Anzac_ambo

HE Ambassador Peter Rowe, speech on 25 April 2008 ANZAC DAY


If you take the coast road around Turkey from Istanbul and continue on from ANZAC Cove, where many Australians will be going today, you’ll come to a town called Canakkale. From there you can divert along a side road to another beach outside the ruined walls of the once proud empire of Troy. There a large band of soldiers also landed some 3,000 years ago.

I was reminded of that decade of fighting all those millenia ago, reading again the other day Homer’s account of the funeral of the young warrior, Patroclus. What struck me re-reading that passage was just how young the participants in that war must have been. Achilles, his comrade, cuts off a lock of his hair and adds it to the funeral bier to accompany the dead soldier on his journey to the underworld.

Achilles could only do that because when he set out for Troy from his home in Greece, he had not yet come of age. It was the custom in Greece in those days for boys on attaining manhood, to shave their heads and dedicate their locks to the local deities that had protected them as they grew up.

Many of those men who landed at ANZAC Cove at dawn on 25 April ninety-three years ago were probably about the same age as Achilles and his comrades. And probably they were filled with the same youthful enthusiasm, high spirits and courage that Homer describes.

But they had come to Gallipoli on a nobler mission than had the Greeks to Troy. According to Homer, they were besieging the walls of Ilium because the impetuous Paris had abducted the famed Helen.

The ANZACs on the other hand were there to defend vital interests. They were there because of a deep sense of connectedness, and shared destiny, with countries with which they had common values and ideals. They were there because of a keen appreciation of the parlous consequences for their two countries if the wrong side won.

They were already aware of the stakes involved by the action Australian and New Zealand forces had had to take before setting out for Gallipoli. For to the north of Australia lay the German colony of Papua, and to the east Nauru. With those two possessions in hostile hands, the freedoms and values that these two young nations stood for would not have lasted long after the defeat of the allies in Europe.

Eight months before Gallipoli, ANZAC forces had distinguished themselves by seizing Papua and Nauru; while off the Cocos islands, the HMAS Sydney engaged the German raider, the Emden, successfully forcing it into shallow waters and sinking it.

The ferocity of the fight that morning in Gallipoli, and for the next eight months, was unimaginable. And bravery, fortitude, tenacity and fighting skill will not always guarantee victory when the odds are against you. Finally the ANZACs withdrew, having sustained massive losses. 7,000 graves mark the Australian losses in that battle. Remains of many of the New Zealand dead were never found, so destructive was the fighting.

But that battle signified for the many fighting there, and for Australians and New Zealanders back home, the coming of age of two young nations, then barely 14 years old. It marked their entrance on the world stage, it signalled that they had global interests to defend, and it recognised that influences far away could have a crucial impact on the future of their countries and people.

Happily for us that spirit of gallantry, of courage, and sacrifice lived on, to manifest itself quickly again in Flanders and on the Somme. By the end of the Great War, 18,000 New Zealanders and 59,000 Australians had lost their lives.

Happily that sense of connectedness, shared destiny and heritage also endured. That bravery, that consciousness went on to inspire ANZACs in subsequent defence of their country, in the Western and Pacific theatres in World War II, in Korea, in Malaya, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We owe our freedom, our countries’ independence of action, our prosperity and security to the spirit of courage, duty and sacrifice that those ANZACs showed that morning in 1915.

I can think of no more fitting commemoration to those brave souls than the words of another poet of empires gone, the writer and journalist, Rudyard Kipling, reflecting after his visit to the ANZAC memorial in Melbourne

On certain men who strove to reach
Through the red surf the crest that no man might hold,
And gave their name to a beach
Which shall outlive Troy’s tale when time is old.