# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Great Debates: The Anzac Legend | The Anzac Portal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Great Debates: The Anzac Legend is modelled on inquiry-based learning. It adopts a debate format using role-play of key characters. Students are not given the information synthesised but rather they are provided with primary and secondary sources to investigate from the perspective of an individual.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Born On The Shores Of Gallipoli - ANZAC in WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps or ANZAC fought in Gallipoli, on the Western Front and in the Middle East during World War 1. Even though the Gallipoli campaign was an ultimate failure, it was the birth hour of the New Zealand and Australian national consciousness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Historians debate importance of Anzac legend

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fact or fiction: Common Anzac myths put to the test

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Gallipoli campaign and the ANZAC legend

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was flawed from the start, destined for failure and should not be a story solely about the ANZACs, according to a new book by a war historian at The Australian National University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Joan Beaumont

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size

"Anzac" is often described as what it "means to be Australian". But as we approach the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 it is time to ask whether all Australians in today's multicultural society see the Anzac legend as the core of national identity.

Anzac was, after all, originally a story about white men. When World War I broke out, the vast majority of Australians were either born in Australia or traced their ancestry to England, Ireland and Scotland. Unless they were "substantially" of European descent, they could not volunteer for the Australian Imperial Force. Despite this, at least 850 Indigenous men managed to enlist, as did a scattering of men of Chinese and other ethnic backgrounds. More than 3000 Australian women also volunteered to serve as nurses. But still the experience of battle, which was at the heart of the original Anzac legend, was a male one.

The original Anzacs were often staunch British imperialists.

Today the majority of Australians are women. And although around three-quarters of the population still claim to have Australian, English, Scottish or Irish ancestry, the other quarter is a kaleidoscope of peoples from across the world.

Is Anzac relevant to these culturally diverse groups? Most of them emigrated after the two world wars in which the majority of the Anzacs served. Many of them are of faiths other than Christianity that infuses the rituals and language of Anzac even today. Some have come from countries that were Australia's enemies in past conflicts.

The question of Anzac's significance for multicultural Australia generated considerable heat three years ago. A report of the official National Commission on the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary suggested that Australia's military history was "something of a double-edged sword". The centenary might provide opportunities for a great sense of national unity but it might also prove "a potential area of divisiveness". The community simply did not know what recently arrived Australians thought about the commemorations", but the centenary commemorations should be "culturally sensitive and inclusive".

These comments were promptly dismissed by the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who announced that she completely disagreed with the commission. Her experiences of attending dawn services in Melbourne, she said, showed it was often children who convinced their parents to go along. "When you can see that kind of enthusiasm ... I think we can say as a nation it's an important part of our national identity."

This had nothing to do with multiculturalism, but the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia assured Australians that Anzac Day was "a day of national significance" and "solemn reflection" for all Australians, "including Australia's culturally and linguistically diverse communities".

The storm died down, and there have been various attempts since to make Anzac more inclusive culturally. The Australian War Memorial and the Department of Veterans' Affairs, for instance, have invested in public information and research on Indigenous Australians, and the Museum of Chinese Australian History in Victoria has developed an exhibition on Chinese Anzacs.

How much impact has this had on the wider population and ethnic communities particularly is not known. One clue may be found in the 1168 Gallipoli centenary grants that DVA has made to each of the federal electorates. Generally these have funded activities such as the repairing of war memorials and honour boards, the renewal of avenues of honour, local histories into members of the AIF, exhibitions and the design of new memorials (do we really need more?). This is not surprising, given the DVA guidelines, but the grants, in effect, reinforce the original rituals and narratives of Anzac. There seems little scope in this scheme for radically new modes of remembrance, which may reflect other, different war memories of multicultural Australians. Very few explicitly ethnic communities applied for DVA grants, with the exception of the Jewish and Turkish communities, though there were occasionally Indigenous, Maltese, Coptic Orthodox and Greek-related projects.

Of course, it may be argued these local commemorative activities are only part of Anzac. The legend is also, and primarily, about values and ways of imagining the national identity. These values, if the inscriptions on four pillars of the memorial at 2002 Isurava​ on the Kokoda Track are any indication, are currently courage, endurance, sacrifice and mateship.

