Address At The Lone Pine Memorial Gallipoli

Address At The Lone Pine Memorial Gallipoli, Turkey
Australian Minister for Defence 25 April 2007

ADDRESS AT THE LONE PINE MEMORIAL GALLIPOLI, TURKEY

It is with a sense of unease, trespass, humility, and abiding reverence that we come to Lone Pine.

Much that is precious lies here. Our past and our future.

Today from the safe comfort of Australia and the distance of almost a century, we admiringly survey pine trees, gravel paths, manicured lawns and white walls.

But from the 6th August 1915 over five days, an epic of savage sacrifice transformed this into a mass grave.

At its end, would be more than two thousand Australian casualties. Brave Turks suffering seven thousand.

Upon the stone pylon and wall of this memorial are the names of 4,932 ANZACs who died with no known grave, or who were buried at sea. Included among them are three sets of brothers. Private James Martin is on this wall. He was 14 years and 9 months.

Captain Alfred Shout was one of seven awarded the Victoria Cross – a man who “made hard things look easy and men around him feel better”.

While they made a frontal assault, the killing by bayonet and bomb was in the trenches, tunnels and galleries.

Sergeant Lawrence, a tunnelling engineer, looked back from the captured Turkish post onto the Australian firing line:

“The whole way across is just one mass of dead bodies…
Beside me, I count fourteen of our boys stone dead.
It is a piteous sight.
Men and boys who yesterday were full of joy and life, now lying there cold, dead – their eyes glassy, faces sallow and dusty. Soulless – somebody’s son, somebody’s boy…
The Major standing next to me says, ‘Well, we have won.’
Great God, won.
That means a victory and all those bodies within arm’s reach.
Then may I never witness a defeat.”

Private John Gammage wrote to his niece:

“The wounded bodies…were piled up three and four deep.
As fast as our men went down another would take his place.
We would sooner have died than retreat.”

In the early dawn of 7th August, the Australian Light Horse attacked at the Nek in support of New Zealanders in four waves.

The first crumpled into dead stillness within mere steps. Seeing this, the second waited for the order and sprang above the parapet to their death.

The 10th Light Horse filed into the empty trench, determined to face death running at the enemy. Their commanding officer said, “Boys, you have ten minutes to live. I will lead you.”

Men shook hands with their mates, removed wedding rings, left notes and when the order came, all went over the top.

The last words of Trooper H. Rush are on his headstone, “Goodbye Cobber. God bless you”.

More than 300 Australians died in an area the size of a tennis court. A grotesque mass of dead bodies, once comrades, dwarfed the thin line of weary, ashen faced men.

Sergeant Cliff Pinnock miraculously survived the first wave to remark in pained anguish: “Roll call was the saddest - 47 out of 550 men answered. When I heard the result, I cried like a child.”

Private Victor Nicholson saw his mate, “Lofty” killed at Quinn’s Post, shot through the eye peeping through a loophole,

“I didn’t cry, unless Gallipoli was one long cry.
If you cried once, you never stopped.
There were friends going every day and sometimes every hour of the day, wonderful friends.
I cried inwardly. That’s all you could do.”

Private E.F. McLean, 8th Battalion, was 21 when killed. His distraught mother, Isabella at her Korumburra kitchen table penned her grief for his headstone in the Shrapnel Valley Cemetery:

HIS FRIENDS BEREFT
HAVE ONLY LEFT
HIS PHOTO ON THE WALL
MOTHER

Our generation owes theirs a debt we can barely comprehend – let alone repay.

But foremost it is to surely, “Keep their memory”.

Can we not, in every workplace, school and home, hang the photograph of just one of them who gave his all – his life, for Australia?

They are us and we are them.

Lest We Forget.

BRENDAN NELSON

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