Just another kids’ movie. I didn’t watch it when it came out, but then again, I don’t watch that many movies in the cinema nowadays. Nor did I watch it on TV or video. But, again, as a night cabbie, I don’t have that much time for evening television.

Oddly enough, Cars is a movie that I’ve listened to many, many times. Driving down to Charleston in BookCrosser Crrcookie’s awesome van, with the flip-down video screens and the library stowage bins and the wonderful travelling bookcart, and again last year between Kansas City and Oklahoma City, the movie played again and again for the entertainment of Cookie’s son Lilgrovers, who is one of the coolest youngsters I’ve ever met.

He loves this movie!

But I always got to ride in the front seat, whether driving or pretending to navigate, and so I couldn’t see the screen just behind my head, nor hear the movie soundtrack clearly.

Once, we were actually driving along Route 66 through Chandler, Oklahoma while it was playing, and I’m rapidly becoming a Route 66 bore. “It’s about Route 66,” Cookie said, so I mentally made a note that, if I ever had a moment when I wasn’t doing anything useful, I’d watch this kiddie movie about cartoon cars racing along Route 66.

Well, about a month ago, Cars came up on television on one of my rare nights off, and I sat down to watch it. Now, you can count me in with Lilgrovers.

I love this movie!

The plot hits my buzzer. Bad boy becomes good guy – that’s pretty much how it goes. There’s a philosophical lesson here, and I love it. Seeing selfish racecar Lightning McQueen learn how to become a team player and gain friends is heartwarming stuff. His relationship with Mater the tow truck is a stand-out.

The characters. A microcosm of America, each of the cars, from Sarge the army jeep to Sally the retired lawyer, has a distinct personality. Sarge seems to have a thorny relationship with Fillmore the psychedelic VW Kombi – “The ’60s weren’t good to you, were they?” – but they are almost always seen side by side.

The crusty old town judge, Doc Hudson voiced by Paul Newman, turns out to be a fascinating character indeed. He has something that Lightning McQueen craves, but instead of living in a Hollywood mansion surrounded by adoring young sportscars, he is out to pasture in a bypassed town on a deserted highway.

Frank. I just love Frank the harvester, who makes a startling but memorable appearance when Lightning and Mater mount a midnight raid on his harem of tractors.

The whole movie is gently humorous, full of little touches. At the racetrack opening sequence, the stands are full of spectator cars adorned with souvenirs, the washrooms have a queue of female cars while the boy cars whiz in and out. Mack, McQueen’s transporter truck amusing himself on a long cross-country trip by making faces in the reflection from a brightly polished tanker trailer just ahead. Mack, on discovering that the media is focussed on his rear end – “What? Did I forget to wipe my mudflaps?”

The guys obviously had a lot of fun with this movie. Fun and love. There’s affection everywhere for the characters, the story and above all the setting.

The old bypassed Route 66 town of Radiator Springs is first encountered late one sleepy night. Little bugfly cars with wings crawl on the fluorescent lights as Sarge and Fillmore gaze at the blinking amber traffic light. “I’m tellin’ you, man, every third blink is slower.”

The town is slowly dying. No tourist cars stop to browse souvenirs at Radiator Springs Curios, dhop Sarge’s Army Surplus store – “We already have too much surplus!”, says a rare visitor – or buy at Luigi’s “Casa Della Tires”. Sally’s Crazy Cones Motel remains empty. The stretch of Route 66 running through the town is cracking and unmaintained.

The dramatic arrival of Lightning McQueen, lost out of Mack’s transporter in a mishap, changes everything. At first resenting his enforced stay in “Hillbilly Hell”, he gradually develops an affection for the town and its inhabitants, who repaint and restore their shops, turn on their classic neon signs and gain new hope.

Following a climactic final race with a surprise ending, we learn how it all works out for the little town and its loveable residents.

Just like the real Route 66 and its string of decaying towns yearning for the glory days, Radiator Springs symbolises the nostalgia and rebirth of the Mother Road. Adventure travellers motor along the remaining lengths of narrow Portland cement, enjoying the restored diners, motels, bridges and views.

As Mack heads west, carrying McQueen to California along I-40, we see stretches of the old Route 66 winding along beside the new sixlane. The scenery becomes more and more spectacular, with mesas and canyons appearing, jagged peaks on the skyline.

I’ve driven along Route 66 with Discoverylover. Just a half a day in Oklahoma, but we sought out some of the original sections of the road, weeds pushing through the concrete slabs, and drove along winding sections, over picturesque bridges, following the contours, past living rooms and shops and museums.