Intriguingly, these do not mirror exactly the values that the original Anzacs embraced. They were often staunch British imperialists and prided themselves on being effective killers─something we tend to forget today when soldiers are often depicted as victims of catastrophe and trauma. But these values are arguably those which Australian society needs to affirm in the 21st century when, for all our materialism and rampant individualism, we still need at least some individuals to volunteer to subordinate their personal interests to the collective good. Anzac, in this sense, can validate not only the men and women of the Australian Defence Force who are the direct heirs of the legend of Gallipoli, but also the service of police officers, civil defence forces and fire fighters.

So the question perhaps is not whether there is a place for multicultural Australians in the narratives of Gallipoli and other battles of the past, but whether the values that the Anzac legend now enshrines are ones that transcend culture, ethnicity and gender.

The experience of battle, which was at the heart of the original Anzac legend, was a male one.

Joan Beaumont is a professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, at The Australian National University and author of Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is the Anzac legend still the core of Australia's national identity?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Joan Beaumont Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size "Anzac" is often described as what it "means to be Australian". But as we approach the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 it is time to ask whether all Australians in today's multicultural society see the Anzac legend as the core of national identity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anzac spirit | The Australian War Memorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Returned and Services League of Australia (WA Branch) suggests that the spirit of Anzac is still seen today in times of crisis or hardship. During cyclones, floods, and bushfires, Australians come together "to rescue one another, to ease suffering, to provide food and shelter, to look after one another, and to let the victims of these disasters know they are not alone".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Updated April 25, 2008 06:23:00

Gallipoli has become a symbol of Australia's national identity, achievement and existence, according to Australian War Memorial principal historian Dr Peter Stanley.

Here's a weird thing. There's a battle, a long way from home and a long time ago. A lot of men are killed and wounded. It was a defeat and it didn't change anything. But we're still interested in it. Is that weird or what?

It is indeed weird. But not mysterious. For Australia, Gallipoli has become an important founding legend. It is attracting even greater attention as the 90th anniversary approaches. Why?

Australians entered the Great War welcoming conflict as a test of their nationhood. Their nation had been born amid prosaic debates and referenda, not in war. The troops who landed on April 25, 1915- almost all civilians less than a year before - wondered how they would meet the challenge.

In the event, the landing was a military disaster - it failed to meet its objectives. But merely hanging on in the face of determined Turkish attacks was triumph enough. Charles Bean, the Australian official correspondent, declared that with the landing on Gallipoli a sense of Australian nationhood was born. The idea took root.

Bean's The Anzac Book defined what came to be called the Anzac legend. It encompassed bravery, ingenuity, endurance and the comradeship that Australians call mateship.

Nations create the history they need. Gallipoli, though the basis of the annual ritual of Anzac Day from the early 1920s, remained neglected as an historical event. For 50 years after Bean published his definitive official history very few seemed interested in the Great War.

For a time, in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, it seemed that Anzac Day might vanish into obscurity, like Empire Day.

But an assertive Australian national identity has returned to affirm the connection between Gallipoli and nationhood. On the 90th anniversary of the campaign Gallipoli remains interesting still. The anniversary has generated books, films, ceremonies and pilgrimages. Almost as many Australians attend the dawn ceremony at Anzac Cove as the same number of troops which landed there in 1915.

The Anzac legend has become elastic enough to span very different emotions. Fervent nationalists can exult; pilgrims can mourn. All can ponder what made that group of Australians able to endure one of the greatest tests their nation has ever faced.

This massive interest might be the result of careful marketing, by schools, publishers, the media or government agencies. But it seems that while the expression of interest might be directed, the consumption of the products seem to reflect the popular interest rather than manipulate it.

Gallipoli, a minor, failed campaign (which cost less than a sixth of the Australian deaths on the Western Front) fulfils a need felt by many Australians to connect with or express their national identity. Much of what is said or written makes tenuous history - it presents a defeat as a victory of sorts, ignores some aspects and boost others, often with a distinctly anti-British spin.

It is dodgy history because it says as much about what Australians today feel about themselves as it relates to the events of the campaign. Gallipoli has become a symbol of Australia's national identity, achievement and existence.
This feature was written by Dr Peter Stanley for ABC News Online's Anzac Day coverage in 2006. At that time, Dr Stanley was principal historian at the Australian War Memorial. In early 2007 he was appointed director of the centre for historical research at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
First posted April 25, 2008 06:13:00

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Updated April 25, 2008 06:23:00 Gallipoli has become a symbol of Australia's national identity, achievement and existence, according to Australian War Memorial principal historian Dr Peter Stanley. Here's a weird thing. There's a battle, a long way from home and a long time ago. A lot of men are killed and wounded.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A bloody shambles

