Shrine of Remembrance

The Shrine of Remembrance offers two quite different ways to listen under one title. Live at the Shrine is the recorded talk: a panel, an audience in the room, and the listener given a seat among them. Shrine Stories is the conversation. It is closer and lighter, and each episode follows one person, one animal or one custom through wartime. The episodes in this run open with an acknowledgement of the Bunurong people of the Kulin Nation as traditional custodians of the land, and that care carries through. The panels reward patience. One, recorded in 2025, marks 85 years since internees were transported to Australia aboard the Dunera and the Queen Mary during the Second World War. It dwells on a book of poems by the internee Oswald Folkman. They are written in German and English and are jaunty and often funny, yet they get close to what the Dunera experience meant to those who kept copies. The same panel turns to legacy and to how these stories are told to later generations. Another panel, from August 2025, just after the 80th anniversary of the war's end, takes up the Yokohama War Cemetery and its part in post-war reconciliation. It covers the architects behind war cemeteries in Asia and asks whether Australia would take the English way, the American way or its own after the fall of Singapore. It closes on a speaker's regret that some people struggle to discuss difficult topics respectfully, with a reminder that the building exists to remember and to learn. Shrine Stories swaps the panel for a hook. Pigeons, one episode begins, are birds people love to hate. It then explains how they carried messages under heavy fire. Its guest, Paul, estimates that pigeon fanciers supplied hundreds of thousands of birds across the two world wars, many of them kept on naval ships and even in submarines. Tony Gaze's episode pitches his life as a Hollywood script. He is a fighter pilot shot down and shadowed from village to village by the resistance, who walked on the far side of the road. He crosses the Pyrenees without weatherproof clothing and later races in the Grand Prix. Peter Isaacson's story follows a Bomber Command pilot awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses and is told partly through a This Is Your Life recording in which his navigator, Bob Nielsen, recalls their first raid over Berlin. The Christmas episode is the gentlest. Katrina Nicholson, the Shrine's Exhibitions and Grants Coordinator, explains that a warm meal on the front line came down to the luck of the draw, while behind the lines the army made an effort to mark the day for the sake of morale. It ends on friendly boasts about the best Christmas cake and Yorkshire puddings. What ties the two strands together is scale: the foreground belongs to individuals, whether a navigator's memory, a poet's verses or a bird carried in a submarine. For a first listen, Shrine Stories: Pigeons shows the lighter strand, and Live at the Shrine: His Majesty's Most Loyal Internees shows what the recorded talks can do.