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Keywords: Anzac Day

  • AUSTRALIA

    The spirit of Eureka at Gallipoli

    • Peter Lalor Philp
    • 22 April 2015
    6 Comments

    On the first morning of the Gallipoli landing, the 12th Battalion was fighting its way up the steep slopes from the beach below. Reaching the top of the cliff, the Australians discovered their commanding officer Colonel L.F. Clark was dead. Captain Joseph Peter Lalor – the 31 year old grandson of Peter Lalor of Eureka Stockade fame – then took command, but by noon he was also dead.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    As politicians evoke conflict a century past

    • Various
    • 21 April 2015
    4 Comments

    In airport lounges, off to foreign hells... They come and go like fatigued FIFO workers day and night; partners waiting for their safe return, might be the only show. No protest march, no ticker tape parade.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The last Anzac's bullshit detector

    • Michael Mullins
    • 20 April 2015
    26 Comments

    We can judge the exuberance of the Anzac commemoration against the nonchalance of the last Anzac Alec Campbell. He said he went to Gallipoli for adventure and, to him, 'Gallipoli is Gallipoli'. John Howard argued Anzac defined our 'sense of self', although he did acknowledge that Anzac is something that was made up. It's better to let historians rather than politicians select events that define the nation, even if they opt for the frontier wars of the 19th century that depict white Australians as violent and racist rather than heroic and virtuous.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Anzac Day a jarring experience for migrant Australians

    • Fatima Measham
    • 20 April 2015
    65 Comments

    Since John Howard promoted the memory of 25 April 2015 in the years after 9/11, it has become entrenched in the public imagination as the definitive Australian moment. I look upon it from a distance, in awe, and as the deification of the white male soldier continues apace, with a deeper sense of alienation. As a non-white Australian who migrated to this country from the Philippines, I did try to make it relevant for myself for a while.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The other hero of Anzac

    • Robyn Rowland
    • 14 October 2014
    8 Comments

    Muriel Wakeford was stunned to see the ocean suddenly scarlet, a shoal of new-mown corpses that lay face-down in the sea. She saw what few steps most men managed before a grey hail began dropping them like insects sprayed.

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  • RELIGION

    Why Bishop Morris was sacked

    • Frank Brennan
    • 24 June 2014
    53 Comments

    'My one new insight from reading Bill's book is that he was sacked because he was too much a team player with his local church ... the Romans hoped to shatter the morale and direction of those who had planned the pastoral strategies of a country diocese stretched to the limits as a Eucharistic community soon to be deprived of priests in the Roman mould.' Frank Brennan launches Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three by Bishop William Morris.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's days of the dead

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 28 April 2014
    20 Comments

    ANZAC Day is a powerful and worthy ritual. But the tales of our soldiers make up only one of the ongoing chapters in the story of our country. There are many others. On 25 January, let us remember the Indigenous people who once nurtured the land. On 25 February, let us remember those who gave their lives in settling this unforgiving land. On 25 March, let us remember the people who lost their lives migrating to this country.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    My pop's Anzac nightmares

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 April 2014

    As a stretcher bearer, he tended to two landmine victims, including one who had lost his leg. He spent the night darting between the two men, providing physical aid, and whatever comfort and assurance was possible. Turns out he was lucky that he didn't end up laid out alongside them: the next morning he discovered that the entire narrow ridge was riddled with mines. 'That was fairly close,' he admitted. It was an understatement.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Anzac myths beyond the Alan Bond test

    • Ray Cassin
    • 24 April 2014
    14 Comments

    In 1983, when his yacht Australia II won the America's Cup, Alan Bond hailed the feat as the greatest Australian victory since Gallipoli. His ludicrous misspeaking shows that by the 1980s the mythmakers' interpretation of the significance of Gallipoli was dominant. But the notion that the Diggers of Gallipoli and their successors in subsequent wars are somehow the paramount exemplars of Australian virtues does not survive scrutiny.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    My brother the silent veteran

    • Julie Kean
    • 23 April 2014
    7 Comments

    I was 13 when he went to Vietnam. There was a kind of perverse status to be derived from having a brother called up for national service, and for him to head north of the equator was a further plus. When I participated in a Moratorium March it remained my secret. What did he see over there? What did he manage to forget over his subsequent 34 years? We'll never know because he never said. And he never participated in Anzac Day.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Fawlty thinking about the aftermyth of war

    • Ray Cassin
    • 29 January 2014
    15 Comments

    'Don't mention the war!' admonishes John Cleese as the hapless hotelier Basil Fawlty in the classic television comedy series Fawlty Towers. With a string of war-related anniversaries to take place over the next four years, beginning this year with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, we may soon find ourselves sharing Fawlty's sentiments.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Time to honour Aboriginal frontier warriors

    • Paul Newbury
    • 21 January 2014
    23 Comments

    New Zealand, our partner in the Anzac legend, has no problem commemorating the Maori Wars of 1845–1872. Yet the Australian War Memorial refuses to honour Aboriginal warriors who fought and died defending their lands and their people against white invader settlers in the Frontier Wars of 1788–1928. This is a moral issue, and has the effect of excluding a whole people from commemoration based on a trifle.

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