I loved it. Every mile of the old road. The day was grey, threatening rain, but sparkles happily in my memory. One day soon I’ll drive the whole highway.

Cars has one delightful scene, where McQueen and Sally cruise and race along the highway, through valleys and forests, splashing through rivulets and fallen leaves, over a bridge before a waterfall, eventually exploring an old roadhouse set into one of those spectacular rock outcrops. It’s a dream sequence, and it inspires McQueen to glory.

And me. I love this film. I watch it again and again. It’s not just for kids.

–– Skyring

Resources

• IMDB entry for Cars

I received a sparkling surprise the other day. A package from Discoverylover! Inside, two books. Right. I need more books. My bookshelves groan under the double-banked load and Mount Toberead towers over my bedside table.

Two very odd books, actually. Fairly slender, they purported to be reproductions of an ongoing correspondence between Griffin, a London artist, and Sabine, a stamp designer on a remote Pacific island nation.

Griffin and Sabine are linked in a very strange and intriguing fashion and the first book is largely concerned with uncovering and exploring this mystery, as well as revealing the two characters, their histories and lives.

In the second book (Sabine’s Notebook), the roles are reversed, with Sabine living in Griffin’s London flat, and Griffin travelling to Sabine’s island chain.

In the third book, who knows what happens? Maybe the mysteries are resolved, maybe they deepen. In fact, there is a second trilogy along the same lines, so obviously there is more to the tale than we discover in the first two books.

Plot aside, the true charm of the books lies in their artistic design. Full of original artworks, little sketches, watercolours, hand-drawn maps and the like, each printed page is a new joy.

The correspondence between the two is reproduced, sometimes reprinted, sometimes as facsimile letters in facsimile envelopes. The two styles of communication are mirrored in the handwriting – Griffin’s tight printing is more restrained than the somewhat more romantic Sabine, who flows a coloured ink calligraphy hand.

Sabine designs the stamps of her tiny nation, and they appear on postcards and envelopes – an idiosyncratic collection largely devoted to island wildlife. I couldn’t help but wonder at the comments Australia would receive if we had such whimsical stamps, but I certainly enjoyed looking at them.

I also enjoyed the letters. It felt quite voyeuristic, opening and reading the mail of others, but realistically, most people’s mail nowadays is bland, computer-printed, and uninteresting. Griffin and Sabine still write (or sometimes hunt-and-peck type) their letters, not to mention the marginal illustrations and diagrams. This is really a cookbook for correspondence – here we are shown delicious examples of how to “plate up” your handcreafted letters.

And of course, the content is utterly fascinating. These are not quite love letters, but they are far more personal than the “like letters” we two write to each other here! We see a shared relationship developing and blossoming, aided by the extraordinary bond between the two. Every letter moves the story onwards, but also opens up tantalising mysteries. Turning a page, opening the envelope, unfolding the letter and reading the private contents – oh, but it is all so delicious!

These books have a feel that is almost unique nowadays. One might describe them as “pop-up books for adults”, with all the attachments and fun of playing with the contents. Novels, even epistolary novels such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, don’t go into this tactile detail. Nor the artistic richness of illustration. These books are sensual feasts!

There was more delight in store, as I rummaged through the pages, becoming more drawn into the developing story with each envelope. Discoverylover had written to me on real life postcards! New Zealand postcards, with her own charming handwriting, talking of upcoming festivals and shared pleasures. Not quite the romantic depth of Griffin and Sabine, but welcome and joyful to read.

Not just cards addressed to me. Cards to a mutual friend. The books were registered BookCrossing books (this and that) and I was instructed to send them on, to be returned to Discoverylover after reading.

Well. What could I do? I went out, bought up some postcards – with a sea-life theme to echo Sabine’s own fishy designs – hand-scrawled my own messages on them, added a block of chocolate and popped them in the post!

So these books are not only a sweet and artful correspondence, they are also a real life link between friends.

Just one thing. Discoverylover didn’t manage to find the third in the trilogy in the second-hand shop where she bought these.

I don’t know how the story ends! I so want these two characters to get together, but given the cliff-hanger natures of the first two books, I don’t know if that will ever happen.

I went hunting for the third in the series – The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes – but when I eventually found a bookshop selling Nick Bantock’s works (quite a hunt, actually; they were shelved under “Art History”!) there were the first two books, and the complete second trilogy, but not the one I wanted! Oh, I could have torn my hair out, if I had any to spare!

One final word. If you want to sample some of the feel of the books, without actually holding the cards and letters in your hands, click on those book links, which will take you to the Amazon pages with their “See Inside” feature, where you can gaze in wonder at the writing and the artwork.

