thanks for having me tonight I’m
actually really honored to be here to
talk about our little project which my
sister-in-law and I started back in 2013
before I talk about the project I’d like
to talk a little bit about my father
because he’s the reason I’m here tonight
my father was a very average man and not
so average he was a wonderful father
wonderful husband great neighbor looked
after his community he was called to
serve in the Second World War by his
King and he went and fought in New
Guinea as most of the people the men of
his age did at the time so it was he was
young he was only this is he was 19 or
20 here beautiful fresh-faced gorgeous
and he came back from war relatively
unscathed although many of his mates
didn’t and many of them didn’t come back
and he never ever talked about the war
he I suspect it was probably his own
private Hill and he didn’t want to share
that with his children mmm our
memorialization days much much like your
Memorial Day Anzac Day and Remembrance
Day each year and he didn’t really get
involved in that sort of thing he didn’t
see the benefit of actually catching up
with his mates and talking about a war
that they would have preferred to have
forgotten it was part of their lives he
wanted to just put it behind him but
I’ve got ahead of myself here so I fast
forward to 20 years later and we’re
working on this project to honor our
fathers and what we decided to do was
create a hundred and twenty poppies and
you’ve all got to poppy on tonight you
would have seen them out in the foyer
I’m certainly wearing one to one our
fathers service and was the
very personal project and we wanted to
create these hundred and twenty poppies
and plant them around my father’s tree
in the avenue of honor at the Shrine of
Remembrance in Melbourne we have this
big Shrine of Remembrance it’s a huge
building it’s absolutely stunning inside
and it’s it’s all about memorialization
and there’s a whole row of trees at the
front that are dedicated to different
battalions that fought in the war over
and it’s for distinguished service one
of those trees belongs to my father or
my father’s battalion I should say so
personal journey the poppy is a really
powerful symbol in Australia and other
Commonwealth countries and I’m sure it’s
got some significance in other countries
around the world and we’re creating this
120 poppies to plant around my father’s
tree and that’s the plaque for his
battalion and they’re our poppies that
we made the response to that was so
incredibly powerful it’s hard to believe
there’s a knitted and crocheted poppies
the response was so powerful from our
friends and family and community that we
decided to take it to the public and so
the 5000 poppies project was created the
aim was to make 5,000 poppies of course
for the centenary of ANZAC which was
coming up so Australia first world war
four year period in 1914 to 1919 1918 so
my methods not great so this is the
centenary of that period and it’s a very
important time in Australia’s history
and in fact the world history so we’ve
decided to create 5,000 poppies and
plant them at in this in the centre of
the city in Melbourne as part of that
project this is what we ended up
creating for the launch of our program
some couple of months later
and by that stage we’d actually
collected 5,000 poppies so we had two
years to do this project and four months
after we started it we’d actually
collected our 5000 so it still amazes me
I still laugh because Maggie and I had
made a spreadsheet about how many
poppies we were actually going to have
to make each before so that we could
actually make it to the end but I don’t
think we needed to have worried so by
November that year we had 5,000 poppies
and we hung them in this beautiful
fracture gallery in the middle of
Melbourne and it received a lot of press
what we had no way of knowing was fifty
thousand people around the world would
join us and we also had no way of
knowing that people all over the world
would become champions of the project
and make little groups that come
together regularly to make poppies and
so we ended up with some we ended up by
saying that well our timing was perfect
and at the launch of the project we met
the chairman of our centenary committee
the Anzac centenary committee in
Melbourne who asked us to become part of
the formal program for the commemorative
activities that were going to be going
on between 2014 and 2018
and so we then decided to revise our
target again to a hundred thousand
poppies we were doing it anyway was
going to be simple right
in any case spreadsheet went out the
window
Ted valuer the mentor mentor became a
biggest supporter and spooked us all
around the country which was really
wonderful of him and then he introduced
us to this guy this guy’s Philip Johnson
and he is arguably no not arguably he
actually is Australia’s premier
landscape designer and he decided that
this was going to be bigger than Ben Hur
he became instantly enamored with what
we were doing he had a great-grandfather
who had
fought in World War one and died on the
Somme so it had a very personal personal
significance to him and so with the
centenary approaching and Philip on
board we decided that a hundred thousand
poppies was was well and truly within
our grasp this was our first
installation it was just a little teaser
5,000 poppies on stems and we did it at
the Melbourne International Flower and
Garden Show it was so powerful probably
the most powerful thing people had seen
for a long time and it was full of heart
and so you know it what happened was
