29/04/2026
And this. Long but so worth the read.
TURBANS, TANTRUMS, AND THE PEOPLE WHO THINK ANZAC DAY BELONGS TO THEM
By The Barefoot Nurse
IN BRIEF
Some people do not really care about Welcome to Country, Sikh service, the Shrine Guard, Anzac Day tradition, or military history. They care about finding a socially acceptable place to dump their fear and hate.
A Sikh man standing respectfully at the Shrine of Remembrance should not be controversial. The fact that some people made it controversial says more about them than it says about him, the Shrine, the ADF, or Australia.
Wearing your grandfather’s medals is a beautiful act of remembrance when done with humility. It does not make you a veteran, a military historian, or the self-appointed gatekeeper of Anzac Day.
The people booing Welcome to Country and attacking a Sikh Shrine Guard online are not defending Anzac Day. They are using Anzac Day as a stage for their own resentment.
This is my opinion, based on my life, the people I met, and the values I was taught. I cannot speak for the whole Defence Force, but neither can some angry bloke in a Facebook thread who thinks inherited medals count as military experience.
I THOUGHT I WAS DONE WITH ANZAC DAY
I thought I was done writing about Anzac Day for the year, which was adorable really, in the same way it is adorable when someone says they are just going to “quickly check Facebook” and then reappears 45 minutes later with lower blood pressure, no faith in humanity, and a vague understanding of how someone’s uncle feels about wind farms.
I had not planned to write this. I was not sitting at the desk with a fresh coffee, a noble sense of purpose, and a perfectly arranged writing schedule. I was procrastinating. Properly procrastinating. The kind where you know there are emails sitting there like unpaid bills, messages waiting for replies, Barefoot Nurse writing half-finished, and a growing list of things you promised yourself you would get done before the week swallowed you whole.
Misa and I have been busy doing couple things, family things, Anzac Day things, and life things, which is a nicer way of saying the admin pile had begun developing its own ecosystem. Dotty probably had more discipline than I did that morning, and she is a dog who considers licking random objects a lifestyle choice.
By accident, I logged into my personal Facebook account instead of The Barefoot Nurse account. That alone felt strange. Personal Facebook is not what it used to be. Once upon a time it was people you knew, photos of kids, birthday messages, slightly overcooked political arguments from people you went to school with, and someone’s aunty uploading a picture of dinner that looked like evidence from a coronial inquiry.
Now it feels like the feed is mostly strangers, pages you never asked to see, rage-bait dressed as patriotism, and the algorithm leaning over your shoulder whispering, “Go on, Matt, ruin your morning.”
I was scrolling through Anzac Day posts, liking photos, doing that lazy social media thing where you convince yourself you are still vaguely productive because at least you are engaging with something meaningful, even though what you are really doing is avoiding the work you should be doing.
Then I saw it. A post from one of those pages with a name like Aussie Patriots, Patriot Aussies, True Blue Something, or Southern Cross Flag Emoji Bacon Battalion. I honestly cannot remember the exact name, because they all sound like they were created by a man yelling at a parking meter outside Bunnings while wearing wraparound sunnies.
The post itself was fine. Nice, even. Three Shrine Guards at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. One of them was wearing a turban and appeared to be Sikh. The post mentioned Sikh service and the wider history of people from different backgrounds serving in connection with Australia’s military story. That should have been the end of it.
A respectful photo. A small bit of history. A reminder that the Australian story is broader than the cardboard cut-out version some people grew up with. Like it, scroll on, make another coffee, maybe finally answer the email you have been avoiding.
Naturally, I read the comments.
THE COMMENTS SECTION, ALSO KNOWN AS THE HUMAN SEWER WITH WIFI
There is always a moment before you open a comment section where some small surviving part of your brain says, “Don’t do it.” It is the same instinct that tells you not to sniff milk that expired last week, not to ask the drunk uncle what he thinks about immigration, and not to trust the hospital microwave after night shift has been through it. I ignored that instinct, obviously.
