Your paper (12 April) carried on the front page a headline ‘Byron Celebrates Anzac Day’. I was offended by this and I imagine there would be others as well by this unfortunate choice of words.
My family, among many others, suffered greatly, including the loss of life of family members in the two world wars remembered on Anzac Day. My mother’s brother at the age of just sixteen was injured and imprisoned in a Turkish POW camp and never got over it, and my family lost my dad as a result of his time in New Guinea as an embedded war correspondent for the ABC.
Any suggestion that a remembrance of warfare is a time of celebration conveys quite the wrong message and is offensive to those like myself who had to live through those terrible times; many still suffer to this day. As pointed out by Simon Alderton (Letters, 3 May), few today can have any sense of what it is like to experience the whole world at war, non-stop for five years; a time when virtually nothing else mattered, then to be followed by many more years of rehabilitation and adjustment to loss. My mother never recovered and was left with three children to raise on her own.
Anzac Day is a day for remembering those who gave up so much, who fought valiantly to protect their people, children, and families, as well as those who struggled for those many years during and after each of those terrible wars that were not of their making.
Please, everyone, remember this, and not just on Anzac Day, so that through our collective awareness and efforts, such destruction, harm, and suffering never again be brought upon us. Wars don’t just happen, they are brought about, while nations of good people are peacefully going about their day-to-day business as usual.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
