ANZAC DAY SPEECH Each year with the leadership of the very Reverend Father Steven Scoutas, St Spyridon Church holds a special ANZAC Day commemoration, in its role as a War Memorial church. Together with the University of New South Wales Army Regiment, the St. Spyridon Parish invites us to remember, and to honour the ANZACs. We thank the men and women of the Army regiment for their presence and participation in this solemn ceremony. The ANZAC soldier is synonymous with what it means to be brave, to be loyal, to be strong, faithful and resilient. The conduct of its soldiers at a critical time in human history, gave Australia its distinctive character as a nation. A character that reflects what is best in young people across time and place. When war broke out in 1914 Australia had been a federal commonwealth for only 14 years; and yet at the end of the World War 1 Australia and Australians became identified in the minds of people across the globe, with everything that is good and honorable. In our travels in the Middle East and Southern Europe, the news that my husband was from Australia, was greeted with warmth and affection, particularly by the older people who had met Australian soldiers in their youth. So who were these young men? Where did come from? How did they come to inspire a whole nation and to invoke in us today a blend of pride and sorrow when we remember them? Well, they were very much like the young men in this very Church. Optimistic and confident; Full of hopes and aspirations; with a strong sense of what means to be true friend, to be fair and just. The thing that strikes a traveler in Australia, from Adelaide to Perth; from the isolated homesteads in the outback, to Alice Springs; from the smallest
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settlements in the red heartland to Darwin; from Cairns to Sydney; from Sydney to Victoria is that no place is too small to have an ANZAC memorial. Men and boys from across Australia teemed to the Cities to enlist for the Great War, answering the call to arms, for King and country. In their enthusiasm some of them lied about their ages so that they would not miss out on the Great Struggle- the war to end all wars. For some, the trip to the city was the first time they had ever left the outback; the first time they ever got on a train; the first time they ever set foot in city. One can only guess at how they felt when they boarded the ships to places they may have seen only on black and white maps. No internet connection for them, no “whereis” and little access to visual images of the places for which they were destined; places with exotic names–Pozieres Tripoli, Gallipoli, Tobruck, Verdun, the Somme. It must have all seemed like a great, heroic adventure. Certainly nothing in their lives at home could have prepared them for awaited them. We do not even want to imagine the horrors they must have faced; fear and homesickness, disease, ever-present danger and death. And yet they fought like lions, they stuck by their friends and did their duty with a spirit that transcended those appalling events. Their own letters home typically played down the worst aspects of their experience, putting a brave face on everything. One soldier wrote back home: “ I knew I was not much hurt, for in the field we say a man is hurt when he's got a leg or two missing, or the side of his head off, whereas I'll be back again, I hope, before long.” It is from the nurses’ letters that we get the clearer picture of the realities of the battle front. Ella Tucker and Lydia King were nurses on the ships taking the wounded from Gallipoli to the Greek Islands of Imvros and Lemnos. They write:
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Every night there are two or three deaths, sometimes five or six; … each night is a nightmare, the patients’ faces all look so pale with the flickering ship’s lights. I shall never forget the feeling of hopelessness on night duty. It was dreadful. Shall not describe their wounds, they were too awful. One loses sight of all the honour and the glory in the work we are doing. 60,000 Australians and 18,000 New Zealanders died during that war. In the words of Charles Bean: They were men their countries could ill afford to lose. But with their lives they purchased a tradition beyond all human power to appraise, and set for all time the standard of conduct for the Australian and New Zealand soldier. We are here today neither to glorify war nor to pass judgment on those with the daunting responsibility to make the ultimate decisions on such matters. If the study of history teaches us anything, it is that it is easy to condemn the past, but difficult to learn from it. We know-after the event- that the end of the Great War did not end all wars. The first war was followed by the second, and then many others, in the Middle East, across Africa, in Latin and South America, the war in Vietnam, in Eastern Europe, in Afganistan, in Iraq, and so on. We pray for the safe return of our Australian soldiers who are in active service across the globe. And now that all the soldiers who survived the first world war have passed away, and just a few of the soldiers from the second world war are still with us, I think it is time to pay tribute to those who returned from those conflicts, as much as those who did not. If any generation had reason to be cynical, bitter and resentful, it would have been theirs. They had every excuse to become a burden on their loved ones and a drain on their country’s resources. But having survived the war,
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they refused to be defeated by life. Many took the trauma and devastation they had witnessed to their graves; choosing to bury these deep inside their hearts. In this way they sought to heal themselves and to spare their loved ones those dreadful things they had lived through. My father in law, served in Borneo and was awarded a medal as a crack sharpshooter, but he never spoke to his seven children or his wife about the war. The ANZACs came back determined to rebuild their families, their communities and their nation. And they did. With the help of their women, they did much more than survive. The same determination, integrity and bravery that had sustained them in war, made them heroes in a time of peace. As a generation I wonder how they would respond to us, to our addiction to self pity and self indulgent emotionalism; to the postmodern impulse to jump in front of the camera at every opportunity and make an exhibition of our feelings in front of the whole world. It seems to me that our responsibility to the returned soldiers is twofoldfirst to remember them and second to honour their memory by emulating their strength and stoicism in a time of war as well as in a time of peace; and to approach life’s challenges with restraint and good humour.
St. Spyridon College students and their families have shown that they do the first by their presence here today. In developing their Student Principles, they reflect their firm intention to do the second. Principle 3 reads: We (the Students of St. Spyridon College), work together to achieve a school community whose distinguishing characteristics are those of friendship, compassion and decency.
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Principle 7: We believe in the sacredness of human life and the dignity of every human person. And Principle 9: We respond to the difficulties of life with patience, dignity and faith, never fearing to start again. I would like to thank Father Steven and the Parish Committee for initiating the first Australian school trip to Gallipoli as part of the St. Spyridon Parish trip. As Head of St Spyridon College, I promise to keep alive the spirit of the ANZACs in our school, always trusting in the inherent integrity of young people to do what is right and what is good for themselves, their families and their country.
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