The Many Days of Anzac short film

Australia is full of silent reminders of bravery, of carnage and of loss. 1000s of them dot the landscape. Then once a year, they snap to attention as sights of sacred ritual and remembrance on Anzac Day. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn, At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them. Why is it that this day, above all others, speaks to the national imagination?

The Many Days of Anzac: A history of Anzac commemoration in Australia

For over a century, Australians have been commemorating Anzac Day. How did this tradition start? Why has it lasted so long? Where is it marching towards?

In the early 20th century, Australia is a new nation waiting to find its place in the world.

Prof Frank Bongiorno AM, Australian National University: Australians have federated in 1901, but they've done so peacefully. There was a sense that they'd created a political unit, but the nation still lacked a soul, and that soul would come from fighting in warfare.

Passing the test

Dr Ian Hodges, Department of Veterans' Affairs: Australians were desperate to prove themselves –not so much to prove themselves in battle but to prove themselves worthy Britons, in fact, because most Australians were of British stock.

Frank Bongiorno: It was a particular way of thinking about nationalism as something that's made by men fighting of wars and in any blood sacrifice. These ideas are very powerful for that generation.

Dr Carolyn Holbrook, Historian, Deakin University: So Australia, in 1915, was very much tied to Britain and its sort of British identity, to the empire. It was much more sort of chauvinistic in its attitudes towards women. White Australia was something that was subscribed to by just about every person.

When war is declared in 1914, Australia immediately volunteers to take part.

The young men Australia sends overseas are thrown into battle on April the 25th 1915. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, known as ANZAC, join an Anglo-French invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula as part of a high-risk campaign against Germany's ally, the Ottoman Empire.

Em Prof Bill Gammage AM, Australian National University: First reports about the landing at Gallipoli arrive in late April with a message from the King. And then on the 8th of May with a message from Ashmead-Barton, one of the British war correspondents. Neither of them say what actually happened. They just say there's been a successful landing in Turkey. But it was enough. The celebrations were instantaneous all over Australia.

While their countrymen celebrate, the Anzacs are discovering the reality of war.

Bill Gammage: This war very quickly is no joke. I mean, the papers are saying what a great achievement, the landing at Anzac was, and it was, although the Turks basically won the Battle of the Landing. But far more important, very quickly, was the shock of casualties, the suffering of the wounded, the fact of death all around you, which men had to get used to. The loss of friends.

2,000 Australians are killed or die of their wounds during the first 10 days of fighting at Gallipoli. By the time the Anzacs withdraw 8 months later, in December 1915, a further 6,000 will be dead. When the war ends in 1918, Australia is a different country.

Ian Hodges: Australia had a very small population, I think less than 5 million in 1914. You have 330,000 mostly men going overseas to fight. 60,000 of them didn't come back. And so you're looking at a small country with a small population that suffered a loss that was unprecedented; that nobody was really expecting when it began.

Anzac Day is the byproduct of 2 powerful emotions: the elation of national pride and the sting of private grief.

Beginnings

[25 September 1915] A coffin is carried from Melbourne's St Paul's Cathedral and placed on a gun carriage. This is the first major commemoration of Anzac on Australian soil. It's the funeral of a single soldier. Major General William Throsby Bridges, Commander of the Australian Imperial Force at Gallipoli, is being laid to rest. Shot by a sniper while visiting the front line, the general's body has been returned to Melbourne from the Middle East in a lead-lined coffin.

Prof Bruce Scates, Australian National University: The streets of Melbourne are lined with people who are grieving. It's described as a sea of black. Women are wearing mourning black to signify the loss of their own sons.

The general's remains are taken to Spencer Street Station and then transported to Canberra by train for burial.

Bruce Scates: There are stories of communities coming out of Benalla, at Albury, greeting the train, which is a simple carriage, clad with black crepe, offering their respects, grieving, playing funeral marches, creating a hymn around this soldier, this dead soldier, because he's one of ours who is coming home and he represents the grief of the nation.

General Bridges is finally buried on a hill overlooking the Royal Military College Duntroon, where he'd been the first commandant. He's the only Australian soldier honoured with a hung burial during the war, as government policy normally forbids the return of bodies from war zones. This means the general's funeral is a surrogate ceremony for all the nation's bereaved families.

Just a month after Melbourne's outpouring of grief, Adelaide hosts the first Anzac Day known by that name, but it's far from a solemn occasion.

The organisers of a carnival to celebrate the 8-hour days simply repurposed it as Anzac Day to raise money for the war effort and encourage enlistment.

Bill Gamage: Volunteers marched. Horses with empty saddles marched. Women, in particular, went alongside the marches, raising funds, rattling tins and selling flowers.

Frank Bongiorno: It was all about spectacle. It wasn't a day of mourning. You had the staging of crashes of tram cars. You had people dressed up as prehistoric dinosaurs. It was spectacle. It was celebratory.

