in between and down under

After checking in at the Alice Springs YHA (Youth Hostel Association), I decided to walk up the Anzac Memorial HIll that is about a 10 minute walk from the Hostel on the north side of Alice Springs' "CBD". The walk up the hill (Lion's Walk) was about 5-minutes. The pathway up to the top was made out of rocky sandstone and was very well maintained. At the top of the hill there was the memorial, just a small white statue commemorating the war effort in WWI and WWWII, on one side of the statue there was the famous inscription, "Lest we forget." The memorial was starch white against the desert which also provided a contrast to the brown letters of "Lest me forget inscribed on the side stood out like sore thumb. There was also two flags, the Australian flag to the East and the Aboriginal Flag to the west. There was something different about this memorial- it wasn't like the grandeur site of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, it was small and insignificant. Although it is on the top of a hill in the desert, the memorial lies in-between the thoughts of Alice Springs' community.
As I continued to admire this simple yet complex memorial, a family sat around eating subway sandwiches while looking out to the view of Alice Springs. Some read the plaques about the war and others took photos with the landscape in the background. I have to say that the view was not spectacular- the hill was only about 100m high. And the view consisted of houses, industrial zones, telegraph lines, and cars- all things that didn't seem to fit in the desert. The memorial seemed out of place, it seemed against the idea of trying to live harmoniously with the indigenous populations.

I couldn't help but feel "in-between" about this memorial. The site itself, just like the telegraph station, is a western European monument, built to provide a view to the developed land that was once free from European Influence. Due to this in-betweenness, the memorial suffers much vandalism. On the stones graffiti and trash impair the memorials significance. (I don't think the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne CBD has a single mark on it.) The site itself becomes a controversy. It embodies the in-congruence between European Memorialisation and Indigenous ways of remembering (non-visual, non-memorial). In other words, this site, among many others in Alice, is embedded with the tension of living in paradoxical society full of a guilty past and a hopeful future.