Today is Remembrance Day;
the 11th day of the 11th month.
In many ways it’s a more solemn occasion then that other day in April when we remember those who didn’t return from war.
In the last few years Anzac Day has almost become a circus. Each media outlet seeming to outdo the other with hyperbole and jingoism and gawkish sentiment.
Give me the the quiet reflection of Remembrance Day where, if you listen you can hear what the dead have to say.
In the the jostle of crowded Dawn services or the clamor of noisy parades their voices are drowned out.
We visited the Australian War memorial only a few months ago and you can’t help but be moved by the dignity of the place – it’s hallowed ground.
You walk in past the two stone lions from Yipres that guard the entrance. From there you can choose to walk between the Pools of Reflection flanking the Courtyard or climb the stairs to the Two long Cloisters that frame the Roll of Honor. At the end is the Hall of Memory and within, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is here at the entrance that you will find the transcript of the speech that Paul Keating delivered back in 1993, the Eulogy to an Unknown Soldier .
Paul Keating was in my opinion a titan of his party, which in turn is my party; the Australian Labor Party. I consider him one of our greatest PM’s (though the unwashed masses will never acknowledge that). He was a complicated man. Not the populist that philandering buffoon Bob Hawke was. A man full of contradictions, a leader that people found it difficult to warm too. He was an unabashed intellectual that loved “those beautiful straight lines of logic”. A swaggering bar room debater that would take on all comers in Parliament yet also a sensitive speaker with an abiding appreciation of the delicacy and the power of the spoken word. His more famous Redfern Speech probably better illustrates the strength of his oratory but this Eulogy is equally moving:
“We do not know this Australian’s name and we never will .
We do not know his rank or his battalion. We do not know where he was born, or precisely how and when he died. We do not know where in Australia he had made his home or when he left it for the battlefields of Europe. We do not know his age or his circumstances – whether he was from the city or the bush; what occupation he left to become a soldier; what religion, if he had a religion; if he was married or single. We do not know who loved him or whom he loved. If he had children we do not know who they are. His family is lost to us as he was lost to them. We will never know who this Australian was.
Yet he has always been among those we’ve honoured. We do know that he was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the Western Front; one of the 416,000 Australians who volunteered for service in the First World War; one of the 324,000 Australians who served overseas in that war and one of the 60,000 Australians who died on foreign soil; one of the 100,000 Australians who have died in wars this century. He is all of them. And he is one of us.
This Australia and the Australia he knew are like foreign countries. The tide of events since he died has been so dramatic, so vast and all-consuming, a world has been created beyond the reach of his imagination.
He may have been one of those who believed the Great War would be an adventure too grand to miss. He may have felt that he would never live down the shame of not going. But the chances are that he went for no other reason than that he believed it was his duty; the duty he owed his country and his King.
Because the Great War was a mad, brutal, awful struggle, distinguished more often than not by military and political incompetence; because the waste of human life was so terrible that some said victory was scarcely discernible from defeat; and because the war which was supposed to end all wars in fact sowed the seeds of a second, even more terrible war–we might think this Unknown Soldier died in vain.
But, in honouring our war dead, as we always have, we declare that this is not true. For out of the war came a lesson which transcended the horror and tragedy and the inexcusable folly. It was a lesson about ordinary people – and the lesson was that they were not ordinary. On all sides they were the heroes of that war; not the generals and the politicians but the soldiers and sailors and nurses – those who taught us to endure hardship, show courage, to be bold as well as resilient, to believe in ourselves, to stick together.
The Unknown Australian Soldier we inter today was one of those who, by his deeds, proved that real nobility and grandeur belongs not to empires and nations but to the people on whom they, in the last resort, always depend.
That is surely at the heart of the Anzac story, the Australian legend which emerged from the war. It is not a legend 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. It is a democratic tradition, the tradition in which Australians have gone to war ever since.
This Unknown Australian is not interred here to glorify war over peace, or to assert a soldier’s character above a civilian’s, or one race or one nation or one religion above another, or men above women, or the war in which he fought and died above any other war, or one generation above any that has been or will come later.
The Unknown Soldier honours the memory of all those men and women who laid down their lives for Australia. His tomb is a reminder of what we have lost in war and what we have gained.
We have lost more than 100,000 lives and with them all their love of this country and all their hope and energy.
But we have gained a legend: a story of bravery and sacrifice and, with it, a deeper faith in ourselves and our democracy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian.
It is not too much to hope, therefore, that this Unknown Australian Soldier might continue to serve his country – he might enshrine a nation’s love of peace and remind us that in the sacrifice of the men and women whose names are recorded here there is faith enough for all of us.”
– The Honorable Paul John Keating
Made oF White 