Tuesday Sep 17, 2024
Tuesday Sep 17, 2024
Saturday, 15 November 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
It was Remembrance Day when Australia, just like many other countries paused to remember the enormous sacrifices made by the men and women who fought and died in war. The nation observed a one minute’s silence for a special moment of reflection.
Remembrance Day was special this year. It marked the 96th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I and 100 years since the Great War began – on 4 August 1914.
Two weeks prior to the Remembrance Day, on 31 October Western Australia (WA) commemorated another event related to WWI. On that day 100 years ago two ships carrying soldiers had sailed from Fremantle.
One writer described that keenness of young men to join the army thus: “They came on foot and on horseback. They were farmers, prospectors and labourers who had marched from Kalgoorlie and others who packed recruitment centres in Perth and Fremantle, eager for the promise of adventure and travel. Little that they knew that the Great War would be a conflict like none seen before it, nor did they know how few would return from the bloody killing fields of Gallipoli and the Western Front.”
The pain was even worse for WA people because no other state in the country had responded so enthusiastically to the call to join the forces. It had the highest per capita rate in the country. Between 1914 and 1918 WA had sent 32,231 volunteers to battle. This amounted to one-third of all men aged 18 to 41.
In addition to their adventurous spirit, the young Australians felt compelled by a sense of loyalty to Britain and a sense of duty.
Australia had sent forces to many wars after WWI. Remembrance Day paid tribute to all those who were killed in these wars. Records indicate that 102,000 had died. School children from around the country travelled to the nation’s capital, Canberra to lay 102 poppies on the remembrance stone. The capitals in all the states had commemorative activities at the War Memorials.
As in other countries here too poppies symbolised the occasion.
The poppy itself goes back to WWI. It is stated that much of the fighting had taken place in Western Europe where previously beautiful countryside was blasted, bombed and fought over, again and again. The landscape swiftly turned to fields of mud, bleak and barren scenes where little or nothing could grow.
Bright red Flanders poppies (Papaverrhoeas) however, were delicate but resilient flowers and grew in their thousands, flourishing even in the middle of chaos and destruction. In the spring of 1915, shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, a Canadian doctor, Lt. Col. John McCrae was inspired by the sight of poppies to write a now famous poem called ‘In Flanders Fields’.
The poem in turn inspired an American academic, Moina Michael to make handmade red silk poppies which were then brought to England by a French lady, Anna Guerin. The (Royal) British Legion, formed in 1921, ordered nine million of the poppies which they sold on 11 November that year. The poppies sold out almost immediately and that first ever ‘Poppy Appeal’ raised over £106,000, a huge amount of money at the time.
