Meadows Primary School and Early Learning Centre has become host in recent years to an Anzac service with a difference.
Armed forces personnel, footballers and politicians all come along.
The Broadmeadows school community reflects diverse nationalities and has the biggest Turkish population in Victoria.
PICTURE GALLERY: Click through the carousel above for more pictures
The school is plum in the middle of MP Frank McGuire’s electorate and hosts his Side by Side service, which aims to unite community and sports traditions to inspire young people.
‘‘It’s important to acknowledge how, as Australians, we have grown together beyond the burden of history and how we can thrive, side by side,’’ Mr McGuire said at last Thursday’s service.
He pointed out that Broadmeadows was home to Victoria’s first army base and enlistment centre, Maygar Barracks, for World War I and was now home to many Turkish descendents of the forces faced by Anzacs at Gallipoli.
Turkish vice-consul Ersel Ozdemir also spoke, as did Essendon and Collingwood football club presidents Paul Little and Eddie McGuire (brother of Frank).
Mr Ozdemir said friendly relations between Australia and Turkey went back to that 20th century battlefield.
The football connection was woven into the Anzac Day dynamic after then-Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy, who was drafted into the army for two years in the late 1960s, gave a 1990s makeover to the Anzac Day game, joining Collingwood tragic and then RSL president Bruce Ruxton to institute what’s become a tradition: the Anzac Day clash between Collingwood and Essendon.
Frank McGuire pointed out that the Broadmeadows Side by Side service did not refer to the Collingwood club theme song but acknowledged the words of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish commander at Gallipoli, when he addressed a gathering of mothers of the Allied troops who died in the battles there.
“There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours,” the Turkish leader said. “After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”
