Today on Remembrance Day, the minute of silence we so solemnly observe is a silence that reaches out to us across 107 years, a noiseless echo of the hush that fell across Europe when the guns stopped in 1918.
Across mud and trench and barbed wire, it was a silence that belonged as much to those who had made the ultimate sacrifice as it did to the living. Amid the exhaustion, the elation and the grief, that silence held the hope the world would never know war again.
As greatly as that hope has been tested, we hold on to it with the same determination we hold on to the memories of all who have fought for peace in our name.
Every Remembrance Day, we carve this sacred moment out from the noise of the world to think of every Australian who has answered the call through the decades. Ordinary men and women who have gone to face the extraordinary.
We think of every family that has felt both the pride and weight of a loved one who put on the uniform, and every family that has known the grief that has no ending, only a beginning.
And just as we think of all who have served, we think of all who serve now.
From our biggest city to our smallest country town, to every place across the world that has known Australian sacrifice, Remembrance Day reminds us that although time passes, our duty to remember never does.
We remember every young Australian denied the chance to grow old, and every Australian who came home but never fully left the battle.
We remember every future lost and every future changed forever.
That is the heart of the pledge we hand from one generation to the next:
Lest we forget.