Search

In 1915, some 8000 Australian soldiers ('diggers') lost their lives in a military campaign that began with an attempt to capture a peninsula on the Black Sea in Turkey. In the years following, their 'sacrifice' came to be commemorated on April 25th ('Anzac Day') in dawn services across the country and at the site of the landing itself: ANZAC Cove. Since the mid-1990s, increasing numbers of Australians have attended dawn services, with young Australians undertaking what they themselves term as 'pilgrimages' to Anzac Cove in record numbers. Simultaneously, Prime Minister John Howard emphasized both the centrality of the Anazc myth to Australian national identity and invoked the memory of diggers' sacrifice to justify military intervention in the post-2001 'war on terror'. This paper explores how the Anzac myth and memory of sacrifice has been invoked politically; how this relates to practices of memorialisation and broader conceptions of national identity; and what implications this has for the way we understand the relationship between collective memory and the practices of international politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]