Anzac Day in Creswick

It is the day after Anzac Day.  I think I have at last stopped being an Anzac Day curmudgeon.  It has troubled me that I have cringed at the words “ultimate sacrifice” and tear choked witnesses of the goings on at Gallipoli.  I’ve been to Gallipoli  I’ve seen one bullet split into a fork by another in a little private museum there.  It gave me pause. I’ve seen the seashore and acknowledge the loss and sadness. It was a horrible happening.  But where is all this emotion coming from?  Grant says it would be different if I had had someone there.  But I wonder.  My own father died meaninglessly and young but I have never wept for him because I never knew him.  How then are all these people weeping for their great great uncles et al?  

Then we stumbled on a little town called Creswick, just outside Melbourne.  We had gone in quest of  a Wool Mill where we were going to buy a blanket as it is very cold in Ballarat and anyway I was hoping to source a bit of fleece for spinning.  Detour signs led us off the main street and when we got to the mill it was closed.  An enquiry to someone who was obviously going to work there got the apologetic reply “It’s the Anzac Day rules’” as indeed it is.  Nothing opens on Anzac Day in Victoria till one o’clock.  Again I am puzzled.  Why on earth.

So we go into town perhaps for lunch  and see a small town, with people milling about the main street.  A lot of them are dressed in 1914-18 dress –  little boys with peaked caps. Women with satiny dresses they have  pulled out from who knows where,  men with magnificent beards who suddenly seem in the right place.  There are nurses in flowing headdresses and both men and women bearing medals which I suppose are the real thing left to them by some forebear. Nobody seems the least self conscious about the way they look. They are being people rather than acting them.

 The museum is free for the day and as a knitter myself I am hugely impressed at the vast number of knitted red poppies surrounding every memorial, and in fact every rusty WW1 relic.  The effort, I thought, the wool! And what will they do with them afterwards?  Unpicking seems vaguely sacrilegious.  Same problem with Lady Di’s bouquets but at least they could be composted.  But the care and attention that runs through everything  moves me.  There is a parade of horsemen – the Light Horse and a band with marching by uniformed soldiers and military nurses.  On the cenotaph there are  wreathes as well as a fine bunch of carrots dedicated to the horses, not one of whom returned from the war.

 Someone had downloaded posters from the time and every shop has them in their windows They all prompt Australians one way and another to forget the surf and go to war. One has an extraordinarily armed kangaroo with the rhyme

Only a “tag earnestly spoke

Ere the grand old year is done,

Only a tag tied on to a swag

Of hopes for the year to come.

May the best of all ever befall

The “Roo “behind the gun

I don’t entirely understand the rhyme but it conveys another part of the urge that sent young boys to war.  Hope and adventure. Enthusiasm. Not a whiff of solemnity and “ultimate sacrifice” I found I had the feeling in my nose that precedes tears before I pulled myself together.  But it was a good moment.  At last I understand a bit and I feel Australian.  I am glad we came.