The Australian War Memorial is one of Canberra’s greatest treasures. It is a fitting backdrop for the moving dawn service and subsequent formal wreath laying ceremony and march past by veterans. Each country commemorates its war dead in slightly different ways, although with equal dignity. As I laid the British wreath I noted that the poppies we use on Remembrance Day in Britain to evoke the WW1 battlegrounds of Flanders are a little different from the New Zealand ones. And many Australian attendees were wearing a sprig of the herb rosemary for remembrance.
Whenever I attend remembrance services, I’m always reminded of what King George V said when he opened the Tyne Cot war graves in Flanders in 1922 “I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.”
Prime Minister Julia Gillard wasn’t in Canberra this year, she was actually at Gallipoli in Turkey, where she movingly described the ANZACs as “our first act of nationhood in the eyes of a watching world, an act authored not by statesmen or diplomats, but by simple soldiers.” This is a sentiment widely shared by Australian people, as can be seen by the strong public support for the Diggers currently serving in Afghanistan alongside comrades from Britain and other allies.