I live in a laidback coastal town in northern NSW, little formality required. I decide on runners and a fleecy jacket, even though the April night is unusually warm.

A car passes as I walk along the main road. Otherwise, the town appears to be sleeping. When I take the street to the war memorial I hear a lone bugle playing. A circle of light shines on the gathered crowd and on the plaques dedicated to those who served in World War I, World War II, Korea, Malaya and Vietnam. Plaques for Iraq and Afghanistan are yet to be added. In the east, behind the black silhouettes of coastal pines, the sky is changing. The shy twitter of birds, then a kookaburra laughing. The day coming to life.

I hover at the edge of the congregation, thinking back to childhood. I'm seven or eight, almost tall enough when standing to look eye to eye with my father who is sitting at the kitchen table. It must have been a weekend in summer because he was wearing shorts, relaxed enough for me to venture a question.

He wasn't always approachable.

In any of our interactions with him, my sister and I found ourselves automatically assessing the situation. Was he in a good mood? How long could we chat before he had enough, or made a comment he thought was cheeky and be blasted by his thundering voice? He never hit us, much as he threatened. The voice was enough. It bore down on us like a tidal wave, crushing us with its force.

I must have decided he was in a good mood. I don't remember thinking about the question for very long, just coming out with it. 'Did you kill anyone in the war, dad?'

He didn't answer, frozen into silence. The kitchen clock kept ticking, steady as a heartbeat. My father's eyes were downcast, staring into a dark chasm. I teetered on the edge of it, bewildered. Something was terribly wrong. He should be taking charge, at least chastising me for being cheeky. Where had he gone? Only later could I name what I saw on my father's face that day. It was shame.

A couple of years ago my father phoned me. It was always my mother who took this initiative, rarely my father. The call was short but monumental. ''I want you to know that the three things I'm proudest of in my life are marrying your mother, having you two girls, and being a Rat of Tobruk.'' It was tantamount to a declaration of love.

He had recently turned 91, could feel the tide of his life turning. There was an urgency to say the things that had been left unspoken. Despite the shame I witnessed all those years ago, and the question that still remains unanswered, it did not really come as a surprise to find my father's World War II service as a Rat of Tobruk in his top three. By securing Tobruk in 1941, the Rats gave the Allies their first significant victory. Of the original 15,000 Australians who fended off Rommel's Afrika Corps, 70 years later when my father made his declaration, fewer than 100 were still alive. His war service at Tobruk, then El Alamein, Lae, Borneo and Finschafen, formed the man who would become my father.

My mother said that after the war he was asked to stay on in the army but refused. ''I'm finished with all that.'' He instructed her to burn the letters and photos he had sent, tried to eradicate the physical reminders of what he had been through but he was never finished with it. ''He was such a happy-go-lucky kid,'' my aunt told me. ''The war changed him; something happened that he probably has never revealed to anyone, not even to your mother.'' I'm not sure when my father began to feel proud.

My earliest memories of Anzac Day were of men of my father's generation, World War II veterans, playing two-up on street corners and in tiled pubs that stank of tobacco and stale beer. They were garrulous, often fighting, invariably drunk, ties loosened, hats tilted back. It seemed like one big buck's party. In the same kitchen in which I asked The Question, I said: ''It's just an excuse for you blokes to get drunk.'' I lumped my father in with the others, although he never actively participated in Anzac Day or indeed ever got drunk. ''Shut up. You don't know what you're talking about,'' he growled. It was a verbal slap in the face. I didn't know, didn't have my father's memories, wasn't part of the camaraderie, the things of which he was ashamed and proud.

For my father's war, people volunteered in droves, making long queues at recruitment centres, lying about their age, or job if they had one in a protected industry. So many were genuinely unemployed after a decade of Depression. Signing up gave them three meals a day, a pay packet, and a sense of belonging.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s my generation had a war of its own - Vietnam. There were few volunteers, most of those who went were conscripted. If World War II united my parents' generation, Vietnam divided mine. Our motto was ''Make Love Not War''. Whereas previously I didn't know what I was talking about, now I was a rebellious teenager and knew everything. I no longer argued with my father in the kitchen but joined anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in the streets.