While Adelaide celebrates, back at Gallipoli the fighting grinds on.

Many of the first commemorations of Anzacs occur on the battlefield itself. They're conducted by comrades of the dead.

Ian Hodges: They wanted to give men a decent burial. And the Padres worked very hard to make sure that that happened, usually at night. You know, under cover of darkness, burying men when they could. And their mates wanted to know that they'd been buried well, and I'm sure their families did too.

The Anzacs' makeshift graves are marked by wooden crosses made from empty ammunition boxes.

Bruce Scates: They'd also take the tins that carried water across the peninsula. They'd beat that tin and they'd inscribe, quite lovingly, an inscription for that man. So you imagine the labour of that. Etching that man's name, the date of his death, and perhaps a message there.

When the Anzacs finally withdraw, the dead fill the thoughts of the living.

Ian Hodges: You read accounts of, of men saying, you know, I hope they don't hear us as we're marching down the gullies to leave. And one of the Padres sprinkled wattle seeds so he'd leave a bit of Australia, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, on the on the graves.

The Anzacs may have passed their test, but now their families are counting the cost.

Bruce Scates: You actually have these private memorials that are set up in homes, on mantel pieces. The rooms of the men themselves become a kind of shrine. They're actually very fragile assemblies of the pictures of men, the medals of men, the artifacts that are brought home. It could be a comb, it could be a bible. Something that carries a sense of that man. These become the focal point of a kind of shrine that families construct around the memory of that last individual.

If we count as a family, a person's parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family is bereaved by the war. Its impact rolls through the towns and suburbs of Australia like a great wave of grief.

The first Anzac Day

Norma Violet Mowbray is a patriotic and adventurous young woman from Queensland. When war breaks out, she becomes an Army nurse and sails for Egypt. She's working at a hospital near Cairo when the first wounded arrived from Gallipoli. In early 1916, she contracts a mild bronchitis, but within days, her condition worsens. On January the 21st, Staff Nurse Mowbray dies of pneumonia in the same hospital she served in. A few months later, on the first anniversary of Anzac Day, her friends improvised an informal tribute. They visit her grave at the Cairo Military Cemetery and lay a bouquet of flowers. Whether they're in Egypt or back home in Australia, ordinary Australians in 1916 are inventing their own ways to commemorate the Anzac landing.

Bill Gammage: People all over Australia spontaneously celebrated Anzac in what I call spontaneous combustion. People did their own thing. All over Australia. Small towns, even where there were no towns, on separate farms, separate homes, big cities, ships at sea, soldiers abroad. Everyone felt that Anzac was going to be celebrated.

At their camp in Egypt, the men who fought at Gallipoli also mark Anzac's first anniversary.

Ian Hodges: On the first anniversary of the Anzac landing in 1916, the men were given ribbons. A different coloured ribbon for men who'd been at the landing to the men who'd been in the campaign but had arrived later than the landing. And there's a well-known quote, that there were precious few men considering the number who'd landed.

In the morning, a church service is held. In the afternoon, the diggers play sport, swim naked in the Suez Canal, and hold concerts. Writing home, a soldier describes this Egyptian Anzac Day as both a sorrowful and enjoyable day.

The first Anzac Day in 1916 is an international event. 2,000 Australian and New Zealand troops parade through the streets of London. The march is part-commemoration and part-wartime-propaganda exercise orchestrated by Australia's Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Back in Australia, governments are also organising big marches to encourage enlistment and support for the war. In Brisbane, large crowds turnout. While in Sydney, returned Gallipoli veterans and soldiers bound for France marched through the city to attend a service in the Domain.

Dr Darren Mitchell OAM, Historian and Convenor of Sydney Dawn Service: The master of ceremonies for the occasion, asks all people to doff their hats and to remain silent with heads bowed, for approximately one minute. That silence gradually turned into the murmuring at first but then the singing of the standard hymn from Anzac Day, as we know it today, Abide with Me.

From Egypt to London to the small country towns of Australia, the Anzacs are remembered.

Anzac Day is only one year old, and already the contours of commemoration are falling into place, but the actual shape of the day won't be settled nationally for many years.

Bill Gammage: There are many arguments about what should happen on Anzac Day in Australia. Firstly, who should march? Should it only be returned soldiers, or should it be volunteers who haven't yet gone to the war but had volunteered to fight? Where should they march to? Should it be the town hall, or should it be a church? The first years of Anzac occur in an increasingly divided nation. During the war, the economy suffers, wages decline, there are bitter strikes, and as the casualty lists grow, enlistment rates fall. Billy Hughes attempts to make up the shortfall by trying to introduce conscription via 2 referendums. But the voters of Australia reject the idea on both occasions.

Frank Bongiorno: A lot turns on the notion of equality of sacrifice. A sense that some were actually doing rather well out of the war, perhaps even profiteering out of it, and that the bill in both treasure – money – but also in lives, was actually been paid primarily by the common people.

