Our highest office-holders rose in turn to pay tribute to Sheean at a ceremony on Tuesday, 78 years to the day that he went down with the sinking HMAS Armidale, still manning a gun in a desperate bid to save his shipmates from enemy fire.

Sheean's Victoria Cross "did not come easy", the Prime Minister acknowledged, and indeed it took an often frustrating struggle for family and supporters to see his deed properly recognised.

Mr Morrison was himself in the firing line for initially rejecting a recommendation to award the VC, before accepting the same advice from an expert panel he subsequently formed to review the case.

Credit must go to Sheean's nephew, Garry Ivory, who chose to never give up, and state MP Guy Barnett, for whom the campaign was never about politics, but what was right.

They helped ensure that well before the VC was bestowed more of us knew of this not quite 19-year-old sailor from Latrobe who gave his life so others would live.

Sheean's actions on the Armidale in 1942 were far from ordinary, and his story, and the importance we give it, tells us much of who we are as Australians.

We do not glorify war, as some might believe, and those who we hold up as war heroes - as Sheean assuredly is - are not celebrated for feats of arms; for destroying our enemies on the field of battle.

No, they are Simpson and his donkey of Gallipoli fame, and Sergeant Simon Fraser, who is not a household name but who is recognisable in the form of the soldier carrying a wounded mate to safety in the statue known as "Don't forget me, Cobber".

And Sheean is another. If his story were made into a Hollywood movie he'd be shown downing all the attacking planes and then some, but that wasn't what happened, nor would it have changed what mattered.

Sheean courageously sacrificed his own chance of survival to save his mates; and he will be remembered.

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