Your Excellency, the Administrator of the Commonwealth and Sir Nicholas Shehadie, Mr Paul Lennon the Premier of Tasmania and Mrs Lennon, Mr Barry Jones, the Mayor of Tasman, my fellow Australians.
We gather in shadows of great suffering and take today one more step along a difficult path.
No words can adequately express the unspeakable horror, the profound sorrow and the justified outrage unleashed from this place 10 years ago. We were all touched by a day that tore a community apart and pierced our nation's heart.
The pain of 35 lives cut short is no less sharp 10 years on. Knowing that today a girl would be a woman, a father perhaps a grandfather, or a cherished friendship even closer.
Today our nation's thoughts and prayers are with all of those who bear the scars of that Sunday in April of 1996, the families and friends of those who died; the injured, especially those whose physical pain continues; and all whose mind and spirit remain burdened.
The evil that happened here darkened our nation's spirit like few other events in my memory. We mourned with those who mourned and we ached with those who ached.
The people who lost so much 10 years ago were engaged in the simple pleasures and solemn duties of Australian life. They were families relaxing in afternoon sunshine. They were older Australians taking a well-earned holiday after a lifetime of work and citizenship and family. They were workers making this outpost of inauspicious beginnings such an important part of our nation's heritage.
What happened here 10 years ago mocked so much of what we thought about Australia, that somehow or other things like this could not happen in Australia.
That we were something different and something special and something better in a world so scarred by inhumanity. It affronted the very essence of what makes us human - the faith and the trust that we have in each other.
The poet Margaret Scott, a Nubeena resident until her death last August, spoke poignantly of the tormented legacy of those events when she said: 'Our trust of people was gone. We had to deal with our fears of other people, with fears of going out and having a meal in a restaurant, or fears of walking down the street. Nobody and nothing was normal any more'.
Ten years on, the anguish and the torment for many has not ended. And sadly for some, it never will.
My friends, my fellow Australians, it is a measure of this community's spirit, Australia's spirit and the human spirit that we gather today not just in sorrow. And not just to look back.
In honouring the victims, we also come to honour a new story written in the poetry of courage and compassion. A story of kindness and solidarity, of resilience and recovery, where humanity steps forward and a community fights back.
This story began that very day with countless acts of bravery and selflessness by emergency workers and police, by local staff and by ordinary citizens.
To their names - many unwritten and unheralded - we add all who worked tirelessly to aid the injured and to comfort the grieving - the doctors and nurses, the priests and counsellors, the families and friends, the carers and the total strangers who gave something back to their fellow man through the long nightmare that followed. Something more than they knew.
We recall that not a single life was lost during the rescue operation and among those brought into hospital.
We remember the outpouring of sympathy across our nation and around the world from a tragedy that touched so many communities here and overseas.
So many acts of human kindness - big and small - flowed from this tragedy. As big as the doctors and nurses of Launceston arriving to relieve exhausted medical crews in Hobart. As small as the simple messages of support - many from children - from places near and far.
In finding light from the darkness, we need look no further than The Alannah and Madeline Foundation - born of tragic circumstances yet now providing vital support to children who are victims of violent crime or sudden family loss.
Today, we also return to honour the strength and the courage of the local Tasman community. The years that followed took a punishing toll on individuals and families, on farms and businesses. For so long your struggle was not to rebuild and recover, but simply to survive.
You never lost faith and you never gave up. Against all odds, and with enormous grit, this community pulled itself together and found new strength.
Port Arthur has risen again to be a vibrant hub of Tasmania's economic and social life, with this historic site reclaiming its place as one of our great heritage attractions.
Those who worked towards the opening of the Memorial Garden some six years ago deserve our special praise today.
Memorials are important. We need places where people can come to reflect, to grieve, to honour those we have lost and, hopefully, to find peace.
It does take a special brand of courage to say to the world: this evil happened; it happened here. It sends a message of faith and defiance, that no act of violence can define this place or defeat the power of humanity and compassion.
For Australia, my friends, that day was also a test of our commonsense and of our moral sense. United in grief, our people responded with calm resolution and steady purpose. Hard as it was to confront, we could not escape that this was not an accident, not an act of nature or an act of God.
All tragedies demand much of us and this one demanded more.
The fact that our society showed its revulsion for these deeds through our courts and our law was itself a show of strength. And by coming together to make the means of such violence less accessible, Australians displayed an unshakeable determination to bequeath a future to this country's children where the chances of such evil happening again are hopefully diminished.
Of course, our obligation to the future does not end there. Nor can our duty to the countless victims end in congratulating ourselves for being no more than civilised human beings.
The struggle to build a society where violence is repudiated and where people can go about their daily lives in peace and security goes on. It always will.
Today, though, our duty is to honour all that was lost a decade ago. And also to honour what brave, determined people - many of them here for this ceremony - have struggled to rediscover ever since - their faith in humanity itself.
A few moments ago, we said the Lord's Prayer and Jesus concluded the Sermon from which it is drawn with a parable of a man building a house upon a rock to withstand the storms that would beat against us.
In looking forward, let us give thanks for that great truth that faith in the human spirit, and our faith in each other, does not rest on the shifting sands that gave way that brutal hour ten years ago.
Instead it offers all who hold such faith a foundation for the storms and trials of life and a base, even in the darkest times, from which to trust and to love.
My fellow Australians, I conclude by saying on your behalf, to all of those who are gathered here today and shared in different ways the pain and the anguish of that terrible event 10 years ago. You have been in our thoughts in different ways over that decade, you continue to be in our thoughts and out of the darkness of that time we have learnt some things about ourselves. We have learnt our strengths, we have learnt our capacity to work together to try and prevent such things happening again. But above all, we have learnt how resilient the human spirit is and how determined the Australian nation can be to confront and overcome evil.
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