'It doesn't belong to me, it belongs to the people'
Australian War MemorialI was only 19 is song that changed John Schumann’s life. But when the singer-songwriter sat down to write about the Vietnam War more than 35 years ago, he never dreamt the song he wrote would become a number one hit, or that its lyrics would one day be inscribed on a national memorial.
“As a young songwriter you are totally convinced each new song you write is going to be the next Stairway to Heaven,” he said with a laugh, “but it’s true to say that I didn’t think for a moment that this song was going to be as influential and as life-changing for me and others as it has been.
“It’s also a song that you can’t perform lightly. It means so much to other people … you have to concentrate and play it with sincerity and intensity every time you play it …
“You have to perform it like it’s the first time you’ve performed it, and you have to perform it like you mean it because the song demands it … [but] in lots of ways it doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the people about whom it’s written.”
Schumann originally wanted to write a song about Vietnam veterans because he knew he could have been one of them. As a teenager in South Australia in the late 1960s, Schumann was the right age to be “swept up in conscription”, but his number never came up.
“It really was a case of, there but for the grace of God go I,” he said. “I was the right age to have had Vietnam on my personal horizon … [and] the army held no terrors for me … Like most families there was a history of service. My grandfather was a marksman on a merchant navy minesweeper during the First World War – he used to stand on a deck with a .303 and detonate mines – and then Dad was in the RAAF in the Second World War.”
Schumann’s father wasn’t too worried about the idea of him being conscripted – “He thought it would do me the world of good” – but his mother was far from comfortable with the idea of her boy going to Vietnam. “I didn’t understand why every time I had an asthma attack I had to go to the doctor, but she told me a bit later on that she was laying a paper trail in case my marble came up.”
It wasn’t until he was studying philosophy at Flinders University that Schumann started to learn more about the war in Vietnam.
“By the time I got to university, the war was in its final hours,” he said. “I had been in blissful naive ignorance about the war – other than what it might or might not mean for me personally – but once the light was turned on, I became opposed to our participation.
Read more on the Australian War memorial website below.
Claire Hunter, Memorial Writer
- Australian War Memorial https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/i-was-only-19
