ANZAC Day 2026 was celebrated recently across the country. This year, many of the services felt particularly poignant, perhaps, sadly, because of current world events. At my school, one of the students shared the following and I believe it is a powerful reflection of the current challenges and hopes that some of our young people recognise in relation to such commemorations. I hope you find it as thought provoking as I do.
Theirs was a generation that did not have the luxury of looking away. They could not mute it, minimise it, or scroll past it. When the moment came, they stood in it — fully, completely, without the option of retreat. And in standing there, they carried something forward through time that no network could replicate and no technology could manufacture.
In the pre-dawn darkness of the 25th of April, 1915, young Australians moved silently toward a coastline that would define a nation. They were diggers — resolute, resourceful, bound not by rank or orders alone, but by an unspoken covenant with the man beside them. Mateship, not as sentiment, but as duty. And in honouring that duty under the most unforgiving of circumstances, they lit something that has never been extinguished.
Now we stand in 2026. The nature of conflict has shifted. The distances we cross are different. The threats we face wear different faces. But what does not change — what has never changed — is this: what they carried does not belong to any single era. Honour is honour. Devotion to those beside you is devotion. The quiet decision to hold the line, in whatever form that takes, is as demanded of us now as it was of any soldier on any shore.
What they left us is not housed in any archive. It does not sit behind glass. It lives only in the people willing to carry it — and it has reached us here, now, not as something to admire from a distance, but as something to bear forward.
And bearing it is not loud. It does not ask for recognition. It is found in the quiet choices — when we choose integrity over ease, when we stand beside someone without being asked, when we refuse to turn away.
Because the legacy of those who landed in 1915 was not built on grand moments alone, but on countless small decisions to endure, to support, and to remain.
They carried it then —without certainty, without comfort, without the promise of return.
Now, it rests with us — not in battle, but in how we live, how we act, and how we treat those beside us.
Lest we forget.