The first bullet of World War I heralded a calamity on a scale unknown to humanity. The last shot was followed by silence.
As Charles Bean wrote of the eerie quiet that settled along the Western Front:
“The change went too deep for actual rejoicing… The sound of guns ceased – the gates of the future silently opened.”
While many of our soldiers found ways to celebrate, many greeted the peace with their own quiet.
Unlike the children who chalked the walls of village houses with messages celebrating the end of the war, many couldn’t even bring themselves to note it in their diaries.
In the spare words of one Australian digger:
“It was over. That was enough.”
We thank them for the peace that came when the final shell crater had uncurled its final wisp of smoke.
When the sea and the sky were killing grounds no more.
When the last coil of barbed wire had been cut apart or turned to rust.
When the singing of bullets had given way to the song of birds.
When the naked mud had begun to once again be clothed in grass and flowers, hellscapes turned back to meadow and farmland.
When ruin had given way to rebuilding.
But as those who survived the War to End All Wars soon learned: victory in war offers no guarantee of the victory of peace.
Another war came. Another generation of Australians went. And at the end of it, another silence.
It was the silence of guns suddenly stilled, of planes left on the ground, of ships with their cannons lowered.
But it was also the silence of the dead, and the grief of those they left behind.
Each time we honour our fallen with silence, it is a silence that also contains within it the hope that humanity has at last learnt its lesson.
The hope that this will never happen again.
Hope, it must be said, is playing a long game. And hope may yet win out.
But we will keep returning to this silence.
This solemn quiet that holds both endings and beginnings.
Of exhaustion and rebirth, and a belief in humanity that somehow survives and holds on despite everything that is thrown at it.
It is a silence I hope that our courageous, suffering friends in Ukraine will also soon know.
For so many of our veterans, silence is also a shield against the world – an outer stillness while within them, the cacophony of war rages on.
That has been the experience for so many, whether they raised arms against the enemy, or worked desperately to save the lives of the wounded and the dying.
But when that outer silence ends, when that shield is lowered, we must listen.
Listen even to the silence.
Just as our veterans stepped up for us, we must step up for them.
We owe them a debt greater than mere gratitude.
I have stood here before and cited the examples of my great mentor Tom Uren – a giant of the Labor Party – and Sir John Carrick, a giant of the Liberal Party.
Two great Australians who, even amid the deprivation of prisoner of war camps, managed to encapsulate what is best about our national character: that our deepest instinct is to respond to the worst of times by being our best.
As we gather in this place of memory, we honour all those who have gone in our name.
We honour them as the bugler sounds the Last Post.
We honour them as the piper plays The Flowers of the Forest, a lament of stately sadness unsoftened by the passing of centuries.
But in our gratitude and sorrow at their sacrifice, we honour them most profoundly with silence.
Lest we forget.