Anzac Day is created at a time of great national conflict, which means it must find a way to unify Australians if it's to grow and develop.

Christian soldiers

Darren Mitchell: Any historian looking to understand what was happening at the time of the emergence of Anzac Day, during the war itself and then throughout the 1920s as some elements of it evolved, has to reckon with the involvement of religious leadership.

Frank Bongiorno: The role of the church is very significant because of the ways in which they helped to craft a kind of – a kind of liturgy for Anzac. They don't control it. They never are able to control what Anzac is about. They're never able to control what is done on Anazc Day. But they do play a very significant role, I think, in devising a lot of the rituals around the day.

The dominant religion in Australia at this time is the Anglican Church, and their clergymen are called upon to create some of the rituals of Anzac.

Darren Mitchell: Yes, there are messages in sermons, and in politicians' speeches, and in the prayers that are given. Of course, there are words there that might sit uncomfortably with those who didn't feel as strongly in their belief or don't believe at all, and that is still the case today. But the core liturgical elements that emerged: the laying of wreaths, the sounding of the bugle, both before and after the silence. Each of those can be made of what you wish to invest in it. And that's the genius of it.

For many Australians, the minute's silence is Anzac Day's most powerful moment.

Darren Mitchell: In a liturgical fashion, that silence is placed between The Last Post and a Reveille. And so if you're a veteran, you will recognise those bugle sounds because they're used in your experience of serving. If you're a churchgoer, you'll be familiar with what message they bring of death and resurrection. But that – they're messages for those who have ears to hear. And what prevails is the quiet, unspoken opportunity for solitude as a mark of respect.

The key Anglican clergy responsible for crafting this liturgy of Anzac, are Canon, David John Garland in Brisbane, well-known as an energetic organiser, and the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, John Wright and his colleague, the Dean of St Andrews, Albert Talbot. Of the 3, 2 served as Padres in the war: Garland in Egypt and Talbot at Gallipoli.

Darren Mitchell: I think the experience of Gallipoli for Talbot and generally as a chaplain for Garland impressed upon them the very significant value of unity. They saw Anzac Day as an opportunity to bring people together.

These Christian soldiers helped fashion an ecumenical Anzac Day that speaks to many Australians. The rules of one church, however, exclude their flock from officially attending a united service.

Darren Mitchell: The Catholics could not attend such a service because it's the Catholic Church's view was that you couldn't have a service of worship outside the church building. And also you couldn't participate in worship together with people who weren't Catholics.

It's not until 1962 that the combined services are truly united. When the RSL successfully negotiates with Sydney's Catholic Cardinal, Norman Gilroy, to ensure that only laymen read the prayers on Anzac Day and no churchman delivers a sermon. As a teenager, Gilroy served as a radio operator on a troopship transporting Australian diggers to the Gallipoli Peninsula. Like other veterans, he has strong memories from the war.

Archival footage of Cardinal Norman Gilroy: And one that grieved me most, that saddened me most, was when night fell, and darkness came on and a hospital ship came by, and we all knew that already there was a big number of our men who had been injured and killed.

The tyranny of distant mourning

In May 1922, King George V makes a famous pilgrimage to the war cemeteries of Belgium and France. On his journey, the king meets a bereaved Australian couple in Belgium. For nearly a century, their names go unrecorded, but we now know they are Frank and Adeline Hannaker from Middle Park in Melbourne. They're searching for the grave of their only child, Bombadier Reginald Edward Hannaker, who was killed in Belgium in November 1917, aged just 19.

Bruce Scates: What many families want is something they can never have. They want to actually stand by the body of the man they have lost.

The long boat trip to Europe or Turkey is arduous and expensive. Most families can't afford.

It's the sense that you must lay a body to rest, and a body can't really be laid to rest until you stand by that grave and pay your respects by that grave. So you get requests from families to the government to subsidise a pilgrimage.

The government rejects these requests as too costly. The pilgrimage to a loved one's graveside remains the preserve of the well-off. But Australia, along with other nations does fund the Imperial War Graves Commission so that the dead can be buried with dignity.

Bruce Scates: One of the most harrowing jobs in 1919 must have been walking across Anzac with that long, thin steel rod, inserting it into the earth to find the obstruction of a decaying body. Then, of course, to exhume that body and lay that body to rest decently. Those bodies are exhumed and they're reburied. And that process is repeated across the Western Front as well. It's gruesome work. It's work that's not completed until really in the late 1920s.

These labours helped to create the vast war cemeteries of Gallipoli, France and Belgium.

Bruce Scates: People talk about the graves being laid out neatly, like the men are still standing in their formations ready to go into battle again.

The new headstones carry a man's name, age, rank and regiment and how he died – killed in action, died of wounds – and if the dead man's family wanted, there's room to add something personal.

