I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
I would like to acknowledge David Pearson and Chloe Pearson, family of Flying Officer Charles Edward Suffren.
I also acknowledge the Leader of the Opposition, and all my colleagues from across the parliament;
Air Marshal Robert Chipman, representing the Chief of the Defence Force;
Major General Greg Melick, National President of the RSL;
The Honourable Kim Beazley, Chair of the Council of the Australian War Memorial;
Matt Anderson, Director of the Australian War Memorial;
Vice Admiral Mark Hammond, Chief of Navy;
Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, Chief of Army;
Air Marshal Stephen Chappell, Chief of Air Force;
We come together here at the start of each parliamentary year in remembrance and respect.
We come because we share a solemn duty to reflect on our debt to all who have put on the uniform and served in our name, and to all who serve now.
It is a debt whose scale is written in the faces of our veterans.
It is measured in places made hallow by the bodies of our fallen – from battlefield to seabed.
And it is weighed in the stones that stand sentinel over graves in military cemeteries across the world, silent testament to all we have lost.
Some bear names, many do not. Some ache with messages from loved ones, words of parting chiselled into tombstone they knew they would never see.
The power of those messages is untouched by time – from Port Moresby, where the final resting place of Private Bruce Stanton bears the inscription:
“Beautiful memories of my only son, so loved, so mourned."
To Gallipoli, where Lance Corporal William O’Bree is mourned forever in the devastating simplicity of five words:
“We miss him at home.”
Then there is the grave of Private Frank Roberts.
Private Roberts fought at the Battle of Hamel under Monash – the first time Australian soldiers fought alongside US infantry.
He so very nearly made it to the Great War’s end and the long journey home to his wife that they must have both dreamed of over and over.
Then at Mont St Quentin, scarcely two months before the Western Front finally fell silent, Private Roberts was felled by an enemy bullet.
Over the coming years, his father would go on to pour his grief into an ever growing pile of scrapbooks, a towering paper monument to the symmetry of love and grief.
Yet the inscription on Private Robert’s gravestone is a reminder of something brighter, his family choosing a line from one of his letters home.
A line that would stand as well for him in death as it did in life. It reads:
“Not lonely with the boys I’m one of the Aussie family here.”
For amid war’s bleak rhythm of fear, boredom and horror, there was a camaraderie no enemy could ever crush.
So as we gather here, we think of that spirit that has carried every Australian who has answered the call through the decades.
We think of every place Australians have stood and every place they have fallen, all of it mapped out in our hearts in an atlas of loss and sacrifice.
And we think of the multitudes cast into the ranks of the unknown soldier as they were torn from life.
As we vow in the Ode of Remembrance, we remember them at the going down of the sun.
For it is perhaps then, as day yields to night, that we can let ourselves imagine them most clearly, gathering about us at the edge of the light.
All those faces, all those voices. Every street that once rang with their youth. Every household whose collective heart beat louder with their presence.
Households that grew quieter when war called them away.
As the sun’s glow fades from the sky, we remember them – not as photographs held distant by dust and sepia, nor as a cenotaph’s solemn rollcall – and we hold them in our hearts.
We remember every time they stood tall against the nightfall of humanity.
We remember every hope they carried for a brighter dawn.
And as the rays of the sun come to warm us once again, we remember them in the morning.
Lest we forget.