At first, the comments just made me feel heavy. Not surprised exactly, because surprise requires some remaining innocence, and Facebook has spent years beating that out of us with a sock full of batteries. More disappointed. More tired. The kind of tired that sits behind your eyes when you realise, once again, that some people can look at a person standing respectfully at one of the most important sites of remembrance in Victoria and see only a target.
The comments were vile. Racist, ignorant, Islamophobic, bigoted, confused, smug, and weirdly proud of being all those things at once. People were not discussing history. They were not asking questions. They were not trying to understand the Shrine Guard, Sikh service, military tradition, or Anzac Day. They were lining up to spit.
A few thought the Shrine Guards were members of the Australian Defence Force. They are not. Some may have served previously, but the Shrine Guard itself is not an ADF unit. Their role is ceremonial and protective, connected to the Shrine of Remembrance, and their uniform deliberately draws on the Light Horse tradition.
That distinction mattered not at all to the Facebook Field Marshals of the 3rd Keyboard Battalion. Some claimed the guards were out of uniform. Others decided the image must be AI-generated, because apparently any photograph that challenges your tiny worldview now gets thrown into the same basket as fake moon landings and pictures of Donald Trump with visible abs. A few seemed convinced that a turban meant disrespect, which tells you everything about what they know and nothing about what they understand.
Then there were the people confusing Sikhs with Muslims, because of course there were. Sikhs and Muslims are not the same. Sikhism and Islam are not the same religion. A turban is not a universal symbol for “whatever group I have chosen to be frightened of this week.” The level of certainty from people carrying that much ignorance was almost impressive, in the same way a forklift driving through a glass door is impressive.
Reading it was disheartening. It dragged the whole post down. A decent, harmless, historically interesting Anzac Day post had been turned into a trough where the usual crowd could push their snouts in and grunt about “our country” while demonstrating they knew very little about either the country or the service they claimed to be defending.
For a while, I just sat there reading, feeling that familiar mix of anger and sadness. Not noble anger. Not clean anger. More like the dirty, exhausted anger you get when you realise people are not merely wrong, they are enjoying being cruel.
Then something shifted. The more I read, the more the sadness started to change shape. It did not disappear, but it became clearer. The comments stopped feeling like a national verdict and started looking like evidence. Not evidence against the Sikh guard, or Welcome to Country, or diversity in the ADF, but evidence against the people making the comments. They were telling on themselves.
THEY DID NOT SOUND LIKE PEOPLE WHO HAD SERVED
There was a rhythm to the ignorance. Once you saw it, you could not unsee it.
They did not sound like veterans. They did not sound like people who had served. They did not sound like people who understood how the military actually works, how uniforms work, how mixed units work, how ceremonial roles work, how memory works, or how Anzac Day should feel when you strip away the flag-cape nonsense and the performative outrage.
Most of them sounded like people who had built an Anzac Day in their head out of movie scenes, inherited medals, talkback radio, and Facebook memes.
That was the first strange relief.
These people were loud, but they were not authoritative. They were angry, but they were not informed. They were certain, but they were not serious. They had mistaken volume for wisdom, grievance for patriotism, and family history for personal service.
A person can honour a relative’s medals with deep respect. I have no issue with that. Plenty of Australians wear medals on Anzac Day for parents, grandparents, partners, aunties, uncles, and others who served. Done properly, it is a beautiful thing. It says, “This person mattered. Their service mattered. I remember them.”
What it does not say is, “I personally stormed Gallipoli, therefore my Facebook comment carries the weight of military doctrine.”
Wearing your grandfather’s medals does not make you a veteran. Wearing your father’s medals does not mean the Anzac legend has soaked into your bloodstream like khaki kombucha. It means you are carrying someone else’s memory, and that should make you humble, not loud.