The Australians went into the landing on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 carrying a heavy metaphorical burden as well as their packs. Conscious of their national identity, they wondered how they would meet the test of battle. Though it was costly and close-run, out of the bloody shambles of the landing at Anzac Cove the Australians (with the New Zealanders) quickly developed as soldiers. Though newcomers to war they soon gained a resilience, toughness and skill which contrasted with what a South Australian school teacher called the 'inefficient, incapable, and badly led' British troops. A Victorian farmer complained of the 'lack of organisation, spirit and individual initiative' of a British unit he had served with at Suvla. Other Australians felt that inexperienced 'New Army' units had let them down (though AIF volunteers had been no more experienced than those for Kitchener's Army). They had expected to learn from the British, but on Gallipoli they looked down on them as amateurs.

Searching for explanations, they fell back on the archetype of the Australian bushman. A self-reliant, ingenious, practical man who could shoot fitted the bill for Charles Bean. Though Australian-born, Bean had been classically educated in Britain. Returning to Australia and discovering the inland in a series of visits as a journalist, he idealised the virtues of the bushman. On Gallipoli he virtually created what has become known as the 'Anzac legend', the celebration of the archetypal virtues of the Australian soldier. The Anzac Book, an annual he edited on Gallipoli, became the defining expression of those qualities. Anzacs were almost defined by their differences with Britain. Many qualities - independence, casual proficiency, and a disregard of rank for its own sake - specifically contrasted with the qualities of the British regular.

On Gallipoli, errors of command and failures of supply and medical care had been obvious to every soldier. Further disillusionment would follow. On the Western Front, where the five AIF infantry divisions served from 1916 to 1918, they had ample opportunity to ponder British successes and failures. With the command and logistic structure essentially British, Australians identified the shortcomings of a straining imperial military system with Britain.

The AIF divisions fought on the Somme in 1916, losing as many casualties in eight weeks as had been lost on Gallipoli in eight months. In 1917 they attacked at Bullecourt, Messines and in the battles of Passchendaele (Ypres). In 1918, now combined as a self-conscious Australian Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General John Monash, they helped to both stop the German March offensive and lead the advance to final victory.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Australians went into the landing on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 carrying a heavy metaphorical burden as well as their packs. Conscious of their national identity, they wondered how they would meet the test of battle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War approaches, Australia prepares to observe the centenary of its first major involvement in the conflict. While the events that began at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 were unquestionably heroic and the sacrifices beyond any justification, the Anzac legend of nation building and the forging of an Australian identity is increasingly coming under question Mike Hedge reports.

Two weeks after the Anzacs scrambled ashore at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, Australia received its first detailed report of the story that became its greatest legend.

It appeared on the front page of every daily newspaper in the country, proclaiming the landings "the finest feat of the war", describing those who performed it as "a cheerful, quiet, confident, nerveless race of athletes" who waded ashore through a hail of bullets, scaled cliffs and got stuck into the enemy with bare hands and bayonets.

This initial, breathless gush came from the pen, and the imagination, of the British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett who observed the landings at Anzac Cove from the bridge of a British destroyer a couple of kilometres off the beach.

It ignited the Anzac legend, and probably did as much to inflate it as anything since.

Ashmead-Bartlett was no jingoistic, tabloid man. He'd been to seven wars before this, participating in one and chronicling them all.

With the benefit of this experience, and perhaps of mere common sense, Ashmead-Bartlett predicted the folly of the landings the night before they took place, along with the greater disaster to come at Gallipoli.

He also did more than any other reporter, general or statesman to expose the mismanagement and bloody incompetence that beset the campaign before it began and continued for the next eight months.

It was thanks to reports such as Ashmead-Bartlett's and Australia's most prominent war correspondent, Charles Bean, that in the weeks immediately following the landing at Anzac Cove young Australians flocked in greater numbers than ever before to enlist.

In those early days of the Gallipoli campaign, little was known at home of the massive losses or the dreadful futility of a campaign perceived as a great adventure.

At the time of that first report, newspapers would run a photograph alongside a soldier's obituary at a rate of around half a dozen each day. They soon abandoned the practice as the numbers of the dead left no room for photos.

But the legend survived and grew.

Bean, who reported the war for the Sydney Morning Herald and later became Australia's official war historian, wrote romantically of the Anzac as a superior individual, a warrior at home on the back of a horse and one who "differed very little from the Australian who at home rides the station boundaries".

All of it contributed to the legend ... or to the myth.