people really gravitated towards what we
were doing and we ended up collecting
more poppies for our first major
installation so this is a minor
installation we covered the steps of
Federation Square in the heart of
Melbourne and that’s about eight hundred
thousand square feet of square meters of
poppies attached to Nets so that they
sit flat on the ground and we had them
cascading down this down these steps in
Federation Square and was absolutely
beautiful and really breathtaking and we
had 260,000 poppies so the centenary of
ANZAC was pretty important time for us
as a nation 62,000 of our young men and
a few women died in first world war for
us we were a nation much the same size
as you are now so about four and a half
to five million 62,000 dead 60,000 who
returned home died within ten years of
repatriation and we felt that really
strongly as a nation but a hundred years
on this amazing grassroots project
masterpiece is imbued with love honor
and respect as rich in meaning as they
were as rich in beauty they were really
breathtaking with this simple message we
value your service
and we will not forget in 2016
we were asked to take the whole shebang
over to the Royal Horticultural Society
Chelsea Flower Show it was a bold
installation in the grounds of the Royal
Hospital Chelsea that had never been
done before the Chelsea Flower Show is a
very small flower show but it’s probably
the most prestigious one in the world
the royal family come along and and walk
around and meet people but this was the
first time that anybody had actually
encroached into the grounds of the Royal
Hospital that actually been quite they
guarded that area very jealously but
when we went to them and asked them if
we could do it there were more than
pleased to do it so we planted somewhere
around 300,000 poppies in there and
shamelessly put a red carpet down the
middle of it to invite the Queen to come
and visit and meet the Queen we did so
it’s the first time in the history again
of the show that the Queen came along
with all of the royal family and met and
onto one display so we were the lucky
ones and Maggie will tell you Maggie’s
sitting down here she’ll tell you she
spent 10 minutes with the Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge at her feet it was
a wonderful day I’ll just point this
picture out to you here this is me with
Prince Harry we’ll come back to that it
really captured the imagination of the
world it’s kind of interesting that’s
not what we were really about but what
we were doing was sort of saying to
people you know we care we value your
service and this is a really good way to
let them know it sixty million views
across all media audited
later that year we were lucky enough to
go across the ditch and do this
installation in from ultramel in France
for the centenary of the Battle of
framel
it’s a pretty important battle in the
history of Australian warfare it’s
probably the bloodiest battle certainly
the most impacting battle over a 24-hour
period that Australia had ever seen
we lost well there were five thousand
five hundred odd casualties and
approximately two thousand of those
people died but that was a 24-hour
period so framel a sacred turf for
Australians
it’s this little battle-scarred plot of
land in the middle of nowhere in rural
French landscape it’s got a couple of
German block houses if you know what
they are and one of our favorite
sculptors has actually done this
wonderful sculpture that depicts mate
ship and mate ships kind of the key to
the ethos of the Australian digger but
while we were creating these massive
installations for our overseas trips we
were also doing some smaller things for
back at home we created the backdrop for
a traveling show that the Australian War
Memorial put on called the spirit of
Anzac centenary experience which told
the story of the First World War and it
travelled around Australia it was
absolutely stunning and a bit scary we
did a series of installations for the
Victorian Government’s state library
writing the war exhibition and we put it
was a fantastically hauntingly beautiful
concert that was done at one of the
major churches in their heart of the
city of Melbourne and we decorated the
whole of you only see a small part of it
there but we decorated the whole of the
church for that concert it was
absolutely beautiful we did an
installation at our national Vietnam
Veterans Museum we did an installation
at our made at our Melbourne Museum
looks a bit eerie there with surf with
this is just one image but we did 14 we
decorated 14 towns across the Gippsland
region which is a very large geographic
region in Melbourne and we decorated 14
towns it was huge and fantastic and all
of the locals got involved I love that
kind of whole local thing and we did our
own Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne
so that’s one part of it with about
12,000 stem poppies but our aim
basically for the end of the centenary
was to take installation to what is the
spiritual home of memorialization in
Australia which is the National War
Memorial and it feels really surreal
still but we did that just last week so
the centenary was last Sunday a week ago
today and we planted 62,000 stemmed
poppies in the lawns perfectly manicured
lawns we killed them but these perfectly
manicured lawns at the Australian War
Memorial and it was just amazing it is
absolutely huge it covers 4,000 square
meters it’s the most beautiful thing
I’ve ever seen thousands upon thousands
of flock to see it not surprisingly I
think it’s been the most photographed
thing on on social media for the last
