Remembrance Day – 100 Years On
“God shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Isaiah 2:4
Dear Students, Parents and Carers
As most Australians know, at 11.00am on 11/11/1918, the guns fell silent across the Western Front. This was the Armistice, which in effect was the end of the ‘war to end all wars’, known at the time as The Great War. Sadly, as we know, this was not the cessation forever of armed conflict, and so we understand this conflagration now as World War I, followed just 25 years later by World War II.
The First World War was one conflict in a long line of wars in which Australians have paid the ultimate sacrifice: the Sudan War in 1885, the Boer War of 1889-1902, WWI 1914-1918, WWII 1939-1945, the Korean War 1950-1953, the Vietnam War, the dates of which were somewhat elastic, but through to 1975. Since that time, the nature of war has changed and sometimes it is undeclared but no less brutal. Australian military personnel and police have been involved in many places around the world, most noticeably Afghanistan, Borneo, East Timor, the Middle East and areas of the South Pacific.
How Australians have regarded Remembrance Day and its companion, Anzac Day, has varied over the decades in the last century. At times, these formalities have nearly died out, to be revived periodically by politicians for, frankly, electoral purposes. Some have seen the coupling of Anzac Day and Remembrance Day as a reductionist form of civic religion. Some have challenged the motives of Australians who have served overseas, pointing to the naïve notions of some WWI volunteers that they were going on a lark, a paid holiday to see the world. Against that needs to be balanced the fledgling nation’s powerful loyalty to the British Empire, such that defending the Empire was a duty and a moral imperative. Indeed, even by the time of my primary school education in the 1950s in Australia, history lessons were essentially an expression of British nationalism, if not actually jingoism. It is no wonder that young men and women felt a powerful call to serve, even at the cost of their lives. By WWII, with Japanese advances through the Pacific, Australia was facing the real and very near prospect of invasion, particularly as the Japanese Army proceeded down the Kokoda Trail, and so defending Australia was a very real imperative. My own parents joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) after the rapid sequence of the fall of Singapore, the sinking of two British capital ships off Singapore and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour.
Controversies have raged over the relativities between appearing to celebrate war as against paying respect to those who have served so sacrificially. The former view, that remembrance was now passe, was perhaps nourished by the end of the Cold War in 1989-1991, with the collapse of the Berlin War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. At this historical moment, the United States was left alone as the world’s sole ‘superpower’ and historian Samuel Huntington famously proclaimed it was “the end of history”. By this he meant that democracy and liberalism had won and the ‘Pax Americana’ (American Peace) had settled permanently on the world. We now know that his confidence was premature! We now have a second superpower, China, flexing its muscles in a new Cold War, as well as rogue nuclear armed states, such as North Korea, providing a level of unpredictability. The conflict in Ukraine is very much a hot war, as a result of Russian imperial ambitions. The notion that wars would cease in this terrestrial existence is far too optimistic a view of human nature, which includes the posturing of dictators and the exigencies of realpolitik. Sadly, it seems, wars will only cease at the end of the age, when God puts all things right. “God shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4).
What does all this have to do with Shore? I hope our boys honour the memory of Australian men and women who have served nobly for our country, both those long gone and those who have been involved in recent military and police activity. We particularly should remember the mostly young Shore men who have given their lives in these conflicts.
I would also hope that our boys will have a broad perspective, understanding that war is horrific, but an aspect of the human condition, and from which we cannot necessarily protect them in the future, as their lives unfold through adulthood. I want their realism about this to be tempered by their gratitude and respect. Australians in the past, including many Shore men, have made the ultimate sacrifice so we can live in the comfort we enjoy. Lest We Forget.
Dr John Collier
Interim Headmaster