Bean Foundation Dinner Acknowledgement

Your Excellency and Mr Simeon Beckett, our distinguished guests, correspondents, journalists, camera and sound operators, friends and AWM Council Members Dr Susan Neuhaus and Dr Karen Bird.

On behalf of the Chair of the Bean Foundation and Council Member, Major General Greg Melick, and my fellow Directors, I’m honoured to offer this vote of thanks to Her Excellency, Sam Mostyn. Our modern, optimistic and visible Governor-General.

For those of us who count these things, this is your fifth visit to the Memorial as Australia’s 28th Governor-General. I would add for our audience there was also another occasion; on ANZAC Day, while you had been announced as Governor-General, you had not yet been sworn in, and instead arrived in our gardens in the pre-dawn hours, without any fanfare, acknowledgement or support, where you stood in our gardens with the public to pay your respects.

It was noticed, and it speaks volumes.

And we were honoured last week when you delivered the Remembrance Day Commemorative Address. You spoke proudly of being the daughter of an Army officer and Vietnam Veteran – and we are delighted your Dad, Bill, is with us tonight. We note too the presence of your sister, Suzanne, and your brother-in-law, Mark Riley. Which begs the question: are there any other Mostyns here tonight?

We have tracked your busy operating tempo in engaging with the ADF, with visits to Holsworthy Barracks, RAAF Bases Tindal and Darwin, Fleet Base East, HMAS Adelaide, the 6th Aviation Regiment, 2nd Commando Regiment, the cadets of my alma mater at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and 2 Flight Training School in Perth.

Thank you for caring enough to visit our sailors, soldiers and aviators - and their families – where they live and train.

Your speech this evening is a reminder that, in this place of history and of story, we are also and must remain a modern and relevant institution.

Our mission – my mission - is to lead the nation’s commemoration and understanding of the Australian experience of war. Quite simply, and as you have reminded us tonight, since the very beginning we have relied on war correspondents to drive this understanding.

We don’t collect objects here. As inspired by Charles Bean, we collect stories. So thank you too for reminding us of JFK, our Coastwatchers, those brave Solomon Scouts and our shared history in that story and in our region.

I had the honour today to host Charles Bean’s granddaughter, Ann Carol, who is also here tonight with her husband, Ian. We took Ann and Ian through the new CEW Bean Building and Research Centre – which will be handed over to the Memorial before Christmas – and we retrieved for her some of Charles’ Bean’s diaries and notebooks. He kept 226, and all of them survived.

But as Bean was reviewing his diary entry of the Gallipoli landing, he penned an ‘explanatory note’:

“If I am plugged and anyone gets this diary they’ll probably think I was either tight or very unnerved when I wrote it. The fact was it was written by night when no candles were to be had and I had to do as best I could by moonlight”.

I’m sure many of today’s war correspondents - and I look at you Karen Middleton and Garry Ramage - could sympathise.

In this place of service, Your Excellency, thank you for yours. Thank you for being modern, optimistic and visible.

And to all our journalists and war correspondents here tonight, may you continue to be the sharp eyes, the finely tuned ears and the influential voices that help me to drive the nation’s understanding of the Australian experience of war.