five weeks that it’s been up and at one
stage we were trending on social media
and my son rang me and told me I was a
we also planted oh that’s a nut shot
sorry we also planted 300,000 poppies at
our Parliament House which is at the
opposite end of the road so these two
buildings have been built particularly
for the purpose of making sure that
parliamentarians understand that
whatever happens in those hallowed halls
has a direct impact on how we fare as a
nation and so we became involved with
our Parliament House so 300 thousand and
if I had the aerial shots of that I’d
show you is absolutely spectacular we
also did some smaller installations
that’s a shrine of remembrance there’s a
poem or at least an ode that we take
from a poem by a guy called Laurence
Minson Binion and it’s called the ode
and it’s I don’t know if any of you know
it probably not but it is it starts they
shall not grow old and it’s an ode to
the fallen and it’s the most evocative
poem I’ve ever heard and it’s just a
small snippet but we’ve surrounded our
whole shrine of remembrance with meter
high letters with this ode on it and
created what I call a contemplative walk
and I think that the the upshot of that
is that people actually know that the
War Memorial now has I was sorry the
shrine of remembrance now has another
side that was pretty special we also did
some smaller installations so this is
all around the centenary of ANZAC that’s
sort of coming to fruition and in fact
came to fruition last week
the acct Memorial point Cooke airbase
and there are also many hundreds if not
thousands of 5000 poppies inspired
projects happening all around the world
and these are just a couple of them it
was done by a florist they’re all
62,000 poppies planted in Kings Park on
the other side of Australia in Western
Australia that doesn’t look like 62,000
and it’s not but they did plant 62,000
huge to mega high letters planted
somewhere in New South Wales I can’t
remember where it’s in Wales in the UK
and I think what’s happened here is that
this all testifies to the depth of
feeling for our for those people who
have served and sacrificed and it’s been
an incredible labor of love for
everybody that’s been involved in it and
Maggie and I will both say it surprised
us just how impacting it’s been both on
the outside world but also on us because
it’s made us realise that there’s this
generational grief that it’s not been
resolved since the First World War a
hundred years ago that’s just been
passed down from generation to
generation it’s been a very healing
thing for a lot of people and they write
to us and talk to us about it it’s been
an honor and a privilege for me I have
to say to be involved in this project
it’s been wonderful and if you wanted to
know the final number of poppies that
we’ve actually collected it’s almost a
million and that’s just the poppies that
we’ve collected for this particular
project
there are hundreds if not thousands of
people out there doing it for their own
local communities now so we’ve spawned
this whole Remembrance thing that’s
happening out there and you could easily
double that Million number in fact you
could probably triple it for this
particular project nearly two million no
I keep saying that’s incredibly
conservative and it is two million
man-hours volunteer hours because this
whole project is volunteer run by the
way including Marg and I so we have this
magnificent team and this is a
mattering of the 50,000 odd that have
been involved in pulling all this
together but this is the team that is
the glue that makes it all stick
together and that’s the big part of our
success these people have been working
with Marg and I now for nearly four
maybe five years in pulling all of these
installations together and it’s a lot of
work we work they work incredibly hard
they do whatever we ask them to do and
sometimes we work well into the night
and it’s all volunteer it blows me away
really so this has been my story every
single contributor to this project has a
story of their own this is a story about
my dad for Maggie it’s the story of her
dad and for every single contributor to
the project it’s their personal story
which I find fascinating we all do it
for our own reasons and I think that’s
part of the beauty of the project it’s a
community project like no other hand
made grassroots no budget no budget
everybody made their Poppy’s from their
own costs everybody sent us their
poppies we had budget to put in the
major installations from the
organizations that we were doing it for
everything else no budget and it’s
become a global movement of sorts
there’s this little thread of connection
that connects us all together and it
goes right around the globe connecting
us to each other connecting us to our
communities connecting us to the past
connecting us to our personal histories
and connecting us to the histories of
others so but it also is connecting us
to our present and it’s connecting us to
the future because these groups will go
on and they’ll continue to do this work
some will continue to do the work that
we’ve been doing and do it in their own
local communities some will do other
works which is just wonder
and a lot of people have stood up after
this project and actually gone out and
done very large projects of a different
nature in their own or in their own
local communities which i think is just
amazing and so if you wanted to talk
about making your mark or leaving a
legacy as I like to call it Marg and I
are pretty proud of the legacy that
we’ve left so thank you for listening
[Music] you
