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The
Dawn Service on ANZAC Day has become a solemn Australian and New Zealand
tradition. It is taken for granted as part of the ANZAC ethos and few
wonder how it all started.
Its story, as it were, is buried in a small
cemetery carved out of the bush some kilometres outside the northern
Queensland town of Herberton. Almost paradoxically, one grave stands out by its simplicity.
It is
covered by protective white- washed concrete slab with a plain cement
cross at its top end. No epitaph recalls even the name of the deceased.
The Inscription on the cross is a mere two words - "A Priest".
No person would identify the grave as that of a dedicated clergyman who
created the Dawn Service, without the simple marker placed next to the
grave only in recent times. |
It reads:
"Adjacent to, and on the right of this marker, lies the grave of
the late Reverend Arthur Ernest White, a Church of England clergyman and
padre, 44th Battalion, First Australian Imperial Force. On 25th April
1923, at Albany in Western Australia, the Reverend White led a party of
friends in what was the first ever observance of a Dawn parade on ANZAC
Day, thus establishing a tradition which has endured, Australia wide
ever since."
Reverend White was serving as one of the padres of the earliest ANZAC's
to leave Australia with the First AIF in November 1914. The convoy was
assembled in the Princess Royal harbour and King George Sound at Albany
WA. Before embarkation, at four in the morning, he conducted a service
for all the men of the battalion. When White returned to Australia in
1919, he was appointed relieving Rector of the St John's Church in
Albany. It was a strange coincidence that the starting point of the AIF
convoys should now become his parish.
No doubt it must have been the memory of his first Dawn Service those
many years earlier and his experiences overseas, combined with the
awesome cost of lives and injuries, which inspired him to honour
permanently the valiant men (both living and the dead) who had joined
the fight for the allied cause. "Albany", he is quoted to have
said, "was the last sight of land these ANZAC troops saw after
leaving Australian shores and some of them never returned. We should
hold a service (here) at the first light of dawn each ANZAC Day to
commemorate them."
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That is how on ANZAC Day 1923 he came to hold the first Commemorative Dawn
Service.
As the sun was rising, a man in a small dinghy cast a wreath into King
George Sound while White, with a band of about 20 men gathered around
him on the summit of nearby Mount Clarence, silently watched the wreath
floating out to sea. He then quietly recited the words: "As the sun
rises and goeth down, we will remember them". All present were
deeply moved and news of the Ceremony soon spread throughout the
country; and the various Returned Service Communities Australia wide
emulated the Ceremony.
Eventually, White was transferred from Albany to serve other
congregations, the first in South Australia, then Broken Hill where he
built a church, then later at Forbes NSW. In his retirement from parish
life, he moved to Herberton where he became Chaplain of an Anglican
convent. However, soon after his arrival (on September 26, 1954) he
died, to be buried so modestly and anonymously as "A Priest".
White's memory is honoured by a stained glass window in the all Soul's
Church at Wirrinya, a small farming community near Forbes NSW. Members
of the parish have built the church with their own hands and have put up
what they refer to as "The Dawn Service Window", as their
tribute to White's service to Australia.
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