Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am honoured to speak on this motion regarding the Anzac Centenary. I rise to pay my respects to the 60,000 Australians who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, the nearly 9,000 who died, the 20,000 who were wounded and the thousands more who carried the unseen scars of war for the rest of their lives.

At dawn on 25 April 1915, some 16,000 Australians and New Zealanders—the first Anzacs—surged ashore at Gallipoli in a place we now call Anzac Cove. We were an infant nation—the federation of Australia born just 14 years prior. As Paul Keating has reflected, the bloody battle at Gallipoli helped to 'distinguish us, demonstrating what we were made of'. He said:

Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition …

Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world – the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.

On Anzac Day this year, tens of thousands gathered at ceremonies and memorials across the electorate of Newcastle to pay their respects to our past and present servicemen and women. At dawn, some 43,000 people packed on to Nobbys Beach for the region's largest service, hosted by the Newcastle City RSL sub-branch. The service had a very special guest—a woman who was almost recognising her own centenary of Anzac. Elva Nairn, of Adamstown Heights, took up her usual position in the front row at the service for her 99th Anzac Day. Born just six days after our men stepped foot on the shores of Gallipoli, Elva rose again this year at 2 am to secure her treasured spot in the front row at Nobbys Beach, wrapped in a woollen scarf and beanie with a knitted poppy fastened to her coat. Of those gathered, she said:

… you could have heard a pin drop. You only have to look at all those people and know that the spirit is still alive, especially the younger people.

Elva celebrated her own centenary just six days after the service, and I look forward to seeing her in the front row again next year. Dawn services were also held in Shortland, Stockton, Hamilton and Beresfield, where large numbers of Novocastrians gathered to pay their respects. Other services were held at Cooks Hill surf lifesaving club, Merewether, Adamstown and Lambton. Many observed that the City of Newcastle was 'alive' all day and, as Elva recalled, so too was its Anzac spirit.

It is often the personal stories, however, that draw the deepest connection to the sacrifice of war. I would like to share with the House a remarkable story that was told at an Anzac service I attended at Callaghan college, Waratah, a high school in my electorate. The story was told by a teacher at the school, Julie Woollard, in loving memory of her father's cousin. John Woollard, known as Jack to most, enlisted in 1916 in Maitland, alongside Captain Clarence Jeffries VC, who was awarded a Victoria Cross. With the 34th Battalion, Jack headed to the battlefields of Europe. I would like to read an extract from a letter that young Jack wrote to Julie's grandparents from somewhere in Belgium, dated 2 August 1917:

Dear Uncle,

Many thanks for the long and interesting letter of May which I received yesterday.

I can imagine you all comfortably settled in your new home and wouldn't mind if I could drop in for an hour of two but I hope to call on you some day after the war.

Remember me to Edith and your bonnie boys. I am sure you will train them up to be good honest men who will never bring dishonour on their father's name. I am doing my bit to keep the name good.

I have just come out from a spell behind the line after 32 days in the trenches. I spent 9 days in the front line which I entered for the first time exactly on my birthday and I have had the good fortune to come through all without a scratch and apparently none the worse for this stint, although I was in many a hot "strafe" by the enemy's artillery and under shellfire all the time, while I suffered no small amount of hardship and bad times generally because of the frequent wet weather we had to put up with.

I was surprised to find how much a man can stand without serious consequences in the way of loss of sleep and wet feet with his nerves at high tension continually.

I fancy you learnt some of those hard lessons in your droving days.

I was on a Lewis gun team so I was stationed at the most advanced parts of the line in our sector, and for periods of 24 hours on three different occasions, our team with another and some bombers, held a strong point about 50 yards in advance of the front line. One night there was a strafe on by Fritz's artillery when we had a hot time but he missed us all, although his high explosives, pineapples, Ninnies, shrapnel and whizzbangs dropped very close. Although the bursting shells have a way of putting the wind up men yet there's a grand thrill in it all which makes the blood run as long as you don't get hit.

A few of our men were killed and a large number wounded, and put out of action with shell shock as Fritz kept up a continual bombardment of our own sector as it was more advanced than the rest of the line.

Two days after we came out there was a big advance along our front extending from the river Lys to the coast so we just missed out on the 'hop over the bags'. As far as we know we will have a few weeks rest before going back into the trenches.

Today I commenced a course in Signalling, learning the Morse code, so I suppose the next time I go into the trenches I will go, not as a Lewis Gunner or rifleman but as a signaller which will be more in my line as all messages are sent by telephone while the wires remain unbroken, and by Morse lamp if the wires are out.

The weather here has for some days past been unpleasantly wet and rather cold, in spite of the season. I am afraid we are in for a cruel time if we have to spend a winter here.

No one will hail the day of peace with more real joy than the boys of the front and I know it now. So, in the hope that that glad day will soon come and that He who watches over all and slumbers not, nor sleeps, will care for you and yours and me and mine and shortly bring us all together again in peace and happiness.

I am,

Yours fervently, Jack

Tragically, Jack was one of 25,000 men who died during the Battle of Passchendaele, in Belgium, just two months after writing this letter. He never got to see his uncle's new home or those bonnie boys or rejoice in that day of peace he and so many others longed for. I thank Julie and the Woollard family for kindly sharing Jack's story. It is the personal stories of men like Jack that help shape the Anzac legend as we know it today. As Paul Keating, many years later, was to so astutely observe:

What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity.

We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ‘ordinary people’ distinguished themselves by their latent nobility—

people like Jack Woollard. Lest we forget

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