World War monuments loom by the lake

#2
Captain RAAF5:12 pm, 19 Feb 11

I understood 4% of the OP’s post, Can I have it again in English, please?

YEAH I agree. Original article doesn’t make sense. What exactly are you trying to say? Please try again….

“I sometimes wonder if they died in vain. If this is the new world it’s a far worse one than the old. Class hatred, discontent, wild extravagance in some places, children starving in others, women mad for pleasure, and the dead forgotten already except by the mothers-the mothers who never to their dying day will see a fresh-faced boy without a sword piercing their hearts and a cry rising to their lips, ‘My son!, My son!’.”

Just read that passage in a book I am reading called ‘Penny Plain’ by O. Douglas. It is on Project Gutenberg if anyone wants a copy. Said by a ministers wife remembering her son recently killed in the Great War. Just felt a tug to put it up here.

BrassRazoo said :

“… veterans’ grievance industry …”

+1

A contributing factor is that the ACT Government, and the relevant parts of the Federal bureaucracy are in the pockets of the construction industry. We have to build something, needed or not, just to keep the money flowing into the wheels turning.

Do away with all those ‘lack of recognition’ or ‘their memorial’s bigger than ours’ bleatings that sustain the veterans’ grievance industry and just have the one memorial – the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And while we’re at it, no more Anzac Day marches (keep your head down and/ or have a bit of luck while doing your job and you’re up for 60 years of big-noting yourself as a ‘hero’) or honours, military or civilian, for doing your job (whatever it takes). Get in, do the job, get out (with the best medical treatment if you’re wounded or hurt), and have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve been a good citizen.

Just because the GG etc are patrons doesn’t mean it hasn’t been done quietly. The Committee established itself, rounded up an influential membership, then wrote to the Government in early 2007 proposing the memorials. This proposal was accepted by the government’s memorials committee, the Canberra National Memorials Committee, in March 2007.
The first public announcement seems to be August 2007, by the Minister for Veterans Affairs.

One further point- one would hope that the military’s famed capacity for contingency planning would mean that they have already identified a location for a World War 3 memorial- where?

The cat did it said :

It seems that you develop a proposal, quietly get some influential supporters …

Not exactly quietly – the Governor-General and her husband are joint patrons and it’s on the GG’s website …

http://www.gg.gov.au/content.php/category/id/2/title/patronages

The memorials will presumably go ahead then – their location is probably the only part of the deal that can be changed.

The cat did it said :

…It is interesting to note that the ‘Memorials Development Committee’ is somewhat of a misnomer. It is a private limited company formed for the purpose of building memorials to World War 1 and World War 2 servicemen. The Committee is entirely composed of ex-military personnel. From its name, one might get the strong impression that it is a government committee of some sort, perhaps related to the NCA, or the Commonwealth’s management function of the Parliamentary Triangle. But I’m sure leaving such a misleading impression would not be intentional.

A bit like Australian Pedestrian Council and the loon behind it, Harold Scruby. Who, last time I looked, lived in a big city and drove a big 4WD, haha.

This has been bubbling away for some time. A design competition was held in 2008. Reminds me of the similarly ill-conceived proposal for the ‘Immigration Bridge’. It seems that you develop a proposal, quietly get some influential supporters and in-principle support from sections of government, go public as late as possible, then try and move the proposal through the formal approval processes before any opposition can reach critical mass.
Timing will be interesting, as they probably have the Feds between a rock and a hard place- if they don’t get enough private subscriptions, the pressure will be on the Feds to cough up the balance to ensure that it’s finished by the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli in 2015.
It is interesting to note that the ‘Memorials Development Committee’ is somewhat of a misnomer. It is a private limited company formed for the purpose of building memorials to World War 1 and World War 2 servicemen. The Committee is entirely composed of ex-military personnel. From its name, one might get the strong impression that it is a government committee of some sort, perhaps related to the NCA, or the Commonwealth’s management function of the Parliamentary Triangle. But I’m sure leaving such a misleading impression would not be intentional.

@facet,
What did we gain from fighting WW1? Revisionist history would try to portray WW1 as a squabble amongst European empires that were as bad as each other. That’s simply not so. Australians at the time were almost universally in agreement that siding with Britain in that war was correct. Not because of slavish adherence to empire but because they understood the British empire was the underwriter of a stable international system. The kaiser’s Germany was not a liberal democracy. Germany victory would have created almost the same effect of an unstable and malignant Europe and wider world as a nazi victory in WW2 would have achieved.