Bruce Scates: You may compose the epitaph. We'll charge you for it, of course. We'll charge you threepence halfpenny for every letter and every space between each letter, and we'll set up very strict rules about what you can say. For a start, there'll be a space limit, so you've only got 66 letters to work with.

Many choose phrases made famous by the war, such as ‘For God, King and Country’. Others turned to the Bible for inspiration. Reginald Hannaker's parents choose ‘Greater love hath no man than this that a man may lay down his life for his friends’. Some families compose their own.

‘A soldier and a man. One of Australia's best.’

‘A brave soldier, a loving son, a mother’s sacrifice for duty done.’

‘We speak of you and think of you and miss you every day.’

‘How much of love and light and joy is buried with our darling boy.’

‘Another life lost, hearts broken, for what?’

The monuments movement

In 1914, life looks pretty good for the young Australians lucky enough to live in the Sydney beachside suburb of manly. One of them is Alan David Mitchell, a law student at Sydney University, a keen cricketer and the much-loved son of a prominent Jewish family. But Mitchell leaves all this behind when he joins the AIF in November 1914. On the first day of Gallipoli, Private Mitchell is wounded. He's transported safely to a hospital in Cairo, but dies there of his wounds on May the 5th. Later, his name goes up on the honour roll in Sydney's Great Synagogue.

Rabbi Dr Bejamin Elton, Cheif Minister, The Great Synagogue, Sydney: The leading rabbis of the day encouraged the young men of the community to go out and fight for Britain, fight for Australia, fight for the Empire, and that call was heard in very large numbers. On a sunny Saturday morning in October 1916, the Governor-General and his wife arrive in Manly to unveil one of the first war memorials built in New South Wales. A crowd of 5,000 people have turned out to greet the Vice-Regal couple. The memorial is a solid granite column 10 m tall. It's been paid for by Alan Mitchell's grieving family. The memorial carries the names of all the dead from Manly.

In 1917, the people of Thirroul, a coastal town south of Sydney, set about raising money for a war memorial. Thirroul knows what it wants: a statue of a digger. Local tradesmen give their skills for free, local merchants donate cement.

Will Lee, Vice President of Austinmer-Thirroul RSL sub-branch: Initially, the quote was for 230 pounds to have the memorial completed. The locals had actually raised 183 pounds so they were around about 40 pounds short. So, on the unveiling day, the locals whipped 'round hat, and they actually got the extra 40 pounds that was necessary to finish the memorial.

The main donation collector is Mrs Margaret Riach, known to all as Granny Riach.

Will Lee: She just kept going around and around and around. She stirred the community and made them want to have it and made them hand over their small donations.

At this time, women aren't encouraged to get involved in the building of memorials, but there's no stopping Granny Riach. On Anzac Day 1920, she leads the procession to unveil the monument. The entire town turns out to take part.

Will Lee: There are not many of those names on there that are local names anymore. However, the community still comes down here. It's amazing to see. People just walking over to the memorial and just looking and taking it all in.

Throughout the 1920s, Australian communities – both large and small – right across the country, built 1000s of memorials. Reminders set in stone about the sacrifices of war.

Laidley, Queensland; Braidwood, New South Wales; Albany, Western Australia; Bunbury, Western Australia; Redfern, New South Wales; Kew, Victoria; Forest Hill, Queensland; Katanning, Western Australia; Melbourne, Victoria; Perth, Western Australia; Ballarat, Victoria.

Insiders and outsiders

In the 1930s, a memorial to the Great War is built in Sydney's Callan Park by former soldiers who fought in World War I. It's designed by an Aboriginal veteran whose birth name is never officially recorded. As a child, he is orphaned in a North Queensland frontier massacre. In the wake of this tragedy, a Sydney couple, the scientist Robert Grant and his wife Elizabeth, remove him from his Country. Eventually, the Grants adopt the boy. They name him Douglas. Though officially not allowed to join the Army due to their race, over 1,000 Indigenous men served during World War I.

Douglas Grant is one of them. He marches as a soldier at Sydney's 1916 Anzac Day. Grant fights on the Western Front, is captured and becomes a prisoner of war. When he gets home, he suffers discrimination, struggles with his mental health and becomes a heavy drinker. At an Anzac Day in the 1940s, Grant encounters an old friend at Sydney's Domain.

Archival audio of Roy Kinghorn, World War I veteran: I saw Douglas standing very dejectedly under a tree. I went across and I said, ‘Come on, Douglas. Hop in.’ ‘Oh no’, he said, ‘No, I'm not wanted anymore.’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, you are. On a day like this, Douglas, everybody wants you.’ ‘Oh, I think I'm better out here. I think I'm better out. I don't belong. I don't belong.’

Grant is eventually persuaded to join the ranks of his fellow veterans. On this one day of the year, the outsider becomes an insider. Douglas Grant dies just a few years later.

