This banner was discovered in October 2003 under the stage of the Memorial Hall at Walpeup in the Mallee district of northwestern Victoria. It was made in 1919 by Mrs C.M. Glen on behalf of the Walpeup Red Cross Society and the Walpeup Welcome Home Committee, and displayed in the Walpeup Railway Station to welcome soldiers from the district returning home. On their arrival, soldiers signed the banner.

Following its discovery, the banner was professionally restored and framed through a grant from the Department of Veterans' Affairs, and unveiled on 23 April 2005 at a ceremony at the Memorial Hall that was attended by many descendants of those who had signed their names in 1919.

26630 George William BAKER, 8th Field Artillery Brigade
19667 Thomas Henry BAKER, 8th Field Artillery Brigade
4886 Francis William BULL, 2nd Field Artillery Brigade
2146 Hector Norman DONNE, 60th Bn
1411 Stephen Leslie GIBBS, 4th Divisional Signal Company
6276 Alfred Ernest Leslie HERRING, 5th Bn
1481 James Thomas HYDER, 4th Light Horse Regiment
3320 Martin Andrew JACKSON, 38th Bn
4421 William JAMES, 23rd Bn
27904 John Henry LILES, 6th Trench Mortar Battery
19575 William Lewis MEAD, 3rd Field Artillery Brigade
2115 Keith Alexander Ross MUNRO, 38th Bn
16098 Alexander Cameron ROSE, 2nd Divisional Ammunition Column
6108 Patrick SEXTON MM, 59th Bn
6892 Joseph Alexander SIMPSON, 23rd Bn
19579 Alfred Edward Theodore THOMAS, 8th Field Artillery Brigade
20354 Gustav Adolph THOMAS, 3rd Divisional Ammunition Column

I am sure that all of you will be familiar with the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and no doubt many of you have visited it. The central feature of the Memorial is the Hall of Memory, where the Unknown Soldier is buried. The Hall is approached through the long colonnades on either side, lined with the bronze tablets bearing the names of those who have died on active service. For the First World War, those names are approximately 60,000 in number. I think that there would be very few who would disagree that those who paid the ultimate sacrifice should occupy the central part of the Memorial.

The concentration on the war dead - right and proper as it is - nevertheless has a tendency to distort our understanding of the war. The fact is that while Australia lost a huge number of men and women, the great majority of those who embarked for service overseas with the Australian Imperial Force returned, that is some 270,000 out of a total of about 330,000. Our celebration tonight should remind us that from all over Australia, from the largest cities, from rural towns, and from tiny settlements such as Walpeup, soldiers and nurses volunteered to serve overseas in what could only be described as a very uncertain venture. In doing so they left parents, wives, and families, indeed whole communities. They returned, having seen and experienced things that were probably beyond their wildest nightmares. Some returned to broken lives, and took to their graves the costs of war; others rarely spoke about what they had seen and done, and resumed their civilian lives with a stoic silence. Most, I suspect, were grateful that they had survived, to resume a life of order and routine, humdrum even. After the lights of Paris and London, Walpeup and other settlements in the Mallee district must have seemed a little small and slow - and perhaps all the better for that.

One name on the banner is that of No 2115 Keith Munro, from Timberoo South. He enlisted in April 1916, and saw service on the Western Front with the 38th Battalion. Twice wounded in action, in June 1917 and August 1918, he disembarked in Melbourne in February 1919, and was discharged, medically unfit, in April 1919. We can only imagine the emotions that he felt on arriving here to be greeted by his family.

The banner that is being unveiled tonight should remind us of several things: that the war effort that produced Anzacs sprang from a thousand little settlements like this; that families waited for years to see their loved ones, and rightly celebrated their return, and a gradual return of the whole community's life, to a semblance of normality, if anything could ever be thought of again as normal. The banner reminds us of those dedicated women - I suspect they were largely women - who staffed the Red Cross Canteens, who poured endless cups of tea for soldiers coming and going, who knitted socks and scarves, who packed care parcels for soldiers overseas, who literally, in some cases, kept the home fires burning and the family farm operating.

I know from reading many personal accounts of the enormous, almost overwhelming, sense of relief and thankfulness that soldiers felt on disembarking at one of the major Australian ports. They had made it. But how much greater must those feelings have been when they arrived 'home', to be greeted by a banner such as we celebrate tonight. An act of love in its making, it surely symbolizes a community's gratitude for the sacrifices of its men and women, and the blessed relief for their safe return.

So against the grandeur of the Australian War Memorial, almost overpowering in its recording of Australia's war history, let us be grateful that this local commemoration has been rescued and restored. It is an invaluable reminder of how the national war effort grew from the efforts of little settlements like Walpeup. It's often said that the Anzac legend reflects the reality of ordinary men and women doing extraordinary things. In its own way, and in a wider sense, this banner should make us reflect on how an extraordinary generation, the old as well as the young, underpinned our war effort. Long may it hang in an honoured place here in the Walpeup Memorial Hall.