There is a point where remembrance becomes performance. There is a point where honouring someone else’s courage becomes borrowing from it. There is a point where medals stop being treated as sacred objects of memory and start being used as props in someone’s private culture war.
That is not patriotism.
That is virtue signalling in a slouch hat.
It also does not give you ownership of Anzac Day. Having a relative who served does not mean you get to decide who is remembered, who is included, who speaks, what ceremonies look like, or what history is allowed into the room. It gives you a connection, and that connection deserves respect. It does not make you the gatekeeper.
The irony was almost painful. A lot of the loudest people in those comments were accusing everyone else of virtue signalling while doing the most theatrical, chest-beating, borrowed-valour version of it themselves. Apparently, a Sikh man standing respectfully in ceremonial uniform at the Shrine was political theatre, but a bloke with no service history, three inherited medals, a flag in his profile picture, and the historical literacy of a damp sock was simply defending Western civilisation from a photograph.
Spare me.
“WHY SHOULD WE CARE?”
One comment brought the whole thing into focus.
Someone wrote, more or less, that Sikhs only made up a tiny number of people at Anzac Cove, so why would we focus on them? According to this particular clackbox, we should be concentrating on the achievements of white Australians.
There it was.
No subtlety. No camouflage. No polite little fig leaf about tradition or respect or historical accuracy. The mask slipped, hit the floor, bounced twice, and landed face-up under the fluorescent light.
Why should we care?
I care.
I reckon most people who have served would care too. Not all, because Defence is made of humans and humans are a mixed bag of brilliance, laziness, courage, pettiness, decency, cowardice, compassion, ego, and whatever was left in the fridge. I can no more speak for every person in the ADF than anyone else can. I cannot speak for the entire Army, every veteran, every RSL, every family, or every person who ever put on a uniform.
This is my opinion, based on what I was taught, what I saw, who I met, and what stayed with me.
What stayed with me is this: the person beside you matters.
The Australian Defence Force, at its best, is not built around whether your skin is white, brown, black, or somewhere in between. It is not built around whether you are Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, or still emotionally committed to praying to the football gods every September.
No one gives a s**t what music you listen to, what your mum’s curtains looked like, whether your dad drove a Commodore or a Camry, whether you grew up with private school Latin or public school tuckshop sausage rolls. The question is whether you are there, whether you are doing the job, whether you are committed to something bigger than yourself.
Service is not about building a shrine to your own background. It is about giving yourself to a group, a mission, a unit, and, when it really matters, the person on your left and the person on your right.
That is why we care.
Every soldier matters. Every nurse matters. Every sailor and airman matters, even though giving the Air Force and Navy a friendly kicking is practically a Defence-wide bonding exercise. Every medic, cook, clerk, driver, signaller, infantryman, reservist, regular, quiet professional, pain in the arse, brilliant leader, average digger, and exhausted human being who put on the uniform matters.
They joined something. They made the commitment. That counts.
Not because every one of them was perfect. Not because service turns people into saints. It absolutely does not. Some people are good. Some are s**t. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, trying to do the right thing more often than we stuff it up.
That is life.
There is no group of people who are all good or all bad. Not soldiers. Not nurses. Not veterans. Not migrants. Not white Australians. Not Indigenous Australians. Not Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, atheists, or any other group we want to drag into the national argument. Every group contains the whole human mess.
That is why painting whole groups as threats is lazy, cowardly rubbish.
THE UNIFORM STRIPS AWAY THE BU****IT
One of the reasons we wear uniforms in the military, at least as it was explained to me during recruit training, is that it strips away some of the individual bulls**t.
There are plenty of reasons for a military uniform: discipline, identification, tradition, practicality, cohesion, authority, safety, and a shared sense of role. The one that stuck with me was simpler. When everyone is dressed the same, you are not meant to judge the person beside you by their suburb, wealth, accent, religion, family name, clothes, car, or social status.
You see the uniform. You see the role. You see the obligation.
