Speech by HE Ambassador Ian Biggs on the occasion of the Anzac Day Dawn Service in Vienna on 25 April 2026
Welcome to our Dawn Service for Anzac Day, the Australian and New Zealand-led commemoration of the landing of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps on the Gallipoli Peninsula, 111 years ago. No one is out before sunrise on a Saturday in Vienna by mistake, so you will all be familiar with the tradition. After all, it is being marked around the world by Australians and New Zealanders and representatives of the more than thirty nations whose soldiers took part in the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War.
British and French forces, and colonial units from the British and French Empires, intended to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and to seize its capital, Istanbul, for the Russian Empire. The Royal Navy, including an Australian submarine, tried to control the strait between Europe and Asia, the Dardanelles. When sea-mines thwarted that, a landing of ground troops at dawn on the 25th of April 1915 was the start of an eight-month effort to seize the Anatolian coast. They failed; we failed; Ottoman defence, in which the later founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, was prominent, was successful, at terrible cost and over many months of hard fighting.
So today we are acknowledging a defeat – not to glorify war, but to recognise the sacrifice of the combatants, the cost to the families and communities they left behind, the heroism of the defenders, and the legacy of civic institutions fought for and now treasured. Anzac Day has become the quiet moment when Australia and New Zealand, with our friends, remember all those who suffered, fought, were wounded, or died in our wars, conflicts and peace operations.
Anzac Day has in recent years had an increasing element of showing respect for the First Nations peoples of our countries, whose contributions to our national stories and even to our military history have too often been sidelined.
Wars have not ended, not for us – there are Australian and New Zealand soldiers in peace-keeping missions and deployments from the Middle East to the Pacific – and, tragically, not for peoples and nations in far too many conflicts, from Ukraine to Sudan, from Myanmar to Haiti, from Iran to Lebanon. The laws of war, the United Nations Charter, the norms against aggression and violence, are everywhere under assault. Those of us who devote our lives to diplomacy and peacemaking and humanitarian protection know our work to be both vital and yet frustrated.
So our remembering today is timely; we’re here to choose the paths of freedom, peace and common humanity. Thank you for being with us. Thank you especially to the Turkish Embassy, and to our Austrian hosts.
Lest we forget.