Anzac Day

April 25th is Anzac day in Australia and New Zealand. It’s the day they honour their military servicemen who have fought in the various different wars. It’s also the anniversary of an important battle in France during WW1 that the Australians fought and won. Kind of like Vimy Ridge for Canadians. It’s interesting to hear little snippets of Australian war history especially since we never hear about them on our side of the world.

Anzac Day is huge here. It’s bigger than Australia Day. 35 000 went to the Melbourne Memorial Shrine for the dawn service! It’s a holiday and teachers focus on it at school too. Apparently about 10 years ago or so it was feared that this day of remembrance was beginning to die out. A push was implemented to make sure that that wasn’t going to happen. Now it’s almost iconic. I saw a bit of the march on tv. I was reminded of my trip to Vimy and Remembrance Day this past November. It would be nice if our day had a bit of a revival.

I spent Anzac day with my friends Phil and Geraldine. I’m staying with them here in Melbourne at the moment. I met them on Iona in Scotland last summer. It somehow feels like I’m starting to come full circle. Anyway, we went on a day excursion to Toolange, a beautiful hilly area north east of Melbourne. We stopped in at a few places; a retreat centre that Phil is using for a retreat in June and we had lunch at a little village tavern. Geraldine and I both had the pumpkin and sage tart in filo pastry with onion jam on top. It was very delicious and perfect for fall. Their friends Karen and Rob met up with us later and we went to a lovely, quaint, little tea room for afternoon tea. It used to be the cottage of the Australian poet CJ Dennis. They had books of his poetry from which Phil read some. We had a little walk around the grounds and afterwards went for a lovely hike.


It’s autumn here. It’s very strange for my system. Admittedly it is nice not to be quite so hot anymore but it’s very strange for it to be April and there are colours and crunching leaves, and pumpkin sage filo tarts. Mind you, the colours are nothing like what we’re used to in Ontario. Deciduous trees are not native to Australia. The only ones they have are those that were imported during various times of settlement. There aren’t many. I noticed on our outing that they were clustered around the areas where the house was built. There were quite a few at the retreat centre which is where I got the crunching leaves experience. Most native trees are the different brands of gum trees. Otherwise the landscape looks quite arid and barren. They’ve been in a drought for a while now, 8 years sticks in my head. The landscape used to be green and lush. It’s rained a couple of times though since I’ve been here. There was a good rain one night and today this evening it rained for a bit too. I don’t imagine that’s enough though. I’ve heard that the ground is so hard and compact by now that rain water mostly runs off instead of into the ground. The temperatures have dropped. Everyone’s complaining that it’s freezing. That’s a bit of an exaggeration since it’s about 15 degrees. Though I think it was colder today. I was cold.