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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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