Anzac Day Address
Dawn Service, Doncaster RSL, April 25, 2022
We gather in the still of the morning, as we have done each year for over a century on the 25th April. It was a still morning like this, unknown to those about to be involved, that that the Anzac story was born. They were the Australian and New Zealand soldiers being rowed ashore on the Gallipoli Peninsula; at a place we now know as ANZAC Cove.
They came ashore that morning, the beating of their hearts matching the stroke of the oars. No sooner than wading to the shoreline, they were under enemy fire, machine guns spraying deadly bullets from the cliffs above the beach.
This baptism of fire began the story of the Anzacs. Nine months later, having secured the cliffs above the cove on which they landed, having fought a terrible trench war, during which thousands were killed and many more injured, they retreated, leaving Gallipoli Peninsula to their Turkish foes.
Many who survived went to the Western Front, the scene of the deadliest war in history. That ‘Great War’ dragged on for four years, leaving millions of people dead, a whole generation decimated. The cost to Australia was horrific. Four in ten males aged 18-44 enlisted of which some 60 per cent were killed or injured.
Over 112,000 young Victorians enlisted, including 42 from this area, then a rural, farming region on the outskirts of Melbourne. Thirteen of those local young men never returned. They lie in the gullies of Gallipoli, or in Flanders Fields, or some unknown places.
The stark recitation of the numbers of Australians killed and injured – and the proportion of the population they represented - explains why World War I had such an impact on the psyche of our young nation.
Although Australian had fought in the Boer War, the Great War left few families untouched by the events.
As the historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote in his Short History of the World: "From crowded apartments in Moscow to sheep farms in New Zealand there were millions of mantelpieces on which stood framed black-and-white photographs of earnest or smiling young men, killed in the war which everyone now called the Great War, not realising that a greater war was barely 20 years ahead.”
Why did thousands of young Australians venture half way around the world to fight a war in foreign soils. They answered a call to repel an aggressor, just as those who have walked in their footsteps - in the Indo Pacific, in Malaya, in Vietnam, in Timor Leste, in Afghanistan and elsewhere - have responded over the past century.
We honour their courage and the sacrifices of many more, the nurses and doctors, and the grieving families left behind.
Sadly, today we are reminded that those who seek aggression over peace remain in our world. We especially think this morning of the people of Ukraine in their time of trial.
We also know that closer to home there are some who would inflict violence upon others in pursuit of their totalitarian objectives. I say, as the former Minister for Defence, that the security of our region is in greater peril today than it has been for generations. Not since World War II – some 80 years ago – have we had to contemplate defending Australia, but we do. That makes our resolve urgent.
This is not celebration; it is a commemoration. War is horrific; it is a last resort, but there are occasions when justice, peace and liberty can only be preserved by standing up to totalitarianism, militarism and evil.
We join with hundreds of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders today – at major shrines in our capital cities, and at an untold number of memorials like this one in the towns and villages of our two nations. Today is an occasion to reflect of what is important; to remind ourselves of those ancient virtues of courage, wisdom and justice; to remember those who gave their lives, their health and their futures for freedom and liberty; and to re-commit ourselves to the cause of peace that they fought and died for.
Lest we forget.
