On 2 November 1993, an unnamed war grave, chosen at random from Adelaide Cemetery in Villers-Bretonneux, France, was carefully exhumed. After confirming the soldier was Australian but otherwise unidentifiable, his remains were flown to Sydney in a chartered Qantas aircraft, then laid in a coffin made of Tasmanian blackwood.
He lay in state at Canberra’s Old Parliament House for four days before, on 11 November, being carried along Anzac Parade by gun carriage. Finally, a military bearer party bore the coffin, bedecked with a bayonet and sprig of wattle, into a tomb inside the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial.
Robert Comb, a 93-year-old veteran of the western front, dropped a handful of soil from the fields of Pozières on to the coffin and told the unknown Australian soldier, “You’re home now, mate.”
It was the moment, 75 years in the making, that brought the grief and loss of European battlegrounds to Australian soil.
Saturday, Armistice Day, marks the moment 105 years ago that delivered the first step towards ending the first world war. It also marks 30 years since the interment of one of the 60,000 Australians who died in that war – of whom 20,000 remain unidentified. His place of birth, home and family will not be discovered. His place, time and exact cause of death will never be known.
“We do know that he was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the western front,” prime minister Paul Keating said in his now-famous eulogy. “He is all of them and he is one of us.”
The soldier’s journey to Canberra was a long one, first mooted in 1920 when two unknown warriors were interred in France and England. The idea was initially opposed by the Australian War Memorial and the Returned and Services League before eventually winning favour under the directorship of the war memorial’s Brendon Kelson.
“The prospect of travelling to Europe [to honour lost relatives] was beyond the reach of most Australians and by bringing him home you’ve allowed that rite,” says the current director of the war memorial, Matt Anderson.
“He may be a relative or may have known one of their relatives. It is more than physical, it is emotional, it is spiritual, it gives them a point of connection here in the land they loved.”
The unknown soldier is one of only two Australian bodies brought back from the first world war; the other was Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges who was shot and killed by a sniper in Gallipoli. His horse was also repatriated.
The 1993 funeral procession was a valediction, said senior historian at the Australian War Memorial, Craig Tibbitts, adding that the tomb has become the centrepiece of national commemoration. The soldier’s final resting place has been visited by royalty, heads of state and heads of government.
It is also visited by some 980,000 Australians each year, and as has become tradition, will on Remembrance Day be honoured with a catafalque party, the Last Post and the reading of Keating’s eulogy.
Anderson says it has become something of a rite of passage for leaders, including Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton, to clean the tomb, taking a soft cloth and paintbrush to the dirt that builds up in the engraved inscription: “An unknown Australian soldier killed in the war of 1914-1918.”
November 1993 saw the beginning of another tradition. Members of the public were given poppies to place on the tomb, but as they waited in line along the memorial’s cloisters, people began tucking the stems of the flowers into the Roll of Honour name panels.
Many thousands of poppies now adorn the 103,000 names of Australians lost in all wars overseas – one of which is likely to be the name of the unknown soldier and all of whom are honoured on 11 November.
To Anderson, the tomb “speaks both to continuity and to change”. When the memorial was closed during Covid lockdowns, he visited the unknown soldier every day, in silence placing a poppy on the tomb’s marble surface.
Thirty years ago Keating said of the entombed soldier: “This Australia and the one he knew are like foreign countries.” In 2023, those words ring truer than ever.
