25. Towers of Memory
An image from an Australian vacation, and more.
Telstra Tower
Dimly I recall a parcel of images from a childhood vacation, when I was fifteen years old, or thereabouts, and visiting family in Australia. We spent a sunny afternoon in an arboretum or botanic garden in the national capital of Canberra, which is where my grandmother lived (she lived in the city of Canberra, not in the arboretum, though the latter scenario would have been intriguing). I recall mainly the texture of the scene: in my mind it was grainy and washed-out, like a faded Polaroid bathed in afternoon sunlight, colored in shades of gold and turquoise. The area we visited has since changed, having been burned in the Canberra bushfires of 2001 and 2003, then rebuilt and re-landscaped.
One of my primary memories is of a great tower – a single spire – piercing the afternoon sky. This was the Telstra Tower, a great steel mast of telecommunications equipment built upon the summit of Black Mountain, offering visitors a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape. Opened in 1980, it was imbued with the stylistic flavor, at least within my memory, of atmospheric 1970s science-fiction films: a bleak and vaguely ominous brutalist monument that, while imposing, still had a sense of strange beauty and timelessness. One could imagine this spire rising high, still and unmoving, impervious to centuries of upheaval and war, while the land about it turned to desert or tundra. It felt to me, as so many brutalist buildings of the 1960s through 80s do, as if it knew something I didn’t.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, an Australia Broadcasting Commission employee had revealed in a public interview in 1991 (which was promptly redacted) that the tower contained a hidden surveillance center, part of the secret ECHELON program jointly run by Australia, the UK, America, Canada, and New Zealand.
I had no idea.
Scene Glimpsed From Front Stoop
Gazing out upon a particularly radiant sunset, in the few moments when all the clouds streaked across the sky are lit up in incandescent oranges and pinks, set on fire against the glowing teal of the sky, and it strikes me that the eternal God who made this all is the same God who became a man, whose heart for us is that warm: no removed Creator, no merely philosophical Source is He, but the warmth and joy and nurturing, enlivening love we call humane — the oft-yearned for but never fully achieved apex of what it means to be human — is in fact not ultimately a human trait; rather it is a divine trait which we, in so far as we reflect it, resemble the image-bearers we were made to be.
If you like this newsletter, please do tell a friend. And if you want more, may I humbly recommend to you my first novel, The Forest Museum.
