Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Wikinews reporter J.J. Liu emailed the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) for comment on the coming 102nd observance of Remembrance Day, commemorating the Armistice of November 11, 1918 that resulted, most notably, in the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I (WW1).
Initially “Armistice Day” from its first observance in 1919, it was renamed “Remembrance Day” after the end of World War II (WWII) to “honour the dead of WWII and the later Australian military involvements”, according to the RSL website. Governor-General Sir William Deane issued a proclamation in 1997 to urge all Australians to observe one minutes’ silence.
The Australian War Memorial website states 61,630 Australians perished during the First World War between August 4, 1914 and March 31, 1921, making the conflict the deadliest in Australian history by far. The RSL website states that from the country’s population of five million, 416,809 enlisted, 155 thousand were wounded and eight thousand died of post-war injuries.
Questions were fielded by RSL Ambassador Pete Rudland, who served with the Australian Defence Force from 1989 to 2017 and had deployments in Cambodia in 1993, Iraq in 1997 and again in 2003, East Timor in 2001 and Afghanistan in 2010, when he was injured in a fatal helicopter crash that killed four.
