Yesterday, we marked the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
The Normandy landings marked the beginning of the liberation of Europe and led to the final defeat of Nazi Germany.
It’s important to honour the men who fought that day – including the 3000 or so Australians who took part, mostly providing air support to the landings in our own or in British squadrons.
By 1945, there were more than 15,000 Australian air force personnel serving in Europe.
Yesterday, it was a privilege to be in the presence of seven Australian veterans: self-effacing heroes who claimed to be “just doing their job”.
Their job was making the world a safer place where people could live in peace and freedom under a government that they’d elected.
World War Two was a war against conquest; against racial pride; and against any country bullying another just because it could.
We should be grateful for the post-war order, secured by the wartime allies, which has allowed so many nations to build their own futures in peace and freedom.
Subsequent to that victory, the golden rule: to treat others as you would have them treat you, has applied to world affairs in ways unprecedented in human history.
Long may that continue.
But D-Day was by no means Australia’s only contribution to the struggle for freedom and justice in Europe.
Today, at Villers-Bretonneux, we remember a time when Australia helped to shape world history as never before or since.
Here, said the Allied commander-in-chief Marshal Foch, “you saved Amiens, you saved France. Our gratitude will remain ever and always to Australia”.
Today, we honour the Australians of the First World War whose service and sacrifice changed the world and shaped our nation.
From an Australian population of just under five million at the time, 417,000 enlisted, 332,000 served overseas in the First Australian Imperial Force, 152,000 were wounded, and 61,000 never came home.
Of men aged 18 to 42, almost one in two enlisted and, of those who served overseas, almost one in five were killed in action.
Some 46,000 died on the Western Front – almost a thousand of them are in the cemetery here and the names of almost 11,000 who have no known grave are carved on the monument here.
No place on earth has been more “densely sown with Australian sacrifice” than these fields in France.
Our duty to the dead is to remember what they achieved.
In the final six months of World War One, the five divisions of the Australian corps bested no fewer than 39 enemy divisions, took 29,000 prisoners, captured 338 guns and advanced over more than 40 miles of contested ground.
They comprised less than 10 per cent of total British Empire forces but made almost a quarter of all the gains in the war’s decisive final months.
It’s the only time Australia’s forces have been in the main battles of the main war theatre and made a major difference to its outcome.
Their commander, General Sir John Monash, brought organisation and technology to the battlefield to break the stalemate of trench warfare and the futility of men charging against barbed wire and machine guns.
Prime Minister Lloyd George called him the “most resourceful general in the whole of the British Army”.
Australians should be as familiar with the story of the western front as we are with Gallipoli.
Australians should be at least as familiar with the achievements of Monash as we are with the heroism of John Simpson Kirkpatrick.
Australians should congregate here, every April 25th, no less than at Anzac Cove.
And on Anzac Day four years hence, the centenary of the Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, I’m sure they will.
Because that’s the day, all going well, a new interpretive centre, the Sir John Monash centre, will open here on the principal site that Monash and his fellow soldiers chose to dedicate to their comrades’ service and sacrifice.
As the historian Les Carlyon has said, if we remember them – if we remember what they did – they are still alive in our hearts.
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