Anzac Day
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
29 Apr 2007
Anzac Day has been part of my yearly cycle of celebrations for as long as I can remember; the only national day to rank anywhere near Christmas and Easter for me. Hearing the Last Post never leaves me completely unmoved.
As a Catholic priest I think of this day of remembrance differently from when I was young because the battles of World War Two as well as the prisoners of war camps were much closer then.
But I never thought Anzac Day glorified war. It always reminded us how terrible war is, but it also told our national story of courage, idealism, self sacrifice and national spirit. It would be a betrayal of the dead if the Anzac Spirit was smothered or forgotten here.
The Commonwealth of Australia was only a teenager, naďve and innocent when the Allied troops landed at Gallipoli. But the romance of war and the grandeur of Empire were changed irrevocably, when the scale of Australian losses, dead and wounded, hit home.
The equivalent of the 60,000 Australian dead of WWI would mean about a quarter of a million dead today; something beyond our imagining. It is no wonder that almost every small Australian town has its War memorial.
Anzac mythology has developed a life of its own, influenced by popular films such as Gallipoli and wonderful histories such as Les Carlyon’s on the Great War, as well as historical fact and contemporary political trends.
It is unusual for a defeat like the landings in Turkey to become the heart of a national mythology and even stranger that we know so little about the great Australian victories towards the end of WWI.
In the Great War 324,000 Australian volunteers fought overseas and 155,000 were wounded, as well as the dead; a casualty rate of two-thirds, the highest in the British Empire.
By 1918 the Australian survivors, with the New Zealanders and Canadians, were elite forces. They were centre stage, under Monash, fighting the best German divisions; a development which has never been repeated.
Before their last battle at Mont Brehain they fought 39 German divisions, almost destroyed several of them, liberated more than 100 villages and took 29,000 prisoners. That is not bad going.
Winston Churchill, still one of my heroes, didn’t much like Australians, clashing with both Prime Ministers Menzies and Curtin. He never visited us.
But in December 1918 he predicted that in one, or two, or three hundred years time when Australia will have “an enormous population”, these episodes from WWI would still be of intense interest and “that every family will seek to trace some connection with the heroes who landed on the Gallipoli-Peninsula, or fought on the Somme, or in the other great battles in France”.
So far it hasn’t worked out quite like that but these victories also deserve to be remembered with the Rats of Tobruk, the Kokoda Trail and Milne Bay.
