Shared Experience
In previous years, I’ve never been a big fan of getting out to the dawn service. I remember an intimate service in the cold of Blackheath years ago with a group of maybe 20 people, but I’ve not been a fan of driving to Martin Place to be among a crowd of thousands. Perhaps it’s because I did serve in the infantry and Spike Milligan’s famous quote ‘Join the Army, meet interesting people and kill them” is discomfortingly close.
My Regiment’s battle honours – places the Regiment has served with distinction - include Bapaume 1918 and visiting there after leaving the army made the connection to young men from my town of 70 years before all too real. I’ve spent a few ANZAC Days in the past in honour parties, but ANZAC Day this year was different.
Like many streets ours handed around a note saying that we should all get out to the end of the driveway at 6.00am. Most of the street turned out – if coronavirus has done one thing, it’s elevated the sense of community.
The weather in Sydney has been brilliant lately and this morning was lovely. As dawn broke it was still and warmish and the birds in the huge gum a few doors up were making quite a racket as they sorted themselves out. Otherwise, there was barely any noise of wind or vehicles. There was something quite uplifting about hearing the birds, knowing that regardless of the economic situation or virus lockdowns, this would continue.
It’s quite a short street and some had remembered to bring out candles which, at least at first, stood out in the lifting dark.
Damian and Lauren from three doors up had one of those outdoor Bluetooth speakers to play the service and with so little other background noise apart from the birds the ceremony carried from one end of the street to the other.
Perhaps the real sense of standing alone but within sight of others created a real sense of the tension between isolation and communion – the sort of feeling which I think church congregations aim for, individual engagement with the service but together in a community.
But the real moment of revelation for me came during the playing of the Last Post.
Like a lot of Sydney, ours is a slightly hilly suburb. Other streets around had the service playing on a speaker and the time delay as the sound of the bugle echoed across the valley which separates us from houses a few streets away meant that after “our” Last Post had finished, the Last Post from other streets was still reaching us – not as a literal echo of ours but evidence that others were there too. And it made me think of all the other streets up and down the country I couldn’t hear but knew had families standing at the end of their driveways.
ANZAC Day this year has so many more resonances – not just a remembrance of Gallipoli 1915 or other combat but of the reality that although, today, we all stand alone, we do it beside close others, within sight of more distant others, within hearing of unseen others and within the awareness of unknown others.
This is a time when “sorrows come, .. not as single spies, but in battalions”. As a community we face mass unemployment, a pandemic of uncertain dimensions, loss of wealth and retirement certainty at potentially Great Depression magnitude as well as the host of concerns which afflict so many families just in the normal course of life.
I’ve taken part in the IMAP virtual conference this week with many advisers and they’ve almost all said that what their clients want to talk about is not “Why am I down x%”, but what this all means for their family and community.
Clients’ questions are a reminder that we appear to be experiencing an elevated sense of the importance of community - whether in our street, JobKeeper and other programs or the global cooperation in the search for a vaccine.
ANZAC Day this year might be representative of that broader sense of care for others.
Have a good week.
Toby Potter