...and in the morning

I found myself walking along North Terrace this morning just before 11am (I was wondering where I'd gotten to) and happened upon the Rememberance Day service at the War Memorial. I had bought a Poppy when I got off the train and decided to stay for the service, sitting on one of the new benches over Kintore Ave from the Memorial, outside the new Library entrance. I haven't been to an event of this kind since Anzac Day, 1990, when I had to photograph a service as part of my Photography course at 1st year Uni. It was a little odd as they don't really observe Anzac day in the US, that being where I was on 25 April that year. Fortunately, I was with a Sister City delegation at the time and a small service was organised in a local church. So I guess I'm a little out of touch with that facet of Australian culture. There's a bit of cultural cringe on my part when it comes to this type of event, where the cliché and hyperbole kind of overtake what's really the central meaning of days like this. Those parts of our culture seem almost mythological, especially when every other sports commentator compares 'the fighting spirit' of our 'war heroes' with the current Australian XI. It makes me want to turn the volume down. All that talk about 'the Diggers' and John Howard talking about 'mateship' a few years back made me pretty much want to hurl. I tend to think of WWII and Vietnam veterans as rather helpless pawns, and of current servicemen as somehow being complicit in a war that the allies kinda started so the 'hero' label has never sat well with me. But seeing a couple of old boys laying the wreath at the memorial really hit it home what the day was all about. They were obviously young at the time they saw action, and the men they lived with, ate with and who, for a time, were quite possibly the only friends they had on earth, were killed. And they weren't heroes; they were just men. Laying the wreath was a simple gesture that transcended any ideas about war, or service, heroism, or even conflict; it was just a gesture of grief, remembering a friend or friends who died, probably before their time; and taking stock and being thankful it wasn't them. As the Last Post rang out, filling an otherwise silent city street, punctuating those two minutes of rememberance, my mind wandered to my Nanna, whose funeral was in ealry November years ago, then to two guys I knew, contemporaries of mine who have died this past year, and the bit about 'age shall not weary them' ceased to become just 'words they say on Remembrance day', and actually started to mean something. My cynical Gen X heart started to soften. Then, as I got up to go, they started singing the National Anthem and talking about God and my Gen X feet bolted for the Mall.