Jeremy
I took this photograph at sunrise one morning. It’s on a winding stretch of road which is more or less the main artery through my whole area. Sometimes I pass through at normal speed, at other peak hour times I crawl past at a walking pace, but I always look at it and no matter what chatter is happening in the car or on the radio, it never fails to get my attention. This road is rarely quiet and the shrine is on a bit of a blind corner which means your back is to the cars coming, so it took a bit of nerve to take the shot. I would say many tens of thousands of cars pass it every day.
On those trips I would think about Jeremy ‘Jem’, who his family might be, who keeps the shrine like this all year round, year after year, and, more gruesomely perhaps, I would wonder how he died. It was a while until I found out the story, which I have been unable to substantiate, but I was recently told that Jeremy was a journalist in Iraq who was killed by a roadside bomb while embedded with troops. He was a young guy in his early twenties who lived on the northern beaches, and, supposedly, he was the first Australian to be killed in the war in Iraq. Knowing this makes the shrine even more poignant to me. It’s not in a war memorial, it’s just on a simple pole and it seems to have been there for years. Day after day I pass it. Year after year slips by. Have we really been in this horrendous war for that long?
For Jeremy and his family: know that there are among us, many who noticed, and who thank you for your undoubted courage and your ultimate sacrifice.
