Commemorative Service of the Battle of Fromelles
Wednesday, 19 July 2023
ANZAC Memorial Auditorium
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC, Governor of New South Wales
Bujari gamarruwa Diyn Babana Gamarada Gadigal Ngura
In greeting you, I acknowledge this land’s Traditional Owners, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to all Elders, past, present, and emerging.
In 1854, 62 years before the Battle of Fromelles, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote one of the world’s most famous war poems. The Charge of the Light Brigade was written after reading of the great losses suffered by British soldiers during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War:
Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die
Tennyson’s words captured the sense of duty and valour of the soldiers in that War who were: “stormed at with shot and shell.”
How true must those words have seemed over the day and night of 19-20 July, 1916, at Fromelles, during the first battle fought by the AIF on the Western Front. The AIF 5th Division, including the 53rd, 54th and 55th Battalions from NSW, fighting alongside the British 61st Division, included a few seasoned soldiers, or one could say survivors, from Gallipoli, but the Western Front, with its trench warfare and use of mustard and other poisonous gases, was very different from The Dardanelles.
Except for this. The Battle of Fromelles, like the Gallipoli campaign, proved to be a strategic disaster and was the worst 24 hours in Australian military history. Again except for this: the sheer and blind bravery of those who fought was there in Fromelles as it was in Gallipoli.
Today, on a sunny winter’s day in Sydney, we walked along a tree lined path, past the Pool of Reflection to this War Memorial, the foundation stone of which was laid 91 years ago, on the sixteenth anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles, by Governor, Sir Philip Game.
The difference between our commemorative walk and the 400 metres of flat, open ‘no man’s land’ over which our soldiers tried to gain territory behind the German line, to prevent the enemy from moving troops southwards to take part in the main battle of the Somme” could not have been more stark. 5,500 Australian casualties. 410 are buried in Fromelles in the VC Corner Cemetery. At the Australian Memorial Park, a bronze sculpture ‘Cobber’ by artist Peter Corlett commemorates the dying words of the wounded – ‘don’t forget me cobber’.
As a country we lost our people: the farmers, labourers, clerks, accountants, railway and tramway employees, doctors, including Captain C Cosgrove, and dentists, policemen, politicians, shearers, stockmen and solicitors – people from all walks of life and all communities. As for the families of the fallen, they were inconsolable. For the survivors, their war continued: the AIF would join the fighting in the Anglo-French Somme offensive, in an assault on German trenches at the village of Pozières.
Today, as in every year, we come together, at 3.15 am French time, to honour the plea of those dying or barely clinging to life on the battlefield at Fromelles: ‘Don’t forget me, cobber.’ We never have and never will.
We remember, too, the thousands of British and German soldiers who fell in this Battle.
Also today, on the 107th anniversary of Fromelles, we have marked the Centenary of Legacy and welcomed the Centenary torch to the Anzac Memorial, following its journey beginning in Pozières. The Legacy Torch relay honours the promise of a private to his fallen sergeant at Pozières that he would look after his family and kids.
We acknowledge the War Memorial’s role in remembering Fromelles, Pozières and the combined battles known as the Battle of the Somme, here within its Hall of Memory. Although the guns of those battles have long been silent, we are reminded of the closing words of official war historian, Charles Bean’s, 12-volume history of the First World War:
“What these men did, nothing can alter now. The good and the bad, the greatness and the smallness of their story….it rises, it always rises… above the mists of ages, a monument to great hearted men and for their nation – a possession forever.”
Lest we forget.