Of the almost 417,000 Australians who enlisted during WWI, only around 57,000 had addresses outside a capital city and 30 per cent of them had been born in Britain.

Another popular piece of Anzac wisdom is that the Australian Imperial Force was the only volunteer army on the Allied side. It was not.

What the Anzacs achieved, and even the way in which they failed to achieve, during the Gallipoli campaign was undoubtedly heroic.

There need be no argument that by-and-large they were good-natured, stoic, resourceful, laconic and refreshingly irreverent. Or perhaps naive.

But the notion that this unmitigated human catastrophe led to Australia staking its claim for international recognition is increasingly seen as a politically motivated myth based on misinformation and exaggeration.

"The emphasis on Gallipoli has really been a part of our political culture. It's not part of history," says Professor Joan Beaumont of the Australian National University.

The nationhood view has always appealed to politicians who love to sound profound, adopting and reinforcing it at every opportunity.

In her final Anzac Day address as prime minister, Julia Gillard embraced the legend with solemn cliche.

"This was our first act of nationhood before the eyes of a watching world," Ms Gillard said.

"The Anzacs, the boys of Federation who became the men of Gallipoli."

The approach of the 100th anniversary of the war in which the Gallipoli campaign was fought has led to further cross examination of the facts.

Professor Peter Stanley, a former principal historian at the Australian War Memorial and president of the group Honest History, questions the widely accepted wisdom attached to the Anzac legend.

"I've never understood how a nation can be born on a particular day on the other side of the world," Prof Stanley says.

"That idea was a view fostered in the aftermath of the war, partly to justify Australia's losses and the waste and expense by the prime minister of the time, Billy Hughes.

"We don't have to believe it any more ... this metaphorical birth on the cliffs of Gallipoli."

Opponents of "Anzackery" prefer to go back 14 years to Federation as a greater nation-building event.

"1901 is an amazing story ... disparate convict colonies coming together to form a nation," says author and historian Paul Daley.

A similar view is put forward by the author Thomas Keneally in discussion of the coming centenary.

"I hope no one says Australia was born at Gallipoli," Kenneally said.

"Australia was born in 1901, and there needs to be a certain amount of de-mythologising. Let's hope the historians win out over the politicians, who strike me as fairly jingoistic."

Daley also points to the federal government's funding of the centenary as a further example of the politicising of Anzac and of Australia's devotion to an Anzac myth.

The Abbott government has topped-up the $140 million funding of the events previously announced by Labor. The British government, by comparison, decided $95 million was enough.

For Australia, Gallipoli and Anzac are hugely evocative. Sacrifice, duty and mateship are worthy aspirations.

But for such a misguided and demonstrably unnecessary military folly, they amounted to little.

More relevant might be a national day commemorating Kokoda. At least it was a victory, and it meant something to Australia.

Consideration of the costs borne by other nations can also be instructional.

Gallipoli claimed 8709 Australian lives, a human tragedy, but far from the worst.

Turkish casualties ran to more than 250,000, including 86,692 dead; Britain lost 21,255 with another 52,235 wounded; and France lost more than 10,000.

Perhaps another measure of the Australian attitude to its role in the Anzac story can be made by comparison to the contribution of the other half of the acronym and the dreadful losses it suffered.

From a population of just over one million in 1918, 16,697 New Zealand lives were lost in the First World War. Historian Richard Stowers, in his 2005 book Bloody Gallipoli, calculated 2779 NZ soldiers died at Gallipoli - one out of every five who fought there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Did Gallipoli make the Australian nation?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War approaches, Australia prepares to observe the centenary of its first major involvement in the conflict. While the events that began at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 were unquestionably heroic and the sacrifices beyond any justification, the Anzac legend of nation building and the forging of an Australian identity is increasingly coming under question Mike Hedge reports.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Twenty-year-old John "Jack" Yarra wrote this letter to be sent to his mother in the event of his death. He was killed six months later.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The war that shaped Australia | The Australian War Memorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Australia came out of the Second World War confident and with an independent outlook. It enjoyed a more sophisticated relationship with Britain and found in the United States a new and powerful ally. The influx of postwar migration from Britain and war-torn Europe forever diversified Australia's population and society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Gallipoli campaign is frequently celebrated as the 'birth' of Australia as a nation, but were we already well on our way? AWM

The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies - human, political, economic, military - that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. Over the next fortnight, The Conversation, in partnership with Griffith Review, is publishing a series of essays exploring the enduring legacies of 20th-century wars. CORRECTED ON APRIL 22, 2015: See the editor's note at the end of the article.
It seems poignantly appropriate that the web address gallipoli.net.au, which features the logo, "Gallipoli: The Making of a Nation", is owned by Michael Erdeljac of the Splitters Creek Historical Group. Splitters Creek is now a suburb on the western edge of Albury, better known for its active Landcare group, and as the home to the endangered squirrel glider.