In its early decades, Anzac Day is dominated by a certain type of veteran: the returned man. A soldier who fought overseas. They see themselves as the custodians of the Anzac tradition, and set up returned servicemen's organisations to protect their legacy.

Dr Rebecca Wheatley, Australian National University: It's secret men's business. So it's the stories of war. It's what they did when they were on the battlefields. It's those kinds of things that want to be talked about and celebrated on Anzac Day.

Between the wars, the largest group of Australians relegated to the outer edge of commemoration are women.

Rebecca Wheatley: The organisers of Anzac Day instruct Melbourne women: Do not come to the dawn service; this belongs to men. This is a men's space. And it's actually described that others being their robs the day – ‘rob’ is the word that they use – robs Anzac Day of its meaning.

The Argus, 4 May 1938: WOMEN AT THE DAWN SERVICE

SIR,– I cannot understand why women will persist in being present at the Dawn Service at the Shrone on Anzac Day, after being publicly asked to stay away.

Yours, N. OSBOURNE. Brighton Beach

The Argus, 7 May 1938: WOMEN AT THE DAWN SERVICE

SIR,– It would be better to have no service if our men are lacking in chivalry. It is 20 years since my brother was mortally wounded in France. Why should I be "not wanted"?

Yours, MARGARET GROOM. North Carlton.

In other parts of the country, women establish their own rituals and sites of commemoration. In South Australia, they raise money to create a Women's War Memorial Garden.

Rebecca Wheatley: And they build this beautiful memorial in the middle of Adelaide, and it's designed to be reminiscent of a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery. There's a Cross of Sacrifice. There's a Stone of Remembrance. There's beautiful manicured lawns. And it's really so that the women of Adelaide can go to this memorial, to this parkland, and have an imagined journey of sorts. They, most of them are not going to be able to go to France or Belgium or Gallipoli. So in this memorial that women build, they are able to mourn and grieve their loved ones.

In Sydney, women acquire a champion: the formidable Mary Booth, one of the first Australian women to qualify as a doctor. During the war, Booth supports conscription, and works tirelessly for war widows. In peacetime, she becomes a powerful advocate for the inclusion of women in the Anzac story.

Rebecca Wheatley: In theory, Mary Booth is on the periphery. She is a woman. She can't take place in those traditional Anzac Day commemorations but that doesn't deter her. She sees that as an opportunity to create her own traditions, her own rituals, so that Australian women are part of this story as well. So she leads Anzac pilgrimages to the gates at Woolloomooloo and women place their floral wreaths on the gates there as a service, in honour of their loved ones. This is the last place they saw them before they went to war, and their farewells happened here.

The Anzac dawn service is without a doubt a signature event on the Australian calendar. Every year, Australians rise before daybreak and gather at the time of day that the original Anzacs landed in Turkey. The ceremony is a theatrical, cathartic and very Australian. And at its heart is the story of a grieving woman, or so the story goes.

Darren Mitchell: On Anzac Eve in 1927, a number of veterans of the First World War were returning home from an Anzac Eve gathering and witnessed an elderly woman attempting to lay a wreath of flowers on the Cenotaph. And so they sought to help her place that sheaf of flowers and the soldiers went away from that experience of wreath-laying and silence and a woman's grief, committed to wanting to replicate that occasion in the future. Now that origin story, whether it's the truth or not, what we do know is true is that the first dawn service officially is held at Sydney's Cenotaph in Martin Place in 1928.

Throughout the 1930s, the dawn service becomes exceptionally popular right across the nation. Anzac Day is now deeply embedded in the Australian way of life. By 1927, Anzac Day is a public holiday in every state and from the 1930s, it's broadcast by the ABC each year on the radio.

Another war

Caleb Shang is a Chinese Australian veteran of the Western Front, where his bravery is rewarded with a swathe of medals.

Like Douglas Grant, Shang is not technically allowed to enlist because of his race. But like 200 other Australians of Chinese heritage, he manages to sign up. When he arrives home in Cairns in 1919, 1000s come to the docks to welcome him as a hero. Shang is a modest man, and for the next 2 decades, chooses not to march on Anzac Day. And in 1943, he changes his mind.

An increase in racism during the Second World War concerns Shang, and he marches to make a point about it to his local community. Like his fellow Australians, Caleb Sheng understands that Anzac Day is a powerful force in Australian culture.

During the Second World War, Anzac Day becomes a rallying point at a time of national danger. Labor Prime Minister John Curtin draws on Anzac when he opens the Australian War Memorial in 1941. Less than a month before Pearl Harbor.

Archival footage of John Curtin: And war memorial is a treasure house containing the records of what occurred 25 years ago, so is it to be a treasure house for all that takes place in the struggle in which we are now engaged.