That does not mean Defence always gets it right. I saw bullying. I saw people behave badly. I saw racism directed at people outside the system, at communities beyond the wire, and that was bad enough. I did not personally see racism directed at another soldier in the same way, although I would never be foolish enough to pretend it never happened or could not happen.
The ADF is not magic. It is not morally superior to the rest of Australia. It has had racism, sexism, bastardry, bullying, abuse, blind spots, cover-ups, cowardice, and bureaucratic nonsense, because every human organisation eventually finds a way to disappoint you.
The ideal still matters.
The focus was meant to be the bloke on your left and the bloke on your right. If everyone does that properly, no one is left out, no one misses support, and everyone matters. The person beside you matters, always, even when they annoy you, even when they are useless before coffee, even when they could not organise a sock drawer with a map and adult supervision.
The person beside you might be Sikh. They might be Muslim. They might be Catholic. They might be Hare Krishna. They might be a lapsed Anglican who only turns up to church for weddings, funerals, and the occasional guilt-based sausage sizzle.
It does not matter.
Are they there? Are they doing the job? Are they part of the team? Then you care.
I care about the whole messy, imperfect, brilliant mob. I care about the good ones, the difficult ones, the private who was s**t but still part of the team, the corporal from 3RAR who was lazy enough to make furniture look motivated, the bloke who was late so often he eventually managed to get himself locked up, and the people who taught me things I still carry around decades later.
I care about Corporal H, one of my best mates from those Army days. I care about Lieutenant Colonel P, who was a corporal when I knew him and showed the kind of leadership I looked up to. I care about Lawrence M, who taught me the sharp and reload lessons that stuck. I care about Walter B, who taught me mateship and leadership. I care about Lawrence K, who taught me more about field craft and small-unit tactics than I would have learned without him.
Those people mattered because they were people. They were not symbols. They were not demographic categories. They were not useful props in someone’s argument. They were the living, breathing, swearing, sweating, laughing, annoying, generous, flawed people who make service real.
That is memory.
That is Anzac Day.
Not this narrow little fantasy where remembrance only counts when the person being remembered looks like the bloke doing the remembering.
THE SMALL STORY IS EASIER, BUT IT IS ALSO BORING
Some people hear us talk about Sikh service, Indigenous service, migrant service, women’s service, nurses, stretcher-bearers, interpreters, labourers, cooks, transport workers, or anyone who sits outside the old postcard version of Anzac Day, and they decide it must be an attack on white Australian history.
It is not.
It is an expansion of Australian history.
Remembering Sikh service does not erase white Australian service. Remembering Indigenous soldiers does not diminish non-Indigenous soldiers. Remembering women, nurses, medics, sailors, airmen, and people from different backgrounds does not water down the story. It gives the story colour, weight, conflict, contradiction, blood, humour, grief, and truth.
The propaganda version is simpler. The mythology is cleaner. The old story is shorter, whiter, easier to teach, easier to chant, and much easier to weaponise in a comment section.
It is also more boring.
A country that only remembers the parts of history that flatter it is not strong. It is insecure with a flagpole.
The Australian War Memorial notes that at least 12 Indian Australians are known to have enlisted in the First AIF during the First World War, including Private Nain Singh Sailani and Private Sarn Singh, who were killed on the Western Front in 1917. That matters not because there were thousands of them, not because anyone is trying to replace one story with another, and not because anyone is asking white Australians to sit in the corner and think about what they have done.
It matters because they were there.
That should be enough.
The same principle applies to Indigenous soldiers. Men served a country that did not treat them equally when they came home. For too long, their stories were pushed aside because they complicated the myth. Now those stories are being pulled back into the national memory where they belong.
That does not weaken Anzac Day.
It makes it honest.
THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT WELCOME TO COUNTRY EITHER
Here is the thing I have been sitting with since reading that comment section.
I do not think these people actually care about Welcome to Country. Not really.
