Today is Anzac Day and as such, it’s a public holiday.
If you don’t know what Anzac Day is, here is a very brief description. Anzacs are the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps soldiers or ‘diggers’ as they are more often called.
Anzac Day is seen as a national day to commemorate all Anzac soldiers killed in any military action wherever it was. You can read much more about it in a post I did three years ago about Anzac Day.
Yesterday, an Australian reader called Kirri made mention of this in a comment when she said…
“I should also point out that as a true blue Aussie now, it’s your responsibility to be up at dawn tomorrow and attend the dawn services for ANZAC day. Enjoy that 🙂 But don’t worry, your responsibility for the rest of the day is to drink large quantities of alcohol. I’m sure you can manage that :)”
The Anzac Day Dawn Service.
That got me thinking.
Thousands of Australians do attend these services all around the country. For example, here in Brisbane, about 10,000 people gathered in Anzac Square at around three o’clock in the morning. As the Courier Mail reported, “A powerful silence swept the near 10,000-strong crowd as they paid their respects to Australia’s fallen.
At around 5.10am, The Last Post was played and a final prayer read, followed by the national anthems.”
I’ve never been to one of these services, I am a notorious night owl. These services start at around the same time I normally go to bed. So it would be really difficult for me, wouldn’t it?
But for the Anzacs, those diggers at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, they didn’t have a choice. Not only did they have to get up early, but they were going to carry out a dawn raid.
Many lost their lives.
So it shouldn’t be too much to ask, should it, that for one day in the year I rise like a lark (or, more likely, just not go to bed) to pay tribute to all our brave Anzacs? If I had, I would have seen something like this…
Did you attend an Anzac Day Dawn Service this morning?
Lest we forget