Ted Matthews was the last surviving Australian of the approximately 16,000 men of the Australian and New Zealand Armed Corps who landed at what is now Anzac Cove on that fateful day more than 82 years ago.

This is truly a time for reflection about our country's first Anzacs and about what the loss of the last of them means to us all.

The national significance of that loss is difficult to articulate. That is because it's impossible to adequately express all that we mean and feel when we invoke or commemorate the events of that day when the first ANZACs landed at Gallipoli.

It is, as Manning Clark wrote, "something too deep for words". It stretches out to encompass not only the sacrifice of those first Anzacs but of all who have fought in our forces - in the following days and months at Gallipoli or on other battle fields of the First World War, in the Second World War, in Korea, in Vietnam and in other places.

It is about the spirit, the depth, the meaning, the very essence of our nation. And it is about sadness and grief for young lives cut short and dreams left unfulfilled. And horror at the carnage of war.

Throughout his life, Ted Matthews was to say that the main purpose of Anzac Day was to remind us of the evils of war. And in saying that he would recall that he had almost been one of the first casualties: only a thick pocket-book which his mother had given him saved him when he was struck in the chest by a piece of shrapnel.

Ted Matthews would also say that he was not one of the real heroes. He was a signaller and the infantry, he said, had the worst of it.

Yet he was there at Gallipoli, without respite, for the whole duration of the stalemate: through the heat, and the flies, and the stench of death, and disease, and attack, and counter-attack, and the cold as winter drew on. And the bonds which transcended and transcend individual mortality were forged between those men and the soul of our nation.

For Anzac is also about courage, and endurance, and duty, and mateship, and good humour, and the survival of a sense of self-worth: the sum of those human and national values which our pioneers found in the raw bush of a new world and tested in the old world for the first time at Gallipoli.

They were not found wanting, not even in the face of overwhelming odds and the final realisation of the inevitability of failure. The significance of Anzac to our nation was apparent at the time. The official war historian, Charles Bean, observed that for eight months the "most intense feelings" of all Australians and New Zealanders were "tied to those few acres of Turkish hillside".

Indeed, when the first Anzac Day commemoration was held in 1916 - a day of profound solemnity and national sorrow - the news journals wrote that "the price of nationhood must be paid in blood and tears". And so it has been.

But not all was failure. One triumph of initiative and daring of the Gallipoli campaign was the manner in which it ended: 80,000 men were evacuated from Anzac Cove, as later were the British troops from Cape Helles, with a mere handful of casualties. Before the Turkish Army was even aware of it, the forces had gone.

Yet leaving was for many of the Anzacs the greatest tragedy of all since it meant leaving their dead mates buried in an alien land so far from home. One of the departing diggers expressed it well:

Not only muffled is our tread
To cheat the foe,
We fear to rouse our honoured dead
To heal us go.
Sleep sound, old friends - the keenest smart
Which, more than failure, wounds the heart,
Is thus to leave you - thus to part.

Obviously, that young-soldier poet could not have foreseen that, more than 80 years on, thousands of Australians, many of them young Australians carrying backpacks, would each year return to visit with those "honoured dead" and to watch another dawn break over Anzac Cove.

Ted Matthews had been among the last of the Australians to go, leaving on the night of December 19, 1915. He was therefore at Gallipoli from the beginning until the very end, and his passing marks a final break in a living thread that united us Australians with the complete Anzac epic.

But, the legacies of valour and of national identity and sentiment left by him and his companions outlive them and will outlive all of us.

With Ted's death, the first Anzacs have now all gone. Yet "their spirit walks abroad". To inspire and sustain our nation for so long as it exists and listens to the whispers of those things "too deep for words" that are heard by all who have true love of our country and its people in their hearts.

Truly, he was the quintessential Australian. May he rest with God.