They do not care about a Sikh man being part of the Shrine Guard. They do not care about Muslims, Hindus, Vietnamese Australians, Chinese Australians, Indian Australians, Indigenous Australians, or anyone else serving in the military. They do not care about the history of ceremony, the rules around uniform, the meaning of the Shrine, or the complexity of remembrance.
They care about having something to hate.
Welcome to Country is just a target. The turban is just a target. A brown face in uniform is just a target. An Indigenous elder speaking at dawn is just a target. The subject changes, but the machinery underneath keeps grinding away.
They are not defending Anzac Day.
They are feeding off it.
This is not me trying to create some safe little balanced argument where booing during a solemn ceremony sits on one side of the scales and basic decency sits on the other as if both are equally valid positions.
They are not.
People can dislike Welcome to Country. People can think it is used too often. People can have opinions about immigration, ceremony, national identity, history, and the direction of the country. People can join an RSL, write to organisers, attend meetings, volunteer, speak respectfully, argue their case, and participate like adults in a democracy.
Booing at a dawn service is not that.
Heckling an elder is not that.
Going into a comment section to attack someone’s ethnicity, religion, appearance, or presence is not that.
That is not civic debate. That is not patriotism. That is not respect. That is a tantrum with a flag draped around it.
FEAR WITH A FLAG AROUND ITS SHOULDERS
I keep coming back to fear.
Fear is often about loss of control. People feel they cannot control how Australia is changing. They cannot control housing. They cannot control wages. They cannot control whether their kids can buy a home. They cannot control whether the job they wanted still exists, whether their suburb feels the same, whether the country looks like the one they remember, or whether their own life turned out the way they thought it would.
That fear has to go somewhere.
For some people, fear becomes curiosity. They start asking better questions. Who owns the houses? Who profits from insecure work? Why are wages flat? Why are services stretched? Why are politicians so good at pointing us at each other and so bad at fixing the things actually crushing people?
For others, fear gets poured onto whoever looks different.
A Sikh man in a turban becomes the problem. An Indigenous elder becomes the problem. A migrant family becomes the problem. A Muslim nurse becomes the problem. A Hindu soldier becomes the problem. A Chinese Australian, Vietnamese Australian, Indian Australian, African Australian, take your pick, becomes the problem.
That is easier than asking who benefits when working people are kept angry at each other.
That is easier than admitting Australia has changed, is changing, and will keep changing, because countries are not museum exhibits preserved in amber for the comfort of people who peaked during a meat raffle in 1987.
Some of these people live in fear. Some seem disappointed in their own outcomes and desperate to find someone else to blame. Some wave around other people’s achievements because they cannot stand quietly in their own. Some borrow from the courage of relatives and then use that borrowed authority to attack Australians who have done nothing wrong.
That is sad.
It is also dangerous if we let it set the tone.
This is where the usual bad-faith goblins will try to twist the point, so let us not give them much room to wriggle. This is not about everyone who dislikes Welcome to Country. This is not about everyone who has concerns about immigration. This is not about everyone who is confused, unsure, uncomfortable, or still learning.
This is about the ones who boo. The ones who heckle elders at dawn. The ones who attack a Sikh Shrine Guard online because of how he looks. The ones who use Anzac Day, of all days, to make someone else feel unwelcome.
That group is the least of us.
Not because of where they were born. Not because of their class. Not because they lack a degree. Not because they speak plainly, vote differently, or hold different opinions.
They are the least of us because they choose to make hatred their public contribution.
ANZAC DAY IS NOT YOUR PRIVATE PROPERTY
There is a strange entitlement in some of this, as if Anzac Day belongs to whoever can shout “respect” the loudest while showing the least of it.
It does not.
Anzac Day is not owned by the loudest person in the crowd. It is not owned by the angriest bloke in the comments section. It is not owned by people who inherited medals, joined a page, bought a flag cape, or decided they alone know what Australia is allowed to remember.
