Vikki Campion: Grave times when greed trumps soul of a nation

It’s an ill wind that blows when a 100-year-old tree-lined avenue war memorial stands to be butchered — risking the trees’ survival — to allow a wind farm to be built, writes VIKKI CAMPION.

O'Connell village's Anzac Memorial Avenue of Trees, main picture, and measuring the 6-metre clearance, inset. Pictures: Supplied

It was an immense sorrow that mothers and war widows couldn’t deal with, so they put up a cross, built a cenotaph, or planted a tree.

Their sorrow built a war memorial in Canberra, Australia’s capital, which lures more visitors than Parliament House.

Grief built the cultural soul of Australia.

In country towns, mothers’ sorrow planted avenues with the seeds of trees that grew where their little boys had died in battle, fighting the war that created the legend of ANZAC, and unwrapped Australia to the world as a nation who volunteered their lives for peace and liberty.

The fact our governments are now giving carpetbaggers authority to butcher our rural war memorials so they can get their junk to a hill to rip you off on power prices is beyond contemptible.

This is a little story in a little village named O’Connell, and its ANZAC Memorial Avenue of Trees that describes who we are now as a nation.

When Field Marshal Lord Allenby cut the white ribbon stretched across O’Connell Avenue on January 20, 1926, he couldn’t tell the folk there, who raised money for the war memorial with community dances, that “in 97 years, we will chop these down to get foreign-made wind industrialisation through for a multinational developer”.

Yet, here we are.

In historic O’Connell, 185km west of Sydney, 66 men enlisted to fight, and 12 were killed in action. You had a one in five chance of dying. That doesn’t include those who were maimed, who returned with their minds out of shape.

Lord Allenby told those who planted O’Connell Anzac Memorial Avenue that he never wished to lead braver troops. He told them their names “would live forever in the gallant deeds they had performed for the Empire” and “it was fitting that their memory should be perpetuated

by an avenue of that kind”.

“As the trees flourished and grew larger in stature, he trusted that the memory of the men to whom they were dedicated would become greener and greener, and more firmly fixed in the minds of their fellow countrymen,” the Bathurst National Advocate reported.

For 97 years, that was true. Families never forgot, and the Desert Ash grew a greener and greener cathedral canopy.

GRAVE REMEMBRANCE DAY

But Saturday could be the final Remembrance Day that the O’Connell community gathers by the memorial before it is butchered.

Spain-based Naturgy Group and the NSW and Albanese governments see it as just trees in the way of their renewables gold rush.

If we are up Rio Tinto for blasting a sacred Aboriginal cave, what are we doing to the foreign wind company for slashing sacred trees to the fallen?

It’s a dreadful shame no endangered frog is living in it.

From the overseas developer to the renewable grifters, to the shameless bureaucrats who believe this should happen, to the weak ministers with the backbones of slugs, this is an incomprehensible act of national shame that speaks to who we now are.

They would not dare rip down memorials for wind factories in Britain or America.

In Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, stretching over 259ha, every war grave gets a wreath, green with a red bow on every stone, every Armistice Day.

Semi-trailer after semi-trailer of American corporates park full of wreaths, and they honour the fallen.

In Australia, our corporates won’t proudly and visibly support our veterans; they drum up support for the doomed Voice referendum and forget about Indigenous issues as quickly as they seemed to care.

Overseas companies now have more rights than the blood of Australian soldiers who fought in World War One, which gave us the two defining moments in our calendar: Armistice Day and Anzac Day.

REMEMBER THIS

A government that sits idly by and lets a foreign company chop down a war memorial has lost its reason to be in power.

No member of the Minns government should say Lest We Forget when they are complicit with this.

You should have remembered.

What is the point of putting the signs up on the NSW War Memorials Register if you are ready to forget? To forget the Harris family, who sent four boys and had one come home?

From black and white photos of my great-grandfathers in their slouch hats shine the eyes of my brothers, nephews and sons.

My brother and his military mates fight a different war than they did — and has since they worked the waves, pulling tiny bodies- — the same size as his own baby — from an ocean that broke apart in his hands.

His sacrifice was what every good soldier sacrificed in the wars before him, in their belief of duty to their country, of freedom and peace.

Suffering, sacrifice, and sorrow grew this avenue.

How dare you allow a foreign company to chop it down at the expense of our sons’ blood?

In the proposed route on NSW Planning documents, the wind turbines will come via the Port of Newcastle and go on a three-day drive, through Dunedoo and down through Mudgee to end up at Oberon for the Paling Yards Wind Farm and others still at the scoping stage.

At O’Connell, each oversized, over-mass vehicle requires at least 6 metres clearance above it and 8 metres across, destroying the cathedral of a connected canopy.

Australian Standards on ‘pruning of amenity trees’ allows a maximum of 10 per cent pruning – yet this, like every other environmental regulation, is junked for a wind factory.

Instead, 120 trees will lose all their boughs on one side, predisposing them to a slow death.

The transition costs to Net Zero are higher energy bills, ruined agricultural land, and koalas murdered with blunt force trauma … and now our cultural soul.

Grief planted this memorial avenue. Greed will cut it down.