Anzac Event at Meadows Primary School:
Extract from Parliamentary Debates
Members Statement Tuesday – 14 April 2014
Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) — A sapling from Gallipoli’s poignant Lone Pine stands proudly in a school playground in Broadmeadows, commemorating the centenary of the Anzac battle that forged a unique relationship between Australia and Turkey. It serves as a reminder of William Faulkner’s insight, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. Nowhere is this more significant than in Broadmeadows. One hundred years ago thousands of valiant men from an adolescent nation trained at the Broadmeadows army camp before being dispatched to Gallipoli, where they matured into diggers and light horsemen and became recipients of the highest award for bravery, the Victoria Cross.
Australia and Turkey forged national identities at Gallipoli after their soldiers fought in trenches sometimes only metres apart, shooting to kill and then exchanging water and chocolate amid the heat, snow and carnage. The Turkish general at Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, became the founder of modern secular Turkey and was given the surname ‘Ataturk’, meaning ‘Father of the Turks’. In 1934, h declared:
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours … they have become our sons as well.
Broadmeadows is where the Johnnies and the Mehmets now live side by side. To mark the ebb and flow of history and the evolution of the largest Turkish-Australian community, I will donate a seedling from the Lone Pine to the Victorian Parliament as a symbol of how communities can grow and thrive side by side, beyond the burden of history.
