In Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of the expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula in order to open the Dardanelles to the allied navies. The ultimate objective was to capture Constantinople now Istanbul , the capital of the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany.
A view looking aft of lifeboat carrying unidentified men of the Australian 1st Divisional Signal Company as they are towed towards Anzac Cove on the day of the landing. What had been planned as a bold stroke to knock Turkey out of the war quickly became a stalemate, and the campaign dragged on for eight months. At the end of the allied forces were evacuated from the peninsula, with both sides having suffered heavy casualties and endured great hardships.
More than 8, Australian soldiers had died in the campaign. Gallipoli had a profound impact on Australians at home, and 25 April soon became the day on which Australians remembered the sacrifice of those who died in the war. Although the Gallipoli campaign failed in its military objectives, the actions of Australian and New Zealand forces during the campaign left a powerful legacy. In the first Anzac Day commemorations were held on 25 April.
The day was marked by a wide variety of ceremonies and services across Australia, a march through London, and a sports day in the Australian camp in Egypt.
Marches were held all over Australia; in the Sydney march convoys of cars carried soldiers wounded on Gallipoli and their nurses. This physical environment, together with the strongly egalitarian ethos of Australian democracy, ensured that AIF men were naturally independent in spirit, questioning of mindless authority, ruggedly individualistic when it came to military discipline, and utterly committed to "mateship" or comradeship during battle.
Scholars have debated how much of the Anzac legend was historically accurate [4] Australia, for example, was a highly urbanized society even in , but this is not the point. Like all myths, the Anzac legend gained traction because it resonated with the needs and values of both individuals and dominant elites. This heroic narrative invested with meaning the more than 61, war deaths that stemmed from a population of fewer than 5 million. In addition, the legend provided the conservative political forces, which dominated federal politics from on, with a means of validating the war and the British imperial cause for which so many Australians had fought and died.
It is clear that this engagement with the Anzac legend and the associated rituals of Anzac Day was not universal across Australian society. The nation had been left profoundly divided by the political disputes of the war, with the labour movement and Catholics some 22 percent of the population and many of them of Irish extraction being demonised as "disloyal" because of their opposition to conscription and their calls for a negotiated peace in Yet by Anzac Day was a public holiday in all states of the Commonwealth; and 25 April was widely recognised as the national day.
Hence, by the time Australia entered the Second World War on 3 September Anzac was the seemingly natural frame of memory within which to position the experience of the new war. The all-volunteer expeditionary force, which served initially in the Middle East and then in the Asia-Pacific region, was named the 2 nd AIF. Moreover, press cartoons and other media depicted the soldiers of as heirs to the men of , as many of them literally were.
Carrying the torch of their fathers, the new generation of soldiers would be judged by the standards that the original Anzacs had set. So dominant was this discourse that Australians who were taken prisoner-of-war by the Japanese in strove, in their later accounts of captivity, to construct themselves as Anzacs.
Conscious that they might be stigmatized by defeat and surrender, they claimed that they had manifested in the prison camps of Asia the Anzac qualities of resourcefulness, survival against the odds and mateship.
Hence, nothing that occurred during the Second World War, with the possible exception of the fighting on the Kokoda Track in Papua in mid to late , challenged the centrality of Gallipoli and the rituals of Anzac Day. But within fifteen years this dominance was under assault. By the early s it was under attack for its strident support for Cold War defence policies.
The growing hostility to Anzac was strengthened by the use of selective conscription for the Vietnam War, which polarised Australia almost as deeply as had the conscription debates of and Finally, the student protests and the rise of second-wave feminism fuelled the perception that Anzac was militaristic, misogynist and anachronistic. By the early s, then, some observers assumed that the rituals of Anzac would fade away as the veterans of the two World Wars aged and died.
But it proved not to be so. To the surprise of its critics, Anzac and the wider memory of the First World War enjoyed a remarkable revival with the onset of what Jay Winter has called the "second generation of memory" in the last quarter of the 20 th century.
Not all of these variables were evident in Australia, but the growth in war memory was nonetheless phenomenal. From the early s on, there was an explosion of commemorative activities at both the government and sub-state level. These covered all conflicts in which Australians had participated in the 20 th century, as the politics of recognition led group after group to claim that their war service had been "forgotten".
But Gallipoli and the associated Anzac legend were at the heart of this revivified memory of war. Even more important was the role of Australian governments of both political persuasions, who appropriated the memory of the war to shape Australian nationalism and national identity to suit their political agenda. In retrospect, seems something of a marker. This was the year of the first officially funded "pilgrimage" of veterans to Gallipoli, a journey led by the Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the landing.
The First World War returned to a more central — though not exclusive — role in national commemoration with the coming to power in of the Liberal John Howard. The commemorative calendar expanded to include anniversaries of battles not just on the half- or quarter-century, as had been the practice in the past, but every five or fewer years. Ellie Griffiths. Memorial, Museum, Shrine. Copy link. Map View. Following this, the Australian War Records Section was established in May to preserve records of the war at the time.
An architectural competition in led to two individual entrants, Emily Sodersten and John Crust, to represent a joint design for this memorial. More info. The First World War was the first armed conflict in which aircraft were used.
About 3, Australian airmen served in the Middle East and France with the Australian Flying Corps, mainly in observation capacities or providing infantry support. When flying over enemy lines he noticed his mate, Captain Rutherford, had been brought down with his plane and was about to be captured by the Turks. McNamara, himself wounded, landed and picked up Rutherford, only to overturn in a gully. Despite being weak from loss of blood, McNamara guided the plane back to base.
He was subsequently awarded with the Victoria Cross. Australian women volunteered for service in auxiliary roles, as cooks, nurses, drivers, interpreters, munitions workers, and skilled farm workers. While the government welcomed the service of nurses, it generally rejected offers from women in other professions to serve overseas.
Australian nurses served in Egypt, France, Greece, and India, often in trying conditions or close to the front, where they were exposed to shelling and aerial bombardment. The effect of the war was also felt at home. Families and communities grieved following the loss of so many men, and women increasingly assumed the physical and financial burden of caring for families. Anti-German feeling emerged with the outbreak of the war, and many Germans living in Australia were sent to internment camps.
Censorship and surveillance, regarded by many as an excuse to silence political views that had no effect on the outcome of war, increased as the conflict continued. Social division also grew, reaching a climax in the bitterly contested and unsuccessful conscription referendums held in and When the war ended, thousands of ex-servicemen, many disabled with physical or emotional wounds, had to be reintegrated into a society keen to consign the war to the past and resume normal life.
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