Always, Without Sale

Day: 375

Towns / Cities Visited: 275

Countries Visited: 31

Steps Taken Today: 4,391

Steps Taken Around the World: 5,805,832

Another annual Weekend Away was fast approaching its conclusion, but there was somewhere we all wanted to go before bid farewell to Sale and headed off in our respective directions: the Gippsland Armed Forces Museum. Packing up our things, we made our way off to get petrol and check the air in the tyres while the older faction of the group made their way to the Visitor Centre to purchase a bottle of local wine. After all, it’s not a weekend away without wine to drink the following year.

Eventually, we all made it to the museum, bundling out of the car and tottering over to admire the old Air Force jets retired to the carpark out the front. There is something about their cramped innards that gives them an almost coffin-like vibe. As I looked at the stencilled words ‘Death From Above’ spray painted on the tail of one, I couldn’t help but wonder who that death was more likely for: those inside these aircraft, or the ones they were battling.

Wandering in, we paid the modest entry fee used to keep up the displays and restore the artefacts cared for by local volunteers. To our left, we took some time to go through the two rooms there, each of them dedicated to the brave local men and women who lost their lives during the First and Second World Wars in service of the Australian Air Force.

Sure, there were stories of heroic and daring battles, but there was a more unconventional display that pulled at my heartstrings: a photo wall of all the local air force recruits who perished in plane crashes whilst training on home soil. It seems such an awful tragedy that the light of these brave soldiers was snuffed before they even faced a single enemy. They joined to defend their country and their people, and yet they were never given the chance to do so.