A Walk in the Park

As rain was predicted it is an unexpectedly beautiful sunny Sunday so I'm off on a trek to the market to arm myself with lunch then on to the Botanic Gardens for some much needed floral relief. Victoria is in drought and has been all year. It becomes sadly obvious when a spring walk in the park crackles under foot. Grass is not supposed to be crunchy but that unfortunately is what you get here in Melbourne, dry, brown or insipid green blades covering rock hard dusty ground like the wisps of comb-over on a bald man. Both are sad.

Tree blossoms have been happening for a few weeks now and leaves are now sprouting so a blue sky day seems the right time to explore the Royal Botanic Gardens. This then is where I take my baguette, brie, pear and celery stick lunch. Unfortunately as it feels like a summers day, the summer plague of Melbourne arrives along with it. I'm talking flies. Oh my god am I talking flies! I have no idea how the people who live here can be so accustomed to the aggression of these pesky insects. They don't just buzz around like Auckland ones, they stick to you like you're covered in a layer of honey-glue. They fly into your face, eyes, even mouth. I'm not kidding, these pests will sit on your lips, resistant to swatting and shooing away. It's really off-putting. I mean I have become used to eating blue cheese but I draw the line at black spotted cheese and there is no way I can pretend that they are chewy raisins! In NZ I love eating alfresco but it is much less appealing here. After sun down the regular flies are replaced by a plague of tiny midgy ones so there is not much respite in a late outdoor dinner either.

My walk in the park takes me to the Shrine of Remembrance so off I got ready for some military sobriety. War memorials are designed I know, to conjure awe at the might of the military through being reminded about the dreaded outcomes of losing and the glory and honour for those who die in the process of winning. Never have they been so popular as a few years after the First World War which was when the stepped pyramid inspired Shrine of Remembrance was commissioned and built. The donations of school children of the day went towards building this monument.

Nineteen thousand Victorians died in WWI. One in five that went overseas to fight did not return. The names of every person to serve in WWI is displayed in books lining the corridors surrounding the sanctuary. The video on display in the Shrine's visitor centre shows young high school students of today relating to how it would have been for them if they had been required to fight the war in Europe. The lack of communication with loved ones, the isolation, the uncertainty of traveling to the far off unknown were all concerns. So a bit like doing an OE then? I didn't sit through to the end but I did not hear anyone mention the abhorrence of having to kill another human being or face bullets themselves. Are we that detached from the act of war these days that we don't think about how we would react if faced with killing?

Certainly as I explore this colossal monument I do not get a sense of war. Death yes, it feels like an ancient crypt to me but war, hmm not really, not for me personally. To my mind this place with its cold stone walls, narrow angled corridor upon corridor and drafty stairs, is more like the pyramids, like a cobwebbed treasure tomb from Indian Jones. I do not mean to take away from the seriousness of this structure nor from the significance of the fact that it commemorates so many lives lost in war. My comment is about the modern de-sensitisation produced by the cosseting we receive in this age from the actual reality of war. We are exposed to so much horror, so much violence and so much hatred on our television screens every day that we are overwhelmed and have shut down. We seem to be closing ourselves off from the immediacy of war by building monuments and glorifying it on television. That may not be the intention of the governments or media (as I generously give some the benefit of the doubt) in building monuments or reporting war but it is the result that I see and feel.

I don't watch the news because I am sick of seeing and hearing how dreadful we humans can be to each other, to our planet. I admit that I am somewhat sticking my head in the sand but if I don't I might not be able to cope with the magnitude of it all. The blame, the shame, the sadness. If I took it all personally I would suffer a melt down and yet by not doing anything much to stop it, I am partially to blame. I believe in picking your battles and mine is planet ecology, someone else can have war so that I can manage still to sleep at night.

So back to the Shrine where I feel cold and it is not just from the draft breezing down the vaulted corridor at me. The only stirring I feel about this impressive monument is in seeing the New Zealand flag flying at the end of the sanctuary.

Every half hour they simulate the 'Ray of Light' ceremony that occurs naturally at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Armistice renamed Remembrance Day. This monument has been designed so that the sun will pass over a window and throw a beam of light on to the stone with the inscription “Greater love hath no man” while the words are spoken, “They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old.”

Two things strike me as I participate in the minute's silence as this simulation takes place. One is that I am told that it is really a guy with a torch shining it from up the tower and the other is that daylight savings had skewed the real natural annual occurrence by an hour. So it's all a bit of a sham this war lark.