The day offers a welcome counterpoint in an age of fragmenting identity politics in which it is becoming more difficult to find agreement about Australia’s national identity.
Already a subscriber?In the swinging sixties, Australia’s cultural dietitians predicted that the “one day of the year” that celebrated the martial feats of the Diggers who stormed the beaches and scaled the rocky heights of Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, would die out as the ranks of marching veterans emptied over time.
All Australians ought to be drawn to Anzac’s transcendent eternal lesson and reality that, without citizens willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, Australia’s precious democratic rights and freedoms will perish. As the thumping 60:40 defeat of October’s Voice referendum showed, it is getting harder to share former prime minister John Howard’s “unshakeable belief that what unites us as Australians is far greater than what divides us”.The lack of consensus about Australia Day may help extend Anzac Day’s revival as it evolves into the unofficial national day.
Anzac Day has always had critics. Some posit that it’s a racist and sexist relic of old white Australia that valourises the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon males. For republicans and sceptics of Australia’s historic imperial links with Britain and current alliance with America, the lesson of the Gallipoli disaster is the danger of getting dragged into what are called other people’s wars – a mistake repeated by going “all the way with LBJ” into the Vietnam quagmire in the 1960s.
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