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Just before dawn, on that first Anzac Day 84 years ago, the boats carrying the 1,500 men who would make the first landing were moving through darkness towards the shore. All was silent, save for whispers of apprehension and the splash of oars.

Ahead of them, two searchlights briefly pencilled the sky, then disappeared. Still silence. The leading boats touched the beach. The first Anzacs leapt out. A yellow beacon flared to the south and a single shot was heard. Then several more. And as the boats further out came in, the fire broke upon them from the heights above. The silence and the waiting were over. And the key, as one of the Anzacs was later to say, "was being turned in the lock of hell".

All the demons of war were let loose as the day wore on. Some men died in the boats and on the beaches, many more in the bitter fighting up on the ridges, through scrub and ravines, towards the third ridge. There were the sounds of gunfire and of bombs. And of the screams of combat, of suffering and of death. By the evening, 16,000 men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps had landed. Some 2,000 were dead or seriously wounded. And the Turkish defenders had forced the advance back to the second ridge - from which position, despite some small gains at huge cost, nothing essentially changed over the next eight months.

There are now no living Anzacs who were at Gallipoli on that first day. The last survivor, Ted Matthews, an Australian signaller, died in December 1997. There are only a few remaining of the Anzacs who subsequently served during the Gallipoli campaign. The last New Zealander, Doug Dibley, a stretcher-bearer, died a little more than 15 months ago. The fourth-last Australian, Frank Isaacs, died in Perth only this month. Those who remain are all centenarians.

So, few are left who experienced the long months of stalemate, of attack and counter-attack on pieces of hillside that were given soldiers' names - Plugge's Plateau, Quinn's Post, MacLagan's Ridge, Johnston's Jolly. Yet the story of those months, and of all that they involve, lives in our national histories and collective memories.

For Anzac is not merely about loss. It is about courage, and endurance, and duty, and love of country, and mateship, and good humour and the survival of a sense of self-worth and decency in the face of dreadful odds.

These were qualities and values the pioneers had discovered in themselves in what were, for Europeans, the new lands of Australasia. They were tested at Gallipoli and on the ancient battlefields of Europe for the first time in the Great War. They were not found wanting.

Gallipoli was not the Anzacs' bloodiest campaign of that war. The casualties in France overwhelmed those of Gallipoli. But it was the first. And it was heroic even in failure. And what makes it unique is that it was where the people of Australia and New Zealand found their nationhood. "Before the war who ever heard of Anzac?" said their commander-in-chief, the British general, Sir Ian Hamilton. "Hereafter, who will ever forget it?"

The campaign failed, but the men were not defeated. There is a crucial difference. In a triumph of daring and initiative, more than 35,000 Anzacs were evacuated during 11 December nights, with barely a casualty. With their boots muffled, the last of the Anzacs came down from the heights to the beaches on December 20, and into the boats that took them in darkness and silence back to the waiting ships.

But their dead - our dead - remained behind on the other side of the world: more than 8,100 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders. For many who were leaving that was the unbearable tragedy. One of them wrote:

Yet we are not apart. While Gallipoli is Turkish land, it has become a sacred site of our nations. And we are united with those young Anzacs who were at Gallipoli so long ago. They are constantly with us in their and our homelands so far away. There, their spirit walks abroad. To challenge, to guide and to inspire. For as long as we remember. For as long as our nations endure.

No-one can express all that this day means to Australians and New Zealanders. It is, said Australia's great historian Manning Clark, "about something too deep for words". But in the stillness of the early dawn, and in the silence that has settled once more along the shoreline, we feel it in the quiet of our hearts. The sense of great sadness. Of loss. Of gratitude. Of honour. Of national identity. Of our past. Of the spirit, the depth, the meaning, the very essence of our nations. And of the human values which those first Anzacs - and those who came after them - embodied and which we, their heirs, must cherish and pass to the future.

Outside the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is the Ataturk Memorial Garden, named after the Commander of the Turkish forces on Gallipoli and the father of modern Turkey. It is the only memorial to a former enemy on Anzac Parade. It carries the immortal words of Kemal Ataturk that are inscribed at Anzac Cove. Words addressed to the mothers, urging them to wipe away the tears for their dead sons. "After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well."

From the Ataturk Memorial Garden in Canberra, you look across Anzac Parade to an Aleppo Pine, planted in 1934 from a cone taken by a soldier from the logs above the Turkish trenches at Gallipoli and sent home to his mother in memory of another dead son. Seedlings from that tree now flourish in many places - including in its native soil at the Lone Pine Memorial and Cemetery.

Let us all, as we walk among the graves on this 84th Anzac Day, listening to the wind in the pine trees, looking across the scarlet-poppied slopes to the "heights of thyme and rosemary", remember the extent of our debt to our fellow countrymen who died so many years ago.

And, on this our national day of honour, let us recall not only those young Australians who gave their lives in our nation's service at Gallipoli, but also all who have died for our country on other battlefields of the First World War, in the Second World War, in Korea, in Vietnam and in other places.

Let us be mindful of so many young lives unlived and unfulfilled; of so many dreams unrealised; of so many of the next generation unborn; of so much that our nation lost; and yet, regardless of victory or defeat, of so much that it and we, their heirs, gained. And let us all be conscious of the whisper of things "too deep for words" that can be heard at Gallipoli by all who have true love of our people and our country in their hearts.

May they rest with God.