Each Anzac Day, Australia falls silent. Across the country men and women gather in the dark to mark an anniversary that has shaped the character of this nation since 1915.
I have stood at Anzac Day commemorations in many places — on the other side of the world, at the end of my own driveway, and in Canberra, in the company of veterans and their families. Every one of those moments has felt different. Every one has mattered.
But as I prepare to mark this one as national president of RSL Australia, I find myself thinking less about ceremony and more about a question. One worth reflecting upon honestly.
What does more than a century of sacrifice actually demand of us today?
I want to be direct about something. The Anzac spirit is not a museum piece. It is not something we take down from the shelf once a year, polish carefully, and return to safekeeping until next April. And it is not the exclusive property of those who have worn a uniform, though more than 1.5 million Australians have done exactly that since Gallipoli.
The Anzac spirit is a set of values that service has forged, and given, to this entire nation. Courage under pressure. Commitment to the person beside you. A willingness to act on behalf of something larger than yourself. Team before self. These are not military values. They are Australian values. And they were purchased at extraordinary cost.
I spent 25 years in the Australian Defence Force. I have seen service up close, in its most demanding forms. And I can tell you that service is not a job. It is not a career path. It is a decision, made again every single day, to put something ahead of yourself.
That decision, and the values it forges, is the thread connecting every generation of Australians who have served. From Gallipoli to the Gulf. From Tobruk to Tarin Kowt. Across peacekeeping missions that barely made the front page. Across every role, rank, and theatre in between. The thread holds.
Today, there are 580,000 living veterans in this country. More than 580,000 Australians who have made that decision and carried its weight home with them. They are our neighbours, our colleagues, our family members. Many of them are doing it tough. The transition from military to civilian life has always been difficult. But in an era of housing pressure, mental health complexity, and a workforce that does not always recognise what veterans bring, that transition can be genuinely treacherous.
Our collective responsibility, as the RSL and as the nation, is not only to honour the fallen. It is to fiercely advocate for and support the living.
That is not a slogan. It is a commitment that must show up in policy, in funding, in the quality of services we deliver, and in the seriousness with which we treat the challenges veterans face every day.
Today’s veteran community is not the veteran community of previous generations. It is more diverse. It is younger. It includes women and men who served in every capacity, in environments that those who came before could not have imagined. If the institutions that exist to support veterans, including the RSL, do not evolve with that community, we fail them.
That is the challenge I have accepted in taking on this role. And it brings me back to the question I started with.
This Anzac Day, as Australia falls silent, I hope you will do more than observe. I hope you will feel the weight of what this day carries, and ask yourself what it means for the choices in front of you — in your work, your community, your family.
Whether you attend a dawn service, watch the march, pause at home in quiet reflection, or simply tell someone in your life what this day means to you, every act of remembrance matters. No matter how you commemorate, the RSL asks only that you do.
The Anzac spirit doesn’t just live in history. It lives in the choices we make today, the way we treat each other, and the unity we show when we come together. Each Anzac Day, we honour not only what was, but what still is: the spirit that has shaped us, the spirit that lives with us and in us.
That spirit is not something we visit once a year and set back down. It is something we choose to live.
Lest we forget.
Peter Tinley is the president of RSL Australia and a former SAS squadron commander
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