For a change, Instead of my own babbling, I am sharing the thoughts of the Rev. Graham Long of the Wayside Chapel.
"ANZAC Day absorbs me in all kinds of emotional conflict. I read recently of a fourteen-year-old soldier killed on Lone Pine and I was left wondering if he’d ever heard of Turkey, or if he wondered why a boy from Australia would seek to defend the British Empire by shooting Turkish people who had attacked no-one. I can’t bear any talk of “The glorious dead” and yet when I hear, “Lest we forget”, my soul is arrested into stunned silence. Unless we remember, an appetite for war can grow like a cancer that kills without any warning symptoms. It worries me that the two men with the worst haircuts in the world could easily bring on a conflict that would send young Australians off to unimaginable deaths, while they sing bright songs and naively worry that “all the fighting might be over before they even get to the battlefield”. How easily we are whipped up by our leaders into attitudes of ‘us and them’ and we forget that a dead German, a dead Turk, and dead Vietnamese, a dead Afghani, a dead Iraqi, a dead Korean, is just as tragic as a dead Australian. Lest we forget."
I was invited, in 2001, to give the Anzac Day address at the Cenotaph in Deloraine. It was a great honour and I had to think long and hard how to express what I felt: pointing to the futility of war without denigrating the sacrifice of those who served. I used Eric Bogle's song, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, as the theme. Here, 16 years later, war is still futile but we are being led by two megalomaniacs into another conflict which can only have devastating consequences .
Stop the world, I want to get off!
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