While there are some things Dr Brendan Nelson will see are done differently in 2014, the recently appointed Australian War Memorial director is ''overall pretty happy'' with Thursday's Anzac Day commemoration.
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''The lighting and projections, in my very strong view, worked; I think the readings worked,'' he told Fairfax Media. ''What didn't work? The buses coming from Russell. We should have had buses running earlier for people who wanted to come and hear the readings.''
Dr Nelson, while gratified by the record attendance at both the dawn and national Anzac Day services, said the AWM would have to allocate additional resources to meet the needs of even larger crowds in 2014 and 2015. ''We are going to have to have more [audio] speakers out in the precinct; not just turn the volume up. We will also need to put more screens further out because, I suspect, we'll have even more people next year and certainly the year after.''
Dr Nelson said he was loving the job he began last December and it fulfilled an ambition, framed while he was still the Australian ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Union, of doing something meaningful. ''You've only got one life. When I heard Steve (Gower) was retiring, I thought, 'Well, it doesn't get more meaningful than the Australian War Memorial'. I spent a lot of time in those battlefields and war cemeteries (in Europe) and, yes, I am very passionate about them.''
The director, like most people at this year's Canberra ceremony, was moved by the rapid thinning in the ranks of the remaining World War II veterans. ''I regard that magnificent generation, born in the shadow of World War I, which grew up through the depression and under the cloud of the war that was coming as the most magnificent generation the country has produced.
''They literally fought to protect our land in World War II and then, after it, undertook a massive social reconstruction.
''They put their responsibilities to one another ahead of their rights, values were much more important than value, and they didn't buy something until they had saved up for it. We will diminish ourselves if we don't pay particular tribute to the legacy they have left.''
Dr Nelson, at 54 a baby boomer, said the resurgence of interest in Anzac Day was a credit to a new generation that had moved on from the cynicism and indifference of his own.
''This generation of young people coming through now are better than us,'' he said. ''They realise these wars were, to some degree, catastrophic and that some of them were wrong. But what they are embracing is the qualities they have found in these men and women [who fought and died]. They know that World War I was a complete disaster but out of it they've got this legacy of courage, of mateship and of enduring when the going gets really hard.''