Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen.
This splendid memorial is built and dedicated at a time far removed from the momentous events in human history it marks, far removed from the young lives it honours. With each year, our living links with the two great global conflicts of the twentieth century gently fall away. Few are left who remember that moment 85 years ago at this hour, on this day, when peace descended on a world still numbed by the magnitude of battlefield losses, and on an Australia changed forever by names such as Gallipoli, Lone Pine, Fromelles, Bullecourt and Pozieres.
So too, the march slows for the World War II generations of Australians roused to action by acts of brutality against innocent peace-loving people. And yet there is a resonance to this memorial's message, inspiration in its example and a warning in its shadows that compels us to reach back across that void of time. In doing so, in recognising the many thousands of Australians who served and fought and died alongside their British allies, we reaffirm the enduring hope of a world set free from hate. In mourning our fallen, in numbers still difficult to comprehend, we also acknowledge the terrible power of those forces that would conspire against such a dream.
History's lesson is that evil will always dwell within the world - in the past represented by armies rolling across national borders, in this new century finding form in acts of indiscriminate terrorism inspired by distorted faith. Such intent can be defeated by the willingness of decent men and women to put aside the comfort, safety and security of their own lives, to understand that militarism and totalitarianism and terror are creeping sicknesses that will inevitably spread if left unchallenged and unchecked, and by the willingness of nations to stand together in mutual defence of the common values which underpin the progression of man.
The young Australians we honour here comprehended those truths. With personal courage, compassion and bound by an unshakeable belief in each other, they won for our nation the respect of the world and from their nation, a debt of gratitude which those who have followed them can never repay. They are truths which have always bound together the peoples of Great Britain and Australia in deep and unique friendship. Together we have endured great peril and confronted great menace. History will always record that for 12 desperate months, Great Britain, with precious help from Australia and other Commonwealth allies, stood alone against the spreading darkness of Nazism. We remained united in that struggle until final victory was won - Australian aircrews serving with great distinction beside their British comrades in perilous missions over Occupied Europe.
Whatever the future may hold for our two nations, we are tied for all time by our history, by shared language and law, but most important of all, by an enduring belief in human dignity and the democratic freedoms that should be the birthright of all.
The Australian War Memorial in London will speak of this belief. It will join the thousands of other memorials in Australian towns and cities and settlements once called home by our soldiers, sailors, airmen and servicewomen, that are each imbued with the pride and grief of the communities they represent, each infused with the memory of service, of suffering and of sacrifice, each serving for generations to come as anchors holding them fast against the slow currents of complacency and forgotten loss, and each paying homage to those who, in the words of one of Australia's soldier-poets, lie at peace 'mingling with earth and dreams and God'.
I now have great pleasure in inviting Her Majesty to address the gathering.
[ends]