Speech at the reception to mark the centenary of Australia House
22 November 2018
Australia House, London
HE the Hon George Brandis QC, Australian High Commissioner
Your Royal Highnesses, your excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you for joining us here tonight to commemorate the centenary of Australia House.
This extraordinary building has been the location of the Australian High Commission these past one hundred years. It is, in fact, the oldest continually-occupied diplomatic building in London. It was the first major public building of the new Commonwealth of Australia.
At the time it was planned, Australia was barely a decade old. The Australian statesmen of the day decided to make a bold statement – here, right in the heart of the Imperial capital – by creating a building both heroic in conception and majestic in design, which would show the world that Australia, although the world’s newest nation, also meant to be a significant and formidable one.
When your Royal Highness’ great-grandfather, King George V, laid the foundation stone on 24 July 1913, no one foresaw the magnitude of the horror which would, a year later, befall the world. By the time Australia House was opened, five years later, just three months before the Armistice, Australia no longer needed to prove its nationhood by a statement in marble and timber because the more than 300,000 Australians who fought, and the 60,000 who died, in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, had already provided it much more emphatically in flesh and blood and sinew.
The day King George V opened Australia House, on 3rd August 1918, this Exhibition Hall, as it is tonight, was filled with distinguished guests to mark the significance of the occasion. Taking pride of place among the leading citizens of the land were some 300 wounded Australian servicemen, specially invited by the High Commissioner, Andrew Fisher. In thanking the King, Fisher said:
“It is the earnest wish of the Commonwealth Government that Australia House may be a tangible sign to the people of the United Kingdom that their interests and those of their kinfolk in the great Commonwealth overseas are common alike in peace and in war.”
And so, over this past century, has it proved to be.
Australia House is an enduring symbol of that kinship. And it is much more besides. It is a statement of Australia’s confidence in its own future. It is an architectural jewel, London’s finest example of the belle époque style which flourished here briefly in that short span of time between the end of the Gothic revival and the blight of modernism. It is – has always been – a focus of the Australian community in London, for whom, over many generations, it has been a place to meet friends, to transact business, to catch up with news, to vote, to observe national occasions; often to celebrate, sometimes mourn.
Here, Australians have rejoiced in the success of our cricketers, our footballers, and our tennis players; toasted the virtuosity of our musicians, our singers and our artists; savoured the delights of our chefs and our vignerons; chuckled at the wit of our comedians. In this Exhibition Hall, we have enjoyed, and shared with the rest of London, the very best that Australia has to offer.
The destinies of our two nations may have diverged over these past hundred years, but our shared interests, our common values, the crimson threads of kinship that bind us, remain as strong as they have ever been. We know that the coming weeks and months will be a pivotal time in the long history of this country. But whatever portends, of one thing the United Kingdom can be absolutely certain: the bonds between our two peoples will remain as solid as Australia House itself – a monument to their permanence and their endurance.
Thank you for honouring us with your presence tonight.