Anzac Day in Bungendore is big. This year it was very big. A large crowd was watching, a large group marching and instead of just attending the service at the memorial in the park, I followed the progress up to the lunch in the Memorial Hall.

Why is the event so well attended?

Well, at a time when every Anzac parade around the country is becoming more popular each year we're no different here. It's an amazing shift in the opinions of the people of my generation who protested against Vietnam, are still strongly anti-war and were part of the 'uncaring' public who made the Australian Vietnam war vets suffer when they came home. Now all I see is people marching that look like my father and grandfather, getting older and weaker and deserving of our kinder thoughts. I'll still keep my anger for the government of the time who sent us off to Vietnam, and I had friends that were conscripted who went not understanding they had a choice.

It's a wider than an Australian cultural shift. On Monday I went to the Sydney Premiere of We were soldiers. Mel Gibson followed us up the red carpet through a crowd of fans and media. As he said when he introduced the film, it's not a film you 'enjoy', but if it was as accurate a re-creation of the time as it purports, then all you can have sympathy for are the young soldiers who went into that battle. And that relates to the ones who are left alive now.

There's another traditional reason why our Anzac day in Bungendore is such a success. It has a good country twist and is because of the location our two pubs and the Memorial Hall. After the regular service the morning turns into a pub crawl, or rather, a pub march.

The day starts with an assembly of the school kids, Scouts, Canberra Pipes and Drums band, the Light Horse group and veterans outside the shops in Gibralter Street. They march up towards the railway line to the Memorial arch near the oval and new school and community centre. The road is blocked and chairs placed on the road for the older marches, the public gather around. After a service with all the traditional features including the rider-less horse with boots reversed in the stirrups, the wreath laying and Last Post, the group return down Gibralter street to the Hall. Except that there are the distractions of the pubs on the way.

Apparently (no-one knows when it started or was formalised), the procedure is then always the same. Minus the primary school kids, the pipe band leads the way from the oval to the 'top' pub, the Royal. Everyone stops for a beer or two and the band then drums them out of the bar and they head off down the street to the 'bottom' pub where there is another drink stop. Some time later they all weave their way to the Hall for some speeches and a sit down lunch provided by the local women's auxiliary.

I've taken a lot more photographs this year instead of just a few bits of video as in the past. I think it really needs a serious doco to tell the story emotively. I was most conscious that I wanted to be recording sound as I worked. When the old faces in these images disappear, I'll consider getting my mother and father's medals out and make sure the tradition of the Bungendore Anzac day pub march continues.

There's a page of thumbnail images, linked to larger photographs, here
  

When I was at photography school most of us did weddings as a part time job, but I hadn't photographed a dedicated wedding for oh, twenty years? And this time I was doing it for pleasure. (I think that's how I'd always approached it because I remember I had a string of referrals from one girl to another who liked my 'candid' approach, back then.)

I wasn't the official photographer (there were two and a video cameraman) so I could treat it a bit more casually. I tried to use natural light and that meant slow exposures and a bit of handheld shake, but they were happy with the results. 

Doug had Peter Bourne select the wines to accompany each of the courses of food and the great little lunch/patisserie place Doug introduced me too (and that we sneak away to sometimes when I'm in Sydney), 67Ate, made the wedding cake.

It was a wonderful Sydney night and the reception in a marquee at the Observatory on Observatory Hill, was the perfect Sydney location. We stayed overnight and it all felt pretty glam.

Is this a country diary?

Like the mobs of kangaroos that always are out towards the Mt Fairy Road (on the other side of the hill to the deer above). Some just kept eating, the others wheel away. They must see trains everyday, and never get attacked by one, but still flee. A big old wedge tail eagle flapped away from the trackside being harassed by half a dozen magpies. Then a confusion of dark shapes on the phone line as parrots, when they were actually the tall ceramic insulators with long spikes that had pulled free from the wooden cross bars. They 'perched', suspended taut above it. 

It's movie camera territory to capture this, not stills (certainly not with my camera). Even then there are just a few frames as you flash past that need to be 'step-printed' to catch the event. I've got reels of Super 8 that I took when I was traveling by train from Gippsland to Melbourne each day, that I then still framed and re-photographed. Moments of blur and beauty. Revealing images that your eyes never saw at the time.

The Ladies (& Gents), Bungendore station. 7.20am and 9.50pm.