A short time ago, we joined together in that most solemn reminder:
Lest we forget.
Just three words, yet they hold within them such a profound power and dignity.
And what they tell us – year in, year out – is that memory is a conscious act.
It has to be tended as carefully as the eternal flame.
It must be passed from each generation into the care of the next.
For nearly eight and a half decades, the Australian War Memorial has kept memory alive and strong.
Memory of all who have served in our name.
Memory of all who have fallen.
That memory emanates from within these stone walls and spreads right across our continent, carrying with it the precious sense of the debt we all owe, and the gratitude we all feel.
The Australian War Memorial is one of our most precious national treasures.
It is a great honour to be here at the beginning of a new stage in its life with the opening of this new main entrance.
This is an addition that is both true to the spirit of the Memorial, and an enhancement of it.
It is a place of light.
It is a physical rendering of the Ode of Remembrance.
And in honouring Captain Reginald Saunders, the first Australian Aboriginal commissioned officer in the Australian Army, it honours a spirit of courage so deeply ingrained in this continent that all Australians can be proud.
When Prime Minister John Curtin opened the Memorial in 1941, the Second World War – in all its horror and calamity – was barely months away from coming over the horizon and reaching our shores.
Prime Minister Curtin said this place would bring us closer to the meaning of all the courage and sacrifice and faith that Australians had shown in the past – and would be so desperately needed in the coming years.
As he said, “This Memorial belongs, like the capital city itself, to all Australia.”
What this new entrance does is open the Memorial’s heart even wider to all Australia.
It is my great and humbling privilege to declare it open.