In 1942, with the Japanese on Australia's doorstep, Anzac marches are curtailed, but otherwise it's commemorated all throughout the war. At home, in combat zones, even in prisoner-of-war camps. When Australians returned from the Second World War, they add new names to the old monuments and settle into a life of peace. Many communities choose to build usable reminders of war, such as memorial swimming pools.

Television extends the commemoration of Anzac into the living rooms of Australia. The ABC conducts its first live broadcast of Anzac Day in Hobart in 1957.

Archival ABC reporter: The children who lay these wreaths are the generation for whom the sons of Anzac fought.

By 1965, it's broadcasting Anzac Day live across the nation. But to some Australians, the traditions of Anzac look out of date.

Archival footage: Gentlemen, it is necessary that we honour the memory of several of our departed comrades. In accordance with our usual custom, I'll ask you to observe a few moments silence. Lest we forget. Thank you, gentlemen.

Cracks begin to appear in Australia's respect for Anzac.

Carolyn Holbrook: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, children of the First World War veterans and even children of the Second War World War veterans started to question some of the sort of values associated with the Anzac legend.

Archival footage of a Melbourne Theatre Company 1986 production of The One Day of the Year: Well, more credit to them. That's what I say. More credit to them. They got up there; they dug in. Yes, great credit to them if you happen to see any credit in men wasting their lives. That's war. That's any war. Yes, and as long as men like you are fools enough to say that – accept that –they'll always be wars. You're trying to drag it down.

Written in 1958, Alan Seymour's play, The One Day of the Year, dramatises the conflict between a veteran and his radical son. Though controversially rejected by the Adelaide Festival in 1960 for being anti-Anzac, it goes on to become an Australian classic.

The post-war boom in immigration means fewer Australians have a direct connection with the Anzac tradition. And increasingly, young Australians regard Anzac Day as simply old-fashioned. Some commentators begin to argue that when the Anzac generation finally dies, Anzac Day will die with them. In 1965, the RSL commemorated the 50th anniversary of Anzac by organising a Gallipoli pilgrimage for 300 veterans of the original landings. At dawn, the old diggers reenact their famous arrival on the shores of Gallipoli. They are welcomed by Turkish officials and veterans and an unexpected group: 4 Australian backpackers who have hitchhiked from London. In the decades to come, this vanguard of young Anzac pilgrims will be followed by multitudes.

Regeneration

The resurgence of Anzac begins with a chance meeting at the Australian War Memorial. As a schoolboy, the future historian Bill Gammage is visiting with his parents when he is introduced to one of the war memorial's librarians.

Bill Gammage: And the librarian got talking. He was leaning on this old grey metal filing cabinet, and he casually opened it and pulled out a letter and read a bit of it and it was a letter from a soldier in the First World War. And he said that that whole cabinet, and a whole row of such cabinets, contain letters from First World War soldiers. I was still at school, but I never forgot those letters.

A few years later, when Gammage begins to study this treasure trove of lost stories, the Vietnam War is still popular in Australia.

Archival footage of ABC reporter: 300,000 people welcome them home and 1000s more watch from office buildings, showering the veterans with confetti.

By the time Gammage publishes his work on these letters, public opinion has largely turned against Australia's involvement in Vietnam.

Bill Gammage: My book, The Broken Years, came out in 1974, and it had quite an impact. And why it had that impact, I think, was because it spoke about the experiences of soldiers and that struck a chord with my generation. These were young men, the same age as us, basically. And people wrote in to me, wrote letters mainly in those days, and said, 'They're just like us, just like us.'

Carolyn Holbrook: Bill's called The Broken Years an emotional history of the First World War, which I think is a really nice way of describing what he did and he was really pioneering in shifting our perspective to that human perspective of the war.

Later, Gammage is an advisor on Peter Weir's masterpiece, Gallipoli. The film was released to critical acclaim and box office success in 1981.

Archival footage of the AFI Awards 1982: Peter Weir for Gallipoli.

It resonates with Australian audiences because it reframes Anzac as a story about the terrible costs of war.

Bill Gammage: The film doesn't really tell you much about the Anzac campaign. I mean, you don't know who won. You don't know who's, how it started. It's about the experience of 2 young men who finish up in this terrible place called Gallipoli. And it's unavoidably, in consequence, a tragedy.

The image of diggers drinking in the streets on Anzac Day is replaced in the public's mind by the image of doomed young men going off to war. As this new narrative of Anzac asserts itself, Prime Minister Bob Hawke recognises its growing popularity and embraces it.

Archival footage of Bob Hawke: This place Gallipoli is, in one sense, a part of Australia. We have not come in order to dedicate this place. It is already sacred because of the bravery and the bloodshed of the Anzacs.

In 1990, his government funds another pilgrimage back to Gallipoli for 52 veterans now aged between 93 and 104 to mark the 75th anniversary. Hawke travels with the old soldiers. The trip is a huge success. And for the first time, a Gallipoli dawn services is broadcast by the ABC live back to Australia. In the decades to come, these pilgrimages grow in popularity.

