At some point, the Anzac story that Australians celebrate each 25 April passed out of history and even beyond legend to become myth.
Myths, almost by definition, do not have a fixed beginning. But in this case there is a convenient, if arbitrary, marker of the change in the national consciousness. In 1983, when his yacht Australia II won the America's Cup, Alan Bond hailed the feat as the greatest Australian victory since Gallipoli.
Bond was obviously hazy about the details of the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. And I am not suggesting that serious historians no longer write about that campaign in accordance with the canons of scholarly research — of course they do.
Nor do I deny that mythmaking began early in the story — indeed, from its very beginning, when Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert, and other war correspondents began filing despatches that distinguished the supposedly bronzed, fit, insouciant and occasionally insubordinate Aussie Diggers from the pale, undernourished and allegedly pusillanimous British Tommies alongside whom they fought.
What Bond's ludicrous misspeaking does indicate, however, is that at least by the 1980s the mythmakers' interpretation of the significance of Gallipoli was dominant in the popular consciousness. Anzac had passed into myth not only because a disastrous defeat had somehow been re-imagined as a glorious victory, but because the heroic strivings of the Diggers had become the benchmark for all other forms of national endeavour.
Does 25 April 1915 really mark the birth of a nation, as so many young people, who march each year wearing their grandfathers' medals, apparently believe? By the bizarre Bond test of what's worth including in the national story, it does.
There is no doubt that Anzac Day has a much stronger emotional resonance for Australians than the official national day, which commemorates the anniversary of British settlement on 26 January 1788. The celebration of Australia Day, like that of Anzac Day, has also been marked by increased popular participation in recent years, despite the inherent conflict in what the anniversary is capable of symbolising: one person's 'settlement' may be another's invasion and dispossession.
But Australia Day has never had, and does not seem likely to attain, the solemn quality that Anzac Day has always had, and which leads many to regard the latter as the 'real' national day.
There is a third option, of course, though it arouses neither the reverential awe associated with Anzac Day nor the conflicted emotions of Australia Day. Indeed, the anniversary of federation on 1 January hardly strikes an emotional chord at all for most Australians, despite the best efforts of historians as different as John Hirst and Clare Wright to remind them what an extraordinary achievement it was.
Australia is not only one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world — the extension of the franchise to women in 1902 made it more fully democratic than the US or the UK could claim to be until several decades later — but it is also that extreme rarity, a nation that achieved unity through peaceful negotiation and the ballot box. No wars or revolutions brought about the federation of the six Australian colonies in 1901 — and that, perversely, is why the event fails to inspire all but a few.
In the decade after federation, Australians had no doubt that their new democracy was a social laboratory and a model for the world. But before another decade had passed that mood of national exultation had been eclipsed by another, which fused mourning for the dead with pride in having survived the ordeal of war.
And so it has remained. The federation narrative of national identity, which arose on these shores and that from the outset included men and women, has been overshadowed by another, martial narrative that until very recently was overwhelmingly masculine, and that takes as its notional beginning Australia's subordinate participation in a military clash on the other side of the world between the British and Ottoman empires.
The notion that the Diggers of Gallipoli and their successors in subsequent wars, heroic though they were, are somehow the paramount exemplars of Australian virtues does not survive scrutiny. Yet that notion will not be subject to much, if any, scrutiny when the young people bedecked in a relative's medals march tomorrow.
Nor is there likely to be any next year, when the centenary of the Gallipoli landings is commemorated. The Anzac myth of national origins has us so firmly in its grip that to question it outside seminar rooms is to play the role of the heretic. Perhaps only those who dissect the myth from within the military tradition, as the former ADF officer James Brown has done in his fine recent book Anzac's Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession, can now do so without courting accusations of disloyalty.
We have a duty to all the nation's dead, however, including those who died before 25 April 1915, to keep asking the questions.
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.
Anzac Day image from Shutterstock