11 June 2007
Walkabout
There was nothing in the air that a very long walk, some intensive and sobering history, and a Victoria Bitters at King O’Mally’s down the street couldn’t cure- that and Ivan, the Croatian, who had an opinion on everything.
Ivan was not drinking; he was in his shop filled with sport jerseys of every Australian team that ever played. I had my eye on a rugby jersey of the Sydney Wombats when he approached me and began to speak, and did not stop for more than a half hour.
He thinks people in this world want to be liked, and he is of the opinion, one of them, anyway, that Americans are the nicest people on the earth with one of the most inept and violent of governments.
I could not precisely disagree with him. Ivan has blue eyes and is a Christian; that was very clear, and he had more opinions about the relationship between the Government on Taiwan and the State of Israel and Washington, and how we were all natural friends of Russia.
There is too much at stake, what with China being a big concrete wall and not subject to reason or negotiation on any front.
Ivan was a small but powerfully-built man with a moustache that defied management. It erupted from his upper lip like a thicket, long hairs beginning to curl beneath his nose and flying out wildly on either side of his dace. There were several inherently Balkan attitudes contained in his monologue, but I found it hard to disagree, since my side of the conversation was limited to the occasional grunt.
I was exhausted. I pushed it too far in an attempt to catch up on time zones. I was still leery of driving and needed to feel my body again. I had set out from the hotel just after ten with important thoughts evaporating like the steam from the Nestle’s powdered coffee that is provided for the guests. I had no particular plan but to take a walkabout and see where I might wind up.
My mood was improved by the exercise, and it was a lovely day as I set out just after ten. The dank chill of yesterday has passed, and the city now takes on the aspect of San Diego in the winter. Sweater weather, no more, and brilliantly sunny.
I walked down to the City Centre as it was beginning to come alive. There is a Starbucks, and of course I stopped to wash the taste of the Nestle’s from my mouth. I stopped at a second-hand bookstore and lost myself for an hour in histories of the Commonwealth before wandering again. I had resolved to head for the War Museum, which had been recommended as the best attraction in the capital.
It was only a few blocks stroll out of the city, and then into the college and some ministries. I was looking for ANZAC boulevard, which forms the sort of National Mall between the history of the war dead and Capitol Hill down the lawn and across the lake.
I was lucky enough to find it, marked by the bookends of the New Zealand and Australia monuments on either side of the wide boulevard. The twins are shaped as great ovals jutting from the soil, decorated with tribal hatchings to replicate woven plaits. The legend on the plaque says they are intended to convey the Maori saying that the two nations are like the handles of a basket, each sharing a common load.
One of the markers told me that earth from Gallipoli is buried on either side of the pavers, and it is Gallipoli that marks the beginning of this land as a nation unto itself. The same goes for the Kiwi handle of the basket. They paid in blood for the right to look the Brits in the eyes and tell them that they had earned their independence, and that is why the sacrifice and the madness are intrinsic to their view of the world.
With the fresh air, I walked along looking at the monuments to the Calvary of the Middle East in the first War, and Australia’s contribution to Vietnam, and the Korean Wars. There were no others to disturb my reverie, though a couple old soldiers did approach, and I had to remember to pass on the left, even on foot.
Eventually, I scaled the hill to the Museum, which was erected in the great swell of emotion after the War to End Wars had finally brought all its sadness home. It is a mausoleum to that war, but there were necessary improvements to accommodate all the others.
Inside the door are two battered lions. They once sat on the city gate at Ypres, and it was through the Menin gate of that Flemish city that a quarter million young men, many of them Australian, passed one way in World War One to disappear forever in the mud. The numbers are quite extraordinary, even in our super-sized present, but it is the smaller and more personal action at Gallipoli that gets your attention first, and never quite lets go.
The thing about the War Memorial is that it is intensely personal. People from all over Australia have contributed bits from those who fought. The medals, of course, but also post cards and battered helmets and khaki uniforms still caked in the mud of Turkey and France.
It was quite overwhelming, and only got more intense as the memories of the trenches morphed into the gallery of the Second War, where the newsreels of the time were projected on a long plain conference-table. It turned out that the table was one of the most interesting relics in the collection. It was from the Ford factory in Singapore, and it was the one on which the Japanese demanded the surrender of British Empire forces in the city-state.
Australia was left open for invasion by the forces of the Rising Sun.
There was too much to soak all in, and it was intensely personal, by design. The minutiae of life was on display, since the contribution of this sprawling land’s small population affected everyone in detail. It was quite incredible, not so much as a collection of war machines but as a framework for the sacrifice of the men and the little towns that sent them off so far away.
The galleries of the post-war world have yet to be completed, but the Aussies were in all of them; Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf One and Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Downstairs, where the new material will be presented, there is a gallery devoted to the old soldiers of the Empire, the provincial troops who served the Queen. There were uniforms in the European style, with cut-away coats and Shako headgear. And then there was the Boer War, where the slouch hats and khaki bush clothing first appeared, and an enemy that did not play by the rules.
We Americans obsess about our Civil War, a conflict that over four years presaged so clearly what technology was going to do to masses of men in the field. We do not focus much about the long guerilla between the Empire and the Dutch settlers of the Transvaal in the Cape Colony, since we had no presence there. The Spanish American War and the ugly fight in the Philippines is what we discuss, but it was on the Cape that the concentration camps first appeared, and atrocities against non-combatants became a cost of military success.
“Breaker” Morant got a brief mention in one of the display cases for his trial and execution along with his comrades. The story of the murder of detainees was addressed brusquely, along with the mater of the big-budget film about the incident. There was a rather finely diced conclusion that the matter was not further addressed, since he and the others accused had been serving under Her Majesty’s forces, not those of Australia. It was too close for comfort, and I wondered how the new galleries will address an old question.
I walked away from the museum, sobered and reflective, and realized I had stayed nearly four hours. I elected to take a different way back to City Centre. Had I seen a cab, I would have taken one- and found myself ambling by blocks of neatly built subsidized housing. They looked comfortable enough, and I was startled when a woman approached me and asked for money.
“Ten dollars for milk?” she asked. I looked at her face. She was young but looked old. Her face was puffy and red and her blonde hair wild and in need of a wash. The same could be said of many of us who have come by ithonestly enough.
I must have blinked. Ten dollars is a lot for milk, I thought, but perhaps I do not understand the economics of this place. I dug in my jeans and gave her $2.50, which I think is enough to buy a gallon back home, though she seemed disappointed in my contribution.
I realized, walking away with the sun lowering to my right and the city before me, that she might have been looking for Simulac, which as an artificial nutrient for infants is much more expensive than common milk.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
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