Anzac Day 2024

Cafe Locked Out

She was in a hardware store, in small country town, when a man, who looked like he was desperate, approached her.

What’s 8:32, he asked, referring to her embroidered cap.

Turns out he’d spotted an 8:32 sticker on the back of her vehicle, then searched the hardware store for the owner of it.

He’d escaped Melbourne and was now living out here, on a remote farm, and felt utterly alone. But now he was here, standing before a woman he never met, but because of these last few years, and their individual choices, he knew. He knew.

Around us we could hear possums manoeuvring through the trees as the roaring fire kept us all warm.

Winter was coming. We could all feel it, but to help the fire keep it at bay, we did what we always do at these 8:32 gatherings, we talk and talk, long into the night, trying to understand the mysteries that had brought us here. To me each one of us was filament of the greater light that our presence and affection, our defiance was creating.

But as David sang his brilliant new song, I knew the darkness was too deep to hear it, and those we were fighting for, those we loved, were too far away to see our light.

Regardless, a few of us, starving for free speaking conversation, would stay up talking until dawn’s pale milk spilt across the horizon.

There were no politics here, no hierarchy. We were just a collection of a new demographic that had been established by the government, MSN, and our compliant brothers and sisters. We were the ones you had been encouraged to hate. The non-compliant, the resistance, the lepers. And temporarily free of all your fears, we knew how to have a good time.

We were meant to stay for two nights, but most of us stayed for three, a few of us didn’t want to leave, but there was nothing here for us but each other. A reality that the last one to leave would have felt the keenest.

Today I was sitting at a picnic bench in caravan park in Bendigo, as a man tells me how the jabs killed his father. Pericarditis and then he went mad, the man, his son said.  And as he spoke, all I could hear was another woman, who waved us down as we passed through a tiny town. She was also our tribe, hiding out here and had been following us online. She had two bags of crocheted butterfies, and each one had a hand written note of hope tucked inside it.

They’ve raised my rent three times this year, if they raise it again I’ll be living in my car. But I won’t give in she said. Then, before she left, she grabbed my hand and said, if wasn’t for your work, I would have killed myself.

And my phone is full of texts from drowning people, waving frantically with invisible hands as those around them laugh at tik tok videos.  

In front of me now, as I write this, four retried Australians, in two expensive caravans, and all of them fattened by the free and fat time they lived through, are setting up an annex as if their culture never went to hell.

All is good. All is fine. They are safe. And that’s all that matters.  

The sacrifices of their fathers, the future of their grandchildren, are subjects I doubt they ever bring up. For silence has replaced ‘she’ll be right’. As it did once before, when people just like them, in the USSR, when that was established, did nothing as the jail was built around them. A jail whose wall, their grandchildren, crazy on the scent of freedom, would be left to demolish.

And today is Anzac Day.

Lest we forget.

Which begs the questions, my fellow Aussies. Forget what? Hmm? Forget what?

Be honest for once. Do you even remember?

~Michael Gray Griffith