Family Matters - By Jude Dobson

Anzac Day is here. This year the family is finally going to do the dawn parade. For the past couple of years we've toyed with the idea but, I confess, never got there. However, this year our smallest person seems robust enough to cope, and since it's all of us up and out the door early, the demeanour of the youngest member of the family has usually dictated our ability to deliver. As my mother so wisely says, you are only ever as flexible as the youngest member of the household. Seems shallow and selfish, really, thinking about how hard it is to get a 3-year-old out of bed early, when 93-year-olds manage to make it to the ceremony. Every Anzac Day I watch the dawn parades on the news and cry, so I can only think that to be there in person is going to be very emotional. I might possibly be able to hold it together early on, but the sight of those proud old men marching (or being pushed in wheelchairs) will tip me over the edge. The Last Post will truly do me in. Perhaps it is the middle years that make you more aware of the world around you, the price our parents and grandparents paid to make it the way it is, the ugliness of what they endured. Certainly, I feel a certain disgust in myself that when younger I did not pay much attention to Anzac Day. It was more a welcome day off in the calendar heading for winter, than something I thought too deeply about. The resurgence of the popularity of the day with today's youth is encouraging. Popular seems the wrong word in this context, but you know what I mean. Seeing children wearing their forebears' medals is a beautiful thing. There is something poignant about the peace, hope and promise that a young child symbolizes when wearing the medals that signify the hardship and unspeakable grief of an adult's experience of war. Those are things that children should never know. It seems right that those children wear those medals, and that they are respectful of and knowledgeable about their meaning. Society at large says thank you and shows returned servicemen and women the respect they deserve through the later generations (who I'm sure so many of those men thought they'd never have a chance to create). My children's great-grandfather was awarded a medal and perhaps this year the kids are old enough to understand the significance of it, and give it an outing on Anzac Day. My mother-in-law is a fabulous historian, for which I am eternally grateful. The gift of the knowledge of years and events past, now committed to paper for us and generations to come, is quite something. With Anzac Day upon us I read the story of her father who was awarded the Military Medal for an ''act of gallantry in the field'' on June 10 1918 near the village of Hebuterne, France. The story starts with the card to his father written as he headed off in 1915: ''We have all been busy sharpening our bayonets lately and we have got our identification discs so we are ready for the frae (sic).'' It ends four years later, in 1919 after pleurisy put him in hospital, with the file note ''discharged on termination of period of engagement''. Various battles are documented in the years between. Understatement says much at different points: ''winter was bleak'', ''fierce fighting ensued'', ''crowded horse line further back also hard hit ? 20 horses killed'', ''casualties from flames'', and many more. It is a grim picture, and one I hope his great grandchildren will never know first-hand, but may have an appreciation of now that they are a little older. Lest we forget ? any of us.