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Over the course of my own life, our commemoration of the service of those who have gone before us has dramatically changed.
I distinctly remember attending the dawn service on ANZAC Day in the early 1980s at the Shrine of Remembrance, and it was far from crowded. One didn’t need to arrive too early to be close to the eternal flame.
In my own 13 years of schooling that concluded in 1990, we only glanced across the events of Australia and Australians at War.
Yet by the late 1980s and early 1990s, crowds has started to increase.
We now ensure our children are taught about Australia and Australians at War in our classrooms.
Every year I attend the dawn service at East Keilor RSL, only a few blocks from where I grew up.
That particular memorial didn’t even exist until 1995, yet now that service thousands attend every year.
I have reflected upon this development every ANZAC Day, and particularly this centenary anniversary, and I think it is partly due to the passing of those who lived through and experienced the horror of war and, indeed, its aftermath as people returned home with injuries both visible and unseen.
Commemoration of such events is in some ways much easier for those of us without direct memory of the horrors of war, loss of spouses and children or even living with post-war trauma.
Yet as those with personal experience pass with time, the Australian community has a hunger to better understand their experiences and their motivation, and particularly their courage.
While we have had thousands of fellow Australians serve in overseas conflicts and peacekeeping operations over the last three decades, it is also true to say my generation has been the first blessed without the experience of mass war and its direct impact upon all Australians.
No Great War with its unprecedented loss of life; no threat of invasion of our shores only a generation later; not even the threat of conscription for the sons of that generation.
I cannot help but think that the fact that there is not a direct experience of such conflict for the great majority of Australians is what drives this appetite to understand the sacrifice of previous generations.
Because, to be brutally honest, it is inconceivable to the great majority of Australians who have never experienced it.
In the era before Wikipedia and the internet, when even books were expensive items for many households, when many had only completed basic schooling, the sacrifice seems so greater because it really was taking a step into a great unknown in so many ways.
And while we rightly commemorate that a century ago this young nation offered up an extraordinary proportion of its young men and women to serve, each of these is an individual story, as it is for each family.
Just as we now better understand the trauma of those who did return, and we are unveiling this partly forgotten history, we are also better at understanding the role and contribution of the many women who served, and indeed our indigenous solders who we did not, as a nation, treat with the respect they and their contribution rightly expected.
Fully commemorating and respecting the sacrifice of those who served and its impact on our then young nation is about understanding it at this level as well, the level of towns, communities and families
Many thanks for the opportunity to join you at this important event this morning.
Lest we forget.