After watching his veteran father plant it 90 years ago, John returns to a great elm at the Shrine

John Miller stands in the shade of a great elm, admiring the gladness of its new cloak of springtime foliage.

“It’s beautiful,” he says.

John Miller, 94, was four years old when his father and godfather planted the seedling of an elm that now stands grandly at the Shrine of Remembrance.Credit: Justin McManus

Ninety years ago, aged four, he witnessed his father and godfather, veterans of World War I, plant the seedling that would grow to become this sublime tree at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.

It was Armistice Day, November 11, 1934 – the day the Shrine was officially opened. World War I, in which 60,000 Australians died, had finished 16 years prior.

Captain George Hedley Miller, adjutant of the 5th Division’s 13th AFA.

The Age reported that 317,500 people – about one-third of Melbourne’s population at the time – attended the dedication ceremony of the new Shrine, performed by Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester.

Miller, now 94, will return to the Shrine – which now honours all Australians who have served in wars and peacekeeping operations – as a special guest for the Shrine’s 90th Remembrance Day Service on Monday.

He says he can’t remember much about the big day in 1934, beyond the impression that it was “grand and noisy with brass bands”.

But he recalls clearly that his mother told him he must pay attention to the tree-planting by his father and godfather because it was important.

A plaque still nestled at the elm’s base spells out the significance. It reads simply: “13th Field Artillery Brigade.”

Miller’s father, Captain George Hedley Miller, MC, and his godfather, Lieutenant-Colonel Hector Osman Caddy, CMG, DSO, were attached to the 5th Division’s 13th Field Artillery in World War I. Colonel Caddy was commanding officer, and Captain Miller was his adjutant.

Both survived the bloodiest 24 hours in Australian history, the Battle of Fromelles on the Western Front of northern France.

Australia’s 5th Division, newly arrived in France, suffered 5533 casualties on the hideous night of July 19-20, 1916.

Of these, nearly 2000 Australians were killed in the action or died of wounds, and 470 were captured.

The ill-conceived assault by the 5th Division and soldiers of the British 61st Division on a German stronghold, which served no purpose worthy of the name, was ordered by British commander Lieutenant-General Richard Haking, widely criticised as both callous and incompetent.

John Miller – who became a doctor and an officer of the Order of Australia, prominent in the fields of accounting, academia and the public sector over many decades – never forgot the story of Fromelles once he learnt of it and travelled to the site of the battle three times.

He was particularly moved by the work of Melbourne amateur historian Lambis Englezos, who led the campaign that famously uncovered during the first decade of this century the remains of 250 missing Australian and British soldiers in a mass grave near Fromelles.

Miller, a former student of Melbourne High School, where Englezos also studied much later, decided to establish a scholarship as a lasting memorial.

The annual Lambis Englezos Scholarship, inaugurated in 2013 by the then-governor-general Quentin Bryce, helps aid a Melbourne High School old boy pursuing undergraduate studies relevant to Australian-French relations.

Miller, who as a child attended the opening of the Shrine of Remembrance 90 years ago, will be guest of honour on Monday.Credit: Justin McManus

And so, as another Remembrance Day approaches, Miller muses on the long threads joining a story that for him began 90 years ago in the park below Melbourne’s grand new Shrine, and where today he can stand beneath a great tree that was, when he was an uncomprehending four-year-old child, a tender seedling.

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