Tag: oh wow

beth-ld:

There are villages along the Turkish coast that are kept alive by zealous Australians and New Zealanders, villages with the hotels where electricity only works on one side of the room and the windows don’t shut so the sleeping inhabitants are roused by cold air at six AM every morning when the call to prayer twists like an almost tangible string of smoke from the spires of the mosque down the street and through the air, permeating the sleepy cottages and the chicken sheds and the schools and the bakeries. There are villages neither good nor bad neither third nor first world nor really of this world, not when some peoples’ whole worlds are marked by and made of backyards. This is not worse and nor is it better but it is different to clotheslines (not mentioning the quintessential hillshoist, except to say that once my father tied a basket to ours by a rope and spun me in circles on a summer day) and it is different to nature strips and things are different everywhere, and the only reason these villages are not overrun by the dogs that prance the main street, the reason these villages are more than just empty homes of families who have moved to large cities for large work is the travellers who come through. There is an annual pilgrimage, there are battlefield tours there is rampant idealisation and many many “brave young men” who exist only in peoples’ minds.

This is okay.

This is okay.

How many wars has Australia fought in? How many times will we lay poppies and how many times will we count and recount tales of “mud, disease and trenches”? Like a mantra, like a mantra, brave young men who gave our lives, red poppies and trenches and poppies and trenches and I’m sorry but

All it is is sad.

Like we need a title. Like we need to fashion someone’s not-knowing uninformed illiterate death into something to hold, tangible. A place to visit and a heart to beat. So we beat it along the Turkish coast in the villages with the dogs on the main street and the men drinking red tea and black coffee and the mosques with speakers attached halfway up the minarets. So we beat it into our minds and we beat it into our lives, and we beat and beat and beat and nothing is more beautiful than walking from the dawn service to the lone pine even though we don’t belong here and even though there was no bravery and even though that is a cliché to set right the clichés there was only sadness and there are only eighteen year olds whose gravestones read “peace” and someone needs to set the southern cross tattoos straight, oh please.

Travellers can learn more from the Turkish towns along the Dardanelles and the children playing on the pebbly beach with the green seaweed beside one of the countless sad stone-walled ANZAC graveyards than we can from the graveyards and battlefields themselves, tell the schoolchildren what the call to prayer means.