Today was ANZAC Day, a public holiday for Australia as we remember the fallen. It's a bit of a national pride event too, where we feel proud of our history and the sacrifices diggers have made for our freedoms. A bit of national myth making, as you will. I've been watching 'Narrow Road To the Deep North', a TV adaptation of Richard Flanagan's novel about memory, truth, and the horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway where around 13,000 prisoners of war and 70,000 to 90,000 Asian civilians died during it's construction, including 2,800 Australians among the POW deaths from forced labour under harsh conditions - starvation, beatings, cholera, and other unfathomable horrors.
It's a beautiful book, and I enjoyed the series, though it was a little overfocused on the love affair and skimmed over other important relationships. Still, the cruelty of the Japanese - and of war - and the complexities of morality were brought home.
“For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Grevillea
It beggars belief that some twats can boo indigenous diggers (returned servicemen) and those paying respect to them at a dawn service. The hostility of a few far right extremists shows a blind ignorance and makes many of us despair. It contributes to the history of violence that has extended from the beginning of time.
And so I turn away from these affairs into the garden, wet with torrential rain. I duck out between showers and take photos of the natives for my sister in law in England - it's so different to the primroses and daffodils that rise from the damp earth on the other side of the world.
Peaches and Cream grevillea
The base of my thumb and wrists ache - even as I type this, I'm afraid, so this post cannot go for too much longer, though I have much to say. It's a surfing issue from pressure of my hands on my board as I push up to pop up. I've been surfing a lot, so it figures. I'm seeing the physio next week for more hip exercises so I'll ask him what I can do about it. Getting old is not easy, and hurts.
Banksia
I'm a little bored today, and snappy with Jamie. I wanted to go surfing, but instead I chose to go for a three hour drive to pick up a wood burner with him. It's second hand, but with some love will look good, and fit bigger pieces of wood. It's unusually warm for this time of year, so people are freaked out about climate change, though it's been this warm close to May before. It's hard to tell what's going on, but we say that it'll be better for us down here because we'll get more rain. Queensland, however, has been drowning.
Cider gum
It'll be busy on the coast anyway - the Easter holiday has bled into the Anzac weekend, and it seems no one works these days. It was even busy through the week and I had my grumpy old woman on, willing people to fuck off home and wishing it was the '80's. How I miss that. But instead I do a more positive mantra until the bitterness goes: 'isn't it lovely they are having a good time?' or something like that. It changes the energy.
Snow bells correa
The rabbits are starting up again and frustrating me too. Jamie says to stop being obsessive. I just want to stop the blighters digging holes under shrubs and eating my young plants - I have to put up little rounds of wire around them which doesn't look pretty. Eventually we'll rabbit proof fence the whole property but as it's not a priority for Jamie, it won't get done until he's ready.
Dagga
Banksia
Most of everything has been harvested now, though there's new vegetables coming up - beans, swedes. The garic are busting soil. The broad beans are planted.
So as we remember the sacrifices of the ANZACS, because lest we forget, I also lose myself in forgetting by focussing on the minutae - the pain in my hands, the garden. There is less horror there.
“In the end all that was left was the heat and the clouds of rain, and insects and birds and animals and vegetation that neither knew nor cared. Humans are only one of many things, and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.”
― Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
With Love,
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