LEST WE FORGET:
Anzac Day services across the region yesterday attracted large gatherings of people who joined in solemn solidarity to salute and commemorate the servicemen and women involved in the many international conflicts involving Australia and its allies. This picture shows Peter Creek, left, handing an Anzac Flame to Ray Buckley as a crowd presses in during a dawn service at Horsham Cenotaph at Sawyer Park.
Life is busy! Many of us in normal everyday life are running around like mad hares – trying to do our jobs, trying to please our bosses, trying to live up to all sorts of workplace, home or personal expectations.
Hands up if you are the type of person who, when they finally get home from work, slumps into the couch mentally or physically exhausted, vagues out in front of the ‘idiot box’ and spends the rest of the night pondering whether it’s all worth the effort. I’m sure this has a familiar ring for many people.
Life is not only busy for the average Australian, it’s tough!
Hang on a minute. Busy and stressful, yes! But tough?
Yesterday was our annual reminder that many of us, often enjoying the comforts of a free first-world environment, should think long and hard about it when we believe we’re doing it tough.
The reality is that what we often consider extreme pressure pales into comparison to what people endured for us in the past.
Most of us, thankfully, can only imagine the horrors of war, horrors that have allowed us to get us to a point where we can actually worry about ‘the little’ things. Anzac Day seemed to creep up on us a bit quieter than usual this year, suggesting that, despite big crowds at dawn services, how people are reflecting on the occasion is changing.
It makes sense. We’ve clocked up 100 years since the first Anzac Day and it might be that community understanding of the term ‘Lest we forget’ undergoes a subtle change with each generation.
It is important to recognise the potential of evolution of a message over time and we must make sure we never lose sight that the Australia we have today is about sacrifice from the past – and what it truly means to ‘do things tough’.
We perhaps get some of the greatest context about what this means when we consider reflective comments from sporting heroes of the past, recognised for their battlefield achievements as well as their sporting prowess.
One of the most memorable is from Australian cricket superstar of the past Keith Miller, also a fighter pilot in the Second World War, asked about the pressure of playing the game at the highest level.
“I’ll tell you what pressure is. Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. Playing cricket is not,” Miller famously said.
In another example, The Age’s Martin Flanagan, in an interview with Geelong football great Fred Flanagan, asked the premiership legend whether Richmond tough man ‘Mopsy’ Fraser had tried to physically intimidate him.
Martin Flanagan wrote: “Fred looked at me as if I may not have been the full quid and replied: ‘I’d been in New Guinea’. Of course. He’d seen real fighting.”
So when those of us who are blessed with relative good health, security and circumstance feel a bit hard done by and that life has dealt them a cruel blow, consider what past generations have experienced for us to get to this point.
Let’s make the most of what we have and what life in Australia can offer.
Lest we forget.