Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Prime Minister for his words. Like the Prime Minister, like thousands of Australians and, in particular, like those amazing widows of the First World War veterans, I had the honour of attending the commemorations at Gallipoli last month. I wish to congratulate all who have worked so hard to commemorate the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. The Anzac Centenary Advisory Committee, chaired by Sir Angus Houston, worked in partnership with the former Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Warren Snowden, and the current minister, Senator Ronaldson, in setting up and implementing the architecture for commemorating the Centenary of Anzac as well as the program to commemorate the period of the Great War until Armistice Day 2018 centenary.

I think it is also important, as the Prime Minister has done, to recognise and thank the role of all the departments of government, including the Department of Veterans' Affairs in undertaking on our behalf to ensure that the Anzac commemoration events were so well organised.

I pay tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Australians who attended events commemorating the event of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli. I also acknowledge the work of Lindsay Fox and his committee to raise a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that the celebrations could be done in the best possible way.

I wish to pay tribute to the staff of the Australian embassy in Turkey who were so helpful to so many of our people. I can assure those listening of the absolute professionalism of that organisation—the experience for Australians to commemorate this most important event in Australian history. It was done to a level which would satisfy all. It was a massive logistical effort. It was a vivid, dignified and very Australian experience that allowed us to see and imagine the history made there a century ago.

Like many Australians, I have read a lot about the landing over the years. But, like every Australian who has ever visited Anzac Cove, I found that nothing prepares you for surveying the span of Anzac Cove and those very steep cliffs. You see for yourself the sheer rocky impossibility of scaling and seizing not one, not two, but three ridge lines. You imagine the prospect that confronted our young men so far from home in the chill dawn of 25 April 1915. And seeing and realising that reminds you that, in some part of their being, those first Anzacs must have known this too—the difficulty of their mission. There can be no courage without a fear to conquer. As they grasped the task before them, in their heart of hearts, these volunteers—these citizen soldiers determined to do their duty—must have clamped down their fear and charged on, despite that ferocious enfilade fire from a determined opponent fighting to defend their homeland.

When Patsy Adam-Smith was researching her famous history of Gallipoli, The Anzacs, she said the worst part of reading soldiers' diaries was 'all those empty pages'. A string of entries full of humour, understated bravery, loyalty for mates, love for those left behind—then, as she wrote:

And there is no more. You turn the pages quickly: perhaps he's only wounded, he'll write when he gets to hospital. But you are on to the back cover before you see his hand again: 'In the event of my death I wish this book to be sent to my Dear Wife to let her know that my last thoughts were of her and Essie my darling daughter …

Australia bore these empty pages for a generation. In his book Farewell, Dear People, Ross McMullin writes of the exceptional Australians lost in the carnage and chaos of the Gallipoli campaign. At 31, Clunes Mathison was already an internationally acclaimed researcher. The director of the Lister Institute in London remarked, 'No man I have ever known possesses the genius for research so highly as Mathison'. At the time, one British professor wrote, 'For the science of medicine throughout the world, the loss is irreparable.

Robert Bage survived Douglas Mawson's expedition to Antarctica, leading a 300-mile sledge expedition in the windiest place on earth, the home of the blizzard. One scientist in the party said of Bage, 'He is the best liked man on the expedition, and personally I think he is the best man we have.' Bage too was killed in the first fortnight of Gallipoli. Their bodies still lie there, alongside thousands more; empty pages and lives of potential and possibility cut short or left unfulfilled.

In one of those twists of families that we all know well, the last Sunday before I left for the commemorations, I was chatting with an older member of my family tree at a christening—as one does. I told him I was visiting Gallipoli. He revealed to me that he had two uncles who were killed there: Private William Burgess who was killed on 28 April 1915, and his younger brother Nathaniel, 21, who was killed at the end of November, barely two weeks before the evacuation. He is buried at Embarkation Pier cemetery. As Uncle Brian explained, the family never recovered: the family broke up and the father left, leaving a mother wracked by grief. The two younger sisters—the youngest being Brian's mother—were placed in foster care. The family was literally wrecked. For those two split seconds in seven months on the other side of the world, he said, his family was damaged for two generations.

When I visited the cemetery at Lone Pine, I saw the wall which records the names of over 3,000 Anzacs whose bodies have never been recovered. I found the name of William Burgess, 16th Battalion, AIF. Placing a poppy next to these letters, mutely carved in stone, moved me in a way that I could never have expected. And the Burgess story is just one amongst 60,000. In that first war, 60,000 young men were lost to an even younger nation. It was a generation of children who never knew their parents; young widows who grew old with grief; and hundreds of thousands more who came home but were never whole again. They were forever changed by the hardship they had faced and overcome; the wounded, unable to return to the jobs they left behind; soldier settlers stretched by a hard land they battled to tame.

There were all those who carried the hidden scars of trauma: the husbands and fathers who could never find the words to tell the people they loved why things could never be the same again. Parents, wives and children welcomed home a different person to the one they had farewelled. We all know country towns and coastal towns where the lists of names etched into the weathered white stone seems impossibly long. I think we have all paused in front of honour roles in local halls where the surnames come not in ones but in twos and threes—the brothers who could not be separated; strapping sons lost to their families, sometimes in the same hour or day of the same chaos.

When we try to think of the trauma, the heartache and the inexplicable, unknowable horrors of this war, it is small wonder that for some Anzac Day is a time of mixed emotions. There have been some who felt the need to rage against Anzac Day, to repudiate the tragedy of war. But I prefer to believe that we have as a people embraced the true lesson of Anzac Day—not glorifying war but celebrating peace; acknowledging the waste and the futility of lost lives but paying respect to the resilience, courage, resolve and loyalty of those who risked and lost their lives for the mates they served beside and for the home that they loved. There is no-one left amongst us who knew firsthand the courage and chaos of 25 April 1915. Those left to grow old have gone too. Yet the Anzac story will always be part of the Australian story. The Anzacs will always speak to us for who we are and for who we wish to be.

I add my support to the former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer's campaign to honour General John Monash, an exceptional leader who, unlike so many others, learned the right lessons from Gallipoli; a leader who amongst his many proud accomplishments included the observation that he spent more time preparing for his battles than fighting his battles. In the coming years of commemorations, I would encourage all Australians to honour the memory of those who served by looking up into the branches of your family trees. Try to discover, if you can, the history of your family's service to find new personal meaning in the Anzac story—a legend, in the words of Keating, at the heart of our War Memorial:

It is a legend not of sweeping military victories so much as triumphs against the odds, of courage and ingenuity in adversity. It is a legend of free and independent spirits whose discipline derived less from military formalities and customs than from the bonds of mateship and the demands of necessity.

Learn and tell the story of ordinary people who found the courage to do the truly extraordinary. Learn and tell the story of our military sacrifice from this conflict through to the Second World War, Korea, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam, the peacekeeping roles in Iraq and Afghanistan and right now to our men and women serving in the Middle East. As a new generation, let's use the Centenary of Anzac to give new meaning to our most solemn national promise. Lest we forget.

Debate adjourned

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