A huge attendance in Campbelltown was the highlight of Anzac Day services across the Macarthur region since sunup.
The parade in particular along Queen Street by returned servicemen and women and their relatives drew massive crowds, some estimating they were the biggest in years.
Campbelltown’s first Anzac Day commemoration, a dawn service, is a low key ceremony which does not draw great crowds, especially compared with Ingleburn’s equivalent event.
Remember too that last year there were extraordinary numbers for the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli.
And yet when the parade got under way at 8.45am this morning, the talking point was how Queen Street was a throbbing mass of people proudly waving their Australia flags as they lined up on both sides.
By the time the marchers entered Mawson Park, the crowd around this iconic green space in the heart of Campbelltown’s central business district was jam packed with thousands of local residents.
Without a doubt this Anzac Day ceremony is now Campbelltown’s biggest day of the year in terms of how many members of its community gather in the same spot in order to both salute and remember the fallen.
Anzac Day these days couldn’t be further from being a glorification of war and indeed it serves as magnet to bring the community together on the one day of the year – April 25.
Words cannot really capture the solemn nature of the ceremony, the moving speeches, the bugler playing the Last Post and RSL chief Dutchy Holland reciting the Anzac oath.
The community, united as one, stand to listen to the words that never, ever fail to resonate:
They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn:
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning.
We will remember them.
Lest we forget.
