Eighty years ago, Prime Minister Ben Chifley began his address to the nation with a sentence of perfect simplicity - and infinite power:
Fellow citizens, the war is over.
The signing of the surrender was some weeks off, but the darkness that had engulfed the world - and made its last stand in the Pacific - was at last lifted.
Here in Sydney - as they did in towns and cities across Australia - crowds poured into the streets. They sang and danced amid a joyous blizzard of paper.
Chifley, who had seen his friend and predecessor John Curtin worn down by the gravity of war leadership, turned his words to all who had fought the darkness - but not lived to see the light.
"Let us remember those whose lives were given that we may enjoy this glorious moment and may look forward to a peace which they have won for us.
Let us remember those whose thoughts, with proud sorrow, turn towards gallant, loved ones who will not come back. … Nothing can fully repay the debt we owe them nor can history record in adequate terms their deeds".
Chifley spoke, too, of the home front, the men and women who had "performed miracles of production … so that the battle of supply could be won".
Between us and that extraordinary day, eight decades now stretch. At this distance, the story of World War II has become set in our memories.
The Allied victory over tyranny has, in retrospect, taken on a feel of inevitability.
Part of the debt we owe to all who served our nation is to remind ourselves how close history came to taking a different path.
And to remember and honour every Australian - and every friend and every ally - who gave everything to ensure it did not.
Across Europe and North Africa.
Across Asia and the Pacific, and even across our own shores.
We think of all the stories of courage. Of resilience and exhaustion, of fear and elation, and an endless longing for the home that so many never saw again.
These are not stories rendered in bronze or marble, but written in flesh and blood.
Stories of ordinary people facing the extraordinary.
Facing loss, securing victory.
Stories of mateship tempered in the fire of combat.
We think of all we owe to every Australian who served in our name.
Every Australian who fell, and every Australian who came home but could never leave the battle.
Every family that felt the pride and weight of a loved one who put on the uniform. Every family that knew the grief that had no ending, only a beginning.
As we gather in the very place so many Australians celebrated that day, we reflect on what victory meant - and what it cost.
Every life and dream and future swallowed in that vortex of madness and cruelty, from every battlefield and every burning city, from the prisoner of war camps to the unprecedented horror of the concentration camps.
These were nightmares made real - not by monsters but by human beings in a grotesque perversion of humanity.
Yet, as we feel that weight, our hearts are lifted by every Australian who stood against it.
Amid the shadows of war, the power of their courage and the strength of their character is a light that is a beacon to us still.
They showed us what it is to remain true to ourselves, no matter what.
They showed us what it means to stand shoulder to shoulder with friends and allies.
And together, they turned the tide.
As we stand here today, think of everyone who gathered 80 years ago.
Think of the noise of their elation.
And, hanging in the air just beyond the sound of their happiness, the silence of those who never came home.
A silence that touched every corner of our continent, from the biggest city to the smallest country town.
As we do, we return to another sentence whose simplicity is matched only by its power:
Lest we forget.