— Skyring

Andy was the first friendly face in America. Oh, there were people smiling and chatting. Mostly in uniform as I went through immigration in Los Angeles and was chivvied on to my onward flight. But when I finally found the luggage carousel at Dulles, there was Andy, watching my big yellow BookCrossing.com bag go round, looking to see who would claim it.

I was so glad to see a friend after the longest, most exciting and confusing Friday of my life, I nearly hugged him.

If I saw him now, I wouldn’t hold back, and I wouldn’t let go.

Andy is everything that makes America great. A lifetime in emergency rescue and public service, a thoughtful disciple of the great fathers of democracy, a warm, caring helper of people in distress, and above all, a family man.

He was the American Dream, and he showed me his suburban kingdom with pride. Beautiful house on a quiet street, two cars, a cat and a dog, a sweet and charming wife, and the real joy of his life, almost lost against the walls covered in their photographs, his two daughters. The pride on his face when he talked of them was like the sun coming up.

Two total darlings, keen to sample the Tim Tam chocolate biscuits of a visiting Aussie, happy to hear tales of a strange land where kangaroos jumped past Parliament House and the stars formed a bright cross in the night sky.

Becky and her older sister had their parents sussed out. Andy would look gruff as he ordered them to finish their homework or take themselves off to bed, but Becky would grin at me – she knew that her father’s frown would melt in a moment if she gave him a hug.

I’ve met Andy and his family several more times since then. Once in Sydney, a couple of times we drove down to Charleston together, and most recently last year when I collected Discoverylover from her rural Girl Scout camp and we drove to Andy’s place for a backyard barbecue, the warm twilight fragrant with cooking and surprising little zips of light under the trees.

Becky gently caught something out of the air, and showed it to me on her palm, the first firefly I’d ever seen. It flashed off and on before she released it to join its mates in the dusk.

Next morning, I prepared the rental car to drive to the airport for my next flight. Becky climbed into the boot, saying that she wanted to come back to Australia with me.

A few days ago we heard the news from Washington, devastating in the few choked words Andy posted. Becky had been riding her bike and been struck by a car. She was dead.

My heart went out to Andy, his wife and surviving daughter. I couldn’t bear to think of the pain they would be suffering, and would continue to feel as the autumn leaves fell into a cold and empty winter.

Kin, friends, church and community gathered around, a comfort to the family as they went through the necessary rituals. I sent some money to the local BookCrossing group for a basket of fresh fruit – flowers wither, but fruit is a symbol of life continuing – but Andy with a shadow of his usual good humour protested that the house was so full of food gifts already that any more would surely spoil before anyone could touch it.

A flicker of brightness. Becky is in her coffin, but not entirely. She was an organ donor, and three other children have received a precious gift from her.

In the dark and emptiness, I feel the happiness of having known Becky, a joyous soul, her bright eyes and cheery smile forever a spark in my memory.

I looked in the Australian sky, and renamed the brightest star in the Southern Cross after her. I won’t forget her spark, not while I have eyes to gaze up to heaven, and a heart to feel the hole Becky has left.

– Skyring

Discoverylover put me onto this song by Australian group Kisschasy.

The song itself is a good one, with some offbeat images:

I know I can’t taste your skin
with an ocean between us
But our love is a dinosaur, hear it roar

Apparently “this is a song that the lead singer wrote in all of ten minutes while waiting at the airport to go on a tour overseas. It was written for his girlfriend…”

The theme is that their love will survive distance and disaster, an inspiring notion indeed.

The music video, however, takes this theme to a new dimension, and is what I really love about the song.

A romantic video about dinosaurs and the ending is kind of sad, but kind of triumphant. The apparently low-budget animation is charming in itself, but it’s the details I enjoy. The Australian (or possibly New Zealand) flags on the spacegloves of the dinosoar. The way that the asteroid destruction sequence echoes the classic old arcade game of Asteroids. The photograph of the girlotops on the dashboard.

It’s a definite like for me. Again and again.

—Skyring

Resources

• Dinosaur lyrics (and some discussion)
• Kisschasy website
• Online Asteroids game

I pressed the button, and light glowed over the quilt, showing it to be made up of squares, each one worked with an intricate design, each one bearing a message laden with emotion. A female choir sang from the small speaker, fading out as I read how the real choir had given regular performances until the members moved on one by one and it grew too small.

I moved on to the next display. So much to see. A series of photographs flickered on a table, mounted at an angle so that at once it was exhibit and projection screen. You could reach out and touch the table, your hand flashing white, black and grey as you stroked the historic wood of the table upon which Singapore had been surrendered.

