The new year is scarcely a month old. Yet we have seen enough to know that the fires raging in different parts of the Middle East and North Africa will not easily abate – and that the firefighting efforts of Western governments may prove no more successful than in the past.
A public forum to consider Australia’s World War I commemoration and whether it pays appropriate respect to those who died believing in a better world.
World War I brought death to approximately 61,000 Australians and shattered the lives of countless others. Globally, a generation was virtually lost.
The legacy of the war continues to this day. A century on, does our commemoration stop short of asking the hard questions such as how such a cataclysmic event could occur, what we learnt from it and whether that responsibility to learn has been lost amid the flag-waving?