Local RSLs and organising committees make decisions about their services. They decide the order of events, who speaks, what is included, and how their local community gathers. Anyone who wants a say can do the grown-up thing and get involved.
Join the RSL if you are eligible. Support the local sub-branch. Attend meetings. Volunteer. Speak respectfully. Put your hand up. Make your case like an adult with a functioning spine and a basic grasp of manners.
Turning your back, booing, heckling, or using a solemn service as your personal little stage does not make you brave.
It makes you the problem.
Having a relative who served gives you a personal connection to service, and that deserves respect. It does not give you a bigger say in what is included on Anzac Day, and it certainly does not give you the right to decide that some people’s service counts less because there were fewer of them or because they do not fit your preferred shade chart of Australian history.
Every person who served matters.
That is the point.
THE STRANGE RELIEF OF SEEING IT CLEARLY
The surprising part, after I had sat there reading enough comments to make my eyes want to resign, was that I started to feel lighter.
Not happy. Not exactly. There was still anger there, and disgust, and that low-level sadness you get when people take something solemn and drag it through the mud because they need somewhere to put their own ugliness.
The relief came from clarity.
I had been thinking about the booing at Anzac Day services, the attacks on Welcome to Country, the way people grab at these moments and turn them into little stages for grievance. Part of me had wanted the answer to be simple: keep them away, ban them, remove them from the day, protect the ceremony from people who cannot behave like adults for five minutes.
That instinct still makes sense to me.
Then the other thought arrived.
Maybe it is useful when they show us who they are.
Maybe there is something clarifying about the mask falling off in public. Maybe the rest of the crowd needs to hear the booing to understand what this is really about. Maybe people need to see the comments, ugly as they are, to realise that the problem is not Welcome to Country, or a turban, or Sikh service, or the Shrine Guard, or diversity in the ADF.
The problem is them.
When they boo, people hear it. When they heckle, people see it. When they attack someone online, they leave their fingerprints all over the ugliness. When they try to dress bigotry up as patriotism, they reveal how little they understand either word.
That does not mean we let them dominate. The crowd should drown them out. Organisers should manage behaviour. Police should act when laws are broken. RSLs and community leaders should protect ceremonies from being hijacked by professional grievance merchants and weekend patriots with white knuckles and thin skin.
We should still remember who they are.
Not to hunt them. Not to obsess over them. Not to become like them.
Just to understand them.
They are not Defence. They are not veterans. They are not the ADF. They are not the Anzac spirit. They are not Australian values. They are Australians, because citizenship is not a prize you only get when you behave nicely, but they do not represent the best of us.
They represent the frightened, mean, resentful corner of us every country has to confront.
IMAGINE BEING THEM EVERY DAY
Here is the other strange comfort in all this.
We only have to put up with them for a few minutes.
They have to be themselves every day.
Imagine waking up like that. Imagine walking through life scanning every room, ceremony, uniform, speech, flag, photograph, and face for something to resent. Imagine needing every public moment to reassure you that your version of Australia still owns the place.
Imagine seeing a Sikh guard at the Shrine and not feeling curiosity, respect, or even mild interest, but rage.
Imagine hearing an Indigenous elder speak at dawn and not thinking about Indigenous service, dispossession, courage, grief, survival, or the long, complicated story of this country, but wanting to boo.
What a miserable way to live.
Absolutely miserable.
There is almost pity in it, although pity must never become permission. Some of these people may be caught in fear. Some may have been swallowed by online rubbish. Some may have been dragged slowly into grievance by pages, podcasts, groups, and comment sections that feed them the same meal every day: you are losing control, someone else is to blame, and cruelty is courage.
Some may know better and choose it anyway.
Either way, their behaviour is their responsibility.
Their hate is not my burden to carry. Their ignorance is not the Shrine Guard’s burden. Their fear is not the Sikh community’s burden. Their resentment is not the responsibility of Indigenous elders standing in front of a crowd at dawn.
That is on them.
