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Harry was 18, a knockabout bush larrikin ready to give anything a try. He joined the Second Machine Gun Battalion on 10 February 1915 and landed at Gallipoli on 16 August. For the next four months he, like so many of his fellow soldiers, had an undistinguished, brutalising time, memories of which would stay with him forever.
The hype surrounding the AFL's annual Anzac Day match has reached near-sacred heights. Asking what it means to have football played on Anzac Day is as risky as wondering why the Digger is the most powerful expression of Australian identity.
Although it was a military disaster, the battle of Gallipoli was a defining moment in Australia's history. But that same battle also marked a nation's destruction: a campaign was underway to exterminate the Armenian race.
People have stopped going to church, but they still have an eye for and an expectation of the mystical. At the cinema, spectators, primed by the structures of the cinema itself, enter into a mystical experience with the shadow world being played out before them.
There was a custom for Maori warriors to eat the enemy they killed in battle. This was called long pig because it tastes like pork but the bones are longer.
With Anzac Day over, and the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign just under a decade away, it's time to re-examine, re-frame, and hopefully tame the Anzac legend. You don't need to be an expert to understand that 'Anzac' has a stranglehold over Australian public life.
Many Irishmen volunteered to fight for Britain in the First World War. Others took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent struggle for independence. Like Gallipoli the previous year, the doomed Rising became a legend more powerful than a military success could have been.
Even senior traditional hard men of the Liberal Party like Bill Heffernan and Shane Stone have indicated that it is time to act. It is time for Brendan Nelson to draw the line so that we can move on, committed to reconciliation and improvement in Aboriginal health, education, and life expectancy.
Accepting a peer award recently, Sydney Morning Herald film critic Paul Byrnes declared serious film criticism to be in trouble. 'Much of the public now believes that a great film can't be great unless the box office makes it great.' He has a point.
The proliferation of flags, the singing of national anthems, and the desire to make Anzac Day emblematic of Australian values, all diminish the real humanity of those who have died, in order to allow another generation to inflate its image of itself.
John Carroll's The Existential Jesus affirms a view expressed by Nick Cave that the bloodless, placid Jesus offered by the Church denies Christ his potent, creative sorrow, and the boiling anger that confronts us so forcibly in the Gospel of St Mark.
The Prime Minister has used myths surrounding Gallipoli and racial politics to tap into our felt, but barely understood, craving for belonging. The tenuous nature of our sense of community make us susceptible to the fear campaigns that have dominated Australian politics over the past decade.