Both his daughters had married American servicemen and he had been living in America for the last few years, returning to Australia only recently. Seven Australians and one New Zealander who served on Gallipoli are still alive, but Ted was the last of those who landed on Anzac Day, 25 April 1915. He served on Gallipoli until 19 December 1915.

His funeral service was held at St Stephen's Uniting Church in MacQuarie Street, Sydney. Half the Federal Cabinet attended the service, along with the Governor General, Sir William Deane, the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, and the Premier of New South Wales, Mr Bob Carr.

Mr Rusty Priest, New South Wales State President of the Returned Services League (RSL) approached Mr Matthews only surviving child, Mrs Irene Phillips and the Premier, Mr Bob Carr, requesting a state funeral for Mr Matthews, which was granted. He said that he knew that as a humble man, Mr Matthews would not have wanted a grand ceremony, but the Anzacs deserved it.

Speeches were given by the Governor General, the Prime Minister, the Reverend Doctor Scott McPheat, and Mrs Phillips. Ted's casket, bedecked with a slouch hat and several dozen red roses, was placed on a gun carriage and taken to the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. The crowd in MacQuarie street applauded his coffin as it passed.

At the crematorium, there was an RSL service and full military honours. Sand from Gallipoli was scattered on his coffin. Pipes and drums played and paper poppies were placed on the coffin. Flags flew at half mast across the nation. The funeral was reported on page one of most papers including the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age.

New Zealand's last Gallipoli veteran, Doug Dibley, died yesterday aged 101 - more than 80 years after he joined his cobbers to enlist for war.

Mr Dibley died in a Rotorua resthome just after midday.

Alfred Douglas Dibley, No3/1136 NZEF, became New Zealand's last surviving Gallipoli veteran earlier this year with the death of Les Leach.

Rotorua Returned Services' Association president Jack Anderson said yesterday Mr Dibley was a "lovely gentleman" and would be missed, especially at Anzac Day ceremonies when he had been a guest of honour in recent years.

Only a fortnight ago Mr Dibley had said he'd had a great life, a lovely family and "when he was called, he'd be ready to go, Mr Anderson said.

Mr Dibley was born in Wellington on June 26, 1896. Up until he died he was mobile and his mind was sharp, but his eyesight and hearing were failing. He still drove until aged in his late 90s .

In 1915 he was working for an oil company in Wellington when he and a friend spotted a newspaper advertisement seeking helpers at Trentham Military Camp hospital where spinal meningitis was raging.

"A cobber and myself, we were just under age, we said, how about going and helping themes. We went in there, we got into uniform, we got everything . . . but we never went near that blooming hospital," he recalled recently.

"And the next thing we knew they packed us off to Gallipoli. We were stretcher bearers going out and picking men up."

Mr Dibley, a member of the Mounted Corps, became part of a 24-man squad which travelled to Cairo and Heliopolis in Egypt and finally Gallipoli, a battleground he could not forget. "Good Lord, if you're in a place with shells going round and seeing your cobbers killed, do you think you'd forget that?"

Five thousand New Zealanders were wounded during the campaign; 2700 died. "The big battles were over when I arrived but I was on Walker's Ridge and the bullets were still flying around. My short time there was quite long enough for me."

Mr Dibley was evacuated on the last day of the big evacuation, ending up in Palestine with Australian and New Zealand mounted troops. He transferred to a field ambulance unit and was sent to France, but never saw any action there because he contracted spinal meningitis.

Mr Dibley was sent to hospital in England and when he recovered was returned to New Zealand and discharged - on April 3,1918.

He worked in Wellington for a few months, then got a scrub-covered rehab "farm" at Ngongotaha.

Later he married, took over his father-in-law's bigger farm nearby, and raised a large family. He spent all his working life on that property and it is still in family hands.

He served in the Home Guard in the Second World War.

Like many other returned servicemen, he was opposed to wars.

"'No one wins in the end. The Great War took the best of our young men, and look how many came back maimed and broken. Many suffered dreadfully for the rest of their lives. Anzac Day is im