The women travelling to Turkey are just 10 of 145 remaining widows of first world war veterans in Australia

Ten widows of Australian first world war veterans have been honoured at a Sydney event on the eve of their Tuesday departure to Turkey, where they will mark the centenary of the Anzac Gallipoli landing.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, spoke at the event at Sydney airport and said this was a day to remember “what war does to the families of our soldiers” and particularly to the women “who so often bear the unseen brunt of war”.

The women travelling to Turkey are just 10 of 145 remaining widows of first world war veterans in Australia. Abbott said many women joined the workforce to support the war effort and “long after the guns stopped firing cared for soldiers that had returned”.

One hundred years after the Gallipoli landing and with no surviving veterans remaining, Abbott called the women “living links with the first great test we faced in the past as a nation” and “members of a generation who knew extreme sacrifice”.

“Your memories make you keepers of the Anzac flame and I promise: as a nation we will keep this flame alive for generations to come. It is our responsibility never to forget, and I promise you we never will.”

The prime minister was joined by the governor general, Sir Peter Cosgrove, the minister for veterans’ affairs, Michael Ronaldson, and the Qantas chief executive, Alan Joyce.

Lee Kernaghan performed songs from his album Spirit of the Anzacs, with lyrics borrowed from a final letter written by Australian private Benjamin Chuck the night before he was killed during an operation in Afghanistan in 2010.

Claire Forbes, 86, told Guardian Australia each woman would represent their husbands, and in her case she will represent not only her husband, private Wilfred Forbes, but also her father, William Hannaford.

Both men trained together and joined the 43rd battalion in France on the same day, and when Forbes was seriously wounded in the arm and back by shrapnel in 1918, it was her father who carried him to a casualty clearing station.

Forbes is not surprised her husband rarely spoke about his experiences – “I think if you put yourself into their shoes they witnessed the full horror of war” – and feels honoured to participate in the Gallipoli event.

“What it does for the country is to remind people that 100 years ago so many thousands of Australian and also Turkish people died for the protection of their own country,” she said.

Veronica Alldritt’s husband, private Robert Gregory Aldritt, enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1915, putting up his age from 17 to 18. Alldritt, 91, said “no soldier ever talks about the war” although she added that her husband “was young and didn’t know he was at war – it was still an adventure”.

Alldritt said she was honoured to be attending the Gallipoli service, and said that for a new generation of Australians the event would act as a powerful reminder of what the young men of that era did.

The women will fly to Gallipoli for the 25 April ceremony on an aircraft named Fysh-McGinness, in a tribute to the founders of Qantas airlines and first world war pilots, Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness.