11 November 2013
Remembrance Day 2013
Speech by Matt Anderson, Australian High Commissioner to Solomon Islands
We gather at this hour, and on this day, to commemorate the moment, 95 years ago, when the guns of the Western Front fell silent.
The Armistice brought to an end what became known as the Great War. Unprecedented in scale, it saw the mobilisation of 70 million people across the globe. Its violence too was unprecedented, as the industrial age ushered in new ways of destroying one another, on land, at sea and for the first time, from the air, with ever more brutal efficiency.
Thirteen million people died, nine million of them combatants. Over one-third of all the soldiers killed were “missing”, or had no known graves.
Three hundred and thirty-two thousand Australians fought in the Great War. Sixty thousand died, 45,000 of them on the Western Front, and 152,000 were wounded.
This Devil’s arithmetic meant that only one out of every three Australians who went to the war got through it unscathed. At least physically. And out of a population of only four million, Australia had suffered amongst the highest casualties in the British Empire.
Such were its horrors; the First World War was thought to be ‘the war to end all wars’. Alas, we had short memories, and we were to see global conflagration again within two short decades.
The bronze plaques at the Australian War Memorial now count the loss of more than 102,000 Australians in the last century, and in the wars and peacekeeping and other operations of the 21st century.
Today, we gather to commemorate those who have served, suffered and died in all conflicts. We try and count the cost.
But as Historian Geoffrey Blainey said, “How can you measure the real cost to Australia of all those talented people who would have become Prime Ministers and premiers, clergy men, engineers, teachers, doctors, poets, inventors and farmers, the mayors of towns and the leaders of trade unions and the fathers of another generation of Australians”
We can’t. But we can and we must honour them.
We honour them today, in our silence. And afterwards, when we leave this place, we must honour them in our thoughts, our deeds and our determination that their service and their sacrifice – recorded on the Roll of Honour in Canberra, or the Memorial to the Missing at Mennin Gate, and indeed on this magnificent tribute to the Solomon Scouts and Coastwatchers - will forever be the standard against which we will measure ourselves.
Lest we forget.