Thanks to our producer Kenny Hill, we have a very special treat for ANZAC Day. Renouned Australian stage and international cinema actor Richard Roxburgh reads the poem; ‘The Fallen”. Richard Roxburgh is one of Australia’s most accomplished and versatile actors, celebrated for his work across acclaimed international film, television and stage productions. His standout film credits include Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! and Elvis, Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Hacksaw Ridge, James Cameron’s Sanctum, and Force of Nature: The Dry 2, which earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 2025 AACTA Awards. Most recently, Richard portrayed journalist Robert Greste in The Correspondent, controversial political figure Joh Bjelke-Petersen in Joh: Last King of Queensland and is featured in the animated film Lesbian Space Princess, which won the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at the 2025 Berlinale. On television, Richard is best known for his iconic portrayal of Cleaver Greene in the multi-award-winning ABC series Rake, a role that earned him a Silver Logie and AACTA Award for Best Actor. Other significant screen work includes Hawke, Blue Murder, Bali 2002 opposite Rachel Griffiths, Stan’s drama series Prosper, and international series such as Netflix’s The Crown and HBO’s Catherine the Great alongside Helen Mirren. A highly respected stage performer, Richard headlined productions for the Sydney Theatre Company and Company B, including Uncle Vanya, The Present, Waiting for Godot, Hamlet, and The Seagull. *** We have included a brief biography of the English poet, Laurence Binyon, who wrote the famed poem, ‘The Fallen’. Because of the cultural importance Binyon has on ANZAC Day, and Armistice (Remembrance) Day and how War Memorials are commemorated in the West. Binyon was a prolific English poet and scholar of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, whose career spanned 50 years. During this time, he authored numerous poetry collections and plays, two historical biographies, and several art history volumes, including books on the works of Asian artists, English watercolourists, and William Blake’s drawings and engravings. He is perhaps best remembered for his World War I poem, “For the Fallen”, and his translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which he translated in its original terza rima, Dante’s original rhyming scheme, which was much lauded by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other poets of the time. Poetry and visual arts shaped his career, the majority of which was spent with the British Museum, where he began in the department of printed books in 1895 before moving to department of prints and drawings, from which he retired in 1933. His first book of poetry, Lyric Poems (1894), was quickly followed by two books on painting, Dutch Etchers of the Seventeenth Century (1895) and John Crone and John Sell Cotman (1897). Later books such as Painting in the Far East (1908) and The Flight of the Dragon (1911) reflect this interest in Chinese, Japanese, and Indian arts and cultures. Ezra Pound praised The Flight of the Dragon and thought of Binyon as a pioneer in the Western appreciation of Asian art. Binyon served as an orderly in the Red Cross during World War I, and his experiences would become an important part of his poetry. From 1915 to 1916 he worked in a military hospital in France, an experience reflected in his war poem “Fetching the Wounded.” His collections The Winnowing Fan (1914), The Anvil (1916), The Cause (1917), and The New World (1918) deal with the war as a noble cause. One reviewer from Literature Digest contended that WWI as a subject brought a new vitality to the poet’s work: “Laurence Binyon’s poetry once was somewhat coldly ‘literary’—aloof from common human experience, but the war has given him new vigor and new humanity.” His best-known war poem, “For the Fallen,” has been frequently anthologized was widely embraced by the British public. “As the casualty lists grew,” notes John Hatcher in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “the poem became the focal expression of national grief, both alone and in Sir Edward Elgar’s choral work The Spirit of England (1916–17). Its central quatrain was carved on cenotaphs and tombstones worldwide and is still recited at annual Remembrance Day commemorations: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.” Some of Binyon’s greatest poetry was produced during the final decade of his life, “greater perhaps than that of any of his generation except [W.B.] Yeats,” according to John Hatcher. Among this exceptional later work are such volumes as The North Star and other Poems (1941), The Burning of the Leaves (1944), and the unfinished “The Madness of Merlin” (1947). During this time, Binyon was also at work on his much-admired and well-received terza rima translation of Dante’s Inferno (1933), Purgatorio (1938), and Paradiso (1943). Mere days after completing final revisions on his Paradiso translation, Laurence Binyon died of bronchopneumonia on March 10, 1943. Upon Binyon’s death, English author and literary critic Cyril Connolly honoured the poet in New Statesman and Nation as someone who understood “how to be both warm and detached, in fact, a sage.” Binyon biography and photo courtesy of: Poetryfoundation.org ‘The Last Post’ performed by the RAAF Band (Royal Australian Air Force) The post ANZAC Day 2026: Richard Roxburgh, Famed Australian Actor, Reads: ‘For The Fallen’. appeared first on Saturday Magazine.
