Janet Rogers is an English journalist and who spent last April in Australia and happened to be in Port Douglas on ANZAC Day.

She wrote this article about her experience on that day as, in her words "I was so impressed with the way Australia remembers their war dead."

ANZAC Day in Port Douglas

by Janet Rogers

Chairs were stacked on tables in cafes, shops were shuttered, dry leaves rustled in the gutter. I was surprised to discover that ANZAC Day in Australia is a public holiday. Everything is closed until noon.

Many towns and cities hold dawn services of commemoration. At Port Douglas, where we were staying, the service was to be mid-morning but we had other plans. We were going on a fast catamaran to the Great Barrier Reef for a day of snorkelling.

We sat on deck opposite a young couple from Brisbane. She wore a straw hat over her dark brown hair. She could have been a tropical fish in her turquoise blue and pink striped bikini but there was warmth and love in her hazel eyes unlike the vacant stare of the underwater community. He towered above her, lean and gentle.

We were to snorkel in three different places on the reef. We donned our stinger suits, black lycra from head to toe, to guard against the deadly jellyfish.

The tall lanky Swedes, the Chinese family and the couple from Brisbane, we were all uniformly swathed. The young man seemed to be secreting something in the sleeve of his suit. His girlfriend was staring at the ocean.

We slithered off the back of the boat like seals slipping from the ice floe. We were having fun and they, the people of Port Douglas, would be marching down the main street now, towards the war memorial.

We hovered on the surface of the water, sky divers in free fall, wide-eyed as hundreds of small fish crowded around us, brushing up against our legs with the gentle swish of a cat’s tail.

We drifted over coral gardens of frilled lettuce, orange pumpkins and cream cauliflowers. Everything was quivering and fluttering as if a soft breeze was blowing across the ocean floor.

Spaghetti and honeycomb, fungi, purple daisies on long green stalks, pink fingers pointing, great slabs of blue slate, sculptured and smoothed, a strange mix of shapes and colours. And everywhere the psychedelic dancers of the ocean were waltzing and twirling gracefully. We loitered, like humming birds drinking in the nectar.

We rose from the sea and clambered, dripping, onto the back of the boat¸ wriggling from our lycra suits like butterflies emerging from chrysalises. There was a buzz of voices. Someone had seen a shark, someone else a turtle.  Everyone shared their secrets from the deep.

Our young friends from Brisbane, now snug in hoodies, were smiling. “What did you see”? I asked.

“I saw something absolutely brilliant,” the young woman replied. I waited and she remained silent. Then suddenly she thrust out her left hand and showed me that brilliant thing, a diamond ring, sparkling on her third finger. It had been an underwater proposal accepted with a spluttering seawater kiss. I shared a moment of celebration with strangers.

I thought about the people back in town. The service would be over now. The flowers, exotic orchids and chrysanthemums would rest at the foot of the memorial to the Australian war dead. And the message on them all: “Lest we forget.”

One young couple would not forget this day. Theirs would be a happy memory.