This year’s winners of the Frank Macdonald Memorial Prize, teachers, RSL representatives and Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier Felix Ellis MP will visit significant World War II sites in the Northern Territory.
The tour will take the delegation to where Australia faced its greatest threat on home soil and culminate in attendance at Darwin’s ANZAC Day dawn service.
Mr Ellis said it is an immense privilege to join a group of students who are so proud of Tasmania’s role in the defence of Australia.
“It’s an honour to be part of this journey with a group of young people so passionate about honouring the sacrifice of Australian service men and women,” Mr Ellis said.
“Knowing that our next generation of leaders are grounded in understanding that as a nation we enjoy the freedoms we do because of the sacrifice of others is heartening.
The tour will include visits to Darwin bombing sites, the Adelaide River War Cemetery and the Pell airstrip.
“It’s one thing to read about these places in a book, and it’s another to see them firsthand. The tour will give us an appreciation for the scale of the bombings that took place here in Australia,” Mr Ellis said.
“Growing up in Broome, the surviving wreckages of Japanese air raids on Northern Australia were a constant reminder of the threat we faced as a nation, but it wasn’t until recent years that more Australians became aware of just how much danger we were in.”
The tour culminates with the students participating in ANZAC Day services in Darwin, representing all of Tasmania.
The Frank MacDonald Memorial Prize is an essay-based competition open to Year 9 and 10 students, which commemorates and preserves the meaning of the ANZAC spirit in the Tasmanian community.
“I have had the pleasure of reading each of the essays and I can see why they won the prize. They were all exemplary and each student should be proud of their effort,” Mr Ellis said.