Visit almost any city or town along Australia’s eastern seaboard at this time of the year and you’ll be treated to the visually joyful and sensory splendour of flowering jacaranda trees. The tree is believed to have been introduced from Brazil in the 1850’s. Since then the widespread and prolific planting of this purple flowering tree, along streets, around houses and in parks, has literally transformed it into an Australian icon. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a time when jacarandas did not rain purple.
The jacaranda tree is immortalised in one of Australia’s most famous paintings, called ‘Under the Jacaranda’. Painted in 1903 by R Godfrey Rivers. The painting is displayed at the Queensland Art Gallery.
This morning while travelling by vehicle the Bazflyers stopped in the Queensland rural town of Beaudesert. It was approaching 11am as we joined a small assembly of women and men at the town’s WW1 memorial. Everyone stood silently together in remembrance. Precisely one hundred years ago, at 11am on the 11th of November, armistice was announced. World War One officially ended. A war that took the lives of more than 80,000 ANZACs. Many more were wounded.
Standing at the war memorial today it was difficult for a Bazflyer to imagine how the good folk of Beaudesert reacted when the news of armistice reached them that day 100 years ago. However, there is one thing that has not changed. On that day, just as it was today, the jacaranda trees were resplendent in their rich purple blossoms.
Every year on the anniversary of armistice, it’s as if the jacaranda tree had an ordained purpose, it weeps tears of purple rain. It is a tree that blossoms in remembrance of the men and women who gave their lives for us. Magically, this most beautiful flowering tree also inspires....
“The jacaranda flames on the air like a ghost,
Like a purer sky some door in the sky has revealed.”
Excerpt from ‘The Jacaranda’ by Douglas Stewart, from The Dosser in Springtime (1946)
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