Random Note #145,321 —- Friendship Is Not The Same As Mateship.
Apart from the insult to the intelligence, and the revisionism and the rewriting of history to accord with the politically correct world view, the problem with deleting the word “mateship” and replacing it with the word “friendship” on the Kokoda Track, is that it totally misunderstands and mischaracterises what is commonly understood by the use of the term mateship.
The entire idea of a friend or at least the word friend, has been totally debased and diluted in recent years by the schmaltzy, saccharine and insincere American use of “friend” by Facebook to describe people you maybe connected with via technology but many of which you may barely know or in fact hold in contempt and have difficulty tolerating.
Others you may not know at all but they have somehow managed to attach themselves to you as a Facebook friend. Some people have many hundreds or even thousands of “friends” in the Facebook sense. But they’re not really friends in the commonly understood sense or meaning of the word.
Mateship on the other hand and particularly in the Kokoda sense, is very specific and speaks of an intimate closed circle where there are no secrets. The propinquity men in a particular situation. You’re in this thing together whatever it is. It could be the sales team at the office, the footy locker room, the trenches, the track or some SAS mission in some dry and dusty far flung hell hole, undergoing and enduring or about to endure a common experience of mud, blood and battle and possibly death whereby the only way to survive is if everyone man has got each other’s back.
How many of your friends, Facebook or otherwise would die in a ditch for you or take a bullet for you or for that matter even attend your funeral?
Mateship is what we witness and is on display right around Australia every year on April 25th, Anzac Day.