An eastern rosella sat on a WWI memorial plinth, surrounded by his chattering flock who were plucking seeds from the grass of the Solders Memorial Avenue on the Queens Domain.
It so just happened to be Anzac Day but I had not gone to the solders’ walk to honour the fallen in the Great War. My aim had been to observe the antics of the rosellas, birds I do not see closer to home in the Waterworks Valley.
The parrot sat on the plinth honouring Segreant Frank Bennett and together with the other chattering rosellas, a magpie sung its flute-like tune from a nearby white gum.
A common thread in the history of the Diggers in the trenches of Gallipoli and northern France is the soldiers’ mention of the unique songs of Australian birds, particularly the magpie, and how they longed to escape the carnage of war and hear them again. I wondered if Sergeant Bennett had mentioned such things in his letters home.
The Soldiers Memorial Avenue commemorates 535 Diggers from the Hobart area killed in WWI, each with a plaque and accompanying cedar or cypress tree. When I walk on the Domain, I always feel a deep melancholy about the events of that terrible war, especially when on the plaques I view the ages of those killed. Some of them were in their teens, most in their twenties. Frank Bennett was a little older than most, aged 31, firmly established in a career as a schoolteacher after training at the Hobart Teachers College.
Birdsong would most likely have been a backdrop to Frank Bennett’s studies at the college – coincidentally on the Domain at that time – as it is now for teachers and their students who take history lessons devoted to the soldiers. walk. The walk and its bucolic rural setting also provides an outdoor class for students to learn of Tasmania’s fauna and flora, a world that was lost forever to the soldiers who never came back from war.
The song of the magpie, the flight of the eastern rosella makes a visit to the soldiers’ walk even more poignant.
Anzac Day on Tuesday, April 25, was a particularly beautiful, magical day with an azure sky stippled by cirrus cloud. Instead of going home, I found myself walking down to New Town, to Frank Bennett’s former home in Roope St whose address is listed on the memorial.
The federation house is still there, looking very much as it would have done more than a century ago, red-brick with red tin roof, a white-painted wooden veranda.
And flitting through the garden was a common bird of the suburbs, a new holland honeyeater. There was even the song of a magpie coming from somewhere beyond a wooden chapel over the road. On the Domain, and along Roope St, the birds link us to the Anzac story.