From the Pastor – Anzac Day 2009

As a child I grew up in Queensland (although I am quick to add that I was born in Melbourne.) One of my abiding memories is standing on the usually hot bitumen of the quadrangle at Upper Mt Gravatt Primary School on Anzac Day. The 400 plus students would fall silent as the flag was raised and the Last Post was played. While we had only a vague notion of what happened on the shores of Gallipoli we knew that respect should be shown and that something significant in the soul of Australia happened in that place.

It came as a surprise to me some years later to discover that Gallipoli was in fact in Turkey. As a child it never dawned on me that this war was fought on foreign soil. For some reason I thought that Gallipoli was a part of Australia and that the Anzacs were heroic because they were defending my country. Later investigation unveiled the fact that they were fighting not for Australia but for the British Empire, those “pink bits” on the maps many of us grew up with in our school classrooms.

In recent years the Gallipoli “myth” has grown. Some have promoted the idea that Australia came of age on the fatal shores of Turkey and that this was a defining moment in Australian history; an experience of what it means to be truly Australian. While I don’t want to engage the wrath of the RSL or the Department of Veteran Affairs, it is important to recognize that the Gallipoli story excludes the majority of Australians.

In 1915 on those shores there were no women, no indigenous Australians (in fact there were some Aboriginals who enlisted and had to lie about their race because the Australian army did not accept them and when their race became know they received no post war assistance from the Australian government.) There were no pacifists which were a significant minority in 1915. We forget that this was a very unpopular war. Two civilized nations, Germany and Britain faced off against each other over a diplomatic incident. The catalyst for the war was the 28 June 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Austria-Hungary's resulting demands against the Kingdom of Serbia led a series of alliances which within weeks saw all of the major European powers at war. As a consequence of the global empires of many European nations, the war soon spread worldwide.

World War one was about Empire. It was a brutal and violent foray that led humanity to the depths of misery. It should have been the war the ended all wars. Sadly it was not. War in all its shapes and forms should not name us. It is true that people do courageous things in war. But at what cost? What names us is our capacity to live at peace with those around us; our creativity and our ingenuity to stop wars and find ways to bring harmony to our planet. That’s what it means to be human and Australian. “Blessed are the peacemakers” was spoken by the Prince of Peace, by the one who when confronted by violence and evil, chose the creative way of non-violence.

If Australia meets a defining moment of coming of Age then the role played by Australian delegation lead by Doc Evatt in writing the Charter of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 is such a moment. We can be proud that Australia, almost single-handedly championed Universal Human Rights in an attempt to create a world in which war would be no more. Pray God that day will come soon.

Christopher

(Rev. Dr. Chris Page, East Doncaster Baptist Church, Melbourne).