This Remembrance Day, spend some time with Claire Adams Mackinnon – the silent Hollywood movie star who stole the heart of Melbourne bachelor and lived the last 40 years of her life in Victoria.
Thinking about Australia’s war experience in comparison with others will soften some of the hyperbole surrounding Anzac.
AAP/Jake Sims
Armistice Day provides a moment to reflect on Australia’s self-identity in comparison to other nations that experienced the first world war and commemorate it to this day.
Has firebrand Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie fallen into the populists’ trap of political overreach?
AAP/Lukas Coch
Apart from the brouhaha over some Victorian schools bumping one minute’s silence to before or after the traditional 11am, Tuesday’s Remembrance Day commemorations went off without a hitch, soberly recognising…
Who should decide how we remember?
Chris Radburn/PA
Anyone who reads the newspapers in the build up to the Armistice Day commemorations in the UK would be hard put to deny there are still many unanswered questions around the public event of remembrance…
On Remembrance Sunday, while in my native Germany a wall of white balloons dissolved into the air to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I joined thousands at the Tower of London…
The dead can’t be insulted by our failure to honour them.
Bob Prosser
Remembrance Day is an occasion when people are supposed to remember and honour those who died in their nation’s wars. But why should we believe that this obligation exists? The dead are dead. They can’t…
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…
Each of the 888,246 ceramic poppies in the Tower of London’s moat represent a British or Commonwealth first-world-war casualty.
EPA/Andy Rain
Tom Gregory, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Every year on Remembrance Day, we pause to look back on old wars and recount the tallies of the dead, including 16 million killed in the first world war and 60 million in the second world war. And every…
Why must Muslim women prove they aren’t terrorists with a scarf?
Johnny Green/PA Archive
For some time, my research has shown that Muslim women who wear the hijab or other types of Muslim attire are the most likely to become victims of street-level Islamophobia. The explanation is simple…
Former prime minister Paul Keating delivers a Remembrance Day address in Canberra.
AAP Image/Alan Porritt
Delivering the Remembrance Day address at the Australian War Memorial, Paul Keating has highlighted the protection that unifying Europe gave from the sort of dangers that led to “Armageddon” last century…
Curiously, there has been no outcry over the Anzac centenary logo.
emmettanderson
The logo for the upcoming Anzac centenary was released last year with surprisingly little fanfare. The final design was selected from several options by the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board after consultation…
Remembrance Day is one of many historic Australian events to fall on that date.
(AAP Image/Paul Miller
Australia’s national story is littered with significant occasions that have fallen on November 11 and two years ago, for me, was no different. It was the morning of November 11, 2011 and I was working…
There are some powerful stories in the Anzac tradition but many more that are unknown to students.
Australian War Memorial
“What are your legs? Springs. Steel springs”. Archy’s nervous mutterings before he sprints into gunfire are familiar in Australian history classes. So are the tale of Simpson and Duffy and their “bravest…
Australia is not fulfilling its obligations to its veterans.
Flickr/Another Seb
Ten years ago this month, John Howard’s Minister for Veteran Affairs, Danna Vale, launched a searchable internet database known as the World War 2 Nominal Roll. It was intended to be a virtual war memorial…
Uniformed attendees at the Remembrance Day service held in Sydney on November 11, 2010.
AAP/Greg Wood
Australia now officially recognises two special days to commemorate our national history of being at war but neither of them is Sorry Day. The Australian history of engagement in war is primarily honoured…