Archival footage of Australian tourists at Gallipoli in 1995: Just to think about what the man did here. It's very moving. Very sad. Just come to think that they came and tried to climb that, against someone shooting at them.

More and more, Anzac Day is commemorated around the world.

Archival footage of a veteran in Vietnam on Anzac Day in 1995: Veterans should come back and see Vietnam. It becomes Vietnam, the country, rather than Vietnam, the war.

Archival footage of an Anzac Day dawn service in East Timor in 2000: As the sun rises this day, as it did on the first Anzac Day.

Archival footage of an Australian in London on Anzac Day in 2004: It's good just to see how many people have actually turned up and so early. It shows it's a good, a lot of pride.

Archival footage of Anzac Day in Afghanistan in 2009.

Archival footage of an Australian in Gallipoli in 2010: When I came to Anzac Day, I knew it was going to be very emotional for me. It spiritually connected me to my grandfather.

Archival footage of Anzac Day in Antarctica in 2020.

Anzac without Anzacs

In 1993, the remains of an unknown World War I soldier are interred at the Australian War Memorial. Along with General Bridges, this anonymous digger is the only Australian soldier killed overseas in the First World War to be honoured with a grave on home soil.

Archival footage of Australian prime minister Paul Keating in 1993: The unknown Australian soldier we inter today was one of those who by His deeds proved that real nobility and grandeur belongs not to empires and to nations, but to the people on whom they in the last resort always depend. That is surely at the heart of the Anzac story. The Australian legend which emerged from the lore. It's legend not of sweeping military victories so much as triumphs against the odds, of courage and ingenuity in adversity. It is a legend of free and independent spirits, whose discipline derived less from military formalities and customs than from the bonds of mateship and the demands of necessity. It is a democratic tradition, the tradition in which Australians have gone to war ever since.

Even though the speech is a great success, Paul Keating spends much of his time in power trying to redirect the attention of Australians away from Gallipoli and towards what he considered to be more important events, such as the war against Japan in the Pacific.

Paul Bongiorno: Keating elevated the Pacific War, and that was a part of an agenda about engagement with Asia. It was a part of an agenda about the Republic. Australia standing on its own 2 feet, fighting to defend itself, not predominantly fighting for the British Empire.

Archival footage of Paul Keating speaking in the Pacific: This was the place where I believe the Australian nation, the depth and soul of the Australian nation, was confirmed.

Carolyn Holbrook: He continued during his prime ministership, this whole effort to shift the balance of Anzac commemoration from Gallipoli and the First World War toward Kokoda and the Second World War. So it was the most brazen, crazy brave attempt by an Australian prime minister to completely shift the basis of Australia's most sort of precious and prized iconography. And it was a failure. It didn't work.

For most of the 20th century, Australian prime ministers from both sides of politics take a low-key approach to Anzac.

Carolyn Holbrook: So really, from Hughes until Hawke, you could say that Australian prime ministers really took a backseat. There are a few trips from various prime ministers who travelled over to check the soldiers' graves were being well tended, but basically the prime ministers are very hands-off. I interviewed Malcolm Fraser, and he told me that when he was prime minister, if he'd gotten on a plane and flown to Gallipoli for Anzac Day, people would have said, ‘What on earth is Fraser doing?’

But not anymore. Nowadays, prime ministers and young Australian backpackers share a common rite of passage: attendance at an Anzac dawn service overseas.

Carolyn Holbrook: What's happened, I think, is that it's become so ubiquitous, and the numbers of people coming to things like dawn services have just grown so much, and it's become the most potent and popular brand in Australia that no politician dares to fiddle with it.

Australians are quick to defend the Anzac brand.

Carolyn Holbrook: Because it's sacred. It's sacred, like a religion, so people are very protective of it. And if they get a sense that people are using it for commercial gain, they get very upset about it. Even the errant use of social media can generate a disproportionate response. In 2017, a young Australian writer and social advocate was pilloried for using Anzac Day to draw attention to refugee rights on a Facebook post.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied: LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)

Archival footage from ABC's Q&A tv show on 1 May 2017: Tanya Plibersek, we've seen a lot of criticism of Yasmin Abdel-Magied, about her comments on Anzac Day. What do you say? I think it's, it's a sombre day. It's not a day for making broad political comment. But she has apologised, and I think that should be an end to it.

Daily Mail: Abdel-Magied's announcement she is MOVING TO THE U.K. after series of controversies

Anzac Day is now so sacred that there are consequences for anyone perceived to be disrespecting its memory. By the end of the 20th century, the Anzac generation is all but gone.

In 1998, Mary Marshall, believed to be the last surviving Australian nurse to serve in the Great War, dies at the age of 103. She is allowed to have an Australian flag draped over her coffin, but her family are not offered a state funeral.

