They had “no idea” — and that's exactly why it matters.
Welcome to The Back Verandah.
On ANZAC Day, I had the honour of speaking at the ANZAC Day service in Airlie Beach about a subject close to my heart - animals in war.
I prepared carefully, researching the subject and checking the facts.
And I was surprised by what happened afterwards.
Several people came to find me after the service, expressing how they were moved, one saying the speech brought tears to her face. And almost all of them said some version of the same thing:
"I had no idea."
Not about the horses. Most people know something about horses in war, but not about the scale of it. Not about the 136,000 Australian horses sent overseas, and the one — only one — who came home. Nor did they know about the dogs, camels, donkeys and pigeons, or about the Light Horsemen who groomed their horses one last time before handing them over, men who had survived years of war, weeping as they said goodbye.
One woman told me she had never connected with an ANZAC Day service the way she did today because that story made it real.
And her words moved me because this is exactly what I see in my memoir work.
Facts inform us, but stories connect us.
The people who approached me that morning connected with a moment — a specific, human moment — that made history feel close. The image of a soldier grooming his horse for the last time did that in a way that no statistic could.
This is why the stories of ordinary lives matter so deeply.
Not the grand sweeping history, but the quiet human detail that makes someone standing in the audience on a sunny April morning suddenly feel the weight of something that happened a century ago.
If a story is not told, it fades. If it is not written down, it disappears entirely, and with it goes the chance for the next generations to feel what we felt this ANZAC Day.
That is the whole reason I do this work.
If you'd like to read the address I gave on ANZAC Day, you can download it here.
Download the full address here.
With care, Natalie
Natalie Stockdale, The Memoir Writer www.thememoirwriter.com.au
Airlie Beach ANZAC Day service, 25 April 2026.