actually really honored to be here to
talk about our little project which my
sister-in-law and I started back in 2013
before I talk about the project I’d like
to talk a little bit about my father
because he’s the reason I’m here tonight
my father was a very average man and not
so average he was a wonderful father
wonderful husband great neighbor looked
after his community he was called to
serve in the Second World War by his
King and he went and fought in New
Guinea as most of the people the men of
his age did at the time so it was he was
young he was only this is he was 19 or
20 here beautiful fresh-faced gorgeous
and he came back from war relatively
unscathed although many of his mates
didn’t and many of them didn’t come back
and he never ever talked about the war
he I suspect it was probably his own
private Hill and he didn’t want to share
that with his children mmm our
memorialization days much much like your
Memorial Day Anzac Day and Remembrance
Day each year and he didn’t really get
involved in that sort of thing he didn’t
see the benefit of actually catching up
with his mates and talking about a war
that they would have preferred to have
forgotten it was part of their lives he
wanted to just put it behind him but
I’ve got ahead of myself here so I fast
forward to 20 years later and we’re
working on this project to honor our
fathers and what we decided to do was
create a hundred and twenty poppies and
you’ve all got to poppy on tonight you
would have seen them out in the foyer
I’m certainly wearing one to one our
fathers service and was the
very personal project and we wanted to
create these hundred and twenty poppies
and plant them around my father’s tree
in the avenue of honor at the Shrine of
Remembrance in Melbourne we have this
big Shrine of Remembrance it’s a huge
building it’s absolutely stunning inside
and it’s it’s all about memorialization
and there’s a whole row of trees at the
front that are dedicated to different
battalions that fought in the war over
and it’s for distinguished service one
of those trees belongs to my father or
my father’s battalion I should say so
personal journey the poppy is a really
powerful symbol in Australia and other
Commonwealth countries and I’m sure it’s
got some significance in other countries
around the world and we’re creating this
120 poppies to plant around my father’s
tree and that’s the plaque for his
battalion and they’re our poppies that
we made the response to that was so
incredibly powerful it’s hard to believe
there’s a knitted and crocheted poppies
the response was so powerful from our
friends and family and community that we
decided to take it to the public and so
the 5000 poppies project was created the
aim was to make 5,000 poppies of course
for the centenary of ANZAC which was
coming up so Australia first world war
four year period in 1914 to 1919 1918 so
my methods not great so this is the
centenary of that period and it’s a very
important time in Australia’s history
and in fact the world history so we’ve
decided to create 5,000 poppies and
plant them at in this in the centre of
the city in Melbourne as part of that
project this is what we ended up
creating for the launch of our program
some couple of months later
and by that stage we’d actually
collected 5,000 poppies so we had two
years to do this project and four months
after we started it we’d actually
collected our 5000 so it still amazes me
I still laugh because Maggie and I had
made a spreadsheet about how many
poppies we were actually going to have
to make each before so that we could
actually make it to the end but I don’t
think we needed to have worried so by
November that year we had 5,000 poppies
and we hung them in this beautiful
fracture gallery in the middle of
Melbourne and it received a lot of press
what we had no way of knowing was fifty
thousand people around the world would
join us and we also had no way of
knowing that people all over the world
would become champions of the project
and make little groups that come
together regularly to make poppies and
so we ended up with some we ended up by
saying that well our timing was perfect
and at the launch of the project we met
the chairman of our centenary committee
the Anzac centenary committee in
Melbourne who asked us to become part of
the formal program for the commemorative
activities that were going to be going
on between 2014 and 2018
and so we then decided to revise our
target again to a hundred thousand
poppies we were doing it anyway was
going to be simple right
in any case spreadsheet went out the
window
Ted valuer the mentor mentor became a
biggest supporter and spooked us all
around the country which was really
wonderful of him and then he introduced
us to this guy this guy’s Philip Johnson
and he is arguably no not arguably he
actually is Australia’s premier
landscape designer and he decided that
this was going to be bigger than Ben Hur
he became instantly enamored with what
we were doing he had a great-grandfather
who had
fought in World War one and died on the
Somme so it had a very personal personal
significance to him and so with the
centenary approaching and Philip on
board we decided that a hundred thousand
poppies was was well and truly within
our grasp this was our first
installation it was just a little teaser
5,000 poppies on stems and we did it at
the Melbourne International Flower and
Garden Show it was so powerful probably
the most powerful thing people had seen
for a long time and it was full of heart
and so you know it what happened was
people really gravitated towards what we
