Tuesday, 15 August 2023
The Cenotaph, Martin Place
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Bujari gamarruwa

Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura

I greet you in the language of the Gadigal, Traditional Owners of the land on which we gather. In doing so, I pay my respects to their Elders past, present, and emerging. I extend that respect also to the Elders of all parts of our State from which you have travelled, and to First Nations people who have served, and continue to do so, with such distinction in our Defence Force.

Just before a quarter to nine on the morning of Wednesday the 15^th of August 1945, a codeword was flashed from the Australian High Commission in London to Government Offices in Canberra.

According to newspaper reports of the time, a Mr J L Mulrooney, Officer-in-Charge of the External Communications Section of the Department of External Affairs, had been waiting for the previous 5 days and nights for the codeword to flash across his receiver.[1]

The codeword travelling across the cables on that historic day was ‘neon’ – chosen because “it was the shortest possible word containing the least number of morse code signals which could be clearly understood”[2]; it was the official confirmation that Japan had surrendered.

10 minutes after receiving the message, Mr Mulrooney and the Prime Minister’s press secretary began hooking up every radio station in Australia to 2CY’s studio in Canberra; forty minutes later, Mr Chifley spoke to his fellow Australians as follows, “Fellow citizens, the war is over ... let us remember those whose lives were given that we may enjoy this glorious moment and may look forward to a peace which they have won for us.”[3]

Impromptu celebrations had been occurring in Sydney since the previous Friday, anticipating Japan’s imminent surrender.[4] Immediately following the Prime Minister’s broadcast, the celebrations took on an unprecedented scale and pitch.

Over the following days, the newspapers were full of descriptions of the rejoicing, the joy and elation, the photographs of happy faces, cheering crowds, and the almost endless rain of streamers and torn up papers flung from office windows.

The outburst was entirely understandable; the Prime Minister’s message closed 6 years of war, a global conflagration that had come not only to our doorstep but, indeed, onto our very soil.

An hour after the Prime Minister’s announcement – amongst the din of cheers, singing, whistles, gas alarm rattles, and planes overhead – ABC reporter Talbot Duckmanton, later to become General Manager of the ABC, observed in a live radio broadcast from here in Martin Place:

"…there is a little bit of sadness too; you only have to look at the Cenotaph to realise that. The freshly laid flowers upon it, and the number of people who have taken off their hats and reverently gone and paid homage […] indicates to us that Sydney, despite all this gaiety and rejoicing […] has not forgotten that our men and our allies too have paid a high price so that we may rejoice in this way."[5]

There were other celebrations, as well as many solemn and restrained moments. In the Sydney Morning Herald, there appeared a small article boxed off from the rest. It read:

"Amid the noise and excitement in Martin Place yesterday morning, a soldier in jungle green knelt in reverence in front of the Cenotaph. An elderly woman joined him immediately. It was not long before 12 women were kneeling around the soldier. They were all visibly affected, and some were weeping. The scene hushed the crowd."[6]

Today is a day of ceremony, unaccompanied by the noise of elation that echoed here 78 years ago today; what remains, however, is the deepest esteem we hold for those whose service, sacrifice, and valour made peace possible.

We also honour the strong friendships now formed with those nations represented here today, whose fate was not victory but whose peoples also suffered the ravages of that war.

Today is important for another reason, as I have the special privilege of acknowledging four men who served our nation in the Second World War.

Mr John Arthur Brightwell, who, called up at 18, joined the Royal Australian Artillery on the advice of his father, who had been “in the artillery with horses on the Western Front” [7]. An artillery surveyor in the 5^th Survey Battery, Mr Brightwell served in Mililat, New Guinea, before returning to Australia in 1944, stricken with malaria and dysentery.[8]

Two days ago, Mr Brightwell celebrated his 100^th birthday.

He was to join us today, but unfortunately couldn’t make it.

Mr Don Kennedy, who joined the Merchant Navy in 1944 as a Deck Boy on the Norwegian Tanker Seirstad at age 16. He later reminisced “I haven’t quite worked out why I did it. It wasn’t any sense of trying to win the war. It was just that it was the thing to do. If you couldn’t get in the Forces, you’d do what you can.”[9] He learnt Norwegian, rose to the rank of Gunner, and served in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. In the month before the end of the war, he transferred to the United States Army Transport Point San Pedro and was travelling past New Guinea at the time of the surrender. He would not leave the sea for good until 1949.

Mr Aubrey Knowles OAM, who, serving in the 36^th Australian Wireless Task Section, was part of the Ninth Division’s September 1943 landings at Lae and Finschhafen in New Guinea, the former the first major amphibious operation undertaken by the Australian Army since Gallipoli. At war’s end, he was serving in the North Solomons on Nissan Island and didn’t return to Australia until the following year.

Mr Ronald Leckie, who, age 20, enlisted in the RAAF’s 31 Squadron. Flying Bristol Beaufighter’s out of Coomalie Creek, Northern Territory, and then Noemfoor, Papua, his Squadron patrolled Australia’s northern coast, raiding enemy shipping, shore installations, and airfields in Portuguese East Timor, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, Celebes, and Halmahera Islands. After serving with the occupation forces following the Japanese surrender, he returned to Australia in 1946 and married his sweetheart Joyce, whom he’d met at training exercises in Narromine during her time in the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force. 

On Anzac Day this year, Mr Leckie celebrated his 101^st birthday.

He, too, was to be with us today, but was unable to make it.

To these four gentlemen, to their comrades who fell in battle and since, to all Australians and Allies who served in the Second World War:

In our coming moments of reflection, in the tradition of commemoration before the Cenotaph, we will think of you. We will remember not only your sacrifice and the cost borne by you and your families, but also the gratitude we as a nation owe to you for your service; a debt, in the words of the Prime Minister in his broadcast on that morning 78 years ago, “nothing can fully repay”[10].

Lest we forget.