When commemorating our troops, doctors and nurses this Anzac Day, consider also tipping your hat to the discovery of bacteriophages. In the post-antibiotic era, our health might just depend on them.
The Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, is marked by Chinese people by going to the cemetery to clean up tombs, bring flowers, and make offerings to their ancestors.
Jerome Favre/AAP
In wartime, food and drink may be a weapon or embodiment of the enemy, but also ‘a token of hope, a soothing relief’. In East Timor, coffee has played a vital role.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been a central figure in linking the Gallipoli campaign with Islamic conceptualisations of the Turkish nation.
EPA
As Australians once found spiritual communion through allegiance to the British monarch, they find similar virtues in Anzac today. Can the republican movement connect with a large enough number of people in a similar way?
The centenary of the first world war is being memorialised around the world. But as it fades from living memory, our children’s education sits uneasily with the uncritical demands of commemoration.
Dorothy Campbell with patients evacuated from Tobruk, Alexandria 1941.
Five thousand Australian nurses served during World War Two. One of them, Dorothy Campbell endured air raids and tended wounded men in freezing tents - but the war opened her eyes to a more adventurous world.
Do the holes in the banner carried by these Vietnam veterans during an Anzac Day parade in Canberra make any difference?
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Attend any ANZAC Day parade and you might see people carrying banners with holes cut in them. They’re supposed to cut any drag or wind resistance but do they do any good?
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.
The Yininmadyemi sculpture in Hyde Park celebrates Indigenous and Torres Strait Island service men and women. On Anzac Day, who are we honouring?
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Anzac Day is a big part of our national story. But the politics of memory mean the parts of this story that don’t fit neatly into the Anzac narrative are too often forgotten.
Gallipoli has become an enduring symbol of World War I’s futile carnage. But the campaign did have a purpose.
Reporter Scott McIntyre lost his job with SBS following several controversial tweets on Anzac Day – but does the Fair Work Act protect the right to political expression?
Dave Hunt/AAP
Scott McIntyre’s legal challenge against being sacked by SBS will be an interesting test of whether the Fair Work Act offers any safe haven for employees to maintain a personal and political identity.
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.
Australian Navy, Army and Air Force personnel marched in record numbers at the 2015 Mardi Gras, led by senior Defence officers – a stark contrast to the way gay veterans were treated in the past.
Department of Defence
On Anzac Day 1982, five gay veterans tried to lay a wreath at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, but were turned away by the Shrine Guard and the state RSL president. This year, that won’t happen.
Activists trying to bring attention to the issue of rape in war were arrested for protesting at Anzac Day services in the 1980s.
ACT Heritage Library
Protests on Anzac Day, rather than being ‘utterly alien to Australians’, have a long tradition and embody the democratic right to dissent for which the troops fought.
Melbourne teenager Jake Bilardi was troubled and thus susceptible to Islamic State propaganda well before he joined them and died as a suicide bomber.
AAP/Twitter
The instinctive response to Islamic State propaganda is to counter it with more propaganda. But my analysis shows that’s not working. We should not play their game on their field with their ball.
Would the Anzac Day game of two-up be a more meaningful commemoration if it were still illegal?
Chris Murray/Flickr
Anzac Day is the one day of the year it’s legal to play two-up. If we want to retain the thrill that was so important to the diggers, we’d keep it illegal rather than sanitising the practice.
Joshua Connor (Russell Crowe) and Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan) in a scene from The Water Diviner.
Universal Pictures/Entertainment One
Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner has been criticised for its historical inaccuracies – but it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
Despite the importance of Remembrance Day in marking the end of the ‘war to end all wars’, it sits below Anzac Day in the estimation of most Australians.
AAP/Julian Smith
For all its importance, Remembrance Day, November 11, does not capture the Australian imagination in the way that Anzac Day does, despite the sustained efforts of successive governments to promote the…
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…