Flames dance and smoke drifts. The people of tiny Yambuk, way down in windblown south-west Victoria, have stoked a couple of drums with fire. A flag flutters above them in the dawn.
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This is Yambuk's Anzac Day dawn service - the first in the village beneath a flagpole. Soon, there'll be breakfast for everyone at the pub, free for anyone who takes a raffle ticket.
It's another first: the town's first Anzac Day gunfire breakfast. Two-up to follow.
Yambuk is an old place - older than memory when you consider the Indigenous people who enjoyed the abundance of its river, its lake hunkered among sand dunes and its wild coast for thousands of years until white settlers came in the 1840s. Call that its first war, violent and shockingly decisive.
Now, it is a century since the young men of the district set off for another war in Europe and the Middle East from which some of them never returned, and more than 70 years since more of the young went away to another world war.
A few months ago, according to Dale Barker, a Yambuk man and proud of it, a few of the locals were enjoying a beer at the town's lovely old pub, the Yambuk Inn, when it struck them that they needed to do something about the way they commemorated Anzac Day.
They'd had an annual Anzac gathering for the past few years, and a lot of the town had been happy to turn out in the dawn. But their memorial was nothing but a plaque on a stone that marked the planting of a "new" avenue of honour in 1998, the first avenue of cypress pines having died and been torn down long ago.
The memorial didn't even have a flag pole. It didn't feel right.
Problem was, Yambuk has a population of only a bit more than 300 and the larger town of Port Fairy is just 20km down the road to the east.Yambuk's veterans had always taken the road to Port Fairy to commemorate Anzac Day and march with their old mates.
But now, with only one Yambuk-born veteran left in the village - Mick Cain, who served in Vietnam - it seemed to the fellows gathered in the pub that it was time the village made a statement.
Local stonemasons, father and son Peter and Chris Southwick, caught the mood. Peter is himself a veteran - he served with the British Army on Cypress in the 1950s. Father and son took it upon themselves to give the memorial a bit of character. They rolled up their sleeves and laid bluestone pavement all around the little memorial stone, granting it greater presence.
And then the townsfolk banded together to raise a flagpole. What had been nothing more than a plaque on a stone by the roadside was transformed into a proper memorial.
Yambuk has no RSL sub-branch. The Yambuk locals' Anzac service, thus, is a simple community event. The village doesn't even run to a bugler. The Last Post was a recording, still haunting in the dawn.
Yambuk's people turned out in force. The gathering on Tuesday morning was about 130 - almost half the village's population.
Mick Cain was happy to officiate and recite the Ode. He served in Vietnam as a rifleman and driver with 4RAR, "the fighting fourth", a true Anzac outfit because it was teamed with a New Zealand company in Vietnam.
Mick, who sports a fine moustache, a gold ear ring and sleeves of tattoos, says he's proud of his service and that he "handles" any problems left with him from Vietnam. Still, he quit work in 1985 because he couldn't sleep and found himself jumping at any sudden sound - big difficulties, because he worked in an aluminium smelter in Geelong. The family farmhouse outside Yambuk suits him better.
"I've never been ashamed of my service in Vietnam," he says. "On Anzac morning there's the feeling of mates lost, still with you, the futility of war, why the hell..." he says, halting.
"But it's made me appreciate life a lot more, and taught me how much it should be valued."
The proprietor of the 170-year-old Yambuk Inn, Gary "Turbo" Russell, decided there should be a traditional gunfire breakfast after the dawn service. He arranged a raffle - a ticket got you breakfast. The prize was a wall hanging commemorating the struggle on the Kokoda Track during World War II.
For want of a flagpole, the people of Yambuk had done Anzac Day all themselves.
Time for two-up.
This story first appeared on The Age
