Record crowd for Canberra War Memorial Anzac service
A record crowd has marked the 100th anniversary of the ANZAC landings in the pre-dawn cold at Canberra’s Australian War Memorial.
Thousands of people spilled out from the memorial onto ANZAC Parade - which features a series of separate memorials to past wars and servicemen and women - to mark the centenary of Australia’s first conflict.
Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison used his commemorative address to reflect not directly on what the horrors experienced in war by Australia and New Zealand troops but on the terrors they faced when they returned home.
Liet-Gen Morrison said while the ANZAC generation seemed distant to the Australians of today.
“They are a generation seemingly set apart and in one sense they are,” he said.
“The certainties … of 1914 had been washed away in waves of loss,” he said.
On coming home, troops had faced changes in their own lives, among their family and friends, and in a community that had also been scarred by events in Europe.
There was a “strangeness” about the world to which they had returned, be it from their own wounds to such things as children they had never met.
Liet-Gen Morrison said these changes, in themselves and in their home, must have been confronting for the returned service men and women.
“If war is a sin against humanity .. Then war itself is punishment for that sin,” he said.
But despite those differences between then and now, there was a connection between the ANZAC generation and today’s.
That connection was the series of wars and battles, from Gallipoli to Long Tan to Afghanistan, in which Australian soldiers had fought.
Attending events like the dawn service, 100 years after that landing in Gallipoli, linked Australians to the past.
“We have not forgotten and we are in part defiend by our act of remembrance,” he said.
Ahead of the service, Victoria Cross recipient Daniel Keighran - who was awarded the honour for his actions during the Battle of Derapet in Afghanistan in 2010 - read excerpts of diaries from Australian soldiers who served through WW1.
The names of the more than 60,000 Australians to have died in war will be illuminated on to the memorial - built to mark WW1 and opened during WW2 - from today until 2018 to mark the end of the Great War.
