Friday 29th of March 2024

At the going down of the sun, Anzac Eve at St Clair War Memorial Park

Last year, on land set aside by a caring family who'd lost a loved one in World War Two, the RSL conducted (first time since the 1960s) an official remembrance ceremony. A few hundred turned up, many I talked to who'd come all those years ago and had returned to show that this was still their place for those memories.

I came to this site via the kindness of Margo Kingston, who saw me flailing about the cyberverse about Halliburton in Adelaide and offered me a spot here. My first blog became the only Australian blog linked from the pages of HalliburtonWatch.  My jokes about St Clair being a HAL-based project came true when KBR finally published their work on the gig as an ad on their website.  If what happened last year occurs again today, as I'm sure it will, then maybe the work of a War Company that's morphed into real estate is going to backfire because of their violation of a decades-long war tradition.

This year the local brass band and choir are adding themselves to the event, along with local Scouts and Guides and Army Cadets, in a park which the SA RSL has asked to keep preserved as a place of memory- a cause to which the boss if the National War Memorial, one Dr Brendan Nelson, has publicly added that place's voice.

Tony Abbot's timing of the Joint Strike Fighter purchase with the visit by the Royals to the Northern Suburbs of Adelaide, who are losing their jobs to the Holden closure and can now work on the warplanes, will turn out to be not without coincidence.  Now wie've lost the submarine contract I highly doubt that enough people to warrant a St Clair Housing development at least partially orchestrated by KBR will be coming to need the little boxes made of ticky-tacky to be built.

My great uncle died by a bullet through the breast pocket of his uniform.  My father still has the photos that were pierced on the way to his heart.  That was WW1, but it helps me understand why those people who lost loved ones to WW2 want to keep a place that was made for those memories.

The warmongers and their bought lackeys should have the decency to piss off and leave this bit of land that was created as a living memorial. It might help others realise the futilitly of wars.  The last bit is what I think is a major consideration of why the park's being demolished.

By the way, Uncle Allan only went to fight because he didn't want to be disgraced by a White Feather (not yet received but inevitable) from the local ladies, a common propaganda-practice that caused many young men in Australia to go to their deaths before their families could be publicly shamed, that left many of those families to mourn lost sons.  Seems to me that such practices have been globalised.