Frank Mitchell has lived in Wodonga all his life, but only on Tuesday did he attend a dawn service in his home town for the first time.
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But this was by no means because of lacking connection – quite the opposite.
“My dad was a watchman at Bandiana after he came back from the war,” he said.
“He served from 1941 to 1943; he was repatriated because he had a shrapnel wound and they amputated his left leg.
“I’ve always watched the Anzac Day service religiously on TV, and I would get very emotional.
“I thought, this can’t keep going on, and made an effort to go to the Gold Coast the last two years.”
Mr Mitchell joined his brother at Currumbin, who was invited to the event by the Royal Australian Navy as a retired serviceman.
“The centenary there was very eerie,” he said.
“Before anything started, the first few bars of John Lennon’s Imagine came on, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
“My father was a very quiet man, I never heard him say one thing about it.
“His very close mate was a bloke they called Mousy, he was killed over there, and the only time I heard my father talk about the war was to do with Mousy, and he just lost it,” he said.
Mr Mitchell wore the medals proudly of Leonard Joseph Mitchell, who was in the second 17th battalion in the Siege of Tobruk, and his brother Kevin, a Korean and Vietnam veteran, at the Woodland Grove service.
As first light hit, he joined more than 800 others in the rain, including Indi MP Cathy McGowan.
“All around North East Victoria, communities have been doing things to commemorate the centenary,” she said.
“One of the really special ones was Middle Indigo Primary fixing up the honour boards for the soldiers of Indigo Valley.
“What was so moving for me was some of the names are the same – these families have been there for 100 years.
“It gives me such a sense of how deep our community commitment and resilience is.”
Wodonga’s dawn service is a must-do for many, but Bernice and Grant Vaughan crossed two states to be there.
Mr Vaughan and his wife commemorate Anzac in a different place every year, having travelled as fast west as Perth, down to Tasmania, and back up to Townsville.
“I was posted to Wodonga in 1986, we took care of everything from motorcycles to tanks … my grandfather, father, and my mother all served,” he said. “We travel to see how different communities do it.
“They all have the same feeling of respect.”