The rest of us can put them in the correct basket. I do not need to judge your whole life to reject your behaviour. I do not need to diagnose your soul to say your actions are disgraceful. I do not need to know every wound you carry to say you do not get to spit that wound at someone else.
You are responsible for what you do.
I do not endorse it.
That is enough.
THE UPBEAT MESSAGE, SOMEHOW
When I first started thinking about this piece, I wanted it to end somewhere warm. I wanted the nice Anzac Day ending, the one with a bit of hope, a bit of reflection, a bit of faith that the day still means something larger than the di*****ds trying to drag it down.
Oddly enough, I think I got there.
The uplifting part was not the comments. They were sewer water. The uplifting part was realising that the comments were not the country. The booing was not the nation. The hate was not the whole story.
It was a small group showing us who they are.
That matters because once you see the pattern, you stop taking the bait. You stop thinking the argument is really about Welcome to Country. You stop thinking it is really about a turban. You stop thinking it is really about whether Sikhs appeared in sufficient numbers to satisfy the self-appointed Anzac accountants of Facebook.
The argument is about who gets to belong.
The answer is simple.
Everyone who served belongs in the story.
Every nurse who served belongs. Every digger who served belongs. Every sailor and airman belongs. Every Indigenous veteran belongs. Every Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, atheist, migrant, farmer’s kid, city kid, rich kid, poor kid, larrikin, introvert, brilliant leader, average private, tired medic, terrified teenager, exhausted mother, grieving family, and returned veteran who never marched again belongs.
That is the story.
Messy, human, complicated, painful, funny, contradictory, and Australian.
The people trying to shrink it are not protecting Anzac Day.
They are frightened by its full size.
LEST WE FORGET MEANS ALL OF IT
Lest we forget should never mean “unless they make me uncomfortable.” It should never mean “unless they wore a turban,” “unless they were Indigenous,” “unless they were not white enough for the bloke in the comments section,” or “unless their story complicates the version I learned as a kid.”
Lest we forget means we remember properly.
The courage. The sacrifice. The grief. The failures. The racism. The mateship. The nurses. The stretcher-bearers. The Indigenous soldiers who served and came home to discrimination. The Sikh and Indian Australians whose service has been too easily missed. The families who carried the cost. The veterans who felt connected to the day and the veterans who felt alienated by it.
Anzac Day is not weakened by truth.
It is weakened by people using it as a weapon.
The Shrine of Remembrance is not weakened by a Sikh guard in a turban. It is strengthened by the truth that remembrance has always been bigger than the narrow little version some people want to keep for themselves.
The real insult to Anzac Day was not the turban. It was the hate underneath the post, the booing, the borrowed authority, the ignorance pretending to be tradition, and the people who never served using the language of service to exclude others.
That is not patriotism.
That is fear with a flag around its shoulders.
Australia deserves better than that. Our veterans deserve better than that. The Shrine deserves better than that. The Anzac story deserves better than being handed over to clackboxes who think yelling “respect” online is the same as showing it in real life.
Real respect is quieter. It learns before it comments. It stands still when the moment requires stillness. It knows the medals on your chest may not be your own. It understands that remembrance is not made smaller by including the people history forgot.
It does not need to spit on someone else to prove it loves Australia.
Lest we forget.
All of them.
Even the ones the bigots wish we would leave out.
DISCLAIMER
This article is opinion and personal commentary. It is not a formal historical paper, legal advice, military instruction, or an official statement from the Australian Defence Force, the Army, the Shrine of Remembrance, the RSL, or any other organisation. It draws on public reporting, historical sources, personal reflection, and lived experience of service culture. I cannot speak for every serving member or veteran, and I do not pretend to. I can only speak to the values I was taught, the people I met, and the way I understand service, remembrance, mateship, and responsibility. Readers should check primary sources, listen to veterans and historians, and treat Facebook comment sections with the same caution normally reserved for a hospital microwave at 2 am.
