It's getting hot in here!

G'day

29 degrees C today which sounds quite a bit better than what's hitting the UK at the moment.

And it was also Remembrance Day - 11th of November. I was wondering over the last week whether it would be such a big deal in Australia. Obviously thousands of Australians came over to Europe to fight in the trenches and, most famously, in the Turkish campaigns such as Gallipoli, but whereas in the UK people start wearing poppies a couple of weeks before Remembrance Day itself, here there was little evidence of it having the same significance. Until today. Today people on the train to work were wearing poppies. There was a one-minute silence at 11am (ignored by the one of the Victorian government's departments which led to them being criticised on the tv news). And the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne (see photo below) was the scene of wreath laying and a field of poppies (just visible in the foreground of the photo) had been planted for the occasion. Almost hundred years after World War I and empire and mother country are long-forgotten, but there are certain shared experiences connecting Britain and Australia still.

Shrine of Remembrance - modelled on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in Turkey, one of the Seven Wonders of the World