The peace travellers from Australia and New Zealand are greeted at Budapest Keleti station.In April 1915, when more than a thousand women gathered for an international peace congress in The Hague, Netherlands, they made long and arduous journeys by land and sea. This week, precisely a hundred years later, we are assembling again in our hundreds here in this same city, marking the centenary of that event, which gave birth to WILPF, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. And this time the great majority of us flew here, from all around the world, in a matter of hours.
But… a handful of WILPF members from the most distant countries, eight from Australia and two from Aotearoa-New Zealand, decided to travel like their predecessors, by the slow, terrestrial route. They would take a train journey for peace. The idea was reminiscent of the women’s Peace Train that travelled from Helsinki to Beijing in 1995, carrying delegates to the United Nations 4th World Conference on Women. Indeed their original intention had been no less ambitious, involving women from Japan, the Philippines, India and Lebanon too, in a train trip that would have spanned Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Time and cost however scotched this plan, and the actual outcome was more modest: ten women departed from Istanbul, the city that marks the juncture between Asia and Europe, on 13 April and arrived in The Hague on 21 April.
Listening to the travellers soon after their arrival, I began to understand that it was by no means just incidental that the motivation for the peace train came in part from Australia. Del Cuddihy told me, ‘It’s something we’ve learned from the indigenous peoples of Australia. They continually stress the importance of land, of connectedness to the land. We wanted to travel by train because we wanted to feel the land under our feet, to tread it. It’s only by walking on the others’ soil that you get to know them, have conversations, learn their culture’.
