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Keywords: Anzac

  • 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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  • AUSTRALIA

    War fires should be left to smoulder

    • David Stephens
    • 11 November 2013
    12 Comments

    Remembrance Day has always been for Australians a quieter affair than Anzac Day, particularly as Anzac Day in recent years has taken on a brassy, bragging style. The historian Ken Inglis described Anzac as Australia's civil religion. Although we were the first country anywhere to come together under a national constitution after a mass popular vote, we downplay Federation and venerate instead a failed military campaign in Turkey in 1915.

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  • CARTOON

    Anzac Day comes for class war mudslingers

    • Fiona Katauskas
    • 24 April 2013
    1 Comment

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The Australian wars that Anzac Day neglects

    • Dean Ashenden
    • 22 April 2013
    24 Comments

    Around 20,000 people died in a series of violent conflicts between peoples extending across the entire continent and more than half of our history. We have yet to find a way to remember the loss of those people with anything like the scale and intensity of our other commemorations, such as Anzac Day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Letter from a lost soldier

    • Brian Matthews
    • 27 April 2012
    5 Comments

    'I wish this war was finished for I am fed up. My dear Ann, you and the children try to be as cheery as you can. I feel all buggered up but I shall just have to carry on the best way I can ... we are on another front now and it is actually hell ...' Whatever ambiguous solace Annie could derive from Alex's letter, it was soon lost.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Profound silence of a conscientious objector

    • Brian Doyle
    • 25 April 2012
    8 Comments

    I remember the day my older brother came back from the navy. He was 20. I was 11. He slouched in his chair, weary and dismissive and friendly. I wanted to say something amusing to make him see me but no words came. So I asked him if he wanted a sandwich. Sandwiches were a way of talking in our family.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Getting personal with Anzac Day

    • Philip Harvey
    • 25 April 2012
    16 Comments

    Should I even be saying all this to people I have never met? What do I say? How far do I go? My paternal grandfather, Edgar, was not only an Anzac but among those who landed nearly 100 years ago at the Turkish cove. Even among my family his experiences are still largely passed over in silence.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Poets in wartime

    • Various
    • 24 April 2012
    2 Comments

    O for a day without comrades bloody fallen, lovers in guttural grief, shrieking, sobbing, and mothers in stoic dignity, mantillas drawn tight, our heroic flame, corralled colts brazenly waiting, cruelly snuffed. Have we learned nothing my friend? 

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  • RELIGION

    Imagining nationalism through Anzac suffering

    • Benedict Coleridge
    • 23 April 2012
    10 Comments

    Political theorist Isaiah Berlin argued that nationalism manifests most strongly in communities that have suffered some wound. In a period of unparalleled wealth, in which most Australians are far removed from war, Anzac Day is a way of instructing ourselves about the place of suffering in Australia's history.

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  • RELIGION

    Uncomfortable Easter and Anzac Day

    • Andrew Hamilon
    • 21 April 2011
    10 Comments

    Good intentions are not sufficient to give life meaning. Easter's significance comes not from Jesus' choice to die, but in God's gift of raising him from the dead. In the Anzac story, it may be comforting to say young soldiers died that others may live, but the comfort is too easy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Anzac revelations

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 20 April 2011
    9 Comments

    My father was just 23 when he saw action. He is now nearly 90, and his recent description of the Borneo beach landing, which he had never mentioned to his offspring before, made my brother's blood run cold.

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