were doing and we ended up collecting
more poppies for our first major
installation so this is a minor
installation we covered the steps of
Federation Square in the heart of
Melbourne and that’s about eight hundred
thousand square feet of square meters of
poppies attached to Nets so that they
sit flat on the ground and we had them
cascading down this down these steps in
Federation Square and was absolutely
beautiful and really breathtaking and we
had 260,000 poppies so the centenary of
ANZAC was pretty important time for us
as a nation 62,000 of our young men and
a few women died in first world war for
us we were a nation much the same size
as you are now so about four and a half
to five million 62,000 dead 60,000 who
returned home died within ten years of
repatriation and we felt that really
strongly as a nation but a hundred years
on this amazing grassroots project
masterpiece is imbued with love honor
and respect as rich in meaning as they
were as rich in beauty they were really
breathtaking with this simple message we
value your service
and we will not forget in 2016
we were asked to take the whole shebang
over to the Royal Horticultural Society
Chelsea Flower Show it was a bold
installation in the grounds of the Royal
Hospital Chelsea that had never been
done before the Chelsea Flower Show is a
very small flower show but it’s probably
the most prestigious one in the world
the royal family come along and and walk
around and meet people but this was the
first time that anybody had actually
encroached into the grounds of the Royal
Hospital that actually been quite they
guarded that area very jealously but
when we went to them and asked them if
we could do it there were more than
pleased to do it so we planted somewhere
around 300,000 poppies in there and
shamelessly put a red carpet down the
middle of it to invite the Queen to come
and visit and meet the Queen we did so
it’s the first time in the history again
of the show that the Queen came along
with all of the royal family and met and
onto one display so we were the lucky
ones and Maggie will tell you Maggie’s
sitting down here she’ll tell you she
spent 10 minutes with the Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge at her feet it was
a wonderful day I’ll just point this
picture out to you here this is me with
Prince Harry we’ll come back to that it
really captured the imagination of the
world it’s kind of interesting that’s
not what we were really about but what
we were doing was sort of saying to
people you know we care we value your
service and this is a really good way to
let them know it sixty million views
across all media audited
later that year we were lucky enough to
go across the ditch and do this
installation in from ultramel in France
for the centenary of the Battle of
framel
it’s a pretty important battle in the
history of Australian warfare it’s
probably the bloodiest battle certainly
the most impacting battle over a 24-hour
period that Australia had ever seen
we lost well there were five thousand
five hundred odd casualties and
approximately two thousand of those
people died but that was a 24-hour
period so framel a sacred turf for
Australians
it’s this little battle-scarred plot of
land in the middle of nowhere in rural
French landscape it’s got a couple of
German block houses if you know what
they are and one of our favorite
sculptors has actually done this
wonderful sculpture that depicts mate
ship and mate ships kind of the key to
the ethos of the Australian digger but
while we were creating these massive
installations for our overseas trips we
were also doing some smaller things for
back at home we created the backdrop for
a traveling show that the Australian War
Memorial put on called the spirit of
Anzac centenary experience which told
the story of the First World War and it
travelled around Australia it was
absolutely stunning and a bit scary we
did a series of installations for the
Victorian Government’s state library
writing the war exhibition and we put it
was a fantastically hauntingly beautiful
concert that was done at one of the
major churches in their heart of the
city of Melbourne and we decorated the
whole of you only see a small part of it
there but we decorated the whole of the
church for that concert it was
absolutely beautiful we did an
installation at our national Vietnam
Veterans Museum we did an installation
at our made at our Melbourne Museum
looks a bit eerie there with surf with
this is just one image but we did 14 we
decorated 14 towns across the Gippsland
region which is a very large geographic
region in Melbourne and we decorated 14
towns it was huge and fantastic and all
of the locals got involved I love that
kind of whole local thing and we did our
own Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne
so that’s one part of it with about
12,000 stem poppies but our aim
basically for the end of the centenary
was to take installation to what is the
spiritual home of memorialization in
Australia which is the National War
Memorial and it feels really surreal
still but we did that just last week so
the centenary was last Sunday a week ago
today and we planted 62,000 stemmed
poppies in the lawns perfectly manicured
lawns we killed them but these perfectly
manicured lawns at the Australian War
Memorial and it was just amazing it is
absolutely huge it covers 4,000 square
meters it’s the most beautiful thing
I’ve ever seen thousands upon thousands
of flock to see it not surprisingly I
think it’s been the most photographed
thing on on social media for the last
five weeks that it’s been up and at one
