POPPY POWER!

LYNN AND MARGARET'S KNITTING PROJECT INSPIRED ANZAC TRIBUTES FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE

- Emma Levett

Mist rolled in and the sun started to dawn as Lynn Berry felt goosebumps rise across her arms. It was 5am and she was standing in a field of 26,000 poppies in the French village of Fromelles, the site of the WWI battle where more than 5500 Anzacs lost their lives.

“There were no words to describe the feeling I got,” Lynn, 66, tells New Idea while recounting the 2016 pilgrimage. “It was eerie and beautiful. At that moment I felt like this was the reason I’d been doing what I’d been doing for the last three years.”

In 2013, Lynn began knitting thousands of poppies as part of a project that has since garnered worldwide attention and inspired people across the globe to do the same.

“I never expected it to get so big,” Lynn says.

It started out just Lynn and her sister-in-law Margaret Knight. They wanted to make 250 poppies to honour their fathers’ war service.