Emily Ballantyne still finding new meaning in the The Last Post after 12 years

With each Anzac Day, the responsibility of playing The Last Post becomes more emotional for long-time Narrogin bugler, Emily Ballantyne. Since first playing The Last Post on Anzac Day some 12 years ago, Ms Ballantyne has bugled at the shores of Gallipoli and at the grave of her great-grandfather in Shrapnel Valley. She said her travels and experiences continued to change the bugle call’s meaning. On Sunday, Ms Ballantyne will return to Narrogin to play The Last Post at the town’s dawn service. “I actually think I’d probably be more nervous playing it now than I was previously, not in the sense of making mistakes with the piece, but the longer I've played it the more meaning that piece has to me,” she said. Ms Ballantyne’s bugle is believed to have come from the WWI battlefields. Its copper brass materials shrink and expand depending on conditions, giving it a slightly different sound depending on its location — a fact that was not lost on Ms Ballantyne while she stood in the cold and choppy waters of Gallipoli. “It’s exactly what they were playing and exactly what the soldiers were hearing...where the boats pulled up for their landing, I was standing in the water playing that bugle,” she said. “Having that context of ‘this is where they were and this is how it sounded in that space’, now when I play it back at Narrogin, I really take that with me.” And more recent events closer to home have also shaped the day’s meaning. Last year she played The Last Post standing alone with her father. “Last year was a really different experience for me...it was sort of surreal because as much as there was no one there, it felt like there were more people there,” she said. “We had people next to the memorial park in Narrogin standing out on their driveways and you couldn’t see them in the dark at dawn but you could feel that they were there,” she said.