ANZAC Day and a multipolar world: what “lest we forget” means now
On ANZAC Day 2026 I remember the ordinary diggers behind the legend and reflect on Australia’s place in an emerging multipolar world, from Gallipoli to today’s conflicts.
ANZAC
ANZAC Remembrance and Peace
On this day I share the text of a speech given by the New Zealand Governor General The Hon Dame Silvia Cartwright from Wednesday, 25 April 2001:
"Nga mate nga aitua ka tangihia e tatou i tenei wa. Haere. Haere. Haere.
The dead, those we mourn, we lament them
Remembrance Day 2012
"Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
These words from Horace have survived since ancient times.
Yet more often nowadays we read it in other contexts like:
or
Wilfred Owen's excoriating Dulce et decorum est:
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come
ANZAC 2012
I don't think that many romanticise war too much these days. And there is something very poignant and compelling about seeing the fruits of war.
In northern France and Belgium the unimaginable scale of loss wrought upon so many families in the great wars of the twentieth century
ANZAC Day: remembering some ordinary diggers, not famous, not important #ANZAC
Another ANZAC Day and another day to remember the sacrifices made by Australian and New Zealand forces. Those who serve in battle never get off lightly, even if they manage to survive seemingly unscathed.
This year I remember some family members - Claude and Tim from Crows Nest, and Henry Demas
Flanders mud is pretty bad too
Recently I visited the site in Flanders where John McCrae wrote the famouns pomen In Flanders Fields. It is at the Essex Farm Aid Station only a few kilometres from Ieper (aka Ypres).
I visited on a cold, muddy and miserable day. The concrete bunker where the medicos triaged the
The Somme really does have sticky mud
I have taken some time out from business meetings in Europe to make something of a personal pilgrimage in the steps of my ANZAC ancestors.
It has been a very moving and very sombre experience. To see the tiny spaces of land fought over in World War 1 that resulted