How Anzac Day became etched in our national conscience. and Australia splintered off into a new story

Wednesday, 20 April 2022

A mural outside the Waimate Town and Country Club represents ANZACs and the bond between New Zealand and Australia, its creator says.

Since Australia and New Zealand gave birth to the Anzac legend at Gallipoli in 1915, their stories, their national myth, and their symbolism around Gallipoli have parted ways, says historian Dr Rowan Light.

Anzac Day in Australia differs from Anzac Day here, Light says in his new book, Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965-2015.

More than a century on, commemorations and symbolism are at variance, depending on which side of the Tasman you stand. Both countries have rewritten the Anzac story, and in doing headed off in different directions.

At the start, it was all brothers in arms, mates, Anzacs united in their disdain for elitist British as they sailed from the other side of the world to fight an imperial war.

New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli. Supplied to Stuff by historian Richard Stowers from his collection.

* School honours Lieutenant Harry Morgan

* Anzac Day: 'Privilege of a lifetime'

* Commemorating the birth of the Anzacs

Kiwis and Aussies at the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.

Gallipoli was a battle where Anzac endurance, courage, ingenuity, and colonial bonds could not win an ultimately unwinnable battle. Thanks, British warlords.

In Australia, rosemary is the traditional Anzac symbol, not the poppy as it is here.

Light, who noticed the differences when he studied and researched in Sydney, has taken the first look at how Gallipoli - not the most deadly WW1 battle either nation fought - became etched in the national conscience, as a powerful expression of nationalism.

“ [It] started off as more a question of, why do societies remember certain aspects of the past?Why do certain stories get shared and not others? And particularly, I suppose, why has the First World War and why has Gallipoli and then Anzac resonated in the last couple of generations?”

And then he found there were differences that a Kiwi would find apparent if they attended Australian Anzac Day commemorations.

Australia and New Zealand diverge

Light, a University of Auckland historian whose great-grandfather fought at Gallipoli and lost an eye at the Somme, found the story had changed, and changed differently. Anzac does not mean the same thing to both countries.

“Part of the change is in those huge cultural, political and social shifts over the 20th century, which is the end of the British Empire, and how those kinds of frameworks previously defined what it means to be a citizen,” he says.

“The ways of telling those stories, or even the currency of those stories is not inevitable….The book tries to show, individuals - storytellers, whether they’re historians, journalists or filmmakers – do make a difference because they interpret the story and present it in a new way, and they create public scripts that we can reuse.”

At the most symbolic, Australia is represented by the Mediterranean native herb rosemary, while New Zealand uses the poppy, a throwback to later WW1 battles at the Somme, in France. In Australia, Anzac is a synonym for Australianism, Light says.

“Anzac is about Australian self-definition about Australian values and what it means to be an Australian. They often don’t think about New Zealand - the NZ in ANZAC.”

The final devastating shot in the 1981 movie Gallipoli.

In 2015, only Australia had the word Anzac on official commemoration logos. It stated “100 years of Anzac, the Spirit Lives”. New Zealand opted for “WW100”, with a large poppy, and smaller Silver Fern. No Anzac to be seen.

In Australia, the most-visited landmark is not the Sydney Opera House or Uluru; it’s the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra. Pukeahu - the New Zealand version in Wellington – does not come close to attracting that level of attention.

“(The AWM) is museum, it’s a memorial, it’s a tomb, it’s a research centre … there’s this layering of institutions on this one site,” Light says.

“What it does, is it produces really interesting and very powerful places of story-telling and myth making. It speaks to a place of national significance. It’s culturally very powerful.”

Storytellers mould the Anzac story

In 1981, the Anzac legend moved firmly to Australia, when filmmaker Peter Weir released the powerful Gallipoli, which took the Anzac story - or Weir’s version of it - around the world. Weir was Australian, his film and its central heroes reflected that.

“It was a celebrated Australian film but also impacted New Zealand audiences in really interesting ways,” Light says. “And that was one of the ways that we think about the Anzacs as fresh-faced and young, who were betrayed by British leadership.

A PYM (Progressive Youth Movement) member trying to return the Vietnam War poster to the War Memorial in Cathedral Square in 1971 after RSA members removed it. A former Maori Battalion member is restraining him.

“That is most powerfully presented and we as a nation felt it when the film reached thousands of people in a way that historians could only dream of.”

Kiwis who served at Gallipoli, in fact tended to be older and from the cities, rather than baby-faced farmers. The dominant image of the Anzacs after the war was one of capable martial warriors who dutifully served King and Country.

So a campaign that could have been written up as an abject disaster, over time emerged as something for two nations so proud of, they set aside a day of commemoration.

There is now a feeling young people and the prime minister will participate in Anzac Day, Light says. But that was not inevitable.

“These things take on a sense of …that they’ve endured. They give us a sense of continuity …[but] actually, this hasn’t been inevitable, there has been this quite contested history.”

Protests further change Anzac Day

By 1965 it appeared Anzac Day was on its last ageing legs, as the numbers of WW1 diggers dwindled. Once the last of them died, it seemed likely Anzac commemorations would be buried too.

And then something counterintuitive took place. Anti-Vietnam war protesters, feminists and student radicals decided Anzac Day and its treasured sites were good places to take a lash of traditional society.

“The longer you wait for employment, the more difficult it becomes to catch up,” Dr Rowan Light writes.

“A case study is the PYM (Progressive Youth Movement) – they were really, really, keen to just cause trouble, disrupt things and ruffle feathers.”

Ceremonies were interfered with. With that lash came a backlash, which sealed Anzac Day as a core national event, and Gallipoli as a kind of national Mecca.

“What was probably most surprising and what might surprise a lot of readers is the role of protest, in some ways that runs counterintuitive to what we expect the history of Anzac to be.

“It forced people to take a position on Anzac Day that they might not have otherwise taken. Protest, interestingly, demands a response. That is to say, `Oh, well, that’s inappropriate. You shouldn’t be protesting, that breaks the rules’.

“So suddenly, people are turning up to Anzac Day to support it, and it’s a different kind of participation, it’s not the typical participation that was happening in the decade earlier.”

Light says the protests helped formulate a sense of what Anzac meant, rather than destroying it. Such cultural debates were crucial for a country, in his view.

Public powers of commemoration

So, why should we care about Anzac traditions?

“There have been the protests in Wellington, and we’re all coming out of Covid, fingers crossed, and all this discussion – so these changes to Anzac commemorations are very important.

“These commemorations make claims about us, about our values and who we are, and in some respects we should be critically engaged.

“You know the importance of that, when you pick something up at the supermarket shelf; we read the label, and we check where it’s from, and what’s gone into it, what ingredients make it up, and also how it’s going to affect us.

“It also confirms the value of participating in commemorative practices, even if it is to protest. If we’re talking about social cohesion, coming out of Covid, and getting out of our bubbles, there’s something very powerful about meeting together in person, and using these forms of commemoration in communities, staking a claim on them and making use of them.”

And as for the future of Anzac?

“It’s very hard to make predictions about Anzac, because it has defied predictions.”

Published by Otago University Press, Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965-2015 is in bookshops now. RRP $50.