stage we were trending on social media
and my son rang me and told me I was a
we also planted oh that’s a nut shot
sorry we also planted 300,000 poppies at
our Parliament House which is at the
opposite end of the road so these two
buildings have been built particularly
for the purpose of making sure that
parliamentarians understand that
whatever happens in those hallowed halls
has a direct impact on how we fare as a
nation and so we became involved with
our Parliament House so 300 thousand and
if I had the aerial shots of that I’d
show you is absolutely spectacular we
also did some smaller installations
that’s a shrine of remembrance there’s a
poem or at least an ode that we take
from a poem by a guy called Laurence
Minson Binion and it’s called the ode
and it’s I don’t know if any of you know
it probably not but it is it starts they
shall not grow old and it’s an ode to
the fallen and it’s the most evocative
poem I’ve ever heard and it’s just a
small snippet but we’ve surrounded our
whole shrine of remembrance with meter
high letters with this ode on it and
created what I call a contemplative walk
and I think that the the upshot of that
is that people actually know that the
War Memorial now has I was sorry the
shrine of remembrance now has another
side that was pretty special we also did
some smaller installations so this is
all around the centenary of ANZAC that’s
sort of coming to fruition and in fact
came to fruition last week
the acct Memorial point Cooke airbase
and there are also many hundreds if not
thousands of 5000 poppies inspired
projects happening all around the world
and these are just a couple of them it
was done by a florist they’re all
62,000 poppies planted in Kings Park on
the other side of Australia in Western
Australia that doesn’t look like 62,000
and it’s not but they did plant 62,000
huge to mega high letters planted
somewhere in New South Wales I can’t
remember where it’s in Wales in the UK
and I think what’s happened here is that
this all testifies to the depth of
feeling for our for those people who
have served and sacrificed and it’s been
an incredible labor of love for
everybody that’s been involved in it and
Maggie and I will both say it surprised
us just how impacting it’s been both on
the outside world but also on us because
it’s made us realise that there’s this
generational grief that it’s not been
resolved since the First World War a
hundred years ago that’s just been
passed down from generation to
generation it’s been a very healing
thing for a lot of people and they write
to us and talk to us about it it’s been
an honor and a privilege for me I have
to say to be involved in this project
it’s been wonderful and if you wanted to
know the final number of poppies that
we’ve actually collected it’s almost a
million and that’s just the poppies that
we’ve collected for this particular
project
there are hundreds if not thousands of
people out there doing it for their own
local communities now so we’ve spawned
this whole Remembrance thing that’s
happening out there and you could easily
double that Million number in fact you
could probably triple it for this
particular project nearly two million no
I keep saying that’s incredibly
conservative and it is two million
man-hours volunteer hours because this
whole project is volunteer run by the
way including Marg and I so we have this
magnificent team and this is a
mattering of the 50,000 odd that have
been involved in pulling all this
together but this is the team that is
the glue that makes it all stick
together and that’s the big part of our
success these people have been working
with Marg and I now for nearly four
maybe five years in pulling all of these
installations together and it’s a lot of
work we work they work incredibly hard
they do whatever we ask them to do and
sometimes we work well into the night
and it’s all volunteer it blows me away
really so this has been my story every
single contributor to this project has a
story of their own this is a story about
my dad for Maggie it’s the story of her
dad and for every single contributor to
the project it’s their personal story
which I find fascinating we all do it
for our own reasons and I think that’s
part of the beauty of the project it’s a
community project like no other hand
made grassroots no budget no budget
everybody made their Poppy’s from their
own costs everybody sent us their
poppies we had budget to put in the
major installations from the
organizations that we were doing it for
everything else no budget and it’s
become a global movement of sorts
there’s this little thread of connection
that connects us all together and it
goes right around the globe connecting
us to each other connecting us to our
communities connecting us to the past
connecting us to our personal histories
and connecting us to the histories of
others so but it also is connecting us
to our present and it’s connecting us to
the future because these groups will go
on and they’ll continue to do this work
some will continue to do the work that
we’ve been doing and do it in their own
local communities some will do other
works which is just wonder
and a lot of people have stood up after
this project and actually gone out and
done very large projects of a different
nature in their own or in their own
local communities which i think is just
amazing and so if you wanted to talk
about making your mark or leaving a
legacy as I like to call it Marg and I
are pretty proud of the legacy that
we’ve left so thank you for listening
[Music] you
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