Secret

April 8, 2002-Friends and Enemies
(photo-Aboriginal Embassy)

We are living in the midst of an aviary. Our hotel room is almost at the top of the building & scads of birds have taken up housekeeping on the roof. They started their cawing & mewling at 5 AM, but we just turned up the sound on our white noise machine & went back to sleep.

We were able to speak to all the kids today. They sounded happy & well. Wendy is busy knocking out walls & finishing up projects around their house. Daniel, Vikki, & Alex are busy with growing a baby, soccer, & thoughts of house hunting.

I’m ashamed to tell you that I still suffer occasional bouts of steering wheel anxiety. One of the captured vehicles on display was from Germany. David & I stared at it & tried to figure out what was wrong with it. Yes, the steering wheel was on the left. I still have minor moments of map disorientation too. To use a map properly in a left side drive country, you have to be aware that the map markings for exits are consistent with that orientation. There have been several times when we make a turn & I cannot find where we are on the map because I’m looking at the wrong cross streets on the opposite corner.

We’re really taken with Canberra. I think it’s a secret kept from tourists & Australians alike. It’s a real treasure & warrants at least two to three days of attention. As we learned today, the plan was to keep the natural integrity of the area as the city grew. They’ve achieved that by building all the houses lower than the hilltops thus keeping the green areas pristine & available for hiking, biking, & playgrounds. Even the new Parliament building was built mostly below grade. They removed the top of Capital Hill, erected the building, & covered the structure with the soil & grass that had originally been there. We actually walked up a slope of lawn & onto the top of the building. The one negative to the Parliament building is a towering spire of a flagpole that sits on four legs spread across its center.

The old Parliament building was built for fifty years of use. They managed to eek sixty-one years out of it before building the new. We took a look at the old building that now houses a portrait gallery. It was interesting in its own right, but the aboriginal tent city across the street caught our attention. There was a rickety shack called the Aboriginal Embassy & the demand seemed to be for aboriginal sovereignty. There were no flyers so we don’t know the details, but it was reminiscent of so many of the tent cities we’d seen in Washington, D.C. This was a much smaller but equally colorful display of only a dozen tents.

Our first stop was the War Memorial. It resembles a Byzantine church & evokes all the solemnity of its architectural style. The Australians were involved in all of “our wars.” They were with us in WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Somalia, & the Persian Gulf. They are with us now in Afghanistan. I cannot hope to capture the breadth & depth of the exhibits, but the museum is enormous & extremely well done. It’s full of detail & massive war machines. It displays the minutiae of good luck charms the soldiers carried as well as planes & tanks that carried them into battle.

One exhibit let the visitor experience a bombing mission with all the vibration, jolting, noise, & a birds eye view through the bomb bay doors. Mention was made of the contributions of the aborigine laborers & trackers who helped with the war efforts in WWII. It was interesting to see that during WWII there was no concept of political correctness. In a letter to the widow of a fallen soldier, the commanding officer refers to those “Japanese beasts.” And over it all, there was the mud.

The photos & dioramas showed the wounded slithering to safety through the mire. The dead were half submerged in it. The living slogged through it, slept in it, & tried to keep it from oozing into their supplies. The omnipresent shine of the slippery stuff lay like a sinister membrane over every scene.

Now, I would like to apologize to the Aussie recipients of this email. In my ignorance, I minimized the toll that Australia suffered on her soil during WWII. I learned that from 1942-1943, the Japanese frequently bombed the northern part of the country. Sydney was shelled, & two out of three Japanese mini-subs were captured in Sydney Harbor. Australians were so alarmed by the incursion of the subs at the time that one man was moved to say that there is, “No safe place in the world these days.”

We left the museum with a feeling that we hadn’t seen it all. There were so many wars & so little time. Our last stop was at the Australian-American Memorial. As I’ve noted, Australia has been there for us because we were there for them. This towering obelisk topped by an eagle is a testament to our mutual respect. It was a fitting end to the day.

Toby