War’s just one black foulness’

Two thirds of the way into Jack Lindsayâ s novel The Blood Vote (1937/1985), Dick, one of the numerous returned men to haunt its pages, takes an explicit stance on Anzac, and invites us to read the novel in terms of its politics of memory: â â And warâ s just one black foulnessâ ,â the crippled man tells his brother, the novelâ s protagonist, who has come to visit him in hospital. â â Donâ t you ever believe otherwise. If anyone talks to you about how war brings out good qualities, stick a bayonet up his entrails, see?â â (251). Taking its cue from this central scene, this essay seeks to reclaim Lindsayâ s novel for a history of Australiaâ s First World War that reveals the diverse ways in which Australians have engaged imaginatively with that conflict. Thirty years on from the bookâ s publication, at the warâ s centenary, Australia, a minor player in the war itself, has become a commemorative superpower, investing a record $A561.8 million in exercises and displays of collective remembrance, more than any other nation. The resurgence of this commemorative fervour has various reasons, but its beginning is often dated to the 1980s, just when Lindsayâ s novel (ï¬ nally) came out in Australia, alongside a signiï¬ cant number of other literary and ï¬ lmic treatments of the First World War. This article retraces The Blood Voteâ s arrival in that historical moment, drawing on archival records and newspaper reviews, and puts it in conversation with other texts reimagining Australiaâ s First World War in that decade. Read in the context of the â memorial dynamicsâ of 1980s Australia (Rigney 369), when the warâ s literary memory was pulling between reassuring heritage ï¬ ctions and more complex, unsettling versions, Lindsayâ s The Blood Vote reveals itself as a challenge to the orthodoxies of Anzac, and to our understanding of Australian war writing as it is still commonly conceived

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