From the Origin ad to Gettysburg via Christmas: What a strange thing memory is

Charlie is a bit of a hero to me. I think you know the type — the minor celebrity who does all the things or has all the attributes you would wish for yourself. Actually, you know who Charlie is — he’s the old gaffer pushing 80 who’s the star of the Origin Gas ad.

He’s considerate to his wife, he’s a cheery raconteur at the local cricket club, a whizz on the sausage sizzle and he’s always ready to fill in as umpire or give the young kids a few tips on how to improve their batting. And Charlie’s never too pressed for time not to look through a young woman’s wedding album, celebrating her own special moment.

But why I particularly admire Charlie is that he isn’t bothered by the shrapnel the rest of us carry from the war-wounds of life. He is free of all the injuries, doubts and ailments that reduce so many of us into imagining life rather than getting stuck into it. Even if you are pushing 80.

Charlie came to mind on Christmas Day during that hiatus between the exchange of gifts and falling upon the turkey. I was listening, for about the 25th time, to A Prairie Home Christmas, great day-dreaming stuff, particularly when you know it all by heart. As I slipped into a familiar doze, I found myself drawn into the recesses of memory by the plangent violin of Jay Ungar’s ‘Winter Solstice’ medley.

Of course, memory can itself be the trigger for the imagination, the trigger of sounds, of smells, you name it, and so from ‘Winter Solstice’ it was only a glide into Ungar’s ‘Ashokan Farewell’, and from there, a short glissando to Ken Burns’s epochal television series of 1990, The Civil War. And then my memory really began to flower.

I was staying with my cousin Meghan and her husband in Washington. He’s very American — old-stock Yankee family, Harvard, Marine Corps officer in Vietnam, corporate lawyer. Nice guy, but not exactly your average knock-about type. Yet, ironically, like Charlie of Origin Gas fame, Carl’s a sports fan and has not the slightest interest in the minutiae of American history.

So, it was with some surprise that he suggested one Saturday that I might like to visit the National Military Park at Gettysburg. As most Aussies of our generation will recall, the Battle of Gettysburg, in early July 1863, was the turning point in the US Civil War and the site of Abraham Lincoln’s much-quoted Gettysburg Address. Although I too had overdosed on American history through years at university, as a good guest I could hardly demur.

Rather than driving due north to Pennsylvania, Carl decided to weave our way along the twists and turns of the Potomac.

“Ahah,” I thought, he’s heading towards Hagerstown where Robert E. Lee crossed the river before swinging east to encircle Washington. This was going to be a journey into serious historical authenticity, I assumed. Wrong!

After the third stop, I grasped that the trip to Gettysburg was an excuse to indulge Carl’s true passion in life, photography, but more particularly the photography of the changing seasons of the eastern United States. For I then recalled the framed photos of maples and oaks and dogwoods, golds, crimsons and ambers, that dotted the walls of my cousin’s home. All breathtaking originals, I now saw Carl in a completely different light.

Eventually, several photo sessions later, we reached Gettysburg, finding the battlefield laid out and curated with the exemplary attention to fine detail for which Americans are renowned. And sometimes doubted.

Under a glorious autumnal canopy (so different from the steamy summer of 1863), we found that all the key positions were carefully signposted, with headstones and memorials indicating where state regiments of both sides were positioned at different points in the three-day struggle.

I stood beside the Pennsylvania memorial that commemorated 35,000 men of that state who took part — 40 per cent of the entire Union army — about which I had never heard a single word mentioned. But was this strange omission a reflection of Carl’s muttered derision that “I don’t like what Philadelphians say and I don’t like the way they say it”, his justification as a New Yorker for supporting the Kansas City Royals against the Phillies in that year’s baseball World Series?

I must confess that hitherto my knowledge of the precise detail of Gettysburg had more than a whiff of Hollywood about it. I knew that a teacher named Joshua Chamberlain probably saved the Union on the second day by protecting the southern flank from the famous Confederate general James Longstreet, and I knew that the encirclement to the north by the Southern cavalry was defeated by our own Errol Flynn (oops, George Armstrong Custer, who “died with his boots on” 13 years later).

But what I didn’t appreciate was the ferocity of the fighting at the heart of this epic conflict, resulting in 51,000 casualties from just 150,000 participants, one in three, compared with about one in four at blood-soaked Waterloo 50 years before.

This intensity was revealed when we entered the Cyclorama, a painted panorama 13 metres high and 115m in length. There, the visitor could stand at a precise place — 50m behind the centre of the Union line (‘The Angle’) on Cemetery Ridge — and at a precise time — when the only Confederates of Pickett’s Charge to breach the defences were repulsed. By turning a complete 360 degrees, the visitor might see everything that a pivoting soldier at that very spot might have seen on the cataclysmic final afternoon.

The Cyclorama was painted by a Frenchman, Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, 20 years after the battle, so there would have been enough survivors to ensure the authenticity of what was revealed by this 19th century equivalent of an interactive display. That is, except for the death of Lewis Armistead, the only Confederate general to reach the Union line. Philippoteaux painted him heroically, shot from the saddle of his charger, when in reality, his death was far more human, being on foot, waving his sword, with his hat perched on it as a Chaplinesque standard for his troops to follow.

Was this a mistake or was it true artistic licence, a heroic abstraction created to salve a nation whose wounds had barely begun to heal? I wondered what the more down-to-earth Charlie might have made of it all: “Keep your eye on the ball, boys and girls, and roll your wrists to keep it down”, maybe? Go, Charlie!

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