An Anzac Day revelation.(Ryan)

THE BIBLE (Acts 9) tells us that Saint Paul met his dazzling vision on the Damascus road. That happened some 1970 years ago, probably in AD 33, and has been widely discussed ever since.

My own enlightenment occurred this year in Melbourne's St Kilda Road, at about eleven o'clock in the morning. It seems, so far, to have attracted no media attention whatever.

It was Anzac Day. The Commandos (who each year hospitably allow me to march with them) were one of the earliest groups to more off from the Town Hall, on the road to the Shrine of Remembrance. Thus, by late morning, I was pretty well on my way back to the City by much the same route, but in the opposite direction, strolling this time along the roadside outside the crowd-control barriers. I was able to see, at close quarters, nearly half that day's participating units marching towards me.

It was a moving sight--the drummers, the brass bands, the Scottish pipers, the colours and the banners proudly aloft, the old boys (and a few old girls) with their medals glinting and clinking. I can hardly claim that every one of the 1939-45 veterans swung along with resolute martial step; it was miracle enough that they were there.

Despite the grey and threatening sky, the barricades were crowded with citizens, many waving their own Australian national flags. They clapped and cheered with a decent exuberance, proper to a basically solemn occasion.

There was a substantial proportion of dark or oriental faces, men and women whose forebears certainly had not hailed from the British Isles, many of them accompanied by toddlers, in and out of pushers. When those little children grow up, the earliest recollection in their minds may well be of Anzac Day.

I studied the bands closely as, bandsmen and bandswomen all impeccably uniformed, they marched down the middle of the roadway. By the time I had spotted my twentieth or thirtieth Chinese countenance under a Glengarry and above a sporran, cheeks puffed out to bursting as they filled their pipes, I was asking whether "racism" and "multiculturalism" mightn't now be moved onto the back burner: maybe tolerance and a bit of common sense have done their work already.