Final edit: Sorry guys, this got out of hand as I feared and it would take too long to answer everything properly and it would just offend more people.
I got some nice tips for finding places and learned more about Australian's views on the subject. I should have been more careful with what I said. It changed my opinion somewhat but people here would still not like it, so I'll keep it to myself.
Thanks for the very civilized and nice answers and I'm sorry if I didn't answer. I would like to, but in private, or this could become a witch hunt. I do not wish to offend anyone or be attacked because of that. As someone commented, I am the problem here.
Hi everyone, I’ve been lurking for a long time and decided to try to ask something I can’t find out.
First, please be tolerant about the question. I am an Australian citizen, but from a foreign background, so cultural things that seem sacred and unquestionable here are not the same to me. I wouldn’t be crazy to post this on reddit (though I deleted my account ages ago) because I know all the posts would just be attacking me (if you don’t like it, leave, are you defending terrorists?, and so on), instead of helpful comments. Hopefully it will be different here.
The question is: is there any Australian town free from military worship? I mean monuments everywhere, pools and parks named after it and so on. Somewhere I can forget and pretend that this is not how the rest of Australia is.
I’ve been traveling around trying to find a place I would like to settle. I found many small towns I liked, but it seems that the smaller the town, the higher the military worship. They may not even have a public toilet, but they will have a military worship statue that seemed to have cost more than all the town to build.
I love Australia, specially the outback, but the military worship issue is so big that makes me think of looking for another country. I know my taxes are being used to send people to kill whoever the US doesn’t like, and the country prides itself with this history. But if I can ignore that, I can pretend to myself that it’s not true and live happy. I tried to fight the issue for a long time but it makes no difference except to me, sacrificing my well being for nothing. But if I keep being reminded every time I go to do groceries trough the park “invasion of foreign country divine pride park”, it will be impossible. I already try to avoid news and ABC, so it should be possible.
I’m sending a picture of some of the places I’ve been to, without much luck. Funny enough, the town I liked the most, Roma, is the worst, with military trees every 10 meters.
Anyway, that’s it. Maybe I’ll get downvoted to oblivion, but let’s try…
By the way, I don’t know if I am posting this correctly, on the right place and everything. It’s my first lemmy post as well. It's very confusing to know the community to post. It shows everything everwhere!
Edit- I posted this before, thought it was in the wrong place, deleted and posted again. Now I see 2 of the posts and the deleted one has 2 upvotes. This is so confusing...
Edit2 - Before I get any comment, I dislike military worship from any country, not just Australia. Military may or not be necessary in modern societies, but worship and praise should never be acceptable and is specially dangerous when applied to a group with power. Citizens should always be skeptical of their military group, its uses, powers and permissions. It should be like owning a gun. You may be allowed to have one but should be constantly proving you are not doing anything wrong with it. The definition of what is "wrong" or "right" should be constantly questioned as well.
Edit3 - just a reminder, that I do not wish to change anyone's point of view. It's your tradition and culture and I respect, but I don't have to like it and I would like to figure out how to avoid it. It is all. I would like to stop Australian involvment in American wars, but besides that I don't mind if Australians like military or not, but I would like to avoid being exposed to that, assuming that is possible, which is the reason for the post, so I can find out.
Yep, it'd have to be a tiny town to not have a war memorial. If there's no war memorial there's probably an honour bord with the names of the fallen in the hall or RSL. Since ANZAC it's been a part of Australian culture that those who died in service of their country is a sort of sacred thing. It's significance has ebbed and flowed a bit over the years. Our pride in the services was especially damaged in the Vietnam war years, when ANZAC day crowds shrunk quite a bit and you could have imagined at the time that it might all die out. It's had a bit of a resurgence since.
After most big wars, the federal government has put a bit of money into war memorials, and it was pretty much just a matter of the local RSL or town council writing a letter to get a decommissioned artillery piece of some sort, or an old torpedo for the local park as a centrepiece for your ANZAC day ceremony. Also, if you read the plaques on 1950's or 60's buildings in the bush, you'll often see many of them are "War Memorials". War Memorial swimming pools and sports grounds are common ones. The reason communities did this is that at the time donations to "war memorials" were tax deductible.
You've made an interesting observation. For Aussies this is probably something they've never noticed. It's probably not an indication that we're very war worshipping, just that for a small country, the deaths involved in the wars we've been part of were significant, and perhaps especially so for little country towns where the surnames on the honour board match some of the street names and the bloke you were just chatting to at the post office.