Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Last month, as we do every year, we commemorated the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli. This year, the 100th anniversary, concentrated our minds most acutely on that war, on that campaign, on that bloody day. But we remembered also, as we always do, those who served and those who fell in other wars, and those who have returned, some much changed. Anzac Day has become, for Australia, the day each year when we mourn the lost and we honour those who have served, and all of those who still today serve, our nation in our armed forces. In the past few months, as we have marked the centenaries of so many milestones of that long-ago war—a war so savage and so all-consuming that it earned, for a while, the name 'the Great War'—we have all been reminded that for those who served, and for those who serve, war is not one day a year.

One hundred years ago this week, burial parties were working on the Gallipoli peninsula to inter those men who died in the Krithia valley in the battle which raged from 6 to 8 May 1915. Their graves are unknown. They are among so many of the dead of that war whose final resting place is still not known to us. Their stories, so many stories, are not complete. It has been a hundred years, but there is still more for us to learn about those men, about those battles and about that war. And, for those who are buried somewhere in that Krithia area, our responsibility to them is not yet complete. We should aim to find those final resting places and to mark them appropriately. There is still more we owe to the men who lost their lives and to the families who lived with their loss, including laying our lost to rest with honour.

One hundred years ago today, the brutal struggle on the Gallipoli peninsula was ongoing, and it would rage for many months more. The landing at Anzac Cove was Australia's first major involvement in a war which, in the following years, became known for that horrific waste of human life, for the suffering and slaughter on an industrial scale. But it was far from our last. The Gallipoli campaign was the bloodiest the world had then yet seen. The names, in English and in Turkish, of the landmarks of those battles tell the story: Hell Spit, the Ridge of Blood. In the years that followed, other names would become known for the horror and waste of war too: Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. But they and Gallipoli would be known too for the indomitable human spirit which can find a joke, a moment of beauty or a gesture of kindness even in such places and such times; for the poetry; for Simpson and his donkey; for the Christmas truce; and for the brief armistices on bloody battlefields to allow each side to bury and mourn their dead.

The men who served in the Dardanelles and in the campaigns that followed have become legends in the century since, striding across our national imagination, bolder and braver than soldiers of other nations, laconic larrikins. But they were not legends then; they were something far greater than legends. They were ordinary men.

They came from all around Australia. Some were born here, some born in other corners of the globe. Among them were the descendants of convicts and of currency lasses. Among them were immigrants and the children of immigrants from Scotland and Sweden, from Canada and China. And, despite the army rules designed to prevent indigenous Australians from enlisting, some among them were from our country's ancient and traditional custodians. Those Indigenous Australian Anzacs fought for a country that had little room for them and gave them little honour on their return. They fought also for the men, the mates, who were shoulder-to-shoulder with them among the shot and the shell. If their bravery and gallantry did not change the policies of government, it did change the minds of many men in the trenches with them, who saw them fighting and dying, as one white returned soldier would later write, 'like the grandest of white men'.

The Anzacs were mostly not professional soldiers. They came from city streets, from stockyards and from suburbs, and it was to them that those who survived returned, many of them with wounds visible and invisible. Every city, every suburb, every country town has its cenotaph and its list of local sons who never came home. If Gallipoli united us as a nation, it united us in grief as well as pride. If Gallipoli is a defining moment in our nation's life, it is not because the men who fought and fell were larger-than-life, mythic heroes. Their courage to charge and to stand fast was the courage of men, not of myths, and all the greater for it. Their refusal to take anything too seriously—not themselves, not their suffering and certainly not authority—was quintessentially Australian. Their tender kindnesses to each other, their loyalty and their sacrifice gave us our finest model of an ideal of mateship—those mates on the beaches, in the trenches, from all walks of life, from all around Australia and from all around the world.

Let us be inspired to not only admire them but to emulate them, to be as they were: their best selves even in the worst of times.

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