When you stand looking down on the Freycinet Peninsula, it’s a bit like life really – its beauty, ruggedness and ageless power have the ability to overpower, inspire or make you feel as though you’ve really just come home. Like a life well lived it has a sense of real and tragic history and a genuine hope for an exciting future for yourself
and those who will follow.
From distant climes, o’er wide-spread seas we come,
Though not with much eclat or beat of drum;
True patriots all; for it be understood
We left our country for our country’s good.
No private views disgraced our generous zeal,
What urged our travels was our country’s weal.
There is a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation.
It is the duty of the State to educate, and the right of the people to demand education.
I say further that our system of education should be unsectarian.
Creating a nation requires the will of the people!
A State which has universal suffrage and a wide extension of the jury franchise, must qualify the people by education to rightly exercise the great powers with which they are invested.
This is a good place for a village.
It lay in the mettle of the men themselves. To be the sort of man who would give way when his mates were trusting to his firmness; to be the sort of man who would fail when the line, the whole force, and the allied cause required his endurance; to have made it necessary for another unit to do his own unit's work; to live the rest of his life haunted by the knowledge that he had set his hand to a soldier's task and had lacked the grit to carry it through… that was the prospect these men could not face. Life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood. Standing upon that alone, when help failed and hope faded, when the end loomed clear in front of them, when the whole world seemed to crumble and the heaven to fall in, they faced its ruin undismayed.
What these men did nothing can alter now. The good and the bad, the greatness and the smallness of their story will stand. Whatever of glory it contains nothing now can lessen. It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of the ages, a monument to great-hearted men; and, for their nation, a possession for ever.