The most famous story of the Boer war was that of Harry Morant, ‘The Breaker’. Lord Kitchener, the officer in charge of the British and Australian troops, issued an order stating that any enemy soldier who was captured wearing British or Australian uniforms should be shot. Breaker Morant and Lieutenant Peter Handcock followed that order and were court martialled and put to death by firing squad. In 1910, Kitchener visited Bathurst, the home town of Peter Handcock, whose wife and children still lived there. Kitchener refused to unveil a new war memorial until Handcock’s name had been removed from the list of the fallen. Handcock’s wife had to be restrained at the opening because she insisted on bringing her children to meet Kitchener, the man who had wrongly executed their father and now had the hide to remove his name from the honour roll. Her protest was in vain and she and her children were turned away, distraught, and in tears.

WWI started when a squabble broke out between two small countries in Europe. Germany and England were the big brothers of the squabbling countries and before you knew it, war was on. They thought the war would last for three months, but four years later the war was a complete stalemate across five hundred miles of trenches, which became known as the western front. To try and brake this stalemate, England decided to invade Turkey to weaken Germany’s support in the East and Gallipoli became another bogged down trench war. In some places the trenches were just fifteen metres apart and waves of young soldiers were sent over the top of the trenches to attack the enemy. The Nek was one place where the ordinary soldier dealt with the fear of being shot and shelled but also the fear of fear. The fear that they would let their mates down and die cowards when that whistle blew for them to go over the top of their trench and run towards those machine guns.

One of the best known stories from Gallipoli is that of Simpson and his donkey. John Simpson used donkeys to save the lives of over three hundred men in the three weeks he survived at Gallipoli. He became well known for the way he and his donkey walked calmly down the Gallipoli tracks, ignoring the bullets and shrapnel. Two of his donkeys, Scotty and Murphy, were shot from underneath wounded soldiers they were carrying. When told to take cover or keep down, his standard response was "My worry, not yours." Over the years there have been regular calls for him to be awarded a posthumous VC. This hasn’t happened yet.

The ordinary soldier in the trenches did it tough. Disease claimed as many lives as the bullet or the shell. It’s no surprise that being shot dead was a pretty good alternative on some days. The good old Aussie black sense of humour created the saying "Cheer up mate, you’ll soon be dead".

The last Australian to fight in WWI, William Evan Allan, died October 17, 2005 aged 106. William was born in Bega in NSW on July 24 1899 and enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy at the outbreak of war aged just fourteen. He served in the RAN for thirty-four years seeing action in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. He took part in the hunt for the German raider Wolf, was once washed overboard in rough and icy seas and was there when the German fleet surrendered. William retired from the Navy in 1947 as a lieutenant and went back to live on the land, setting up his own farm near Frankston in Victoria.

By the second World War, the Australian Army had been split into two. The Australian Infantry Force was made up of professional volunteer career soldiers. The Citizens Military Force were conscripted men who were only able to serve within Australia as a reserve home guard. They were the butt of the jokes by the regular army boys. The reserves were called "chocolate soldiers" and "koalas" because they couldn’t be shot and couldn’t be exported. When Japan invaded Malaya in 1941, Prime Minister Curtin ordered Australian troops in Europe home. When Japan entered New Guinea, which was then still part of Australia, Curtin sent these rag tag reservists to stall the Japanese advance until the regular soldiers came home. Our soldiers knew what they were fighting for this time…Australia and despite the average age being eighteen years old, they fought fiercely and created the legend of the Kokoda Trail.

The War that had always been "over there" sailed into Sydney Harbour in may 1942 when three midget submarines launched an attack. In a nice display of military courtesy and respect, the bodies of the Japanese sailors were cremated and their ashes returned to their families in Japan. In 1968 Mrs Miatsue Matsuo, mother of commander Keiu Matsuo of Midget Submarine A21 came to Australia to lay a wreath and visit the place where her son was killed. We often forget the enemy in our war remembrance, that they had families, mothers who also suffered the pain and grief of loss.

The ordinary soldier used mateship and humour to get through the long months overseas. Music also helped pass the time. It was a great morale booster and an instant memory of home.

Women played a big part in the war effort. Many became nurses who found out pretty quickly about the real business of war. They were faced with a flood of casualties each day; with basic equipment; with atrocious conditions and disease. The young nurses became a mixture of mother, girlfriend and big sister. Being a nurse didn’t protect them from being bombed shot at or becoming a prisoner of war and the girls suffered as badly as the men. A song for the women who held back their tears.

Whilst the men were overseas fighting, women back in Australia were left to pick up the slack. They were encouraged to work in the factories and on the farms, performing tasks previously only considered capable by men.

During WWII sixteen thousand Australian girls married American servicemen. Many married in recycled parachute silk. Australian war brides going to America had to wait twelve to eighteen months before being admitted and they had to give up their Australian citizenship in order to become US citizens. This made the traumatic move seem even more final. Recently the laws have changed to allow dual citizenship to those war brides…welcome home girls; we’ve missed you.

Only one in three survived capture by the enemy. POW (Prisoner Of War) camps were a byword for atrocity and inhumanity. Despite this the will to survive is basic. Heroism and bravery are the stuff of legend.

Coming home from a war is hard; it’s even harder when you’re not welcome. Vietnam was a war that couldn’t be won. Australians were involved in the famous battle of Long Tan on August 18 & 19, 1966. Many of these soldiers were national service conscripts. Conscription was as unpopular as it was unfair. If your birthday was drawn out of the ‘barrel of death’ you were off to Vietnam. The unpopularity of the war meant that there was no official welcome home for the soldiers. Many Vietnam veterans suffered abuse from the general public and became casualties of war twenty or thirty years later, suffering mental and physical problems from exposure to toxic chemicals such as napalm and agent orange.

War used to be about soldiers in bright red coats battling it out on a piece of ground well away from towns. As time passed, it was accepted that civilian deaths would happen, they were just called ‘collateral damage’. Since 9/11, civilians have become the main targets. There is no battlefield. War is now on the bus, on the train, in the nightclubs, on our planes; it’s strapped onto the person walking next to you in the street. In a world that seems to want to pull us apart, this may be our chance to pull together again, to look out for one another. A song of hope.

While the government fiddled about and argued for twenty or thirty years to build the Cenotaph in Sydney and The Australian War Memorial in Canberra, small towns and communities all around Australia were putting up their own war monuments. We have more War memorials per head of population than any other country in the world. Grannie Riach organised one of the first WWI war memorials in 1916 at Thirroul. These monuments are important because one in three men who died overseas weren’t formally identified. They aren’t just a lump of marble. They represent the flesh and blood of the young men and women who never came home, and our eagerness not to forget.