BENDIGO

Date:  Monday 11^th November 2024

Time:  10.30 am Start

Location: Forecourt, Soldiers Memorial Institute

37-39 Pall Mall  Bendigo

EAGLEHAWK

Date:  Thursday 14^th November 2024
Time:  8.30am am Start

Location: Brassey Square, in front of the Town Hall

Cnr. Peg Leg Road & Sailors Gully Road, Eaglehawk     

For any enquires please contact commemorative@bendigorsl.com.au

Origins of Remembrance Day – Australian War Memorial

At 11 am on 11 November 1918 the guns on the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of continuous warfare. The allied armies had driven the German invaders back, having inflicted heavy defeats upon them over the preceding four months. In November the Germans called for an armistice (suspension of fighting) in order to secure a peace settlement. They accepted allied terms that amounted to unconditional surrender.

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month attained a special significance in the post-war years. The moment when hostilities ceased on the Western Front became universally associated with the remembrance of those who had died in the war. This first modern world conflict had brought about the mobilisation of over 70 million people and left between 9 and 13 million dead, perhaps as many as one-third of them with no known grave. The allied nations chose this day and time for the commemoration of their war dead.

Poppies 

The Flanders poppy has long been a part of Remembrance Day, the ritual that marks the Armistice of 11 November 1918. During the First World War, red poppies were among the first plants to spring up in the devastated battlefields of northern France and Belgium. In soldiers’ folklore, the vivid red of the poppy came from the blood of their comrades soaking the ground. The sight of poppies on the battlefield at Ypres in 1915 moved Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae to write the poem In Flanders fields. In English literature of the nineteenth century, poppies had symbolised sleep or a state of oblivion; in the literature of the First World War a new, more powerful symbolism was attached to the poppy – the sacrifice of shed blood.

The poppy soon became widely accepted throughout the allied nations as the flower of remembrance to be worn on Armistice Day. The Australian Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League (the forerunner to the RSL) first sold poppies for Armistice Day in 1921. For this drive, the league imported one million silk poppies, made in French orphanages. Each poppy was sold for a shilling: five pence was donated to a charity for French children, six pence went to the League’s own welfare work, and one penny went to the League’s national coffers. Today the RSL continues to sell poppies for Remembrance Day to raise funds for its welfare work.