Archival ABC news reporter, Hobart, 24 May 2002: With a soldier's farewell, Alec Campbell was sent on his final journey along the route of Hobart's Anzac Day Parade, the path he's travelled so many times before.

Then in 2002, Alec Campbell, Australia's last Anzac, passes away, also at the age of 103. He's given a state funeral.

Archival footage of Australian prime minister John Howard: We thank Alec Campbell, and we thank his generation for all that they gave to Australia.

Frank Bongiorno: I think the significance of the passing of the First World War generation is that, yes, it did allow politicians to impose national meanings on Anzac in a much more deliberate and effective way. I think it's also true that the Returned and Services League, the RSL, had also seen Anzac as very much a part of their property and Anzac Day as their ritual. And their political power certainly was reduced by the time we get to the year 2000.

Modern Anzac

In 1982, Anzac Day at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance becomes the site of controversy when 5 gay veterans set out to break a taboo.

Stuart Martin: Air Force veteran and member of DEFGLIS: They just came up to lay a wreath to remember gay veterans who died and served before them and for them as well, and they were refused by Bruce Ruxton [President, Victorian RSL 1979–2002]. And some Shrine guards wouldn't let, allow them to lay a wreath. And he basically had been removed from the Shrine. He was quite homophobic. His words were something like, ‘There were no poofters in the Army in my time so why should we let them lay a wreath?’ So he's basically saying that, ‘It's my Anzac Day; no one else's’.

40 years later, rainbow wreaths are laid at war memorials around Australia and no one, it seems, wields an umbrella in protest.

Since its regeneration in the 1980s, Anzac has also become more open.

Archival footage of Anzac Day in Redfern in 2007: For the first time, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders march to honour Indigenous veterans for their contribution. Organisers said they held a separate service because, too often, Indigenous diggers were ignored.

On Anzac Day in 2007, Sydney's Aboriginal community organised their own coloured diggers' march to draw attention to the war service of Indigenous people. By 2017, Indigenous veterans are invited to lead the march in Canberra for the first time.

Archival footage of Anzac Day in Canberra in 2017: I just thought that I never live to see this day, and how lovely it is. It's about time us diggers, some of us got a bit of recognition. You know, we haven't had much in the past.

Carolyn Holbrook: There's an old saying that if you want things to stay the same, things will have to change. So I think that's one way of looking at what's happening with Anzac. If the government and other people want the Anzac mythology to stay very popular and powerful, they have to expand it and they have to bring other people in.

Anzac Day is no longer purely a soldier's day. The distinction between outsiders and insiders is blurred. Increasingly, it seems a family day.

Rebecca Wheatley: The march we have today is a very different kind of march. It is made up of many descendants. You know, we have people in replica uniforms. We have children wearing medals. It creates a very different kind of atmosphere to the marches that took place in the 1920s, you know. Some would say it's sentimental and celebratory compared to some of the marches that we saw earlier in the century.

Survival

Mark Twain once said, ‘History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes’. And today, history is rhyming.

Over a century after General Bridges' re-burial, another soldier from the Great War is on the move. Raukkan, an Aboriginal community near the mouth of the Murray in South Australia, is welcoming home one of its long-lost sons, a man named Miller Mack. Mack fought on the Western Front and returned to Australia in 1919, already ill with tuberculosis. He died later that year and was buried in a pauper's grave in Adelaide. Decades later, Mack's family discovers where he's buried, and today at their instigation, he's returning to Country. Like their fellow Australians over 100 years ago, these 21st-Century Australians are creating new rituals of remembrance.

If Anzac Day is to survive, it must continue to adapt and change, maybe in unexpected ways.

Rebecca Wheatley: Young Australians are finding their way to an Anzac story in different ways. That multicultural Australia is claiming a stake in Anzac Day. You know that we have stories of Turkish soldiers. We have stories of Chinese Australians enlisting in the war. So we're being able to pull in these threads and make Anzac something that is far more inclusive and that many more Australians feel they can take a part in.

Bill Gammage: I would continue the dawn service as a local event. For example, in the COVID years, people were encouraged to, in the street, to have their own little ceremonies. In our street, a young fellow across the road from me played The Last Post and Reveille at dawn and just a small group of people gathered. I'd like to think of that all over Australia. Then for the march, I'd say only returned people could march. Only returned people. And then the day would come, I would hope, when they'd be the last person – one person – marching. The last survivor, as it were. And I'd say what a great day that would be. The last Anzac march. The last survivor. Because it would mean we'd been at peace for a long while, and that's what those men in the First World War were fighting for.

Anzac is not one story; it's the weaving together of many stories. And today, every Australian is welcome on Anzac Day. And during the hush of the minute's silence, every Australian is free to consider what the Anzac story means to them. This is the simple and profound truth about Anzac. Lest we forget.