FROM THE ARCHIVES: Reading Guilford Young on ANZAC Day in a world still at war

By Lara Colrain, Archives Officer

I spend much of my time reading voices from the past written for moments different from our own. Yet, at times, those voices speak with an unsettling clarity into the present. This ANZAC Day, that has been my experience in reading the handwritten homilies of Archbishop Guilford Young.

Preserved in cursive hand, these ANZAC Day homilies were written in the decades following the Second World War and during the tensions of the Cold War. Their paper is fragile, marked by the slight rust of long‑removed staples; their handwriting often difficult to decipher. But their message is neither fragile nor obscure.

Young returns insistently to Gallipoli. He does not sentimentalise it. The landing, he writes plainly, was “a mistake from the start,” carried out beneath “towering, sniper‑infested cliffs,” ending in defeat, withdrawal, and enormous human cost. Yet he notes something profoundly Australian: “We have made a day of defeat our day of national pride.” Far from criticising this instinct, Archbishop Guilford Young honours it. ANZAC Day, he insists, is not the glorification of militarism, and he prays Australia will always be free from it.

What is honoured instead is courage. Not bravado, and not the romance of war, but what he calls “dogged perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds,” and the willingness to suffer—even to die—for what is right and just. These, he tells his congregations, are values more enduring than comfort, success, or even survival itself.

What struck me most, reading these homilies today, is Archbishop Guilford Young’s repeated warning about misdirected courage. Courage, he insists, can be wasted. It can be drained into false causes, dressed in stirring language and patriotic slogans. “May God save us,” he warns, “from the tragedy of spending our courage on false ends.”

Equally striking is his rejection of hatred as a national or political force. Hatred does not build nations; it poisons them—a truth he illustrates by quoting a military leader who warned that teaching hatred is itself destructive. Drawing on Christian teaching and the testimony of soldiers, he insists that fear and hatred corrode societies from within, even when they claim to defend them.

I am trained not to project the present onto the past; however, reading these homilies when war again shapes the global horizon, it is impossible to miss their relevance. Archbishop Guilford Young does not offer slogans, nor policy prescriptions. He offers something rarer: moral clarity without dehumanisation.

At the altar, where every homily ends, he entrusts the dead not to rhetoric but to Christ, “the conqueror of death.” He reminds us that the deepest ANZAC legacy is not found in force of arms, but in disciplined conscience, sacrifice rightly ordered, and the refusal to let hatred decide who we become.