Anzac
-
Australian war artist George Washington Lambert wanted the fallen to be remembered as they were in life. In Gallipoli's waste land he found, springing out of the ground, the perfect symbols of youth and sacrifice, of death and renewal, of the squalor and the glory of war and the debt owed to nature
May 3, 2024
13 mins
-
Given the attacks on Australia Day, ANZAC Day now stands alone as an occasion for remembrance and respect. But for how much longer, given querulous politicians' seeming eagerness to bow before the Left elite's zeal for tearing down statues, denigrating revered institutions and shredding the very fabric of Australia's conception of its past and, indeed, of itself
April 5, 2024
6 mins
-
Sixty years after the sinking, the sole surviving Japanese sailor recalled how, amid the screams, he heard Australian prisoners trapped in the hold singing Auld Lang Syne as the ship went down, the indomitable Australian spirit of yesteryear sustaining them as the disaster snuffed out 1,053 lives
April 25, 2023
8 mins
The latest
-
This week marks another year since waves of Diggers left their Gallipoli trenches and were immediately cut down by Turkish machine guns, a scene best known from the climactic moments of Peter Weir's 1981 film. That, however, is fiction. The truth about the attack, the slaughter and the heroism, is even more horrifying
August 8, 2022
8 mins
-
Long before he won the appointment he coveted as Australia's official war correspondent, Bean had travelled, understood and wrote about life in the bush. It was an environment that didn’t encourage hierarchy or servility, but bred instead the stoicism, egalitarianism and mateship that he was to locate at the core of the Anzac spirit
April 25, 2022
16 mins
-
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we forgetApril 25, 2020
7 mins
-
James Hurst's magisterial 'The Landing in the Dawn: Dissecting a Legend' leaves open the possibility that genuine victory – that is, capturing the paramount heights – was notionally possible. Had the John Monash of 1917 and 1918 been in command, Gallipoli might have been a very different story
April 25, 2019
9 mins
-
All who could, on both sides of my family, volunteered for the world wars, inspired not by jingoist sentiment but personal duty. Despite what its detractors and the academic revisionists would have us believe, Anzac Day honours such service and sacrifice, not shallow triumphalism
April 25, 2019
4 mins
-
One species’ bedlam can be endured, as those attending the Dawn Service managed to do when the rookery came alive. And the other? No matter how loudly they howl and sneer and posture for each other's approval, there is nothing worth hearing in such a parade of hollow virtue and empty souls
April 25, 2018
5 mins
-
If Angus Campbell’s objection is that bloodthirsty iconography offends a puritanical soul -- or a politically correct one, in the case of Defence Minister Marise Payne -- then his directive is an indulgence that damages morale while lifting the spirits of those bent on emasculating the armed forces
April 24, 2018
4 mins
-
Immune to the plagues of hack academics that annually erupt to deplore what they insist is Anzac Day's celebration of militarism, racism, sexism, you-name-it-ism, there towers the figure of the man who, more than any other general, brought the slaughter to an end
April 23, 2016
11 mins