The barracks are always empty at that time, illuminated by just a few security lights and maybe the piercing rays of a rising sun.
All is quiet, there’s no shouting of commands, no thud of marching boots, but the noise of war crashes around my mind.
Yes, this tiny and insignificant part of the Australian war machine sits close to the heart of the city. Yes, we are ready to play our part in defending the county.
But at what cost, I wonder.
Walking on into the calm morning, I remember that I was a sergeant in the Cadet Corp at the Echuca Technical School, a role, upon reflection, for which I was wholly unsuited and unprepared.
Looking back, it’s clear I was, and remain, a pacifist and didn’t realise or understand that the core role of soldiers is conflict and violence, an ideal foreign to my values and beliefs.
But so it goes. Many young boys responding to prevailing male stereotypes get some perverted pleasure strutting about in uniform, a slouch hat and shouldering a real .303 rifle.
I got to fire that rifle, with live rounds, a Bren and Tommy gun, again with live rounds. They were fearsome things, and although I never said it to anyone, I vowed to leave such things in my past.
I’m a regular at Shepparton’s annual Anzac Day ceremony near the corner of Fryers and Welsford Sts. Not because I have any particular emotional connection with the day; rather I’m attempting, out of curiosity, to divine the reason why thousands of locals turn out to recognise something that should be a well documented part of our history, but a place where it should remain.
Our minds have been militarised, from the prime minister down, with the massive armaments corporations delivering endless propaganda about our personal security and safety being dependent on their products; not mentioning, of course, that our bent for that imagined nirvana does nothing but fatten their already bulging wallets.
Somehow, while recognising and acknowledging those who died for our country, we need to escape from this corrosive militarisation of our minds, and turn to making this a kinder, friendly, more collaborative and broadly a happier place free of conflict and violence.
Utopian? Well, maybe, but so once was the idea that women should have the vote and equal rights, although the latter, remains, in many instances, a fantasy.
The idea of AUKUS and nuclear submarines should be offensive to any right-thinking, decent Australian. Not just because of the horrendous cost, but because the whole concept further embeds the militarisation of our minds and intellectually distances us even more from the embrace of the other.
And so all is quiet for the moment, beyond weekly Army Reserve training sessions, at Shepparton’s Somme Barracks, as it should be.
The goal should be to defang the barracks completely and in their place, using existing funds and facilities, create a community-based team, an adjunct to the Shepparton Search and Rescue Squad maybe, to deal with the quickly unfolding dilemmas of the climate crisis.
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