Remembrance Day: Changing faces at the timeless Shrine
Smoke from a canon salute mixed with the embers from a welcome to country, as the crowd gathered at the Shrine of Remembrance’s 90th anniversary. Watch the livestream.
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The more Melbourne changes around it, the more the Shrine remains the same — an island of calm and contemplation in peaceful parkland near what was once a graceful boulevard.
But the sunshine bathing the Remembrance Day gathering at the Shrine’s 90th anniversary on Monday didn’t disguise the fact that it is a giant gravestone, conceived in sorrow by a young nation that had lost the flower of its youth.
The Shrine Of Remembrance represents the 60,000 Australians who lost their lives in World War I, almost a third of them Victorians.
The figures are brutal. When Australia had a total population of fewer than five million, exactly 416,809 enlisted to go to Gallipoli, the Western Front and the Middle East.
Roughly speaking, close to one in three men of fighting age went to war. One in seven of them didn’t return, and those that did limp off troop ships carried scars, physical and mental, inflicted by industrial-scale warfare never seen before.
As one speaker reminded the respectful crowd on Monday, only two Australians were brought home to be buried from “the war to end all wars.”
Stream the Shrine’s Remembrance Day service live below or on the Herald Sun Facebook page and see the order of service here.
One was a general, buried at Duntroon Military College. The other was the Unknown Soldier, whose body was chosen randomly from the battalions of unidentified dead, those whose graves in France are marked “A soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God.”
Whoever he was, the Unknown Soldier triggered one of the finest speeches ever written. Prime Minister Paul Keating got to read Don Watson’s words at the Australian War Memorial in 1993. They still echo today.
Among the flawless lines is the one later chiselled into stone: “He is all of them. And he is one of us.”
Elsewhere in that speech, Watson’s Keating says: “This Australia and the Australia he knew are like foreign countries. The tide of events since he died has been so dramatic, so vast and all-consuming, a world has been created beyond the reach of his imagination.”
Three decades later, that rings more true than ever. The vast crowd that gathered in 1934 to see the Shrine open on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month would not, 90 years later, recognise much except the monument’s timeless shape.
There were 300,000 of them that day, a sea of sombre faces stretching in every direction: the equivalent of three Grand Final Crowds, almost a third of the Depression-era Melbourne’s population.
As Patsy Adam-Smith wrote in the opening pages of her classic The Anzacs, the children of the 1920s and 1930s grew up in the shadow of the Angel of Death — “We almost heard the beating of his wings.”
To borrow more of her words to describe the mourners who gathered at the Shrine in 1934, they “were the generation whose fathers, uncles, and sometimes elder brothers were either dead, or ‘returned men’ …”
That was only 15 years after the war, and seven years after two architects, both returned soldiers, won a national competition to design a monument worthy of a generation of dead and injured.
They are all long gone now, likewise Second World War veterans. On Monday, there was a sprinkling of returned service people from modern wars and campaigns and missions, but they were outnumbered by relatives and friends and members of the public who come to pay their respects from a sense of custom and duty, perhaps even curiosity.
Every public spectacle attracts passers by and rubbernecks, camera phones out to record the occasion, and Monday at the Shrine was no different. But the sheer range of attendees shows the diversity of a modern Australia that would have bewildered the Unknown Soldier and his Digger mates.
Standing along the concrete barricades on Monday were a row of very different people.
First, a wiry tunnel-construction worker in an orange high-vis shirt and safety boots, who had obviously raced up from working underground nearby. You can imagine him rolling a smoke or cracking in a trench in 1915.
Then there’s a pony-tailed, bike-riding tour guide who never misses Remembrance Day if he’s in his hometown. He has spent at least 20 Anzac Days taking Aussie tour groups to Gallipoli.
Next is a neat-looking Indian man with a crew cut and a navy tattoo on his forearm, standing at attention for the National Anthem.
Next to him, a traditionally-dressed Indian grandmother who might be his mother. Nearby, a young Asian woman in a face mask standing near a rangy denim-clad figure with plaited grey pigtail and motorcycle boots.
Scattered through the crowd are “old timers” wearing the poppies bought days ago, commemorating fathers and uncles and grandfathers and great grandfathers. The ranks of those who knew the “returned men” are thinning, too.
Twice an artillery piece is fired and a cloud of gun smoke wafts above the trees. But there is a different sort of smoke, too. The welcome-to-country “smoking ceremony” is part of the preamble, and is accompanied by an address on the beneficial properties of the gum leaves left smouldering in a brazier during the ceremony, wreathing the front rows of the audience in smoke and the chance of an asthma attack.
From gun smoke to gum smoke: Remembrance Day has altered in ways that might have bemused the Diggers who survived the horrors of trench warfare to see the guns fall silent on November 11, 1918. But the Shrine is still part of who we are and what we do.
Lest We Forget.
What is Remembrance Day?
Remembrance Day marks the end of World War I.
On this day 106 years ago France, Britain, the US and Germany signed an armistice halting four years of conflict.
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month Australians have paused for a minute’s silence to honour the soldiers who gave their lives in service to the country.
The red poppy – a symbol of Remembrance – is worn by many as tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
The poppy’s significance traces back to the battlefields where the flowers bloomed on the war-torn soil of the Western Front.
Where to commemorate Remembrance Day in Melbourne
This year the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne will hold a special service marking the 90th anniversary of the Shrine.
The tribute to those who served Australia will be broadcast live to the Big Screen at Fed Square.
Where to commemorate Remembrance Day in Victoria
Remembrance Day services will take place across the state – including free public events hosted at local RSL clubs.
Australians are encouraged to ‘remember to remember’ by purchasing a red poppy, donating to the Poppy Appeal or by taking a minute of silence at 11AM to reflect on the sacrifices made by those who fought for freedom.
Originally published as Remembrance Day: Changing faces at the timeless Shrine
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