Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

G. O. Hawkins personal narrative about Tel-el-Kebir, Egypt, May 1916
MLMSS 5424 ADD-ON 2143 / Box 1 / Folder 1

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[1st?] Copy

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The time is the month of May 1916 and the place is Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt where on the 13th September 1822 the Egyptian Army under Arabi was broken by two Squadrons of the Dragoon Guards. Almost on the site of that historic event there is a wide-spread camp of Australian soldiers. The country is a desert with a railway passing through it like a great artery for the flow of the vital blood of progress. There is, too, thanks to the bounty of the merciful Nile, a canal of life-giving water flowing like a stream of silver through the pale gold of the sun-bleached desert sand.
The air is pure and sweet. The sky is like no other sky in the world: it is an illusion and a reality that grips and confounds. It is a pageant of light: light that bleaches with ruthless and terrific power, that gilds with transcendent glory,

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that paints vividly and with precious beauty. Of this light the Day with all the sky and changes of the sky is made. And when Day dies Night, with her own rich jewels ablaze upon her breast, carries the faded splendor and pallid loveliness of it as [part?] her own across the heavens in her jealous arms. At dawn the Eastern segment of the sky is like to the expanding of a rose. Later in the day but before noon the over-reaching dome is a perfect blue and as clear as a bell while where its lower vastness shuts down round the rim of the earth the blue is marred and thickened with a faded darkness as though there existed the colossal shadow of Time as a background to the world. This weird sense of shadow in the elements of day is vibrant as though with the infinite tremors of a thousand occult pulses that seem to be no less eternal than Time while throbbing out the impenetrable

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mystery of the east. At noon the sky becomes as burnished brass. The un-lidded space though supreme for the whole day is at that period a scourging conqueror of the world. His near presence overhead is a shock of light that blinds as it falls like a curse upon the sand. At one the western quarter of the sky is a furnace of orange fire.
At night the great dome lifts to a diviner altitude and is mantled with purple velvet through which sharp points of glory are cut by the steel of stars. And thereunder, as though thrown to its place and poised mysteriously glows, like a slender jewel of gold, the crescent moon.
In the day time there is to be seen here a fragment of Egypt that cannot be called remarkable, yet it is not unworthy of being briefly sketched. Alongside the railway line, occupying an extensive area, lies the Australian camp, a conspicuous enough sight but one devoid of beauty consisting, as it does of thousands of white bell tents

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and several hundred rush huts placed like toy structures in regular lines on the buff sand of the desert. Nothing could be more severe nor more simple nor, perhaps, less picturesque. Still by the bleaching glare of the intense light in which the whole scene vibrates there is imparted to it something suggestive of a faded painting. Add to the picture the human element, Kahki-clad bronze-faced men, and the description of the camp is complete.
The spire-like points of tents that covered a rise in the ground stand out clear and sharp against the sky. Away beyond these, over the brow, stretch miles and miles of undulating desert. A mile or so to the left is the exact site of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, where old trenches and redoubts can still be clearly traced and old relics of antiquated munitions and arms can still be found.

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Not more than a hundred paces on the other side of the railway streaks the placid irrigation canal, and from there as far as the eye can see spreads a level portion of the desert that has been reclaimed and made brilliant with the emerald wealth of cultivation. Here and there the charm of that wide spread of green is enhanced by the beautiful and invaluable date palm posing singly with its picturesque outline towering above the flatness of barley crops and clover field. Beyond these there are other palms that commence in clusters, and beyond again there are palms that sleep in groves and screen from view the hazy further distance.
Among a group of these characteristic trees of the East and darkened by the shadow of their fronds can be espied the flat-topped mud hovels of an Arab village which, by a stern decree of Head-Quarters, is out of bounds to the soldiers. With their hulks heavy and flat on the waters of the canal and well-nigh hidden by the green bank that sleeps along

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the edge and with their huge single sails towering above all other objects, the native barge-liked boats glide silently through the simple scene with a serene and stately motion akin to the passage of solemn shapes in a dream. Between the canal and the railway line away to the right there is a little railed-in plot of sacred soil where lie the bones of the gallant Britishers who fell in the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, men of the Queens Own, of the Gordon Highlanders and of other famous regiments. Cypress pines are there and palms, and so it comes to be that, in one place, the brave British who died for the Empire, sleep in the shadow of the “Palm and Pine".
The old-fashioned oleander and flaming scarlet hibiscus grow there and bloom amongst the graves. The little pathways are dust, the marble headstones and wooden crosses are bleached and withered, and the intense light that enters so boldly there seems to cheapen these poor attempts of the quick to build a memory for the dead.

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With the red of the oleander and the scarlet of the hibiscus added to the painted glory of the butterflies for ever restless in their fickle flight there is the gaiety of color there and the manifestation of life that continues to superimpose decay. Within a new and roughly fenced portion of the plot are several newly made graves of men who have died on service here in the present war. No tree or scrub is yet planted to guard and shade these simple mounds of sand. They lie forlorn in the blinding glare of light cheap inglorious ragged ends to beings made in the likeness of their god.
Spreading sycamore trees of great beauty grow at the entrance of the graveyard. It is in the gracious shade of these that there is the life of today heedless of the dead of yesterday so near. In the cool of the black shadows are Australian soldiers, some slaking their thirst with iced drinks purchased from the wily Arab who is always picturesque no matter how unkempt

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and unclean, some playing at Crown-and-Anchor and some at cards. The heated and almost breathless air is full of sound from the soldiers, their laughter, humor, banter, annoyance and general profanity, graphically picturesque and sulphurous. The Australian soldiers swore in Egypt as the soldier of old swore in Flanders and as all soldiers swear in any land under the sun.

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Re my fathers only Exhibition in Melbourne. Sedden [Sedon] Gallery

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[Page partly obscured – not transcribed]

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[Cutting from the Melbourne Herald – review of an exhibition of Australian paintings]
George Falcon’s Fantasies
Watercolor Show

[Review not transcribed]

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[Two newspaper cuttings of reviews of two art exhibitions in Melbourne. Not transcribed]

[Transcribed by Peter Mayo for the State Library of New South Wales]