Honouring them by remembering
WHAT IF AROUND THE NEXT CORNER WAS NOTHING, WHAT IF ALL THE PEOPLE WERE THE SAME,
WHAT IF THE EARTH’S BEAUTY CHANGED LITTLE,
AND WHAT IF THE PAST NEVER WAS..
ONLY THEN WOULD I SAY DON’T TRAVEL…
It was at a tiny backpacker hostel in Thamel, Katmandu, that I wrote those words, feeling outrageously adventurous, and I guess a little melancholy as well.
I was on the road to Tibet, being alone, I missed Mum, but all I wanted to do was visit faraway lands only seen on Disneyland, Attenborough, and three-year-old National Geos in doctors’ surgeries.
I guess as you get a little older, the yearning is even stronger as the pages left in ‘life’s’ National Geo, get a little slimmer.
The most wonderful thing about travel, are memories, you can bring them back instantly, even quicker than the 49724528 photos you took on the mobile.
As I sit in my own world, skimming from one memory to another, hoping to find an appropriate one to share, I stop at one particular moment...
They asked me to stay.
I picked up my swag and headed up the stairs to the loft, it was warm, had a friendly feel, and it was in the heart of the Western Front!
A well rounded English accent called from below “You should feel at home, your Sir John Lavarack stayed up there during the campaign for the Somme”.
I did not know.
And so it was I slept in the very room where Lavarack, the legendary master of warfare from Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, had planned the Somme, maybe even Hamel, I don’t know, but what an experience.
To come from Townsville where the great home of Third Brigade bears his name, and now be in the room where battles imagined were planned, well, the ghosts were real those nights.
The little commune in France where I had the absolute honour of staying was Mailly-maillet in the Somme valley, and I loved it.
It was during a wonderful tour of the battle fields, and the people who owned the tour company, owned the little historic house, and as I was the only one on the tour, I basically gate crashed.
This is what can happen on the road to somewhere, but with the freedom to go anywhere, whenever.
In these days of faraway conflicts, pandemics closer, and the lure of Magnetic Island, travel to those far flung or even nearer flung places, is not that easy.
But those incredible memories stay deep in ones heart, just waiting for revival, and Friday I’ll be reviving them all.
It will be Remembrance Day, and my dear Dad loved it.
He would take me to the RSL, and talk about his Dad who was there, in the mud of the Somme on the Western Front, I’d hear the stories, but foolishly didn’t take the notice I should have.
To think there were blokes at the bar who were in the first world war, and I was there with Dad, but of course I’d only got my first bike, my voice recorders were many years away.
Pity I sometimes think. BUT, maybe that could have been intruding, asking to dig out memories, that I can easily reveal from my happy travels, but for them, the pains too great.
This Friday, we must think of those blokes at the bar, the blokes I saw as a young fella, those blokes who’s eyes saw things I could never imagine.
And of course, those blokes who fought under our flag, the very same flag we’ll stand under, 11am Friday, Remembrance day in our great Garrison City.
Happy and thoughtful Days. ooroo