Dad only did two years of National Service in the 60s — does that even count for military honours?

Ask tomorrow. Genuinely, you won't be embarrassing yourself, and this is one of the most common things families get wrong about eligibility, so you're in very good company.

In my years doing this, honours have never once been about how long someone served, whether they deployed, or whether they thought of themselves as "a veteran." They're about the fact of service itself. National Service is exactly the kind of history that qualifies: it was compulsory, which is precisely why so many families don't think it "counts" the way a career soldier's service does. It counts the same. Two years in the late 1960s, no deployment, is enough on its own.

Bring the discharge certificate tomorrow if you have it handy, it makes confirming eligibility faster, though it usually isn't strictly necessary to get the process started. I'll liaise with the local RSL sub-branch on your behalf; you won't need to deal with Defence or RSL directly. Given it's short notice for the funeral, we may not get a full catafalque party depending on what's available locally in the time we have, but at minimum the flag and the Ode are almost always arrangeable even on a tighter timeline. I've written up what's typically involved and how eligibility actually works in what happens at a military or veteran's funeral in Australia if you want to read it before tomorrow's meeting.

One thing worth sitting with tonight: your dad not talking about it doesn't mean it didn't matter to him, and it doesn't mean honouring it now is presumptuous. Plenty of families tell me the quiet ones are exactly the service records worth marking, precisely because the person never made a fuss about it themselves.