In the competitive market for Great War memorabilia, Erdeljac deserves to be congratulated. He has owned the URL for 14 years, well before commemoration became a national preoccupation. He is motivated by his own conviction that "we must remember".

Image courtesy of Ben Quilty and Jan Murphy Galley, published in the latest Griffith Review, Author provided

The history recalled on the site is serviceable; the list of names of those killed at the Gallipoli landing, Lone Pine and Nek battles heartbreaking; the opportunity to "own a piece of history" well-priced: A$1200 for a framed print of a photo from the front. The photo was donated by the late daughter of Corporal Herbert Bensch, one of the many Australians of German heritage who fought for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in the Great War.

It was in a camera belonging to his mate, who was one of the nearly 9,000 Australian soldiers, 3,000 New Zealanders, 35,000 Brits, 27,000 French and 86,000 Turks who died on the peninsula a century ago. Years after returning, Bensch processed the photo and it became a family heirloom.

It is poignant because it was settlements like Splitters Creek in the Riverina that were home to many of the almost 60,000 Australians who died during that war. As has been graphically captured on the screen, and is now easily accessible in the digital records of those who fought, many of the young men who volunteered to travel across hemispheres were country lads woefully ill-prepared for the slaughter they would face.

Not all, like Bensch, traced their forebears back to England. For many of those who fought it was a chance to be involved in a great adventure, albeit often with tragic consequences.

Did the Great War really create Australia?

The notion that this blooding and the other epic battles of the Great War made the nation has become a truism. But it is one that needs to be examined.

Australia was already a (teenage) nation in 1914. It was a nation crafted from the time, eager to assert its independence (in most things) from the motherland, infected by a racism made (almost) scientific by Darwinism, egalitarian, protectionist, and, in important democratic domains, marked by a progressive spirit.

In many ways, Australia was a world leader - forging both a civic and an ethnic idea of nation.

In Europe, by contrast, at the beginning of the war, as David Reynolds details, there were only three republics - France, Switzerland and Portugal - but five major empires: the Ottoman and British, and those headed by the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Five years later, all but one of these empires had imploded. There were 13 new republics and nine nations that had not even existed before the war.

In Europe, the 16 million lives lost and 20 million injured literally created nations. The carnage emboldened a democratic, nationalist and in some places revolutionary, spirit. It led to major political changes in Great Britain, the beginning of the end of the old aristocracy, and eventually the devolution of Ireland. In Australia, by contrast, it slowed and divided the progressive movement, tingeing the country with grief.

Although the trauma and loss was profound in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, there were no battles on home soil in either the motherland or the dominions. In Britain, the outcomes were less concrete. They were more tied, as Reynolds argues, to:

... abstract ideals such as civilised values and even the eradication of war.

In Australia, as John Hirst has written:

Gallipoli freed Australia from the self-doubt about whether it had the mettle to be a proper nation.

So, in Australia, the experience of war became shorthand for nationhood. In New Zealand, it marked the beginning of a long journey to even fuller independence.

It is an ancient notion that equates battle and blood with independence and freedom; that there is life in death. The very idea that war "was the truest test of nationhood and that Australia's official status would not be ratified psychologically until her men had been blooded in war" is, as historian Carolyn Holbrook persuasively argues, evidence of:

... muscular nationalism [that] was given legitimacy by Social Darwinism.

The Great War did not make Australia - that had been relatively cerebral activity, notwithstanding the conflict of settlement, which reached its conclusion on January 1, 1901, when the colonies federated into a nation. The nation began as penal colonies, prosecuted battles of settlement, welcomed people from many lands and crafted a constitution. But like many adolescents it was conflicted, as Holbrook argues:

... the very nation that it sought to distinguish itself from was the nation whose approval it craved.

The Great War was not even the first foreign war that Australians fought in alongside Britain - that was in South Africa. But as the legend of Breaker Morant has captured, there were important differences in attitude between Australia and Britain that came to the fore in foreign battles.

AWM

Many historians have argued that the lingering feeling of illegitimacy, of having a chip on the shoulder that needed to be avenged, helped fuel the idea that participation in the Great War was a coming of age. This was proof, as Hirst noted, that Australia really had the "mettle to be a nation".

