Anzac Parade draws record crowd
Over 100 people attended the dawn ANZAC Parade in Collingwood. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Record turnouts for the Anzac Day parades in many towns around the country were certainly reflected in Collingwood, where over 100 people turned up at dawn to commemorate the fallen.
Around 15 local returned servicemen led the town’s Anzac dawn parade, which started outside the Collingwood Memorial Hall and ended at the War Memorial in Elizabeth Street with a simple yet poignant service in the awakening dawn light.
Jim Chambers spoke of sacrifice, and Collingwood RSA president Barry Pomeroy recited the fourth stanza from For the Fallen by English poet Laurence Binyon, customary at all dawn parades ever since they began 96 years ago. The crowd presented their poppies to the names of the fallen, then the Last Post was played while Frank Davis raised the flag to half mast.
Said Barry Pomeroy: “We veterans get less every year while the crowds only seem to get bigger. It’s just great to see more and more people turning out to remember.”
Many of the dawn attendees (which included top Fire Service brass who had attended the Collingwood Fire Brigade’s centenary celebrations the night before) then retired to Collingwood Tavern for a big breakfast. Another Anzac service later that morning saw the town’s Memorial Hall packed with over 200 people. That service also included a parade, this time with the Takaka Citizens’ Band in attendance, and the laying of a wreath at the war memorial.
The oldest of Collingwood RSA’s dawn-marching veterans was 91-year-old Clem Randall, who spent almost the whole of World War Two engaged in air, sea and ground action around south-east Asia and the Pacific. He was a flight engineer with Squadron 488 of the RNZAF and posted to Singapore just as that city fell to the Japanese. His squadron’s adventurous escape back via Sumatra to Freemantle in a boat they pulled off a reef was little short of miraculous. Clem is one of only six surviving vets from his former 200-strong squadron. In 1980 there were 255,000 returned services veterans in the country. Last year that number was down to 44,000, although around 1,000 returned service personnel are created every year via our overseas military, engineering and peacekeeping deployments to places like the Solomons, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Collingwood RSA has been responsible for organising several military displays in the town on Anzac Day. Barry Pomeroy says the next to watch out for will happen in 2015, when, amongst other displays, a big fleet of 4WD army and ex-army vehicles will descend on the town for Anzac Day.
Gerard Hindmarsh
