Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Rudolf Novak Augstein (alias Peter Austen, also Augstein) (Ex No: 87) was born in South Brisbane in 1892. His grandparents on both sides were Austrian immigrants. In Brisbane, he attended local schools and worked as a clerk in the Customs Office. Soon he found more suitable employment at the Queensland Public Library. He became known as a ‘Digger poet’. He had keen interest in the Islamic faith while serving in the army, and just after the war he became a Muslim, naming himself Aly Azir-el-Din (Azireldin).

The war introduced Lance Corporal Peter Austen, the ‘soldier to the East’. As an under-graduate, fresh from the University of Queensland, he enlisted and served at Gallipoli and in Egypt, Greece, and Flanders with the Australian army medical corps. While providing med-ical care to Australian soldiers, he survived a number of battles. In the sunbaked land of the Arabs, the Middle East culture was an inspiration for him. In particular, the arrival of the AIF in Egypt gave Austen a ‘new landscape of the mind’ where he came across Islam and Muslim natives of the Middle East. In a manuscript entitled, ‘Omar Layyam Tableaux’, in aid of the Women’s University College, 22 July 1914’, Austen had already written some Muslim poems: ‘The Blue Mosque, The Sultan’s Garden, Sakkara, To H.M. King Fa-rouk’. Unlike Austen’s genuine curiosity about Islamic culture, the German Kaiser looked ‘faintly ridiculous’ to the liberal West’ when, after visiting the Middle East, he was called ‘Haji’ Wilhelm II, ironically implying that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Aly was invalided home after serving at home 93 days and overseas 958 days and dis-charged on 22 October 1917. Through his poetry ‘Back again in Aussie,’ the poet seems to have felt the old feelings as much as when he was in Gallipoli and Flanders, and ‘there is no camouflaging the facts and horrors of the campaign’. While living for a while in Austral-ia, ‘he never forgot his stay in Egypt’. From Brisbane, in his application to the Repatriation Department, Austin asked for free passage from the Commonwealth for employment to travel to Egypt where he set up his business. In response to him, it was stated, ‘The appli-cant has been offered a position as a buyer of Eastern rugs etc. by an Adelaide firm and pro-duced a letter stating that ₤ 1000 would be placed at his disposal for this purpose …’ The Commission’s decision, however, rejected the application as ‘it was not the policy of the Repatriation Department to assist Returned Soldiers to leave the Commonwealth.’ In spite of the rejection, Aly went back to Cairo in 1920, working as a freelance journalist, but also as a poet with a new poetic inspiration immersed in classical Arabic literature. Aly Azir’s attitude to Middle Eastern culture is a ‘curious mix of passionate nativism and Euro-pean condescension’. While in Egypt, he started a business selling carpets and curios in Cairo. Then, he worked at a government school, and as an English reviewer at the famous Al Azhar University, as well as the Egyptian Mail, the daily newspaper of the British com-munity, and the Sphinx, another Cairo newspaper.

In Egypt, Aly symbolically recognised place in a way that no other former Anzac soldier could fathom. The lordly fastidiousness of his reviewing tone conveys a sense of a new personality, emerging from the experienced traumas of the war, adjusting himself in an en-vironment and new religion to which he remained devoutly attached for the rest of his life. In 1939, Aly Azir-el-Din died in Cairo, never having returned to Australia. It was reported that when leaving the home of a friend, he fell down the steps and fractured his skull. He was taken to Cairo Hospital, but never recovered consciousness. His body now lies in Imam el Shafel Cemetery, Cairo. However, living far from his homeland, he spread fame for the Anzacs. Indeed, this Anzac soldier, poet and librarian, never forgot his broth-ers-in-arms, leaving many poems, including this one:

Yea, let it flame throughout the countless years,
With the white stars the breast of Heaven bestud.
That our soils’ sons may murmur with proud tears,
We are of ANZAC blood.

Successively, when peaceful relations between Turkey and Australia, New Zealand and the West were developing, the Turkish side, would say words of compassion and wisdom to the mothers of the Anzac soldiers who fell in Gallipoli: ‘those heroes … after having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well’. These noble words ascribed to Mus-tafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkish Field Marshal and statesman, were actually the words first de-livered by Sukru Kaya, a former Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Interior Minister in his interview in 1953 for the Turkish newspaper Dunya. The opening sentence of the middle lines of the epitaph, in its original version said by Kaya, actually, begins: ‘Ýou are side by side, bosom to bosom with Mehmets’, which corresponds in Turkish, Sizler, Mehmetçiklerle yanyana, koyun koyunasınız. These Kaya’s ‘Ataturk words’ are often quoted for good purpose and constituted a foundation for Turkish–Australian friendship.

From the book:

Dzavid Haveric, 'A History of Muslims in the Australian Military from 1885 to 1945: Loyalty, Patriotism, Contribution’, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, London, 2024