Interview with Chris Smith, 2GB Radio

Australian National Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux, France

Transcript, E&OE, proof only

25 April 2011

CHRIS SMITH: Representing Australia at the Dawn Service was the Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd who is still here and has been kind enough to come in. Firstly, thank you very much for finding time for us. Have you got your thermals though because it is very cold here, isn't it?

MR RUDD: I think my mum would be very disapproving of the fact that I didn't have my thermals on this morning and it was freezing.

CHRIS SMITH: I think that when you were doing your commemoration it got down to 7.5 or 8 degrees but you've got a cup of coffee so you're off and racing…

MR RUDD: Got the blood circulating again.

CHRIS SMITH: Can I just say, as an onlooker, that you came here and you were virtually mobbed when you came up towards where most of the 4000 people are and while I think that there's a great deal of popularity in your favour at the moment I think beyond that there was a real 'thanks' being delivered to you from those who were here saying, 'hang on this is the Foreign Minister, he's not at Gallipoli. He's where we are, where we have recognised is an important place to be,' and I think they thought that the Australian Government had made the right decision.

MR RUDD: Well, the first thing I'd say is that it has got nothing to do with me personally. I think that what people are responding to today is a reawakening that this Western Front saw hundreds of thousands of Australian casualties, hundreds of thousands if you put dead and wounded together.

This ground upon which you're doing this interview at the moment — men died here.

Not just one or two, not just hundreds, not just a thousand or two, tens of thousands. And it takes your breath away.

French people from the French media have just asked me this morning, 'why do your young people come?' Because we scratch our heads and we ask why a hundred years ago we had tens of thousands of Australians embarked from the other side of the world to defend a country they knew very little about. But they knew that there was a principle at stake here, which was to defend people's freedom. And we've just got to take our hats off to these Diggers who did it and did it so well.

CHRIS SMITH: For those who don't know, your family's history has its convict origins and as such, you've got many generations who went to war. Your father Bert in the Royal Australian Engineers in World War II, your mum a nurse and your older brother, Malcolm, served in Vietnam. How did war impact your family when you were growing up?

MR RUDD: It was always there. I grew up in Eumundi in country Queensland. One of the great things about growing up on a farm is that from time to time the power would black out, or a tree would fall over the power lines. And you say, 'well what's that got to do with the price of eggs?' What would happen is when there was no power often for hours and hours and sometimes for days on end, my father would amuse us all sitting down in the dark and tell us stories of the war. He never spoke about the war unless we had blackouts. We would sit there in the dark and he would tell me the stories of his campaign — in the Syrian campaign in 1942 and then in Borneo later on and then the stories of other members of his family. So for him it was a real experience. It shaped him. It changed his life fundamentally.

When he came back to Australia he moved to a different part of the country and met my mother. For mum, who passed away four or five years ago, after she passed away I discovered love letters from a bloke that she was obviously engaged to but who was killed by the Japanese in 1942-43. Lives change by war. Families are torpedoed amidships. Here we are with forty or fifty thousand dead in the killing fields of Flanders and France. Imagine their families and the just the complete havoc it wrought in the lives of ordinary Australian families.

CHRIS SMITH: This memorial, this site, it's high up (…). It is a gorgeous place and then you've got to temper that with the fact that this was the scene of so much horror.

MR RUDD: Because we are on higher ground, it makes sense that this is where so much of the action was.

I think that one of the extraordinary ironies of this place is that in the great tradition of Australian bureaucracy it took us between 1918 and 1938 to get this thing built — 20 years.

I suppose that's speedy by Commonwealth bureaucratic processes. Anyway, 20 years later this thing gets built and when did we open it? On the eve of the next bash in '39. If you look at this tower, designed by Lutyens — the great architect of the time, he designed most of the Government buildings of the time in central Delhi — and this is part of his product – if you look at this great tower, it's full of bullet holes from the second bash when the Germans rolled through here with the Blitzkrieg and they used this tower for target practice. So it's the high ground. It was the high ground in '18 and it was the high ground also in '40 when the Germans came rolling through again.

CHRIS SMITH: I have been through yesterday reading many of the headstones that are here amongst the 2000-odd graves. There are far too many 19-year-olds to count. They were just kids on this spot and in other areas of the Western Front who were slaughtered.

MR RUDD: I was thinking about this just before I jumped on the plane to come here.

I was with the family for Easter up in Sunshine Beach and I was looking at my boy, the youngest fellow, he's 17. In a year's time this guy would have been old enough to have signed up for what became the killing fields of France. I think to myself, 'he's a boy'.

That's why I tried to say something about that in the remarks I made before, these boys in a short period of time became men, battle-hardened men – they became warriors – but they were kids at heart.

CHRIS SMITH: Your address had some segments of French in it. I heard the first segment and I thought, 'that's very typical of the Foreign Minister. When he was Prime Minister he did that a lot'. But you kept doing it and then kept doing it. Do you speak French?

MR RUDD: Oh, I've got enough French to frighten the natives. It's workable.

CHRIS SMITH: You did very well. And I just thought that the delivery and understanding of what went on here and the impact of the Western Front –

MR RUDD: The reason for speaking some French here was because we had many French guests, dignitaries here who don't speak English.

CHRIS SMITH: Yes, sure.

MR RUDD: Sometimes on these occasions we think it's just us, but frankly, we're in France, 1.3 million French war dead. So for those who didn't speak English, I wanted at least to pay recognition to their presence and say some things to them as well.

CHRIS SMITH: I don't know about you but I feel honoured to be here on Anzac Day. Do you?

MR RUDD: For me, it's spine-tingling.

However long you are in public life there are occasions, just occasions, when you pinch yourself and just say, I'm a kid from Eumundi and I'm here representing my country in a place like this on sacred soil. And it is remarkable — remembering those who sleep just below us here.

CHRIS SMITH: Absolutely. Thank you very much for coming in and I'll shake your cold hand. We're all cold here. I'm sure the coffee will warm you up. Thanks for coming.

MR RUDD: Thanks very much.

ENDS

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