She was a guest of honour on Wednesday at Woden Valley RSL's Anzac and Peace Ceremony at the park, which was named after her father, Captain Walter Eddison. A British-born soldier settler, Eddison was granted a soldier's lease in the Woden Valley in recognition of the service he gave Australia in the Great War of 1914-1918, fighting in Gallipoli with the Light Horse.

Today, Eddison Park is a small corner of what was once (from 1920-1953) the Eddisons' spacious farming property, Yamba, on which the family lived from 1926.

Ms Yonge is her father's last direct descendant. Three of her brothers died while serving during World War II.

''Yes, I grew up here,'' she reminisced after Tuesday's enormous ceremony - attended by 780 primary schoolchildren - while dozens of musicians from the ACT Schools Senior Concert Band packed up.

''This was a lucerne crop here,'' she remembered, gesturing towards the manicured lawns of today's park, ''and we'd sit under this tree with a billy of tea,'' she said, pointing to one of two grand old eucalypts that added considerable dignity to the ceremony held beneath them.

Earlier, on a still and muggy morning, columns of primary-age children from 18 schools converged on the site. Skateboarders may not know it, but just a long cricket ball's throw from their swish facility, the park has a small white obelisk, a war memorial that becomes the focus for wreath-layings such as Wednesday's.

The children settled on the grass in front of the memorial, but what were they all doing there?

As they streamed in, the MC for the day, a decorated Michael Taylor of the Woden Valley RSL, explained: ''The reason for having this ceremony is that throughout Australia, schools always ask their local RSLs to send someone along to speak to them at Anzac. So some 22 years ago, we thought it might be better if the schools came to us, hence the day.

''For the past 22 years, we've had schools from within about an eight-kilometre radius of Woden Valley invited to come along.

''We present an Anzac ceremony and we have a wreath-laying ceremony, where [representative children from each school] are accompanied to the memorial by an ex-serviceman.''

Sure enough, what came to pass was a kind of replica Anzac Day service/ceremony (rather like the Dawn Service), complete with, among other features, the setting of a catafalque, the playing and singing of anthems (a girl from the band trilled both New Zealand's national anthem and our comparatively lacklustre one), and the laying of wreaths to the accompaniment of melancholy hymns, such as Abide With Me and Oh God, Our Help In Ages Past.

Four trumpeters played the Last Post. Then there was an impeccable one minute's silence that was so quiet, the only sound (there being no breeze to rattle the leaves of the old eucalypts) was the distant hum of traffic on Yamba Drive.

What did make it a bit different from the Dawn Service was that the very large band (it had eight percussionists, two of them playing xylophones) played lots of light music too, before and after the solemn passages of the ceremony.

As the children arrived, for example, their steps were given some spring by a jolly rendition of the highly danceable World War II pop hit Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me.

On another occasion, the band played the Colonel Bogey March, which, I'm afraid, I can never hear without remembering every blush-making word of the ribald lyrics set to it during World War II (and then at my rather rough school) alleging genital malformations in Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels. Thank God the 780 children at Wednesday's ceremony were innocent of those lyrics.

Another difference on Wednesday was that Chaplain O'Donnell's prayers and sentiments, thoughtfully pitched to the children, were far more cheerful and fun-filled than the earnestness we hear (quite rightly) when God is being bothered at Anzac Day's understandably solemn ceremonies.

The Reverend O'Donnell offered a ''non-denominational prayer'' that he said we could all join in saying since ''it covers just about every kind of god you can imagine, that you might have in your mind''. And, yes, it turned out to be just the kind of amiable, one-prayer-fits-all supplication he'd said it would be.

After laying the first wreath (a simple posy involving autumn leaves, daisies and rosemary), Pamela Yonge returned to her chair to remember how, once upon a time, this park before us had been a field of lucerne, how the homestead (it was all built from recycled timber) had been over where the Southern Cross Club sits today, and how she and the other children had travelled to their schools (Boys Grammar and Girls Grammar) on horseback.