Anzac Day 2026.

This year, we want to make sure we remember some of the people who have too often been left out of that promise.

When Australia answered the call in 1914, thousands of young men signed up to serve a country they believed in. Among them were an estimated 1,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who served with the Australian Imperial Force in the First World War.

The precise figure will never be known — because a number of those who served changed their names and birthplaces when they enrolled, just to get around racist enlistment practices.

They wanted to serve so badly that they hid who they were to do it. They enlisted to serve a country in which they were not yet recognised as citizens. No vote. No rights. No citizenship. And yet — they went.

They went to Gallipoli. They went to the Western Front. They went to places with names they'd never heard, to fight alongside men who, back home in Australia, might have treated them as less than equal. War gave these men a taste of equality through a set of circumstances that was all at once horrific, incredibly human and totally foreign to them.

And then the war ended. And they came home.

Most First World War Aboriginal ex-servicemen received little public or private support on their return. They were denied access to soldier settlement schemes. In some states, Native Welfare Departments quarantined their wages and pensions. Sometimes they were denied access to military funerals. The treatment they and their families received at Anzac Day services and in local RSLs varied depending on the attitudes of the local community.

Some families were subjected to a second dispossession — their land granted to returning soldiers under Soldier Settlement Schemes, while Aboriginal applicants were denied the same blocks.

Brothers in arms on the battlefield. Strangers when they got back.

While in Europe and the Middle East the Aboriginal soldier was a valued brother — back in Australia he returned to an unequal life and was gradually forgotten by all but his kin and closest mates.

But their families never forgot. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have long kept these stories alive through oral histories, passed down through families and local communities — the military careers of their forebears carried quietly through generations.

This Anzac Day, we remember all who served. We remember those who gave everything for a country that didn't yet fully recognise them. We remember the Black Diggers — proud, brave and too long overlooked.

Their courage was real. Their sacrifice was real. Their story is part of this country's story.

And it always will be.