ANZAC: The sacred in the secular

Transnational Identity in Robyn Rowland’s Australian/Turkish Poems: This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 - İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915

“…Used in this sense, myth is not incompatible with history in its contribution to the formation of cultural identity. Thus, out of the carnage of Gallipoli emerged the cultural construct of "Anzac", described by Seal (2007) as "a conflation of history and myth" (p. 136).…”

Playing With ‘Patriotic Fire’: Women and Football in the Antipodes during the Great War

“…8 A distinguishing feature of the last two decades of scholarship has been a more critical focus on the myths surrounding the so-called ANZAC legend, and wider consideration of memories of loss and grief associated with the Great War on the home front. These important themes are invoked in the titles of several works, including The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations During World War I, 9 Anzacs, the Media and the Great War, 10 Inventing ANZAC: The Digger and National Mythology 11 and The Gates of Memory: Australian People's Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War. 12 Several anthologies have also added a critical edge to the debate, with Australia's War, 1914-18, 13 Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century 14 and the provocatively titled What's Wrong With Anzac?…”

Origins of the Anzac Dawn ceremony: spontaneity and nationhood1

“…13 Indeed, this 'simple but extremely symbolically charged moment of spontaneous affirmation' was quickly embraced across Australia and is for many 'the core of Anzac Day' which, according to the findings of the 1999 'Australians and the Past' survey, stands out as the principal official anniversary, as 'the only special day with any significant national meaning'. 14 The politics of origin…”

“…As Graham Seal points out, the dawn ceremony emerged out of a grassroots 'need for an element of Anzac Day that avoided the formalities, the imperial and religious rhetoric, the pomp and ceremony'. 19 However, as Seal also notes, the 'relative spontaneous innovation of the dawn ceremony in the late 1920s' was 'quickly appropriated by the Christian religious elements of the observance through the use of the term ''service''', thus enacting the 'ongoing interaction between the formal and the informal', between grassroots or personal interests and those of the nation-state. 20 At the same time, this claim may be merely asserting that this was the first service in Albany, just as White's church register notation 'First Dawn Service held in Australia' may well refer to the first service he had held in Australia.…”

“…Interaction of this sort is central to the vitality of the Anzac tradition and myth: the multiple origins are part of 'the persistent potency of Anzac' as Seal describes it, enacting the 'ongoing ability of the myth to link the grassroots and the national, the past, the present and the future'. 31 Articulated in the broader framework of community pride, heritage and tourism, the lay narratives are more than oppositional, reactive or derivative. The official claims draw on and in some ways incorporate local claims.…”