Yesterday was anzac day. Every 25 April we take a day off to commemorate the death of Australian soldiers at Gallipoli in Turkey. In fact, the battle commemorated was a complete massacre - thousands of Australian and New Zealand soldiers killed with little strategic advantage.

Phil and I have an Anzac tradition. We go to one of the largest sporting stadiums in the country and watch a yearly football fixture between traditional rivals Collingwood and Essendon.

The stadium is always packed. This year, with a reduced seating capacity, there were 62,000 fans at the ground - tickets had sold out four weeks ago. Before the match, they put on fantastic entertainment - the roulettes, a RAAF precision flying team, perform aerial acrobatics over the stadium. Parachutists descend to land in the centre square. The match balls are delivered by helicopter. The army band played a couple of songs. The atmosphere is festive.

Suddenly, a hush falls over the 60,000 plus people. The president of the returned servicemans league stood to read a reflection. The players stand at attention in an honour guard. The crowd is absolutely silent as the last post is played. The national anthem is played. And then the game begins.

The experience is incredibly awe-inspiring. Silence at a football game is not normal, is it counter-intuitive. But everyone joins in. Once the silence starts there is not one wag from all those thousands of people who calls out or makes a spectacle of him or herself. They know that this would be unacceptable. The respect and reverence that we as a nation hold for this ritual is too great.

I am always reminded that there are moments of deep spirituality and ritual in our secular society. Our community does have the capacity and willingness to worship.

[by the way, as is fitting for commemoration of a massacre, collingwood was absolutely spanked by essendon by 66 points. Which is why I am focussing on the pre-game ceremonies.]

UPDATE - Tim points out that I failed to mention the Turk casualties of the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula and what later became known as Anzac Cove. Anzac day as an Australian holiday focusses our minds on our citizens gone to war. The Turks lost a tremendous number of casualties (est 86,000 as compared to 9,000 Aust dead and 3,000 NZ dead), but they did acheive their strategic advantage - they forced the Anzac forces to retreat from the peninsula, having failed to achieve their objectives. For more historical information, look here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2003 at 10:12 am by dan and is filed under us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.