Friends, thank you for travelling to Hellfire Pass to see in this Anzac dawn.<\/p>\n
Today is a pilgrimage. Alongside one another here, and with countless others throughout the world, we journey to the places that war has etched and scarred.<\/p>\n
The theatres of conflict.<\/p>\n
The graves and cenotaphs.<\/p>\n
The shrines and memorials.<\/p>\n
Our minds and memories.<\/p>\n
Here, in the Thai jungle, standing on the bones of the \u201cDeath Railway\u201d at the withered heart of darkness 1<\/sup> .<\/p>\n Our silence begs the relentless hammer and tap of our soldiers\u2019 tools; the Last Post\u2019s haunting final wail as another succumbs to the brutal toil.<\/p>\n Our torchlight recalls the long-lit, gruelling nights of work, the days that never gave way to nourishment and sleep.<\/p>\n Our soldiers\u2019 strange and gruesome battlefield.<\/p>\n Not the sort they\u2019d imagined: bullets, bayonets, mortar blasts; hand-to-hand combat on the front line; courage under fire.<\/p>\n The fire here was from hell, they said.<\/p>\n It needed a different kind of courage 2<\/sup> .<\/p>\n Exiled from the Allied war effort, and held captive to advancing its defeat our soldiers braved a battle fought in the shadows.<\/p>\n In the shadows of the hell fires. In the shadows of their captors\u2019 torture and menace.<\/p>\n In the shadows of their ravaged frames and private anguish.<\/p>\n It was in this impenetrable, malarial jungle of monsoon deluges, saw-toothed mountainous rock, crocodiles, scorpions, snakes and mosquitoes,that our soldiers built a railway with a few crude pulleys, derricks and mixers, and their mighty bare hands.<\/p>\n In ten months: four million cubic metres of rock was shifted, 14 kilometres of bridgework constructed.<\/p>\n Our soldiers, prisoners-of-war, among an extraordinary slave-labour force: 30,000 British; 18,000 Dutch; 13,000 Australians; 700 Americans; and with them, 250,000 Asians 3<\/sup> .<\/p>\n As the aggressors grew anxious to expand their offensive, so the toll grew, on our soldiers\u2019 lives and wellbeing.<\/p>\n Abject cruelty and neglect, increasingly signified their treatment.<\/p>\n Inevitably crippling fatigue, starvation, horrific sickness, disease and death gouged their ranks.<\/p>\n Just about everything was filthy: the miserable rations, the water, the men\u2019s bodies, their loin cloths, their rotten wounds and ulcers, the brazen inhumanity.<\/p>\n But there were some things that transcended the filth.<\/p>\n The feisty dictum that the path home is an empty mess bowl, no matter what was dished up 4<\/sup> .<\/p>\n The miracle workers in the makeshift hospitals.<\/p>\n The men\u2019s spirits: somehow impossibly sustained by faith and hopes and dreams; the poetry of Keats and Arnold; their own quiet lullabies; a budding Plumbago flower; a decent, gutsy laugh.<\/p>\n Their deep, generous, tender friendships.<\/p>\n The fires that burned in their starving bellies.<\/p>\n The home fires they burned for one another.<\/p>\n Long after the war, when Chilla Goodchap nursed his wife before her death, he thought of his dead mates:<\/p>\n In Burma we would link up in a group of say four or five, and work as a family.<\/p>\n You\u2019d know every mortal thing about them.<\/p>\n They\u2019ve told you every one of their stories of home, and their upsets and their pleasures. With those five fellows, no matter what you get you\u2019d share, and if one bloke is crook, you stand with a bloke, in his dying moments, his bloody awful bloody death, and you\u2019re holding his bloody hand 5<\/sup> .<\/p>\n Friends, let this new day, this Anzac sunrise, blaze in the deeds and memories of the tens of thousands of soldiers who suffered and died and rest here now.<\/p>\n In those who survived the filth and rallied to rebuild their bodies and lives, find their families, and hold onto their mates. In those who are with us today to affirm the injustice, the pain and the torment, and the long, slow road back to healing and living well.<\/p>\n I sincerely thank my fellow countrymen, my companions, for showing me the way today.<\/p>\n Mr Lex Arthurson<\/p>\n Mr Cyril Gilbert<\/p>\n Mr Bill Schmitt<\/p>\n The Hon Tom Uren<\/p>\n And with us, Mr Neil McPherson.<\/p>\n Fine, courageous, knowing veterans of this place, who join all of us here to honour the wartime sacrifice of those we love and respect.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of such atrocity, let us be thankful for the lessons of war; for what Anzac Day offers every year in growing our wisdom; and for the mutual sense and compassion of our governments in preserving this memorial to honesty, peace and understanding.<\/p>\n The fires will always burn here, as they should, in rightful remembrance of all they destroyed and all they nurtured.<\/p>\n The fires from hell.<\/p>\n The fires in the bellies.<\/p>\n The home fires of mates who made their terrible way together here, who built a railway in the jungle by hand \u2013 our soldiers of the Hellfire battle. Friends of Australia and Thailand.<\/p>\n Lest we forget.<\/p>\n References<\/em><\/p>\n Cameron Forbes used this metaphor in his book, Hellfire, Pan Macmillam Australia, 2005, Chapter 17 \u201cHearts of Darkness\u201d, p 279<\/em><\/p>\n Ibid, Chapter 1 \u201cA Different Courage\u201d, p 1<\/em><\/p>\n Ibid, p 263<\/em><\/p>\n Ibid, p 299<\/em><\/p>\n Ibid, p 289<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ADDRESS BY HER EXCELLENCY MS QUENTIN BRYCE AC GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA ON THE OCCASION OF ANZAC DAY … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2170,"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions\/2170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.btrma.org.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}