{"id":628246,"date":"2026-04-24T16:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T16:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/628246\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T16:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T16:59:10","slug":"anzac-day-isnt-what-it-used-to-be-111-years-on-what-place-does-it-have-in-modern-australia-paul-daley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/628246\/","title":{"rendered":"Anzac Day isn\u2019t what it used to be \u2013 111 years on, what place does it have in modern Australia? | Paul Daley"},"content":{"rendered":"

The pageantry and celebratory nature of today\u2019s Anzac marches<\/a> are a far cry from the gatherings of sombre recollection that characterised this day in the decades after the first world war.<\/p>\n

That was when the veterans of Australian involvement in the botched invasion<\/a> of, and later retreat from, Gallipoli, were still very much alive and those who\u2019d died in the misadventure remained hauntingly vivid in the memories of surviving comrades in arms and the families who\u2019d lost them.<\/p>\n

Many veteran-survivors didn\u2019t march \u2013 so painful were their recollections, so fervent their opposition to Australian involvement in future wars and to any opportunistic national glorification of their experiences. Others marched quietly, then drank away their afternoons and memories before returning to families who endured their pain<\/a>, confining their medals to dusty recesses of cupboards for another year.<\/p>\n

All of the Gallipoli veterans have died. Soon they will also have personally passed from living memory entirely. And yet the events that have written them into Australian foundation lore, beginning with that fatally flawed landing on an obscure finger of the Ottoman empire on 25 April 1915, still fire so much political and national imagination.<\/p>\n

In extinction they have been ever more eulogised, their horrible battlefield deaths, their terrible experiences and their endurance amid terrible traumas have been rendered at once with an ecclesiasticism and political reverence that obscures their human complexity.<\/p>\n

Imagination, especially in its collective state, is a potent national force. And the Anzac myth and legend has long thrived on imagination, deifying those involved and somehow elevating fledgling Australia\u2019s military involvement in the Gallipoli campaign to a nation-defining glorious defeat.<\/p>\n

The loss of so many young people in the Great War so soon after federation in 1901 (from a population of barely 5 million, 416,000 men \u2013 half of those eligible \u2013 enlisted<\/a>, 331,000 deployed, 60,000-plus were killed, 155,000 were physically wounded and countless more psychologically impaired) did have a profound impact on the neophyte nation\u2019s sense of self.<\/p>\n

It is worth remembering what happened, of course, and paying respect to the men who served and died \u2013 just as all Australian veterans deserve ongoing acknowledgment and thanks.<\/p>\n

But the further we get from the Gallipoli landings, the more hard historical perspective the events warrant, not least given the way Australia has so dramatically changed \u2013 demographically, culturally and in terms of adherence to religious faith \u2013 in the ensuing 111 years.<\/p>\n

For starters it\u2019s beyond time to acknowledge that any insistence the Gallipoli campaign birthed the nation fallaciously denies so much of the continental history (not least as the home of the world\u2019s oldest continuing civilisation, and the frontier wars of Indigenous dispossession on which the federation was truly built) underpinning national foundation.<\/p>\n

As Gallipoli reaches ever further into the past, the less relevant it arguably becomes for multi-racial and increasingly secular Australian society.<\/p>\n

Yet again this 25 April Christian prayer<\/a> will define national commemorations led by political and military leaders at the Australian War Memorial \u2013 Australia\u2019s shrine to Anzac (and so much more military) mythology.<\/p>\n

The Rationalist Society of Australia continues to lobby the memorial to adopt a more secular approach to its nationally televised Anzac Day<\/a> ceremony in line with the evolving religious attitudes of the Australian population (affiliation with Christianity stood at 43.9% in 2021) and, it\u2019s fair to assume, service personnel. But the memorial (always glacial when it comes to reflecting community and cultural change) is sticking with its status quo.<\/p>\n

The historian and novelist Peter Cochrane has articulated<\/a> one of the most incisive and compelling lines about the enduring political and cultural potency of Anzac myth in Australian society.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrape Anzac over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument becomes sacrosanct,\u2019\u2019 he wrote.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an adage that is so often exemplified by the war memorial (look at its stubborn intransigence<\/a> over its representations of the frontier wars and its reputational risk<\/a> regarding its long defence of the war hero and alleged murderer Ben Roberts-Smith).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s beyond time to remove the cloak as Anzac becomes ever more socially anachronistic.<\/p>\n

Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The pageantry and celebratory nature of today\u2019s Anzac marches are a far cry from the gatherings of sombre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":628247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-628246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}