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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has delivered ANZAC Day speeches at Gallipoli.
Minister Warren Snowdon spoke at ceremonies at Villers-Brettoneux in France.
Shell-Shocked: Australia After Armistice, an exhibition at the National Archives of Australia, has been opened by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
The exhibition contains a selection of war records about the end of World War I, and how the Australian community dealt with the war’s after-effects.
Rudd mused on “what it is about ANZAC … which so moves the Australian mind and plumbs the depths of the Australian soul?” The answer is made up of many things, Rudd said, including the “grand narrative” of nations which resort to war.” But in Australia’s case, “it is the sheer dimension of the sign up”.
This is the text of Kevin Rudd’s Address at the National Archives:
What is it about this extraordinary conflict which so animates the Australian mind and so animates the Australian soul? We are all shaped by our own experiences and I am no different to anyone else in this room. [Read more…]
This is the text of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Commemorative Address at the Remembrance Day Service, held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Fellow Australians, friends of Australia, Veterans of Australia:
90 years ago today, the great guns fell silent.
After fours years of bloodshed, the battlefields were silent.
Great empires had been broken.
Millions, millions lay dead.
Among them, sixty thousand Australian heroes whose final resting place will forever be foreign soil.
And then there were the wounded a further one hundred and fifty thousand whose bodies and minds were to be forever scarred by the horrors of war.
And all this from a country of some four millions.
The scale of the carnage; the new ways of killing on an almost industrial scale; the tiny pieces of land over which so much blood was spilt; the sheer, stark horror of life and death in the trenches made all peoples hope that this could never happen again. [Read more…]