The Australian War Memorial is like that. The exhibits, where they are at all durable, are mounted so that they may be easily seen and touched. You may trip over the trail of a field gun, reach up to stroke the elegant curve of a Spitfire’s wingtip, poke your head into the cramped confines of a tail-gunner’s turret. Signs warn to dissuade touching or leaning on particularly significant objects.

I ran my hands over the cold grey paint of two gun mountings, one from the first World War cruiser HMS Sydney, the other from the German raider SMS Emden. Now standing a few metres apart, they once spoke to each other in anger one far off day on a distant ocean. A sound and light show recreated the battle for us in old photographs and bursts of man-made thunder, brought back into the immediate present so that we children of later days could remember.

There is only one Anzac remaining now, a lone survivor of the event which occupies a whole hall in the Memorial, and names the vast new display area, the wide avenue running down to the lake, and a day that strikes a chord from the heartstrings of Australians everywhere. Almost from the moment you move into the building, that day reaches out to you, stirs you, holds you. Here, leaning almost casually in a corner of the entrance hall is one of the nation’s most sacred treasures, a boat from that first Anzac Day, 25 April 1915, when dawn over the Dardanelles saw Australians and New Zealanders rush ashore and up the steep and scrubby hills of Gallipoli. A sign warns against touching, but one doesn’t need to touch to feel the sensation that echoes resonating from that ship’s boat, like bullets pinging and ricocheting off the frame, or piercing through the skin.

I find myself pierced the further I venture into the Memorial. There are places I cannot go without feeling the ghosts of the past, the hair rising up on the back of my neck when I see Will Longstaff’s eerie Midnight at Menin Gate, my eyes filling as I read the letters of families left behind in Australia, left behind forever in far too many cases.

This is not a war museum, though it is crammed full of guns and warplanes and tanks and uniforms. It is a war memorial, and there is little to celebrate any supposed glory of battle, but rather to tell the stories of the men and women who served and suffered and died, so that we who come after them, we who survive, may remember them, give thanks, and hesitate before taking up arms lightly.

The Australian War Memorial sits like a great grey stone lion under Mount Ainslie, staring down Anzac Parade and over the lake, past the white wedding cake of Old Parliament House, past the new one under Capitol Hill, and off to the mountains and sky beyond. The eye is drawn inexorably down and up again to some point above the distant Australian flag flapping lazily in the cold Canberra breeze.

Ted and Samantha joined me at the top of the front steps, and like countless other visitors, turned to see the sight, and like numberless others took a photograph. We passed through between the grey lions from Menin Gate, their stone skin cold to the touch, their cold eyes unblinking as they thought of the streams of young men they had seen march off to war.

You may see them still, many of them. Old and stiff in stiff old suits, a dignity and formality for their fallen comrades, whose names line the walls over the courtyard at the heart of the Memorial. They stare into the pool of remembrance, where the flames bubble eternally through the water, and the smell of rosemary is in the air.

We bumped into one of my old comrades, stiff and formal in a dark suit, a badge pinned to his lapel, and I thought of the days when we were both sergeants together in the old regiment. I introduced him to Ted and Samantha. Ted, once a soldier in the British Army, and for many years a guide on the battlefields of South Africa, where Australia was already at war a hundred years ago when our nation was born. Samantha, Australian and proud of it here, a nurse who looked with keen interest and kinship at the names and photographs of other nurses, and lingered long over that quilt as the light came and went, the sweet voices rising and falling.

I didn’t have the strength to stand beside her there. The long halls are crammed full of displays and you simply cannot see them all in a day. As the hours pass the benches placed here and there are eagerly sought out by visitors resting their feet, before rising to spend more of their precious hours here. My legs were weak and I had to move on, to see the table, to take a bomber flight over the Third Reich, the vibration of the mighty engines rising again through our soles and shaking the hairs on the back of our necks as we listened to the cheerful voices of fliers long gone and saw the flash of bombs and guns as they completed another mission.

Guns point in all directions. Pistols and rifles in the display cases, cannons protruding from the wings of aircraft mounted overhead, field guns and antitank guns parked in the halls. “That’s the gun that shelled Paris.” I showed Ted a tiny weapon which barely came up to our knees, its slender barrel maybe a metre long. “Incredibly high muzzle velocity.” He smiled at my feeble joke.