Eagerness to participate was not universally shared. This is illustrated most powerfully in the failure of two referenda to introduce conscription. This was another important mark of an independent nation, of a place where people had the right to make their own decisions rather than being the property of the state. So those of Irish heritage expressed anti-British sentiment, those of German descent were regarded suspiciously, and Indigenous Australians joined the fight. It was complicated.

Afterwards, the tragedy of loss and grief was palpable. Australia's progressive spirit was divided and lost momentum.

And then, in little more than a generation, another war began which layered trauma on catastrophe, left the air full of human smoke, changed global geopolitics and renamed the Great War, World War One.

In an enduring sense, it was the Second World War that really changed the world. It consolidated the American Century, defined in part by conflict with the Soviet Republic and its empire; triggered the end of colonialism and its multi-faceted implications; created space for the assertion of international law; and provided the framework for the remarkable transformations of the past seven decades.

How Australia changed

Undoubtedly, the wars of the 20th century shaped - arguably even made - modern Australia. But this was not because of an ancient blood sacrifice in distant lands or even the closer strategic battles that followed. It was a product of the responses, realignments and decisions that followed.

Every country has its most symbolic year from each of the world wars, and can trace the consequences of the bloodletting that accompanied the global realignment of the last century.

In Australia this can be measured in many ways, but three major legacies stand out: increasing independence from Britain, deeper engagement with the rest of the world and more multiculturalism at home. It was in the aftermath of these wars that Australia found its voice in international forums - at Versailles and in the formation of both the League of Nations and United Nations.

AWM

After excluding the Chinese, deporting German residents and treating the first Australians as subhuman a century ago, Australia slowly let down the gangplank and after the Second World War began again to welcome large numbers of people from all around the world. While the legal separation from Britain took much longer to achieve - and is still a work in progress - the reaction to the knighting of Prince Philip on Australia Day, 2015, suggests this is a project nearing completion.

At a more prosaic level, one of the greatest media empires the world has ever known can trace its antecedents to the wartime reporting (and political dealmaking) of Sir Keith Murdoch. And it was the wartime experiences of Gough Whitlam that shaped his political agenda that was implemented three decades later, and still upholds the foundations of contemporary Australia.

Not just an intellectual exercise

It is striking that 2015 is the centenary of the Gallipoli offensive, the 70th anniversary of end of the Second World War in the Pacific, and the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This is a good time to reflect not only on the actions of those wars, but on their consequences and their enduring legacies.

The battles are important, but the lessons to be learnt in their aftermath need to be interrogated to explain how we got where we are.

This is essentially an intellectual exercise. Australians generally shy away from such activity, preferring celebration, commemoration and consumption. This year is replete with travel agents offering guided journeys to far-away battle sites (because, apart from Darwin, none of these modern wars occurred on mainland Australian soil), books, films, television series, exhibitions and coins.

The ballot for places to attend the Gallipoli commemoration was massively oversubscribed. The Perth Mint's 99.9% gold Baptism of Fire $5050 coin sold out quickly, but there are still plenty of the 99.9% silver Making of a Nation coins for just $99 and others from the Anzac series. The first episode of Channel Nine's Gallipoli miniseries attracted more than one million viewers before sinking into ratings netherland.

And the Splitters Creek Historical Group still has copies of Corporal Herbert Bensch's colleague's battlefront photo, and the list of many of those who died at Gallipoli 100 years ago.
Corrections: This article previously stated that nearly 39,000 Australian soldiers died on the peninsula a century ago. The correct figure is nearly 9,000, as the Griffith Review article originally stated. That error was inadvertently introduced by The Conversation during the editing process. There was also a reference to "important democratic domains (compulsory voting)". Although Australia had universal franchise (excluding Indigenous people in some states) before the first world war, compulsory voting was only introduced federally in 1924, an error made by the author. Thank you to our readers - especially Ned Johnson and Alfred Venison - for pointing out those errors, and we apologise for not seeing and responding to them sooner. You can read a longer version of this article and others from the Griffith Review's latest edition on the enduring legacies of war here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Great War shaped the foundations of Australia's future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Gallipoli centenary provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the many wartime legacies - human, political, economic, military - that forged independent nations from former colonies and dominions. Over the next fortnight, The Conversation, in partnership with Griffith Review, is publishing a series of essays exploring the enduring legacies of 20th-century wars.