In Australia we've just commemorated the centenary of Anzac Day: 100 years since Australian and New Zealand troops landed on the Turkish beaches at Gallipoli. It was a military failure, but the event still resonates. In fact there's been a huge revival of interest over recent decades, especially among the young – to the point where, instead of disappearing as we thought when the last of the old diggers died, in Australia it's become our de facto national day.
Over 120,000 people turned out at the Australian War Memorial's dawn service last Saturday; and where there was only a handful at Anzac 40 years ago, this year they had to ballot the 10,000 places. Yet, the question of why this has been so is a puzzling one.
I imagine it’s something to do with the rediscovery of our history at the time of the Bicentenary of the founding colony in 1988. Gallipoli was the first time Australians went to war as a federated Commonwealth, not as six separate colonies. It was the first time they fought on the battlefields of Europe, and were not found wanting. And national days, sadly, seem to require battles (successful or otherwise) to commemorate, rather than peaceful, constitutional referendums.
But it’s more than that I think. There’s a very deep human need to connect to the generations that have gone before. We are instinctively social beings, and I have a sense until recently that was largely missing in non-Aboriginal Australians. Our people are mostly migrants or descended from them. It’s why we looked to Europe and elsewhere so often to discover our identity. My mother, a third generation Australian, still referred to Britain as ‘Home.”
Now, as the nation becomes ever more heterogeneous, we find that identity in Anzac Day. Home is no longer “over there”. It’s here. And hence the youngsters in the marches wearing their grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ medals. Carrying their banners. Hence, too, the media overflowing with reports and old photographs as families rediscover the parts their relatives played in battles long past.
For ultimately history is not a grand, disembodied sweep of events. I think it is the sum of countless individual stories and the roles played by each man and woman and child who were involved with them. His-story. And her-story. And for many of us I suspect that is what Anzac Day has come to represent: that by rediscovering the qualities and actions in life of those of our families from the past, we are in some inexpressible way trying to find connections, meaning and belonging in our own.
After all, as the Prime Minister said in his speech on the Gallipoli beach, unless Anzac Day was emblematic of something profound within each of us, we would not have been there. But trying to properly understand it, let alone articulate it, remains as elusive as always. Any thoughts?
Over 120,000 people turned out at the Australian War Memorial's dawn service last Saturday; and where there was only a handful at Anzac 40 years ago, this year they had to ballot the 10,000 places. Yet, the question of why this has been so is a puzzling one.
I imagine it’s something to do with the rediscovery of our history at the time of the Bicentenary of the founding colony in 1988. Gallipoli was the first time Australians went to war as a federated Commonwealth, not as six separate colonies. It was the first time they fought on the battlefields of Europe, and were not found wanting. And national days, sadly, seem to require battles (successful or otherwise) to commemorate, rather than peaceful, constitutional referendums.
But it’s more than that I think. There’s a very deep human need to connect to the generations that have gone before. We are instinctively social beings, and I have a sense until recently that was largely missing in non-Aboriginal Australians. Our people are mostly migrants or descended from them. It’s why we looked to Europe and elsewhere so often to discover our identity. My mother, a third generation Australian, still referred to Britain as ‘Home.”
Now, as the nation becomes ever more heterogeneous, we find that identity in Anzac Day. Home is no longer “over there”. It’s here. And hence the youngsters in the marches wearing their grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ medals. Carrying their banners. Hence, too, the media overflowing with reports and old photographs as families rediscover the parts their relatives played in battles long past.
For ultimately history is not a grand, disembodied sweep of events. I think it is the sum of countless individual stories and the roles played by each man and woman and child who were involved with them. His-story. And her-story. And for many of us I suspect that is what Anzac Day has come to represent: that by rediscovering the qualities and actions in life of those of our families from the past, we are in some inexpressible way trying to find connections, meaning and belonging in our own.
After all, as the Prime Minister said in his speech on the Gallipoli beach, unless Anzac Day was emblematic of something profound within each of us, we would not have been there. But trying to properly understand it, let alone articulate it, remains as elusive as always. Any thoughts?