There is an elegance, an art of war. The beautiful streamlined shapes of torpedoes and shells and fighter planes, their elegant curves drawing the eye with them as they move in the imagination, rushing through air or water, wheeling gracefully and diving on their targets. And the paintings that line the walls, literally works of art – you could remove all the artefacts, leaving the paintings and statues, and still have a splendid gallery to lose yourself for a day. I found myself drawn to the paintings, admiring the soft watercolours, the bold oils, the works of artists whose respected names and famous pictures hang in the National Gallery over the lake. I simply had to sit down in awe when I saw a whole wall of pictures by Arthur Streeton, each one a jewel in subject, composition and execution.

But there is also another side to war, and at one stage, finding myself in a group of grey guns, mortars, tanks and vehicles, I was struck by the sheer brute ugliness of the machinery of battle. There was nothing, nothing positive about these squat functional shapes, cast in some hellish foundry in Imperial Germany and sent to the muddy fields of Flanders and France. These awful weapons, these hulking guns, they killed so many of our young men. The survivors of Anzac perished under their fire, and if they were not killed outright, they failed in the mud and cold and disease of the front.

The diorama of the stretcher-bearer brought out an emotional response. Crouched in a sea of mud, his face in his hands to hide the horrors, his body slumped in fatigue and shock, there is nothing glorious or artistic or elegant about him. His uniform is covered in dirt and blood and he is lost in time and space, remote in every way from those he left behind. I simply cannot pass by him without sharing his feelings.

There are places I cannot go. There is the displayed uniform of a doctor I once met, killed in Africa, and I remember her lively face, her voice now forever silent, and I move on, sick at heart.

There are places I must go, and I stand in silence before the unknown soldier’s tomb, under the mighty dome, in dim light filtered through stained glass, an insignificant insect under the gaze of the heroic figures standing tall and proud in the corners, their virtues listed for us. Courage, candour, chivalry.

There are places where I cannot remain. I am moved. Here is a corner, showing the effects of the war on Australians at home. An antique wheelchair for a limbless soldier, a stuffed cockatoo from the wards of a repatriation hospital, letters and diaries, and most poignant of all, the official forms from the War Graves Commission, asking next of kin for “60 characters, less spaces” to be engraved on the tombstone of their son, husband, father and friend. There is a stock of these forms, and visitors may write their own message. Very few of them can stick to 60 characters, less spaces, and all of them speak of thanks and remembrance.

I cannot stand there and write even a short message, My eyes betray me and the paper blurs, and I must put down the shaking pen. I cannot possibly stand there and construct a message where every letter counts, which would mark forever the grave of someone I loved. Others are strong enough to do so, but I must sit down and compose myself.

And I cannot stay for long before that quilt, made by service nurses in a prisoner of war camp, thinking of home, their families, those they cared for. The choir sings as I look at the faded squares and read how the members of that choir died, one by one, until there were too few to sing. Samantha reads on, but I cannot. I think of their courage and their kindness, they who gladly went overseas to care for the sick and hurt, and found themselves in need of care. Some survived brutal massacres and they all witnessed scenes of appalling suffering.

I am not made of stone. I am not strong enough to remain, like the Menin Gate lions, and think of those who passed this way, who passed away.

I stand for a moment at the entrance, looking out on that postcard view, the warm glow of the setting sun sinking over the mountains, the Last Post keening in my ears. The broad avenue is lined with smaller memorials, children to this one, commemorating participants of other conflicts. Vietnam, Tobruk, Korea, the heroic figures of the Army memorial, the rushing, sounding water of the Navy memorial opposite. The soft green of the service nurses memorial, its gently curving walls in contrast to the angular shapes surrounding it. The Australian trees and the New Zealand shrubs march together down the Anzac Parade, ending in the most recent addition, the New Zealand memorial, the handles of a Maori flax basket, one on each side of the avenue, our two nations sharing the load.

The memorials end there, but in spirit they pass on into the country, where every city, every town, every township has a memorial, a shrine, a digger eternally standing guard, a man of stone who is strong for us, who can accept on our behalf the endless thoughts and memories.

Close at hand, where the avenue ends, are two more memorials, here in Australia’s heart. One from Greece, a shattered column and a twisted girder, and the other from Turkey, an elegant, enfolding space where Kemal Ataturk, who led our enemies on that first Anzac Day, gives we Australians fresh strength with the words that mark the graves in Gallipoli. I cannot remain unmoved when I read those words, and I doubt that Ataturk wrote them without his paper blurring before him, for he couldn’t stick to 60 characters, less spaces.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. You are now living in the soil of a friendly country therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Oh, that our arms could hold and comfort our fallen children.

—Skyring

Canberra
1 July 2001

Resources

• Australian War Memorial