EDITORIAL
At the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month each year, much of the world pauses.
Across the Central Coast, from Woy Woy to Wyong, people will gather at memorials, RSLs and schools to mark that single minute when, in 1918, the guns finally fell silent.
Remembrance Day is more than a date; it’s a moment of shared reflection, an act of remembering those who carried the weight of war so that peace could return.
This week, our community farewelled one of those quiet heroes.
Peter Muir Wyllie, aged 99, was among the last of the Central Coast’s living links to the Second World War.
His passing reminds us that we are slowly losing the generation that carried the memory of conflict not from books or documentaries, but from their own eyes and hearts.
When we say “lest we forget”, it is people like Peter we mean.
Yet remembrance does not fade with them; it simply changes form.
It passes to the young, and the many locals who choose to walk the old battlefields, who listen to the echoes and bring the stories home.
Earlier this year, Scarlett Sheridan climbed Hill 504 in South Korea, site of the Battle of Kapyong, retracing the steep ground where Australian soldiers once fought in freezing conditions.
Another local, Zane Foulis from Kincumber High, trekked the Kokoda Trail with the Youth Leadership Challenge team, learning first-hand about courage, endurance and mateship.
Their journeys, though separated by continents, share a single thread – gratitude, and the duty to remember.
Each November, Remembrance Day asks us to pause not just for those who fell, but for the peace they earned.
It is also a call to the living, to ensure that these stories remain part of our community’s conscience.
Here on the Coast, as school students lay wreaths beside returned servicemen and women, the baton of memory quietly passes hands again.
So when the bugle sounds at 11 o’clock this coming Tuesday morning, wherever you are – on a worksite, in a café, beside the water – take that minute.
Think of Peter Wyllie and his generation, of Scarlett and Zane, and of all who have carried the meaning of remembrance forward.
For in that silence lies the true measure of peace, and of a community that still remembers.
David Abrahams – Managing Editor
