It's no exaggeration to say that after WW1 every town, every village and every suburb in Australia rushed to erect a memorial statue to honour our young men who went away and did not return. Such was the loss of life among the Australian Imperial Forces that we still have a significant imbalance in the ratio of men to women in our population 100 years later. Every single family in the country felt the loss of a loved one or someone close to them, and despite the fact that the war was being fought half a world away, it infiltrated and changed the lives of every Australian family.
The most popular form of statue erected on the memorials that exist in every town in Australia was the "Digger" resting arms. Because we buried our war dead in cemeteries on the other side of the world, our people had no funerals to attend and no cemeteries to visit. The Resting Digger statues came to represent the boys who would never come home and became the focus of remembrance day and ANZAC Day services. Every though ANZAC Day was several weeks ago, you can still see wreathes of flowers sitting respectfully at the base of these statues today all over Perth, and I suspect in cities and towns across the country. Over the years we have added more names and plaques to commemorate the fallen from subsequent conflicts, but these Resting Digger statues have come to symbolise the ANZAC Digger as one of the strongest and most revered icons in our culture.
In addition to statues, we also planted thousands of trees as commemorative "Avenues of Honour". The Avenue of Honour outside Ballarat in Victoria has a tree planted for every man from the local district who served in WW1 and it stretches for
22 kilometres.
I've visited the battlefields of France and Belgium and toured the hundreds of cemeteries and memorials that litter the countryside. They are peaceful and beautiful and they are a vivid reminder of the massive scale of that war and the impact it had on so many people around the world. It may surprise many of you who live in the UK and Europe and North America to see that here in Australia, so far from the battlefields of Europe, we have similar memorials and statues that honour the service and sacrifice of our young men and women in war.
The photo immediately below is the State war Memorial in my home town of Perth. It overlooks the city with majestic views over the Swan River. It is where the dawn service is held each year on ANZAC Day. This year 100,000 people attended.
Bob, they were the ones I was gonna..........
