Peter Underwood, Governor of Tasmania, died on Monday 7th July, a month after having a tumour removed from his kidney. Aged 76, he was appointed Tasmanian Governor in 2008, after serving as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Tasmania between 2004 and 2008.

In his Anzac Day speech this year, he called for Australia to drop the “sentimental myths that Anzac Day has attracted” and called for this centennial year to be declared the Year of Peace.

In this speech, Peter Underwood stressed that remembrance and honour will neither bring nor preserve the peace for which Australian service men and women thought they died. Rather he urged us all to “actively strive for peace on a daily basis” and suggested that “we could best begin that process, and thus properly honour and remember those who were killed or wounded while their country engaged them in the business of killing, by declaring this centennial year of the start of the War to end all Wars, the Year of Peace.”

In his last Anzac Day speech, Peter Underwood called on all Australians to address “the causes of war and how we got involved in wars”  He emphasised that we “should spend less time studying Simpson’s donkey and more time looking at why we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for so long.”

For Peter Underwood, the true spirit of remembrance is, and always will be, best served by being “resolute about peace”.