The sky held off long enough for the march. Residents, veterans, school children and visitors assembled at the corner of Wilga Court and Flaxton Drive at 9.30am on Saturday 25th April, stepping off behind Parade Marshal Lloyd Anderson, into a morning that still carried the particular cool clarity of the hinterland after rain. By the time the column reached Mapleton School, where the service had already been moved from the RSL Memorial Park in anticipation of the weather, heavy showers swept across the Range. The flags flying at half-mast at the Memorial Park a short distance away, as proceedings got underway inside the hall.
This year marks the 111th anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, a campaign that was, by any military measure, a catastrophe, yet which forged something enduring about who Australians and New Zealanders believe themselves to be. In Mapleton on Saturday, with rain hammering the roof of the school hall, that paradox was examined with unusual candour.
“Lest We Forget”- But Forget What, Exactly?
Sub-branch president Matt Dykes, himself an Army veteran who served sixteen years as a Royal Australian Engineer before transferring to the Inactive Reserves in 2022, opened proceedings with a welcome, noting the first aid officers from the Mapleton Rural Fire Brigade stationed around the hall, thanking the school for its hospitality, and advising that wreaths laid inside would be carried to the cenotaph in the Memorial Park afterwards. It was a practical, warm beginning, and it set the tone: this was a community gathering as much as a formal ceremony.
The address was delivered by John Watson, a former officer in both the New Zealand and Australian armies with a biography that spans half a century of service across two continents.
Born in New Zealand, he had joined the New Zealand Territorial Force after high school, transferring to the regular army in 1964 and serving in infantry, senior corps, and briefly as an aviator, before deploying to Singapore in 1972–73 and transferring to the Australian Army in 1979.
What John offered was not comfortable mythology. He spoke plainly about what Gallipoli actually was.
The campaign, he noted, was conceived as part of a broader Allied effort to force the Dardanelles, take Constantinople and knock Turkey out of the war, which would, in theory, ease pressure on Russia and shorten the conflict. It was, he said, “hastily planned to react to events, with all the problems that that would pose.”
It was tactically unsuccessful and strategically a failure. And it was not, he reminded the gathering, primarily an Anzac affair: of the forces committed, there were some 150,000 British, 80,000 French and 16,000 Indians, as many as there were Anzacs. Senior Allied generals, John observed, viewed the campaign as a sideshow from the outset, their attention fixed on the slaughter in France and Flanders.
The casualty figures, when placed in context, are sobering in an unexpected way. Australian losses over the eight months of Gallipoli, around 8,700 killed and 19,500 wounded, were terrible. But John noted that, set against the scale of forces committed across the whole campaign, they tell a different story about the war’s relative weight. The Battle of Fromelles on the Western Front cost 5,500 Australians killed in a single day. “So our casualties in eight months of Gallipoli represented around about three weeks,” he said. “You could argue that Gallipoli was not the most costly campaign for Australians, and that is not often spelled out, and it’s not very popular when it is.” None of this was said to diminish the sacrifice. It was said to understand it honestly.
The Saving Grace: The Men Themselves
The principal saving grace of Gallipoli, John argued, possibly the only one, was the conduct of the rank and file of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers. Colonial troops were regarded with condescension in some quarters of the British command, he noted, and that attitude had survived well beyond the beaches of Anzac Cove. It was still present when Australian forces were beginning to make their name on the Western Front. It did not survive General Sir John Monash.
John invoked Monash as the figure who most completely redeemed what Gallipoli had cost. Born in Melbourne to Jewish parents, Monash had commanded the 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, endured the same mud and futility as every other man on the peninsula, and drawn his own conclusions. By the time he was appointed commander of the Australian Corps in June 1918, at that point the largest individual corps on the Western Front, he had developed a philosophy of warfare that was radically different from the attritional meat-grinding that had characterised so much of the conflict.
Historian A.J.P. Taylor would later describe Monash as “the only general of creative originality produced by the First World War.” His Battle of Hamel on 4 July 1918, a meticulously coordinated assault using infantry, armour, artillery and airpower working in concert, was completed in 93 minutes and became the template for the larger Allied offensives that followed. When the Australian Corps punched through the German lines at Amiens on 8 August 1918, advancing twelve kilometres in a single day, German General Ludendorff called it “the black day of the German Army.” The war was, for all practical purposes, over.
The arc from Anzac Cove to Amiens is the arc John traced: from colonial troops treated as expendable, fighting under British command in a campaign their own generals doubted, to Australian forces under their own officers, commanded by one of the war’s most brilliant minds, driving the decisive blow of the entire conflict. Gallipoli’s failure, in a dark irony, had made that transformation possible.
Nine Names, Nine Families
At the centre of the service, as always, were the names. As each name of the local fallen was called out, Mapleton School students stepped forward to pin a poppy below it. On the World War One side of the memorial: Pritchard Carnell, John Logan, Robert Logan, John McKinnon, and Thomas Robert Waller. On the World War Two side: Allen John Dumschat, Ivan Harley Shields, Gordon Henry Williams, and William David Williams.
Nine names. In a small hinterland community, nine names represents something close to total loss, the stripping away of a generation’s young men from a district where everyone would have known everyone. The Logan brothers, John and Robert, serve as a particular reminder of what war cost individual families: two sons, the same mother and father, the same home, gone.
The Shields family connection was present on Saturday too, with a wreath laid by Lloyd Anderson in memory of Ivan Shields on behalf of his family. That a family representative could still be named, that the thread still runs, matters.
Wreaths were laid by a long roll of organisations and individuals: service groups, the Mapleton and District Community Association (MADCA), Mapleton Library and Community Centre, the Men’s Shed, the Lions Club, the Masonic Lodge, the Craft Group, local schools, and other community members. Each wreath, in its way, is a community saying: we have not forgotten who you were, or where you came from.
The Children and the Poems
The Mapleton and Montville Combined School Choir sang the hymn “Lest We Forget.” Students recited “In Flanders Fields” and a poem written by the school titled “Poppies for ANZAC.” The Mapleton Community Choir performed “Walk with Me.”
The presence of children at the heart of an Anzac service is often treated as merely decorative, a sweetening of solemn proceedings. At Mapleton on Saturday, it felt like something more structural. These were the students who pinned the poppies below each name., sang the hymns and recited the poems. In a community this size, some of them may well be descendants of the men on that memorial.
The Ode was recited by Denis Griggs, the congregation giving the response “We will remember them” in unison. The Last Post and Rouse were sounded by a Salvation Army bugler, the bugle’s notes carrying their peculiar mixture of mourning and defiance even through the noise of rain on a hall roof. The flags at the Memorial Park remained at half-mast throughout, as protocol requires until noon on Anzac Day. The Australian and New Zealand national anthems were then sung: two nations, one memorial, one ceremony.
The Benediction was given by Nambour Salvation Army, and Matt Dykes delivered closing remarks.
Freedom and Its Cost
John Watson closed his address with two quotations that deserve to be heard beyond the walls of the school hall. The first came from Pericles, the Athenian statesman, writing some three thousand years ago: “Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.”
The second came from a commentary published in the Australian newspaper on the eve of Anzac Day 2026, which Watson quoted as he concluded: that the Last Post is “sounded into the dark and resolved into light,” and that between the two lies a moment in which the nation briefly becomes, once more, clear about who it is and what it owes, to those who fell, to the truth of what they did, and to the continuing obligation of those who remain.
It was, for a rain-soaked morning in a school hall, on a hill in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, rather a large thought. But then, that is what Anzac Day is for, not simply to mourn, but to think clearly about why it still matters that we do.
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