Letting go of Anzac

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 2 April 2010

Why do we accord the Anzac story priority over every other aspect of our history? The contemporary focus on Anzac has not been a constant feature of Australian historical thinking.

There has been opposition to the militarism inherent in Anzac Day celebrations at various times since the 1920s and it intensified from the late 1950s. Most of the general histories written during the middle decades of the 20th century paid little attention to Anzac even though many of those historians had served in World War II.

At that time war history was seen as a specialist sub-discipline with little relevance to the mainstream of history.