My father accused me of wasting my education, said that I had become nothing more than an international hippy. If only he knew how sweet that insult sounded to my ears. My boyfriend was a conscientious objector and served time in jail. When he was arrested at a demonstration he gave his name as Joe Hill. The police took him at his word, obviously not familiar with the American trade unionist executed by firing squad and immortalised in song. My boyfriend died young, killed in a car accident. The conscientious objector did not get to grow old as my father the soldier did.

In his 1971 song, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Eric Bogle comments: But as year follows year, more old men disappear, Some day no one will march there at all. At the Anzac Day ceremony in my small town the gathering is surprisingly fulsome. In a group of 150 or so, there is only one World War II veteran. He sits in the front, his blazer sagging with campaign bars and medals, while the rest of us stand. Paradoxically, though the survivors of 20th century wars are disappearing, in the 21st century there are increasingly large numbers of participants in Anzac Day ceremonies. Inclusion of Anzac Day study units in school curricula, widespread media coverage of the day itself and the high priority accorded to reporting individual Australian casualties in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan, have given it greater prominence in the national psyche.

The march is no longer restricted to servicemen and women. In my town, everyone who wears a uniform is represented - police, fire brigade, marine rescue squad, scouts, guides, school children. The children lay wreaths in front of the war memorial. Some are wearing the medals of grandparents, great-grandparents. They are here to honour their ancestors, their lineage, the family histories that have shaped our collective history.

A short while after his phone call to me, although frail and weighing less than 50 kilograms, my father achieved a state of grace. He had finally finished with ''all that'' and my sister and I had the privilege of seeing the young man he was before we were born. He was no longer emotionally distant but welcomed us into his arms. He made jokes. After successful treatment for a bowel blockage he commented: ''I feel terrific. It was the biggest evacuation since Dunkirk.'' We laughed uncontrollably, heartily, all three of us, for a long time. My father no longer put a stop to it with 'That's enough!' It was as if some emotional blockage had also been relieved.

He became cheery, patient, entertaining. He told stories about the war but they were sweet, mild. It was as if he had been on an organised tour, or a boy's own adventure. He talked about drinking the first pressing of grape juice in Lebanon; of the army cook making marmalade from surplus oranges in an orchard in Palestine; swimming in the Dead Sea, the combination of salt water and Brylcreem giving the men crew-cuts a decade before they were fashionable; being nudged in the back by a desert mole digging a tunnel under the blanket my father was lying on; a pet monkey who slept in a box while the men played cards.

We heard about childhood adventures, taking the train at age seven by himself to visit his aunt and uncle, feeding baby homing pigeons with pellets from his own mouth. He remembered Sydney Harbour before the bridge, how enterprising young men stole kegs of beer from pubs on Saturday night and sold them from boats to harbourside picnickers the following day.

When my father finally went to a nursing home, we packed his belongings. His bedroom was orderly, everything arranged with military precision. Disturbing this sense of order, opening drawers and cupboards seemed like trespassing through his life but somehow I felt he would no longer mind. In the wardrobe was a coat hanger made of rolled-up newspaper, wire and string, reminiscent of the creative frugality of the Depression and war years. I unfolded the newspaper, hoping to see a history-making headline such as ''De Groot Steals Honours in Bridge Opening''. But it was the local paper from 1998. When I asked my father about the hanger he said: ''I made it for my raincoat.''

In a metal box I found his service medals and a Father's Day card from my mother written when her hand and mind were still steady: ''Thank you for being the father of my children.'' There they were, contained in this box, the symbols of my father's proudest achievements. I held the box in my hands till the cold metal grew warm, tears welling in my eyes.

When the Anzac Day service is over, the march makes its way to the RSL club for a sausage sizzle. The World War II veteran can no longer walk the distance and is helped into the ceremonial jeep at the head of the procession. I think about the once young men and women who are no longer here, about the young man who called himself Joe Hill, about the generation of elders that is disappearing. I have become the keeper of memories.

I don't go to the club but join an unofficial procession - dribs and drabs of people - single, in couples, or families - strolling across the bridge. The river glistens darkly with ripples and whorls, the aftermath of pelagic fish passing beneath the surface. Swifts make patterns in the air just above the ripples.

I came to the dawn service to bear witness for my father but I am thinking of the life we all one day will leave behind, about what dies with us and what we pass on. In the sky are wisps of pink and the sun starts to break through thick, grey clouds.