Bryce joins dawn service

National, Normal
Source:

The National, Friday 26th April 2013

 By MIRIAM MALAWA

THE Governor-General of Australia Quentin Bryce commemorated Anzac Day at Bomana War Cemetery and Isurava Memorial yesterday. 

She joined a dawn service at the Bomana War Cemetery in Port Moresby and later took a trip to the Isurava Memorial in Northern. 

The two services were to honour the courage of Australian defence personnel including Private Bruce Kingsbury VC who was killed in Isurava in1942. 

She said “in the shadowy awakening of Anzac Day we pause together in peace, and await the dawn to shed light on an earlier dark, deadly war time”.

She said Australian soldiers, merchant navy men and airmen plus members of the Papua and New Guinea local forces defended their territory and secured our future.

“In remembering these men, we remember the hundreds of thousands of Australian servicemen and women who, across centuries, have fought and fallen for the freedoms and rights that are the essence of civilised humanity,” she said. 

“Kokoda, a name that evokes one of the most arduous battles of the Second World War, in a place very close to our northern shores, yet a million miles from home and this is where our men battled.”

She also paid tribute to other servicemen and to native Papuan porters who were the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels who carefully, patiently, kindly conveyed the wounded along the track which earned them their divine title.