This version has been edited and amended in light of two astute referees' reports, for which the author is grateful, and the passage of time.
Over the last hundred years, Anzac Day (25 April), the anniversary of the initial landing of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915, has captured the Australian and New Zealand national imaginations. The day remembers the first significant engagement involving Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the First World War. This article is an early report of a major project that will chart Anzac Day’s origins, development and contested meanings. It is both an historical study, tracing changes in commemoration and remembrance over time, and an investigation of the ways in which Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day in the present day. It will interrogate the shaping of historical sensibility by exploring the complex connections between personal and collective remembrance. One of the challenges to understanding Anzac Day is dealing with the multiplicity of meanings of such a large‐scale, diverse and now venerable (in modern Australian terms) observation. It will also examine the neglected subject of Anzac Day’s observance outside the Australia and New Zealand – in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Pacific – where it has long played a role in expressing the identities of Antipodean expatriate communities.
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This article surveys some of the key contributions to the secondary literature on Australia's foreign and defence policy during Robert Gordon Menzies' two prime ministerships (1939–41, 1949–66), and seeks to identify Menzies' place in a “Liberal” and Liberal Party tradition through a reading of this work. Via a study of Menzies' imperialism, British race patriotism, nationalism, and attitudes towards Asia and the United States of America, it argues that the prime minister stands in an ambiguous relationship to the transformation that occurred in Australia's international orientation between the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1950s the Australian government's cold war foreign policy, and the political language that Menzies used in private and public to articulate it, were largely successful in balancing the competing claims of Britishness, Australianness and the newly‐formed “American Alliance”. By the early 1960s, however, his nostalgia for a dissolving imperial order was sufficiently pronounced that it contributed powerfully to a symbolic and rhetorical defeat for his side of politics, allowing Labor to claim the mantle of Australian foreign policy modernity.
This article will examine a neglected ‘front’ in Australia's ‘History Wars’: the debate over the Australian response to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Since the 1980s, several historians have contributed to a body of literature which insists that Australia's vital interests were at stake in the confrontation between Britain and Germany in the Great War, and that Australia participated in order to protect these interests. In short, these historians are united in asserting that the Great War was ‘Australia's war’ as much as Britain's, and in condemning an alleged radical‐nationalist orthodoxy that presents Australia as a victim of the British Empire and the war as none of Australia's business. They also seek to redirect historical attention away from the themes emphasised by social and cultural historians, and towards strategy, diplomacy and high politics. Recently, several conservative newspaper columnists have also taken up their line of argument. This article seeks to explain how and why this somewhat one‐sided ‘debate’ has gathered momentum. While recognising the value of much of the new research generated by these historians, we also suggest that its terms are closely connected with efforts by the political right to defend the legitimacy of the British colonisation of Australia. At this point, the issues at stake in the historiography of Australia's response to the outbreak of the Great War intersect with some of the better‐known battles in Australia's ‘History Wars’, and notably those over the nature and extent of frontier conflict.
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