Final edit: Sorry guys, this got out of hand as I feared and it would take too long to answer everything properly and it would just offend more people.
I got some nice tips for finding places and learned more about Australian's views on the subject. I should have been more careful with what I said. It changed my opinion somewhat but people here would still not like it, so I'll keep it to myself.
Thanks for the very civilized and nice answers and I'm sorry if I didn't answer. I would like to, but in private, or this could become a witch hunt. I do not wish to offend anyone or be attacked because of that. As someone commented, I am the problem here.
Hi everyone, I’ve been lurking for a long time and decided to try to ask something I can’t find out.
First, please be tolerant about the question. I am an Australian citizen, but from a foreign background, so cultural things that seem sacred and unquestionable here are not the same to me. I wouldn’t be crazy to post this on reddit (though I deleted my account ages ago) because I know all the posts would just be attacking me (if you don’t like it, leave, are you defending terrorists?, and so on), instead of helpful comments. Hopefully it will be different here.
The question is: is there any Australian town free from military worship? I mean monuments everywhere, pools and parks named after it and so on. Somewhere I can forget and pretend that this is not how the rest of Australia is.
I’ve been traveling around trying to find a place I would like to settle. I found many small towns I liked, but it seems that the smaller the town, the higher the military worship. They may not even have a public toilet, but they will have a military worship statue that seemed to have cost more than all the town to build.
I love Australia, specially the outback, but the military worship issue is so big that makes me think of looking for another country. I know my taxes are being used to send people to kill whoever the US doesn’t like, and the country prides itself with this history. But if I can ignore that, I can pretend to myself that it’s not true and live happy. I tried to fight the issue for a long time but it makes no difference except to me, sacrificing my well being for nothing. But if I keep being reminded every time I go to do groceries trough the park “invasion of foreign country divine pride park”, it will be impossible. I already try to avoid news and ABC, so it should be possible.
I’m sending a picture of some of the places I’ve been to, without much luck. Funny enough, the town I liked the most, Roma, is the worst, with military trees every 10 meters.
Anyway, that’s it. Maybe I’ll get downvoted to oblivion, but let’s try…
By the way, I don’t know if I am posting this correctly, on the right place and everything. It’s my first lemmy post as well. It's very confusing to know the community to post. It shows everything everwhere!
Edit- I posted this before, thought it was in the wrong place, deleted and posted again. Now I see 2 of the posts and the deleted one has 2 upvotes. This is so confusing...
Edit2 - Before I get any comment, I dislike military worship from any country, not just Australia. Military may or not be necessary in modern societies, but worship and praise should never be acceptable and is specially dangerous when applied to a group with power. Citizens should always be skeptical of their military group, its uses, powers and permissions. It should be like owning a gun. You may be allowed to have one but should be constantly proving you are not doing anything wrong with it. The definition of what is "wrong" or "right" should be constantly questioned as well.
Edit3 - just a reminder, that I do not wish to change anyone's point of view. It's your tradition and culture and I respect, but I don't have to like it and I would like to figure out how to avoid it. It is all. I would like to stop Australian involvment in American wars, but besides that I don't mind if Australians like military or not, but I would like to avoid being exposed to that, assuming that is possible, which is the reason for the post, so I can find out.
Where the hell are you going with military statues that cost “more than the town” to build?! Outside of the big cities I can’t think of many places with more than a small (less than 1m) statue and a plaque. And I’ve lived in every state and territory except Tasmania and New Zealand.
Anecdotally, the one in a park near where I lived was much large than that. Some examples of larger ones can be found just by searching images of
australia war monument in park(not including the huge ones in some cities, like the Anzac Memorial in Sydney or the Canberra Australian War Memorial)And the majority of small towns have a small memorial that you’d have to go hunting to find. Google searches will of course tend towards the bigger, more obvious ones.
I live in a country town. Our memorial is (literally) 1.2m tall, made of concrete and takes up less than 3m square. It has been there since the 80’s.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of fetishising the military. But the OP suggestion that they’re all massive monuments is patently absurd.
Sorry, I exagerated a lot. But yes, I've seen quite a few towns where it seems like the memorial was the biggest public investment in the town.
Exaggerations my search is still the same. But yes, as eureka says, there are some pretty big ones. Luckily some times some big ones that are unrelated to war, but very rare. Like Barcaldine I think, where there is a very big and beautiful monument to worker's strikes. I was very surprised when I saw it and found it's not military.
https://monumentaustralia.org.au/search Incredibly detailed info on monuments all over the country. Lots of non-conflict-related ones.
The only way you could have signed off better was to leave out Tasmania since we don't want that and we claim nz
Haha couldn’t resist the NZ joke.
We do actually like our West Islands neighbours.