Today we mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day. We give our thanks to all who stood for liberty – and we remember all who fell.
I’m pleased to inform the House that the Governor-General, David Hurley, and Mrs Hurley are in France representing Australia at the commemorations.
D-Day was an unprecedented feat of collective willpower and daring – the free world’s decisive reply to the poison of Nazi tyranny.
It rightly holds a place in our collective hearts as one of the most extraordinary turning points in history – and it turned on the courage of nearly 160,000 soldiers, sailors, air crew and medics on that first day alone.
It was the greatest armada of ships, landing craft and aircraft the world had ever seen. Rarely has a shore been as fateful as the Normandy coast was that day.
As General Eisenhower told them:
The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
They carried those hopes and prayers across sky and sea. And they carried them on to those beaches, where they fought in the knowledge that the fate of the world hinged on them.
Cinema has given a sense of how it looked, yet what will always remain elusive to us is how it truly felt.
The chaos. The noise. The desperation and fear.
Yet also the determination. The camaraderie. The overwhelming sense of purpose.
From that fierce cauldron of heroism and sacrifice would flow a force that ultimately swept half a continent.
Among all the British, Canadians and Americans, our tendency is not to think of D-Day as a story with Australian voices.
So many Australians were defending us much closer to home by then.
Yet there were 3300 Australians serving on D-Day, and they acquitted themselves as bravely and nobly as in any theatre of war.
There was even an original Anzac among them – George Dixon, a Tasmanian who was wounded at Gallipoli after managing to enlist aged just 15.
So he was no stranger to fateful shores when, decades later, he took charge of one of the Canadian tank-landing craft at Juno Beach.
His story is just one of the thousands of those who were there at the beginning of this most extraordinary mission, this headlong drive to lift Europe out of the darkness into which it had been plunged.
Eight decades on, we are reminded tragically often that peace is far from a foregone conclusion.
Yet as we remember D-Day, we are also reminded about one of the most important truths – peace is always worth fighting for.
On those French beaches eighty years ago, that is the great light those courageous thousands held up for the world.
Lest we forget.
