Anzac in a time of uncertainty

Australian soldiers march in front of Buckingham Palace during a parade in 1919. Source: World War I photograph album, 1919, by Herbert Green. Te Papa (O.032031) https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/953293

One of Australians’ perennial illusions – one abetted largely by inexperienced journalists sent to file ‘Anzac Day stories’ – is that the observances of the ‘One Day of The Year’ are essentially unchanging. The classic Anzac Day local newspaper story features a ‘veteran’ (not that they were called that until the 1980s) recalling war experience and reflecting on its costs, the importance of qualities like ‘mateship’, and the need to remember sacrifices made and lives lost.

Scholars of war memory know that the day has always changed. Alistair Thomson revealed the malleability of Anzac Memories (1994); Carolyn Holbrook showed in Anzac: An Unauthorised Biography (2014) how protagonists, practices and popularity have changed over ten decades; most recently, Joan Beaumont’s revised Gull Force (2025) shows how commemoration (in her case of captivity) is now dominated by elusive ‘post memory’ often remote from history.

While Anzac Day rhetoric seems unchanging, from local services before suburban memorials to the massive, media stage-managed commemorations in Canberra, Villers-Bretonneux and especially Gallipoli, the observances, and even the foundations of Anzac Day seem to be more brittle in a changing world.

Anzac Day: A history of tension

Anzac Day has always seen tension. The 1920s saw clashes over who should own war commemoration, a contest firmly won by Returned Men and their institutional arm, the RSL, and arguments over its religious content (in a deeply sectarian society), in which a vague Protestantism captured the rituals, alienating a Catholic faith unwilling to embrace ecumenism.

In the 1960s, with Second World War men (all men besides the respected ‘sisters’) wrested control from Great War survivors. In the 1960s and 70s the ambiguities of the Vietnam war and the advent of television altered people’s experience of the day. Later, women, ethnic groups and ‘Aborigines’ challenged the largely white male complexion of the day. With the growth of a media-conscious bureaucracy and increasing media management, from ‘Australia Remembers’ in the mid-1990s observances became increasingly homogenised.

The ‘Centenary of Anzac’ (2014-18) saw the entrenchment of official Anzac views, not least through massive funding provided by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and its state counterparts. Australia spent not only more on the centenary of the Great War than any other nation, but more than all the rest combined. At the same time, it became apparent that regardless of party, Anzac still resonated with ‘old’ Anglo-Celtic Australians with an Anzac in the family. Since 2018 war commemoration, while formally maintaining the rhetoric of nationhood and mateship, Anzac has arguably diminished in strength and intensity as Australian, and New Zealand, society changes.

Influences on Anzac’s future

Several developments suggest that the cult of Anzac no longer permeates Australian society as it once did. In no special order:

• The passage of time has made the events of the world wars, and even Vietnam, increasingly distant, weakening the personal and family connections so evident in earlier decades. Inevitably, the commemoration of unknown great-great uncles is less intense than that of brothers or fathers.
• Demographic changes continue to make those with an Anzac in the family a smaller and smaller minority. Migrant groups lacking a family connection to the Australian experience of the world wars especially, with British, Indian and Chinese migrants having few reasons to connect with their new country’s legend. (Sikh-Australians who actively embrace Anzac, are one of the few exceptions to this growing apathy.)
• Recent conflicts have eroded connections with Anzac, with the involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan (based on lies or mistakes) fostering an ambivalence last evident during the Vietnam years. That a judge found “substantial proof” one of SAS’s VC heroes was implicated in war crimes complicated any simple celebration of Anzac values: killing unarmed civilians is not a tenet of the legend.
• Growing international tensions, especially over China, exacerbated by an unstable, unpredictable and unreliable US regime, has raised the prospect of conflict, making the simple celebration of historical experience problematic. Sacrifice in war may lie in Australia’s future as well as its past, and Anzac is seen by many as a cloak for bellicosity. The folly of AUKUS may unwittingly foster the decline of Anzac.
• Despite the failure of the Voice referendum, the widespread acceptance of the fact of the Australian Wars (aka Frontier Conflict) has disrupted the simple message of Anzac: wars are no longer seen as happening outside Australia, and a debate over their incorporation into war remembrance continues.
• As I argued in Beyond The Broken Years (2024) the great wave of books on Australian military history, which emerged in the 1980s, has arguably diminished. Whether this heralds a diminution in commitment to Anzac remains to be seen.
• The Australian War Memorial, for 40 years a respected centre-piece of commemoration, has since 2018 undergone massive, but unnecessary, expansion at the cost of over $600m, the legacy of Brendan Nelson, director 2013-18 and a former Liberal minister of Defence. A recent ABC 4 Corners exposed the expansion’s flawed processes and reported allegations of cronyism with an ANAO assessment finding possible conflicts of interest.
• Finally, while we might decry the ignorance, apathy or preoccupation of younger generations on whom war has had little direct impact (partly explaining Anzac Day’s failure to resonate), their greater sophistication and scepticism makes them less liable to accept the simple verities of Anzac.

What might once have seemed one of the eternal and defining expressions of Australian national identity, perhaps turns out to be less certain. Anzac and its day has always evolved, and it will continue to do so. What directions that evolution takes will – or should be – up to the Australian people to decide.

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