Local Symbol of ANZAC Centenary

First published in the Logan Reporter, 25 April 2015.

This weekend we mark the centenary of ANZAC and honour those who risked everything to protect and advance our nation.

They’re our fellow Australians, and our brothers and sisters from New Zealand; a century ago, and in the hundred years since; those who came home, and those who could not.

One ANZAC, Frederick Pope, made it home – but only just. At 4:30 in the morning, on the 25th of April 1915, he was among the very first to go ashore at Gallipoli.

As he and his mates scrambled onto the beach, they could not have imagined the place they would occupy, a century later, in the story of our nation.

At Gallipoli, Pope’s battalion lost 236 men and another 390 were wounded. Pope himself survived gunshot wounds in Gallipoli and gassing in France and Belgium to settle locally in Woodridge where his daughter still lives today.

For us, Frederick Pope is one symbol, our symbol, of every courageous Australian service man and woman. By keeping Frederick’s memory alive we honour not just him, but all of them – in their graves around the world.

He is all of them; he is one of us. As the story of our community and of our country inches forward, we will remember him. And we will remember them.

For another hundred years, and the hundred years after that. Lest we forget.

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