“We are assembled here to commemorate that immortal day when the young men of Australia, by their deeds and sacrifice, demonstrated to the world at Gallipoli that Australia was truly a nation,”  RSL president Geoff Robinson told the crowd of veterans, students, families and others who came to pay tribute.

Commodore Jay Bannister was this year’s guest speaker, and he praised the qualities of extraordinary sacrifice and fierce mateship shown by the Anzac soldiers.

He spoke about Tom Uren, a long-term Labor politician who had been a POW on the Thai Burma railway, and who became a staunch opponent of violence and war as a method of solving problems.

Mr Uren often quoted Martin Luther King Jr: “Hate distorts the personality and scars the soul. It is more injurious to the hater that the hated.”

Commodore Bannister went on to tell the story of Lieutenant Gavin Campbell of the HMAS Perth, whose ship was destroyed by torpedoes, leaving him floating on a raft with another soldier splinting his broken leg.

“It was the first of countless acts of mateship given and received by these Perth sailors in the months and years ahead,” Commodore Bannister said.

The soldiers came ashore in Java and made their way down the coast before being caught as prisoners of war and taken to Changi Prison and then to the Thai Burma railway.

In the last days of the war, as the prisoners were marched towards Bangkok, Gavin Campbell carried the weakened assistant navigator of the HMAS Perth most of the way through the jungle, ensuring that both men made it back to Australia when peace was declared.

“He arrived at Melbourne’s old Essendon airport on the 15th of November, 1945, on a chilly day,” Commodore Bannister said.

“There was no one there to meet him, so he went over to a Red Cross Hut and explained to the lady there that he’d just returned from being a prisoner of war of the Japanese.”

“Well,” she said. “I suppose you’d like a cup of tea then.”

“Time dims the memory of ordinary events, but not great events,” Commodore Bannister told those present at the Mudgee memorial service.

He said the greatness of an event was not measured by success or failure, but by the quality of the human endeavour that the event summoned.

Around the world, Commodore Bannister said, the men and women of the Australian Defense Force today draw on the tradition of service established by the Anzacs.

“We are all their heirs and we are in their debt,” he said.