High Commissioner addresses Anzac Day dawn service in London

“On this 98th anniversary of the Allied landings at Gallipoli, we gather at hundreds of dawn services around Australia and New Zealand; here in Britain; in the steaming heat of Papua New Guinea; in a chill morning of a Flanders field; at Fromelles and Villers Bretonneux, in Turkey and in ceremonies around the world. And on this day we honour a special relationship between Australia and New Zealand forged in mud and blood.

The statistics tell a stark story. During the First World War, 38.7 percent of the total male population of Australia, aged between 18 and 44, fought with a casualty rate of 65 percent, the highest of any country. It was a similar story with New Zealand. 42 percent of Kiwi males fought with a casualty rate of 58 percent. It was a conflict that helped define our identities as new nations as well as enshrine a bond between us that can never be broken.
Before ANZAC Day last year, a former New Zealand Prime Minister, Mike Moore, said in Washington, ‘crisis and hardship don’t just build character, they reveal character.’ He said no two nations have ‘sailed, marched and flown further to defend freedom than the ANZACs.’ And to our British friends, the inscription on this memorial poignantly reveals bonds of kinship far deeper and richer than any treaty or alliance. It reads: ‘Whatever burden you are to carry, we also will shoulder that burden’.

But at dawn this morning, in each of us saying our quiet and humble thank you, we mark the everlasting companionship between the living and the dead – a handshake across the void.
There are many ceremonies ahead of us. In a few months we commemorate the crucial Battle of the Atlantic. In August next year we honour the Centenary of the beginning of the Great War. The following year, the 100th ANZAC Day and in rapid succession during 2015, the 75th anniversary of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain and in the same year the 70th anniversary of VE and VP Days.

And so it will continue with memorial services the following year at the Somme, a battleground which alone claimed more than a million lives. Among them the writers, artists and musicians, the great engineers and doctors, the farmers, factory workers, the husbands and fathers who were not to be. We will sing the hymns and read their names engraved on memorial walls and headstones; the lost company of cheerful friends who have joined the silence for which we are all bound.