Th
( I
PRIME MINISTER
SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING, MP
VE DAY AUSTRALIA REMEMBERS COMMEMORATIVE CEREMONY,
AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL, CANBERRA, 8 MAY 1995
It was my privilege to launch the Australia Remembers celebrations last year
and I took the opportunity to say that I hoped all Australians would be
touched in some way by the commemoration. The program today has
certainly touched all of us, and no doubt similar events being staged across
the country this year are having similar effects on millions of Australians
including, I hope, millions of Australian children.
Here, and wherever we commemorate the service and sacrifice of Australians
in war, we at once pay tribute to generations past and remind ourselves that
our duty is as they saw theirs to the next generation, to the future of
Australia. Major General James and my colleague, Mr Sciacca, paid eloquent tribute to
the contribution Australia's servicemen and women made in the European
theatre during World War 11. More than nine and a half thousand Australians
died there: young Australians, men and women with the best part of their
lives still ahead of them.
They went to Europe as their parents' generation had gone before them and,
perhaps, under fewer illusions about the realities of war.
We know why they went. We know because Australians decided long ago
that they would not forget those who made the supreme sacrifice, and that
they would pass on to future generations of Australians the message that
sacrifice contains.
We know because our parents and our teachers told us, because we
attended ceremonies every 25 April.
We learned that these men and women had a notion of duty they believed
that so long as they wanted freedom and democracy, and loved Australia and
believed in its future, they were obliged to defend them and even lay down
their lives.
It is an example we must keep alive for our children.
Our young men and women should know that Australians like themselves
believed so deeply in their country they were prepared to die for it. That
Australians like themselves crossed the world and joined forces with men and
women from many other countries to defend freedom against tyranny.
They should also know what we mean when we talk about courage and
perseverance and the immeasurable value of sticking together in hardship
and they will know it when they learn about these Australians.
It is important that they know these events occurred, that they engulfed the
whole world. They should know and we should remember today that vast
numbers of Allied servicemen perished in the war; that millions from what was
then the Soviet Union, millions of innocent civilians, millions in the
concentration camps, perished. They should know about and we must
remember the Holocaust.
They should know that, as people thronged in city squares to rejoice in the
victory, the horrors of Auschwitz were just being revealed. That as liberation
was being celebrated in one half of Europe, totalitarian rule was being
imposed in the other. And that on the battlefields and in the prison camps of
Asia there were three more months to be endured.
In knowing these things we hope that they will never forget that freedom and
democracy are hard-won and must be defended. That peace is the greatest
gift any generation can receive, and should never be taken for granted. They
should know that these things are to be cherished.
Yet it is no less important to see the message in the jubilation of fifty years
ago. What we see in those images is humanity triumphant. We see men and
women celebrating the victory of good over evil in the battle they have
fought. It is their victory.
Perhaps nothing makes the reasons for fighting the war so clear as their
happiness. For many thousands of Australians VE Day meant beginning their lives again.
It meant being reunited with their families. It meant going back to their farms
and factories and offices and restarting their lives.
Someone once said of the Americans of that time that they were an heroic
generation they refused to be broken by the Great Depression, they fought
the war and then they built a great country. Without a doubt, the same can
be said about that generation of Australians. They went about re-building
their lives with confidence and purpose and their efforts gave rise to a period
of sustained national development.
Among the builders were many thousands who had endured the war in their
own countries and left their shattered lives and devastated homes to start
new lives in Australia.
I do not think we should let this day pass without reminding ourselves of how
much they have given Australia; how much we have gained by being open to
the world, generous towards those who have come here to escape
oppression and hardship, and tolerant of cultural differences.
In building new lives here they enriched us all. That is one of the great
lessons of the fifty years which have passed since the war ended, and one
that we should not forget.
Today we pay tribute to a generation whose faith was profound: not just
among those who served in the armed forces, but those who kept up the fight
at home and all those who carried the vigour with which they defended
Australia in war into building Australia in peace. Through this ceremony and
through all the commemorative events this year we hope to sustain their faith
in our own lives.
And I believe it does sustain us. This generation of Australians have
engineered great changes in their country and its relationship with the region
and the rest of the world.
They have coped with change imposed upon them global change of
unprecedented dimensions at unprecedented speed. They have adapted
perhaps as no previous generation of Australians has had to. And they are
building a country which is stronger, more confident of its place in the world,
and more able to play a creative role for peace and democracy than ever
before.
To continue to do this is to continue to honour those whose lives we
remember today.
It is to say in ways which our children will understand why the war was fought.
If we do that, in future we will be able to say that on the 50th anniversary of
the end of World War II Australia truly remembered.