Dedication of the Flame of Remembrance

Hobart, 25th April 2015

Your Excellency Professor the Honourable Kate Warner AM,
Governor of Tasmania; Lord Mayor of Hobart, Alderman Sue
Hickey; my colleagues from Federal, State and Local
governments; distinguished members of the Australian
Defence Force, serving and returned; President of the RSL
State Branch, Mr Robert Dick.
Today we commemorate an event considered a defining
chapter in our countrys story, and our national identity.
One hundred years ago the first Australian and New
Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli.
One hundred years on, and every year on this day, we
come together to commemorate this catastrophic
campaign and to remember and honour the brave men and
women who served there. 15,000 Tasmanians enlisted in
World War 1, and 2,432 never came home.
My fathers great uncles son, Private Harry Hodgman, was
one of them. A 22 year old, from Brighton, he enlisted in
October and landed at Gallipoli on 25thApril 1915 six
months later, where he was killed almost immediately. He
was one of 61,000 Australians who died in World War 1.
Today, like on every ANZAC Day, we will remember and pay
gratitude to Australians who have served and died in all
wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations.
But on this most extraordinary day - the 100th Anniversary
- we will especially remember the first ANZACS, those at
Kabatepe - Anzac Cove - on April 25, 1915.
Today, I think of the sacrifice of my ancestor, young Harry half my age - and the thousands like him. I honour him, and
those thousands, for their bravery, their sacrifice, their
service to our country.

And I also thank them from the bottom of my heart for

what they have done to give meaning and value to the
sense of our national identity.
The official war historian of the time, Charles Bean,
wrote; during four years in which nearly the whole world
was so tested, the people of Australia saw their own men
those who had dwelt in the same street or been daily
travellers in the same trains flash across the worlds
consciousness like a shooting star.
In the first straight rush up the Anzac hills in the dark; in
the easy figures first seen on the ridges in the dawn sky; in
the working parties stacking stores on the shelled beach
without the turning of a head; in the stretcher bearers
walking, pipes in mouths, down a bullet-swept slope to a
comrades call . Australians watched the name of their
country rise high in the esteem of the worlds oldest and
greatest nations.
Every Australian bears that name proudly abroad today
and by these daily doings, great and smallthe Australian
nation came to know itself.
And now, 100 years on from that nation defining event, we
now at last dedicate this new Flame of Remembrance, to
ensure we will never, ever forget them.
I now officially hand over the Flame of Remembrance to the
People.