Eric Bogle’s song is about an Australian bush rover who enlists in 1915 and is wounded at Gallipoli losing both legs and with them his livelihood.

Written in 1971 it is an anti-war song and at the end of it the old rover sits on his porch watching the old “forgotten heroes of a forgotten war” march on Anzac Day and muses “the young people ask, what are they marching for? ...and I ask myself the same question.” It is a valid question but there is one area that Bogle has been proved wildly wrong in the last 50 years.

Though all the original First World War veterans are now long dead, the numbers marching have not got “fewer and fewer”. In fact Anzac Day is more popular than ever and the young people are no longer asking what are “they” marching for, but marching themselves.

It has helped we have had four years of important anniversaries, this year commemorating the 1918 Armistice that ended that brutal and ultimately futile war.

It also “helps” (if that is the right word) that Australian forces have served in numerous conflicts since 1918 producing veterans aplenty that proudly wear their medals on April 25 each year.

There is nothing wrong with that and it is right we should fete people who served their country with honour.

But I worry at the fetishisation of the Anzac legend and a growing unwillingness to tolerate any criticism of the day.

Isn’t freedom of speech one of things they were supposed to be fighting for?

The sacrifices of those who suffered in war should always be remembered but who will remember those who in this very day are living through unimaginable horror in Syria?

And who will remember Australia’s own war? Just outside Winton in Bladensburg National Park is Skull Hole. It is a beautiful place but there is a reason for the name. Here in the 1880s Native Police and local settlers surrounded 200 Aboriginal people and sent them to their deaths off the cliffs. There is no monument to this brutal slaughter. Lest we forget – Derek Barry