What's Wrong With Anzac? by Marilyn Lake

Author:Marilyn Lake [Lake, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742240022
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2010-08-11T14:00:00+00:00

Rehabilitation of the Anzac as tragic hero

Even as anti-war protest surged, new social histories of Australian soldiers at war were being written, such as Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974) and Patsy Adam-Smith’s Anzacs (1978) which began to shape a new narrative in which the young soldiers themselves became the focus. Cast as the innocent victims of war, as in Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, they became the embodiment of youthful sacrifice. As historian Jenny McLeod has argued, whereas the close association of the RSL with the Anzac tradition had alienated progressive historians, once the RSL was increasingly marginalised in the telling of the Anzac story, historians were free to ‘describe it anew’.43

Thus was the ground prepared for dissolving the distinction between attitudes to the soldiers and the wars in which they fought. This was also deemed necessary to the political imperative of providing appropriate recognition and restitution to Vietnam veterans, many of whom felt bitterly exiled from the Anzac legend and the tradition of the soldier’s heroic return. Increasingly all ‘Anzacs’ were cast as national heroes as debate about the justice or legitimacy of the wars in which they fought faded away. The new emphasis on the youth and innocence of soldiers – and their status as victims – was reinforced as children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the fallen and the aged were permitted to join Anzac Day marches. Far from being Anzac’s fiercest critics, the young had now emerged, according to the Sun newspaper in 1981, as ‘the new Anzacs’.44 Distanced by decades from the horror of World War I, the new recruits to Anzac were free to celebrate ‘the Anzac spirit’.

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