ANZAC weekend

This was the first weekend which I think this country – or any country – remembered. It wasn’t the country which forgot it – it was the COVID-19, the first pervading pandemic which laid out the world. I know that the globe has had pandemic’s before – SARS, ebola, HIV et al. – but this one was the worst in the history. The death wasn’t (isn’t) as bad as the pandemic in the 14^th century which resulted in many more than 75 million deaths, but this pandemic has the way to get right around the world. There were deaths on cruise ships, deaths from passengers on cruise ships, death from passengers on flights, death from people who visited a country with is and brought the virus home. It’s the best that every country – well, almost every of them – has taken, which includes a lock down.

The lock down in Australia affected the ANZAC memorial. No-one could attend anything like they used to have at their cenotaph. Yesterday morning, on ANZAC day, so many residents stood in their own driveways with candles, and some musicians – or kids – played the Last Post on their own instrument. Some of the papers listed below wrote about their own state memorials.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-25/a-special-anzac-day-in-mornington/12184392

https://www.begadistrictnews.com.au/story/6735007/anzac-day-2020-lonely-last-post-echoes-across-bega/

https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2020/apr/25/anzac-day-2020-australia-and-new-zealand-come-together-in-isolation

https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/anzac-day-commemorations-cancelled-but-thousands-of-flames-will-still-burn-bright-20200422-p54m8x.html

Last year I had found details of two of my own relatives – my great-uncles – who died in WWII in Egypt. Alexander Walter Fell was a Lance Corporal with New Zealand’s 24 Infantry Battalion in Egypt when he was killed on 22 July 1942. His brother, Martin Edmund Coston Fell, was a Flight Sergeant for New Zealand’s Air Force and was killed at El-Alamein in Egypt on 15 July 1942. I put poppies for both of them on the NZ online Cenotaph.

I was in the NZ Army years ago, and after one issue at the Australian RSL I don’t go to ANZAC anymore, but I am very aware of what soldiers – including my relatives – did for the population. I have my own thoughts about wars, and why do they happen on this planet, but I’ll keep my own thoughts to myself – for now, anyway. Thinking of you Lance Corporal Alexander Fell and Flight Sergeant Martin Fell.