Radio Australia Today Editorial

A Day of Contrasts

25 April 2008

Today is ANZAC Day here in Australia and New Zealand.

It’s day that we commemorate the soldiers that have fought and fallen in wars across the years. We gather, we pay homage, we simply remember.

Riding into work this morning in the early hours I went past the ANZAC Day service held at Melbourne’s War Memorial. The crowds were enormous. The memorial is huge, but people still had to spill onto the road, and thousands more were still on their way there with their children and the occasional dog, all wanting to share the time and to remember people who would never be able to live in the goods times, or have children, or walk dogs to memorials on frosty early mornings.

The same scene was happening right across Australia and New Zealand. The images are stark, like in this scene in Sydney’s Martin Place Cenotaph:

The faces of the former soldiers get older by the year. I remember as a kid seeing the first world war veterans march, and they were still reasonably spritely men. Back then, the world war two soldiers were barely into middle age. Now we are almost to the last of the Gallipoli diggers, and those older faces are of soldiers from ‘modern’ wars in Korea and Malaya and Vietnam. The pain on the faces doesn’t change though. They remember the friends they loved and trusted with their lives. They remember them every year. Perhaps they remember them every day.

Back to my cycle trip. My trip to work also takes me down Melbourne’s Chapel St, and while the thousands were at the war memorial, others, the pretty young things, were using ANZAC Day to be a nothing more than a holiday, a chance to spend all night in bars and clubs. These people I saw too, dressed in their high heels and sweet little nothings trying to get into clubs past the clubbers who are leaving, intoxicated and bilious. Not a pretty sight, and watch where you step.

A contrast indeed, and only two kilometres from the war memorial.

The thing that mollifies me is the fact that the number of people at the shrine was far greater than the number in the club precinct.

I reckon the people at the memorial feel a lot better this morning too.