themes of what ‘the War’ had taken, and given, not just at Anzac Day in April and Armistice Day in November. In 1927, for example, reports that the British official history, then in preparation, was intending to depict Australians as amateurs who largely malingered on the beach at Anzac Cove roused Dennis to satirical fury. In ‘The Dinkum Oil’ he had a Gallipoli veteran sarcastically admit that ‘that little picnic on the beach? … it was a screech …’ In this, Dennis surely articulated the thoughts and feelings of people, many Returned Men and their families, for whom the war continued to be a presence – and often an absence – in their lives.

Among such a wealth of powerful verse, it is hard to identify one which exemplifies Dennis’s devotion to Anzac and what it meant to his Australia, but his Anzac Day 1929 poem, ‘The Army of the West’ comes close. In the war, men had spoken of death euphemistically, of ‘going west’. Dennis depicted Returned Men as:

The grey men, the grave men are marching in the street;

And maimed men and blind men and shattered men are here.

But many a man he marches not who marched last year …

“Close up the ranks,” the soldier said, “for the boys march West.”

Den’s verse allows us to recapture the mood of a people for whom the Great War remained, as he wrote in 1930, ‘some ugly dream’. Fittingly, his last Anzac day poem in the year of his death ended ‘Anzac lives on’.

Prof. Peter Stanley, FAHA

UNSW Canberra