This year Anzac Day promises to be a subdued celebration with local events in which people who have fought in wars and their relatives can take part. Few will be able to travel to Gallipoli to remember the invasion. The focus of the day will remain rightly on the sorrow of war and not on the heroic achievements of soldiers or on deemed distinctive Australian qualities displayed at Gallipoli. The association of soldiers at Gallipoli with footballers playing their games on Anzac Day will seem not only crass but ridiculous.
With the reality of war in Ukraine daily before our eyes we shall remember with compassion people who died and whose lives were maimed by war with sorrow, and think of war with horror, not excitement. Each day in the media we have seen the destruction in Ukraine of cities, of centuries-old centres of civilization. We see the young soldiers on both sides brought into the conflict and sent back in body bags. We see the columns of refugees leaving Ukraine and read of those forced to stay in cities that are bombed around the clock, where the dead lie frozen in the ice with the living.
As we think back to Gallipoli and the battles in Europe we rightly honour the suffering and the courage of the Australian soldiers who fought there. But we think equally of the grief that spread from the battlefield to the Australian families and rural settlements who lost sons, brothers, fathers and the hopes of growing communities. We think, too, of the families to which soldiers returned, changed for the worse by their experience and sucking joy out of their homes.
Anzac Day also invites us to reflect on the ways in which it subsequently shaped Australian life. It has often been described in grandiloquent terms as the birth of Australia, as the forming of Australian identity and as the expression of such distinctively Australian virtues as mateship, informality and endurance. Such claims recognise the enormous effects that unprecedented travel, the death and injury of so many young Australians, and the self-conscious desire of many Australians to prove their credentials to the rest of the British Empire had on society. The high claims for Anzac Day also reflect the religious imagery in which such a momentous loss of life was described. Australia’s birth was through blood sacrificed on the altar of arms. The events of Gallipoli and the trenches in Europe therefore had a sacred value.
'Anzac Day this year is a time to meditate on war, to honour the suffering and courage of those who have been required to serve in it, to be compassionate to the those who have lost lovers and children, and to feel with those who have lost their humanity through their experience of war.'
The claims made for Anzac Day and the subsequent Australian experience in the Flanders trenches are nevertheless too large and self-serving. Australia was born from a convict fleet, grew through conquest and settlement and became a nation at Federation. The participation in war marked by Anzac Day added layers to the Australian identity, including those of division and sectarianism. In the immediate aftermath it was also seen widely as the strengthening of Australia’s links with the British Empire, not as the creation of a new Australian identity.
Anzac Day was primarily a memorial by participants of death and loss, not of life and a new identity. The risk of the high claims made for it and the derived religious language in which they were set is that war itself will appear to be a noble undertaking. Anzac Day then becomes a celebration of the warrior spirit, the highest expression of the national spirit. Even more dangerously it gives politicians a solemn sacrificial role in committing young men to war, a task often seen as a cause for pride and not as an appalling responsibility.
Anzac Day is not simply a memorial of the past. It speaks to the present and to the world in which we live, encouraging us to attend to the sorrow of later wars in which Australians have taken part — to the divisive Vietnam War, to Iraq and Afghanistan. We see beneath the ceremonial dress, the technology and the honours of war the cost of constantly living in danger, where every farmer and grandmother might be an enemy fighter, and where Australian soldiers are seen as passing like straw in the wind. We see the hurt done to mind and spirit by war, and the cost to a rich humanity.
Anzac Day this year is a time to meditate on war, to honour the suffering and courage of those who have been required to serve in it, to be compassionate to the those who have lost lovers and children, and to feel with those who have lost their humanity through their experience of war. It is a day to swear off all the dystopias that glorify mass destruction and shut out compassion and other human responses.
Anzac is a day to pray for the dead and to grow in compassion for the wounded whom wars leave behind them.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: War veterans wearing medals march during Anzac Day service in Cooroy, Queensland. (Jimbo_Cymru / Getty Images)