Among all things Anzac, the contribution of women is becoming more complicated and controversial.
Part of a black cotton cushion cover depicting the Australian coat of arms embroidered by Lance Corporal Alfred Briggs (Albert Biggs), 20 Battalion, AIF.
Courtesy of Australian War Memorial
Embroidery - often seen as women’s work - was a common form of therapy for troops wounded in the first world war. One soldier, Albert Biggs, learned to sew with his left hand after his right arm was badly injured.
The internet offers a chance to personalise our commemoration by choosing when, where and how we take part.
Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
The internet and social media are changing how we commemorate war. The hashtag #LestWeForget will be shared millions of times on Remembrance Day in tweets and Facebook comments.
Poppies at the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
From crossing cultural barriers with a cake, to starvation used as a brutal tool of war, Australian soldiers’ letters and diaries reveal an urgently important relationship with what they ate.
Tackling Gallipoli is an onerous challenge: it carries baggage that must be accommodated or unpacked with extreme care. Western Australian artist Lev Vykopal’s two exhibitions offer a mix of reverence, analysis, critique and poetry.
Australian newspaper photographers have always been forbidden to show military failure or fragility.
AAP Image/Dave Hunt
Although more than 100,000 Australians have lost their lives as a result of war service, photographs of our dead have never been published in newspapers.Perhaps we should reconsider this.
‘Let me try and put sacked SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre’s tweets in historical perspective.’
EPA/Sedat Suna
It is naïve to expect men to kill and die for their country, to live through the horrors of a particularly barbaric war, and to come out the other end unscathed – despite our popular myths.
Labor has long had leaders, such as former prime minister Paul Keating, capable of speaking the language of Anzac.
AAP/Alan Porritt
There is a complicated story involving the Anzac legend and the left between the 1920s and the 1960s which historians have barely begun to untangle.
Like their allies, New Zealand troops served in Afghanistan without the ‘Rolls Royce’ legal agreement now being demanded by some politicians for the upcoming joint mission with Australia in Iraq.
AAP/NZ Defence Force, CPL Sam Shepherd
Australia and New Zealand’s joint mission in Iraq is getting underway. But in NZ, the decision to send 143 troops to train Iraqis against Islamic State has faced a divided parliament and public.
The idea of the Anzac soldier, as crafted by Australia’s official historian at Gallipoli, Charles Bean, has dominated historical memory.
AWM
Charles Bean made editorial decisions to eliminate the bloody realities of war in favour of a specially crafted and idealised construction of the Anzacs and the Gallipoli campaign.
A military covenant sounds noble, but it opens up many pitfalls in the relationship between the Australian Defence Force and public.
Andrew Mercer/Flickr
The ANZAC centenary will be full of symbols. After all, commemoration is cheaper than defence. ANZAC symbols, in particular, have an uncanny way of dismissing any doubts about defence policy and spending…
Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s leadership style emphasises his masculinity.
Andrew Meares/AAP
Whoever is advising Prime Minister Tony Abbott understands something of the place of the larrikin in the Australian national consciousness. Abbott’s threat to shirtfront Russian President Vladimir Putin…
A guide to help you shake out some enduring Anzac myths.
State Library of South Australia
The centenary of the Great War has begun. Now, as we move towards the centenary of the Gallipoli landings on April 25 2015 we are gearing up for an extravaganza of Anzac-ery. The combined processes of…
Where New Zealand’s embrace of Anzac differs from Australia is the place of the legend in national mythology.
Archives New Zealand/Flickr
As the centenary of the Gallipoli landings approaches Australians need to consider the other half of the ANZAC acronym. The rise of Anzac Day as Australia’s national day has been paralleled by the increasing…
The “digger myth” has left little room for appreciation or debate surrounding the work of today’s service personnel.
Australian Department of Defence/AAP Image
In his new book Anzac’s Long Shadow: The cost of our national obsession, James Brown argues that: a century after the war to end all wars, Anzac is being bottled, stamped and sold. The former soldier turned…
Senior Lecturer, Classics and Ancient History and Director of Teaching and Learning (ugrad), School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University