The Air Force veteran, 88, who served during the Korean War, was shaken by the exploding ordnance sounds played on twin giant screens at Tuesday’s service.

He thought about it later, over three beers at Mayfield Diggers.

“The most moving part was the explosions. They bring back too many memories, even from our training,” Mr Smith, of Hexham, said.

“That got to you, particularly when a few of us have had a few close shaves with death. I’ve had all sorts of accidents, a couple of fractured skulls.”

The lawns of Camp Shortland had started filling before 3am with young people in uniform and their partners, elderly couples drinking from thermoses and parents hoisting children, who asked about the band onstage in their pea-green finery.

“Mum. Is that the army?”

Police had closed the roads around Nobbys at 3.30am, which caught spectators, news crews and even the gunners of Fort Scratchley off guard.

The city garbage trucks parked across police checkpoints – one had idled behind Monday’s HMAS Newcastle parade – were a measure of the statewide terror alerts.

Much of the crowd walked from the harbour with the self-policing solemnity of muffled footsteps and conversation. Laughter seemed out of place, and from somewhere came the snort of a horse. Bicycles were let through the roadblocks; “throw her in, mate,” said a fluoro-wearing officer, “and don’t fall off”.

Apart from the fort beam nudging the cloud and catching the odd seagull, the big screens were all the light there was.

Several organisations had “proudly supported” the service. One was the Coates Hire Newcastle 500. A man let out a “yiewww!”

The sparse drums of a catafalque party gave way to a booming big screen montage, and Newcastle lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes told the crowd “the spirit of Anzac is inside you”. 

The cloud ribbed pink. Medals glinted. It was possible to make out the diggers where they stood – many, at Nobbys, who served in Vietnam – straight-backed men with an air of silence, at their most silent.

The Dean of Sacred Heart Cathedral, Reverend Andrew Doohan, read the tribute to the fallen at Gallipoli by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country... There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us.

A blood ribbon formed across the sea and it was possible to imagine how a beach could be deadly, and that fear could lie with the dawn.

A procession of diggers’ descendants and the Hunter’s civic, police and military leaders laid floral wreaths, bowed deeply or furtively and resumed their places.

In between the bugler’s high-wire acts of the Last Post and Reveille was a minute’s silence. Flags flapped, people shifted. In the mind of Ron Smith the explosions silently returned.

Behind the interchangeable flags of the Anzac nations played their very different anthems. The sun had warmed the beach and restored the green to the land. There was a residual dreaminess to the occasion that was more than the setting, hard to tease out of Australians, and Novocastrians harder than most.

When the second of four shots from Fort Scratchley was delayed, the emcee, Newcastle RSL sub-branch president Ken Fayle, dryly assured the crowd it would come.

“Told you,” he said, as it fired.

The crowd clapped and fell in under a roar of conversation. People checked their phones and made plans involving coffee and bacon and egg rolls.

Those who took naps would wake up to a different city, where the dawn had receded with its silence.