It has been a strange year for weather so far but the winds are turning colder. A chill is entering our capital and letting us know it is finally and definitely autumn. In this season we recognise ANZAC Day. This day encompasses tough times in the last 100 years and our responses to them.

ANZAC Day comes around every year on 25 April, the day a combination of Australian and New Zealand armies landed on the shores of Gallipoli. It was meant to be a bold move and a dawn surprise but instead it was the beginning of eight months raging against the cliffs rising out of the beach. So we remember it. 100 years on we remember it and rise much earlier than we normally would to stand together in silent observance.

For me ANZAC Day means walking from my primary school to Simpson’s Hill. There were rituals that seem to last at least as long as the walk in my young eyes and we would sit, uncomfortable, while the bugle played the last post, it would pause and keep playing. We didn’t do this at dawn, more like lunch time or (or probably the 11.00am service), I remember the song which seemed to be full of endings, being packed in with other kids on uneven ground with my legs crossed, time stretching out further than my legs could in this cramped space.

Now we get up by choice. Early, to mark the moment our ancestors hit the Turkish beaches, before the beginning of the eight-month long siege. The origins of the dawn service have a pretty legend. It tells of how some celebrating ANZACs from the night before returning home on the morning of 25 April came across an old woman laying a wreath in the days early hours and the tradition has grown from there – continuing to honour the day even while another war raged in 1942.

So we remember the day our country entered the First World War. Loyal and valiant and proud of the ANZAC nickname and all that it represents. Australia as a country was young – Federation was less than 15 years earlier – prepared to back its friends and allies in a war that took so many lived on both sides. These traits have been honoured again and again in the following times of hardship and war over the subsequent century.

In 2015, ANZAC Day stands for determination and for hope and, above all, for remembrance of the brave deeds of the past.