Battle of Australia Commemorative Ceremony

My Mum is 92 years old. She has lived her entire life in Melbourne. She still lives in the house she and Dad built in Forest Hill in 1959.

She has been a Collingwood member for over 50 years, she goes to every home game, occasionally travels interstate, and sometimes even goes to training! Although these days she doesn’t get a run on. We might have made the finals if she had!

Born in 1932, Mum remembers clearly what we now call the Battle for Australia.

She was 10 years old when our wartime Prime Minister John Curtin described “our nation’s gravest hour”. He said “the fall of Singapore can only be described as Australia's Dunkirk…(and that) the protection of this country would no longer rely…(on our) contribution to a world at war, but rather resistance to an enemy threatening to invade our shores.”

I called her on the weekend to chat, told her I was welcoming you all today, and asked what she remembered of 1942.

It was a mix of dismay and nostalgia.

“We simply didn’t hear any of the bad news…We didn’t know that Darwin had been bombed...I remember the blackout curtains, and the rationing of course”, of sugar, and butter and tea. She remembered my Nana going to the local school to “fill the copper with milk and cocoa for the children who were going without.”

She recalled school lunches wrapped in newspaper and then, with Catholic guilt which, sadly, I have inherited, she told me in a whisper, hers were “wrapped in a serviette”!

An air raid shelter was built in her back yard in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Preston, which Mum used as a cubby house when it didn’t rain, and slit trenches were dug by volunteers on school playgrounds and local ovals. The children would practice air raid drills regularly.

Kids, my Mum thought this was all part of “a very normal childhood”.

As the conversation continued, she thought a little more deeply.

Mum said “most of the boys went off to war, one way or another”.

She was right.

Of a population of only seven million, nearly one million would enlist.

Mum explained her Dad was fit and strong and felt it his duty to enlist – only to be told at the recruiting depot he had a heart murmur and was deemed unfit for service. He was heartbroken.

Mum’s uncle, Martin, joined up and served in the Army with the water transport workshops in Milne Bay and Lae. The Military Police took him from the hospital bedside of his newborn son, Ray, to be sent to New Guinea. Ray would die shortly after. My Nana took the grieving family in for the duration of the war. “It’s just what you did.” My Dad’s father enlisted, against the protests of my grandmother, and survived the war, stayed in the Army after the war, and rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant.

But it was not just the boys.

Mum’s older and only sister, my aunty Kathleen, worked in an office job at Shell, and of an evening, was a Voluntary Aid Detachment at St Vincent’s hospital where she and other VADs had some medical training, but mostly carried out menial but essential tasks - scrubbing floors, sweeping, dusting and cleaning bathrooms and other areas, dealing with bedpans, and washing patients.

Kathleen’s boyfriend, Richard Southey Hookins, joined the Royal Australian Navy. He wrote wonderful letters, signing off as ‘Shakespeare of the Sea.’

He would serve as an Ordinary Seaman on HMAS Australia, and was one of the 30 officers and men who were killed or died of wounds, including the Captain, when a Japanese kamikaze aircraft struck off Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944.

Our Shakespeare was only 18 years old.

After the war, Kathleen would marry the dashing Adrian Callinan, who served as a radar mechanic with the Royal Australian Air Force and was based 54 miles south of Darwin, later in Air Defence Headquarters in Darwin and in the Atherton Tablelands over the period 1942-1945.

So you can see, kids, from this random sample of my own family, the Battle for Australia probably touched nearly every family in the country.

And as I look to the wonderful school children here today, remember that Mum thought hers’ was an ordinary Australian family with nothing much to report about the impact of the Battle for Australia.

We are honoured today to have Second World War veterans Les Cook, Ms Merle Hane and Mr Terry Colhoun with us.

I encourage all school children here today to come up and say hello to members of this most remarkable generation. Take the time, as I did with Mum, to talk to them and to listen.

And, if, you know where to look, evidence of the attacks on Australia can still be seen across the nation: from derelict gun emplacements and overgrown airfields to the foundations of dismantled barracks and fortifications, from the wrecks in Broome to the base of the boom defence at the entrance to Sydney Harbour.

Those who lived through these years still remember the harrowing days of air attacks and the threat of invasion. They remember their men who embarked for “overseas” and did not return, and the sights and sounds of foreign soldiers in their pubs and on their streets.

They remember living with the knowledge that the enemy was only just over the horizon.

We now know that the battle for Australia changed us. We built our own planes, ships, trucks and rifles. It swept away the unemployment of the great depression, brought women into the work force in numbers and occupations never seen before, and that remain to this day.

During the Battle for Australia, Australians, and our allies represented here today, fought and died on the home front and in the campaigns to liberate the Pacific and South East Asia.

Children, this remarkable generation saved us, and over 40,000 gave their tomorrows for our todays.

We are here today to remember them, to give our thanks, and to utter: Lest we forget.