The first boat landed at a small cove surrounded by steep slopes of thick scrub shortly after four in the morning.

One of the ANZACs who went ashore at Anzac Cove that day was Private Leonard Kerry Smiles.

The well-known boy from Albury, educated at St Patrick’s Boys School and according to The Border Mail a young man of “good appearance, smart and alert in manner” moved to Sydney and worked as a grocer, first at Pitt Street and then at Bondi.

He enlisted at the age of 20 as a private in the AIF’s 2nd Battalion and set sail aboard HMAT Suffolk.

In his letters home, Smiles was confident of “getting through all right”, but this was not to be.

Three days later he was badly wounded on the peninsula and transported to a hospital station at Alexandria, Egypt.

He died there on May 2, 1915.

Leonard, along with his brothers Frank and Ernest, would never see Albury again.

The Smiles family, like so many Australian families, paid a heavy price for their love of our country.

World War I cast a pall over all.

From an Australian population of just under five million, 417,000 enlisted, 332,000 served overseas, 152,000 were wounded and over 61,000 never came home.

Historian Bill Gammage has spoken of “dreams abandoned, lives without purpose, women without husbands, families without family life, one long national funeral for a generation and more after 1918”.

On this centenary of the landing, we remember the ferocious struggle among the ridges, bluffs, valleys and trenches of Gallipoli.

Charles Bean, a war correspondent, wrote: “The universe seemed to be buffeted first from one side, then from the other, as if giants were battering its empty sides with sledgehammers”.

And when the ANZACs were not navigating shells, shrapnel and bullets, they suffered from plagues of flies and outbreaks of disease.

By the time of the evacuation, the only successful part of the campaign, in December 1915, Private Smiles was one of more than 8700 Australians who had died.

We do not glorify war, but rather honour the values the ANZACs embodied in the most trying of circumstances.

We acknowledge that the worst of times brought out the best in them – extraordinary courage, perseverance against all odds, and selflessness in doing their duty.

Such qualities were found too in the medics, the stretcher bearers, the cooks, the chaplains – and the nurses who tended so many of the wounded on hospital ships.

In the magnificent defeat at Gallipoli, the terrible victory on the Western Front and the successful advances in the Middle East, our soldiers embodied the commitment to freedom, the spirit of adventure and the bonds of mateship that we hold dear to this day.

The Great War was the crucible in which the Australian identity was first forged.

The sacrifices of our forebears have left us an enduring legacy of freedom.

The Allied and Turkish memorials dotted across the Gallipoli peninsula are testament to another enduring legacy that emerged from the suffering of war – our friendships with those we served with and those we fought against.

The Smiles brothers and the names of all those Australians who died in the Great War are forever engraved at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

They are joined there by the names of more than 40,000 Australians who have made the ultimate sacrifice since.

In a century, we have lost over 102,000 of our nation’s finest.

Even now, our armed forces are on active duty in the Middle East and elsewhere risking their lives in the defence of our freedom and the universal decencies of mankind.

On Saturday we honour the Australians who founded the ANZAC legend and all those who have followed in their path.

We are the custodians of their legacy and we hope that in striving to emulate their values, we might rise to the challenges of our time as they did to theirs.