First stop, the War Memorial.

Managed to get away at 6.45. Stopped at Gundagai at 9.45. Fuelled up both us and the car. Egg and bacon roll and a cuppa and then back on the road.

Arrived at the War Memorial at about 11.45. Five hours door to door. There's a cafe, Poppy's, at the War Memorial and we had arranged to meet Trish and Paul there for lunch. They arrived not long after us.

Paul had booked us into the War Memorial for 1.20pm. Once inside, we were asked if we would like a guided tour. That's how Bob became our guide. He's been guiding for 17 years. He explained, “we can only see a fraction of the exhibits in an hour and a half”.

We started at the reflection pool with its eternal flame and flanked on both sides by walls of remembrance with the names of all Australians killed in conflicts. One side is for WW1. It contains 62,000 names.

There is a story behind each and every name on these walls - this is one:-
https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog/alex-bidice

The tomb of the unknown soldier is in the Hall of Memory at the far end of the reflection pool.

“Plans to honour an unknown Australian soldier were first put forward in the 1920s but it was not until 1993 that one was at last brought home. To mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the First World War, the body of an unknown Australian soldier was recovered from Adelaide Cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux in France and transported to Australia. After lying in state in King's Hall in Old Parliament House, Unknown Australian Soldier was interred in the Hall of Memory at the Memorial on 11 November 1993. He was buried with a bayonet and a sprig of wattle in a Tasmanian blackwood coffin, and soil from the Pozières battlefield was scattered in his tomb.
The Unknown Australian Soldier represents all Australians who have been killed in war.”

We were then shown through WW1 and WW2 exhibitions. As Bob had warned us, this short tour would just give us a small taste of the exhibits. To see everything would take a long, long time as there are some 80,000 items on display. In Bob's words, “if you were to spend one minute at every item, you would take 55 days.”

There are extensions underway, so even more time will be needed in future. This is certainly a place worth re-visiting.

Then it was time to head to our hotel and check in…Read more