By Dandenong Cranbourne Rsl President John Wells
Exercise Stone Pillow is an initiative of the ‘young veterans’, which in very broad terms means those who have served in Australia’s defence since the Vietnam War.
The idea is that participants sleep out or sleep rough for a night and pay for the privilege.
I slept only a half-hour from my perfectly good, warm bed, and I paid for the privilege, but not once did I begrudge it because the money being raised was for the support of younger veterans who were sleeping rough on that night.
There are many of them.
Picture the large asphalted carpark at the Dandenong RSL, on Stud Road. Normally there might be 50 or 60 cars here but tonight there are few, and the gates are closed.
The three camouflaged Army Landrovers of the Young Veterans Rally ‘hold ground’ for us.
It is going on sunset and the windows of the club are all brightly lit.
The people inside are eating, drinking, talking. There is the sound of music, the sound of talk. We hear laughter.
There are perhaps 40 people standing about in the twilight, talking quietly.
Some of them remember other sounds, the sounds of danger in faraway places.
Some try to forget those sounds, and some are determined never to forget.
In some ways the sounds are the one changing but somehow constant part of the night that is falling.
The RSL’s evening stand-to ceremony leaves only the sounds of the traffic, but then a young man steps from the growing shadows and calls for our attention.
He fought in Afghanistan and was badly hurt when his armoured vehicle struck a mine.
He is slowly but surely learning to move on, and he has worked hard to make Stone Pillow a reality in Dandenong.
He calls for quiet and the conversations fall away. A young man steps forward, raises a bugle, and the haunting sounds of the Last Post flow clear and sure through the night air.
There is a silence and I know what some of those young men are remembering.
I know whom I remember.
Even the sound of the traffic seems to die away.
The silence is broken by Ian Arell’s pipes and now the sound is the haunting melody of Flowers of the Forest, a tune that could only be played on the pipes.
We go inside the RSL for an auction of donated goods, and in the light and the noise of the auction the sound of talk and laughter rises and again dominates.
Much money is raised for the cause of those who need a hand.
Much of the bidding is really about donating. Much of the donating is about caring, and sharing, and looking after our mates.
We go outside again to where two fires have been lit in oil-drums and we stand around, talking, laughing again, telling old jokes and trying to come up with new ones.
The soldiers are telling ‘warries’ and explaining how their part of the army was the only part that mattered.
We are not all ex-service people, either. There are wives and girlfriends, brothers, mates.
By midnight there are about 20 of us still sitting by the fires, talking more quietly now. The club is silent and the lights have gone.
People are sleeping all around us, between our cars, in our cars, on airbeds and in swags.
We are not all comfortable, but we know there are others doing it harder, and we are doing it by choice. They are not.
We sleep and the fires die away.
We rise to a new day and a simple breakfast. We pack up and move back to our normal lives.
We have all taken part in something special and something meaningful.
And a few young ex-service men and women who need help will get it, and will know that this help came from mates they’ve never met but who are, just the same, mates.
