PRIME MINISTER
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY EMBARGOED UNTIL DELIVERY
REMARKS BY THE PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA
THE HON R J L HAWnE AC MP
AUSTRALIAN WAR NENORIAL
VILLERS-BRETONNEUX SUNDAY 18 JUNE 1989
Citizens of France, fellow Australians
The great Napoleon said:
" It is geography alone which decides the policy of
nations".
No nation understands the meaning of this better than France
in this century.
And no place in Europe has seen its results in history more
than the Somme.
Yet, for all its truth, this memorial to Australians who
died fifteen thousand miles from home bears witness that
there are other truths about the spirit of man which
transcend the mere facts of geography.
For why, we must ask ourselves, did so many thousands of
yrntuv Australiana volunteor and lot uo rmao bor that they
were all volunteers to come to fight, so many of them to
die in these foreign fields, so far from home?
The memorials to be found in every city and township around
Australia most far less imposing than this very often
bear the inscription: For King, God and Country. But their
own diaries and letters home give a dirrerent emphasis.
Some oxpress the spirit of adventure.
Rut thpir mnrt eonstant them. one atrenqghonod by the
sufferings of the war is the characteristically Australian
one of mateship expressing, indeed, that ideal of
" fraternite" enshrined by the French Revolution, but,
containing a meaning at once more simple and more subtle,
and one which is uniquely Australian.
Yet, whatever the motives and ideals of indiv iduals, they
came to serve a greater cause, greater perhaps than most of
them realised, or, with their typical Australian diffidence
about their own importance, would have acknowledged or
articulated. The remarkable impression made by these young Australians
was expressed by Prime Minister Clemenceau when he addressed
them in the field in July 1918 after the series of battles
which had saved Amienas and turned the tide of the last drive
upon Paris:
" When the Australians came to France, the French people
expected a great deal of them... but we did not know
that from the very beginning you would astonish the
whole Continent. I shall go back tomorrow and say to my
countrymen I have seen the Australians. I have looked
into their faces. I know these men will fight alongside
of us again, until the cause f or which we are all
fighting is safe, for us and for our children".
Yet the very generation of French men and women and
Australians, of whom Clemenceau spoke, were to face another
and even more terrible ordeal barely twenty years later.
We do not come to these consecrated fields today, to glorify
war. And in no sense does it glorify war to honour the sacrifice
made by those who fought in these wars as vs may regard it
now the long civil war of Europe.
Yet citizens of France, fellow Australians
I ask you to consider with me this great point: that today
we stand on the threshold of a more hopeful era for the
peace, human rights and fundamental unity of Europe
better-founded, more strongly grounded, than at any time in
the past 75 years since the Great War the first World War
began.
It will take much courage and resolution on the part of many
to cross that threshold.
The courage and resolution of those we honour today was of a
different order, facing a different kind of challenge.
Yet it is a great truth that the challenges of peace often
require as much courage as the challenges of war.