26 June – Thursday
A clear, sunny and VERY cold day in Canberra. Today we visited the Australian War Memorial and TomTom did a marvellous job of navigating through the confusing roadways of Canberra. A 90 minutes guided tour helped orientate ourselves and then we retraced our footsteps through the various exhibits. We spent some time in the Vietnam area, which contained a couple of very realistic sight and sound exhibits. An Iroquois helicopter was set up with two different shows – one was the actual radio traffic as a helicopter attempted to retrieve soldiers and was shot down, and the other was a movie behind the display of an insertion, with very realistic lights and sounds. Les was very impressed with the realism, especially the silence after the soldiers had been dropped off and the helicopters had departed.
A couple of other Second World War sight and sound shows were also very good – a bombing raid with an Australian crew in a Lancaster bomber and the Japanese mini submarines invading Sydney Harbour. It was also good to see that no attempt has been made not to offend Japanese tourists as the treatment of prisoners of war, and the civilians, is history and should be remembered. A very poignant display was a wall of small photos of all the men who died on an infamous death march. It reminded me of the baby bonnets project at the Female Factory.
There were large groups of school children visiting the War Memorial and it was great to see their respect when they entered the Hall of Remembrance. The mosaics in this hall would definitely be equal to anything we saw in Europe.
A clear, sunny and VERY cold day in Canberra. Today we visited the Australian War Memorial and TomTom did a marvellous job of navigating through the confusing roadways of Canberra. A 90 minutes guided tour helped orientate ourselves and then we retraced our footsteps through the various exhibits. We spent some time in the Vietnam area, which contained a couple of very realistic sight and sound exhibits. An Iroquois helicopter was set up with two different shows – one was the actual radio traffic as a helicopter attempted to retrieve soldiers and was shot down, and the other was a movie behind the display of an insertion, with very realistic lights and sounds. Les was very impressed with the realism, especially the silence after the soldiers had been dropped off and the helicopters had departed.
A couple of other Second World War sight and sound shows were also very good – a bombing raid with an Australian crew in a Lancaster bomber and the Japanese mini submarines invading Sydney Harbour. It was also good to see that no attempt has been made not to offend Japanese tourists as the treatment of prisoners of war, and the civilians, is history and should be remembered. A very poignant display was a wall of small photos of all the men who died on an infamous death march. It reminded me of the baby bonnets project at the Female Factory.
There were large groups of school children visiting the War Memorial and it was great to see their respect when they entered the Hall of Remembrance. The mosaics in this hall would definitely be equal to anything we saw in Europe.
TomTom is our GPS navigational system - she tells us where to go!
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