Prime Minister Scott Morrison and all my parliamentary colleagues.

Matt Anderson, Director of the Australian War Memorial.

Glenn Keys, representing the Chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial.

Colonel (Retd) Susan Neuhaus, member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial.

Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell.

Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Vice Admiral David Johnston.

Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Michael Noonan.

Chief of Air Force, Air Marshal Mel Hupfeld.

Major General Andrew Hocking, representing the Chief of Army.

All veterans and serving members of the ADF represented here this evening.
 
And the Ngunnawal people, on whose land we are gathered.

Is there any silence so profound as the one that falls after the firing of the last gun?

However brief that silence is, it marks more than the transition from war to peace.

It is a border, a frontier beyond which so many can only travel in the form of memory.

For those who have fallen in battle, that silence is the final full stop.

As we gather here, we think of them all.

Their names. Their faces. Their voices. 

Each one of them was once the bright centre of someone’s universe.

And so many are mourned still.

The minute of silence lets us reflect on the moment the guns stopped, and we imagine all the voices that belong to that silence.

Of course, we have our other rituals.

We listen as the piper plays The Flowers of the Forest, a lament for the dead of a battle centuries ago, and we are moved by its austere beauty.

And we feel each note of the bugle during the Last Post, a piece of musical simplicity that holds us like so little else.

Just as they touch our hearts, we hope they can somehow touch the spirits of the dead.

Yet, ultimately, we return to that silence and we think of everyone we have lost, even as humanity keeps confounding the optimism of the old phrase, “The war to end all wars.”

The very act of remembering them is to be a flame holding back the fall of night.

But as we mourn those who fell and feel gratitude to all who have served, we also take heart in the spirit that drove them.

Long after war had shed the naïve sense of adventure it once held, for some, Australians have kept rising up against tyranny and injustice.

Here, in this sanctuary of memory, we are surrounded by the machinery of war – each one a reminder of the fragility of peace.

The guns. The bombs.

A life raft from HMAS Sydney that was meant to bring salvation, but didn’t.

A landing boat that was meant to help deliver victory at Gallipoli, but couldn’t.

A Mitsubishi Zero fighter, the likes of which darkened the skies over Darwin nearly 80 years ago.

Look about at the dioramas of battlefields, the earth below and the heavens above turned into hellscapes, the sea into a tomb.

We think of those who fell. Walk through this building and feel their presence all around you.

We think of those who came home. And those who were so changed by what they lived through, they left part of themselves back on the other side of that great silence.

Just as we owe a great debt to the dead, we are indebted to our veterans. They stepped up for us. We must step up for them.

Yes, Australians have been extraordinary – as warriors, and as builders and keepers of the peace. But they are also human.

“A curious mixture of toughness and sentimentality”, in the words of British general and Victoria Cross recipient Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart.

Throughout history – whether on the Western Front or at Kabul airport – they have carried in their hearts the values that make us who we are.

Values that can never be taken for granted, but must always be defended.

I will always turn back to my great mentor and Labor giant, Tom Uren.

Tom said his fellow Australian prisoners of war survived because of a simple code:

I also like to turn to the words of his comrade and Liberal Party luminary, Sir John Carrick, who during his own time as a POW was struck by the heroism and the humanity of the medics:

Two great Australians who encapsulated what is greatest about our national character. Not conquest, not victory, but the fact that our deepest instinct is to respond to the worst of times by being our best.

Even when things are at their bleakest, Australians ensure that humanity prevails. And because of that we are assured that we will endure – as a people, as a nation, as an idea.

That is both the hope and the gratitude we feel during the silence.

Lest we forget.