Australian troops landing at Gallipoli, 1915 
 

But the band plays Waltzing Matilda, and the old men still answer the call,
But as year follows year, more old men disappear,
Someday no one will march there at all One of the many paradoxes of Anzac Day is that its most prolifically recorded paean – Eric Bogle’s And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda -- presages its demise. When first strummed out in 1972, the conclusion that "Someday no one will march there at all" evinced a bittersweet recognition that a national tradition was dying. Scholars, artists, commentators and veterans themselves had assumed, by the late 1960s, that falling attendances at Anzac ceremonies heralded the swan-song of Australian war commemoration. Surely, with the death of the last Great War veterans and the historical distance growing with every generation, Anzac Day had an expiry date?
Not at all. Far from falling out of public relevance, Anzac Day has taken on new social and political significance in Australian and New Zealand public life, reaching new heights as we mark the Anzac centenary on April 25. Gallipoli: a heroic disaster On that day in 1915, some 16,000 troops, made up mostly of men from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps or ANZAC, landed on the west coast of the Gallipoli Peninsula as part of a wider Allied campaign. It was a dawn landing redolent of another invasion across the Aegean in a different age: the flowering youth of the British Empire storming the alabaster ramparts of olden Troy. It was a comparison which contemporary writers were delighted to make, to set Edwardian hearts racing.
Certainly the scope and aims of the campaign were impressive. The British had drawn up plans for a massive naval and amphibious assault which would knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, weakening the central powers and hastening aid to a beleaguered Russia. It was a campaign emblematic of “the Great War for Civilisation”: the clash of empires, as French and British colonial troops filled the assault ranks. The Welsh and Irish had made a spirited attack the months before the Anzacs’ arrival; Indians and West Africans would come later as casualties necessitated more men; Sikhs, Ghurkhas, and indigenous units arrived too, including Maori and Kanaks from far-flung Polynesia.
Yet a bungling leadership and, more importantly, a ferocious enemy, doomed the campaign to failure. The Ottomans, “Europe’s dying old man”, were given new teeth with their own imperial array – Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and German officers. There was to be no quick end to the Great War: instead after tens of thousands dead and many more wounded at Gallipoli, the conflict would continue to grind away lives for another four years.
If this was the reality of Gallipoli, then why the solemn persistence of the national remembrance of Anzac Day? To many observers within and without the Anzac nations, this phenomenon is a perplexing one.
 

Crowds of Australians and New Zealanders have gathered at Gallipoli in recent years. Photo:AAP
A new generation embraces Anzac Since 1926 (in Australia) and 1936, when Anzac Day was formally established as a national day of observance, many Australian and New Zealand communities had gathered to mark the anniversary of the landing and commemorate those who lived and died on the red ochre shores of Gallipoli. But it was a community focus, assisted by military institutions which the citizen-solider had made so central to civic life, and protected in the stewardship of the RSL and RSA. At the fiftieth anniversary of Anzac in 1965, there was no extraordinary national commemoration; only a handful of veterans who had to pay their way to Turkey, with no audience save for a few scruffy backpackers who happened to be visiting at the same time. It was a private journey, without the weight of a national ceremony.
Today, the difference couldn’t be starker. The Australian federal Government is orchestrating a bewildering array of educational and cultural programs for the centenary: a dedicated travelling exhibition; digitisation of repatriation records to tie family history to Australia’s military past; the commissioning of art exhibitions, symphonies, and theatre plays.
The programme is underpinned with significant financial resources: $100,000 was distributed to each federal electorate to help local projects fill the gaps in federal and state programs. As James Brown notes in his recent book, Anzac’s Long Shadow, detailing the extent to which Anzac Day has become a global industry, Australia will outspend the United Kingdom on the commemoration of the Great War by more than 200 percent, totalling some $325 million state and federal tax dollars. Factoring in estimated private and corporate donations, that sum rises to half a billion.
The New Zealand Government, on a smaller but no less determined scale, is organising a week of commemorative events in the nation’s capital. Television and radio programmes about Australian and New Zealand wartime experience, including TV interstitial, vignettes, and on-board flight videos, will ensure saturation at home and abroad.
The conflation of past and present in the “Anzac spirit” reached a special apotheosis when in December 2014, during a joint press conference, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and New Zealand Prime Minister John Key announced that the two nations would engage in a joint military operation against Islamic State. The emotional and rhetorical power of a modern Anzac military expedition to the Middle-East, to a backdrop of the centenary Program, is descriptive of dramatic transformation of Anzac in the life of the two nations.
The culmination of the Centenary programme is the commemorative service at Anzac Cove itself. The dawn service was expected to provoke so much interest that the Australian and New Zealand governments organised a lottery to limit the number of attendees. Ten thousand Australians and New Zealanders are expected to fill the seats of the commemoration on April 25. Most of these modern day pilgrims are young people, a generation not only totally removed from the experience of war like no other since 1915, but also written off as irreligious, Gen Y narcissists who vote Green and care only for the latest iPhone. A spirit which accommodates all Why the identification with that bygone age when King George V was fidei defensor and Emperor of India? Perhaps, as some remark, it is because Gallipoli offers Australians and New Zealanders their place in world history; a chance to bask in the sun of global interest, and to stake their claim in the moral order. Anzac also offers heroism in a hero-less age -- with stories of self-sacrifice, friendship, and pluck, amid whizzing sniper fire and festering heat -- in a daily news cycle dominated by celebrity and the superficial.
Other scholars have called Anzac the cult of victimhood, whereby the Anzacs are re-imagined and refashioned into the fresh faced, blue eyed farm boys of Peter Weir’s 1981 film, Gallipoli, and most recently the television series of the same name: the Anzacs as victims of war, rather than its perpetrators.
For many who attend Anzac Cover, Gallipoli is about family. Medals, shrapnel, diaries, are handed down as family relics; part of genealogies which entwine the personal and familial with the societal and global. For some, this is where history in a sense begins, as stories are told of a great grandfather meeting a great grandmother while recovering from wounds in a hospital in Britain, and of families sprung from a serendipitous meeting between solider and nurse -- hope born amid the horror of war.
Or is it elsewhere that we should locate the significance of Anzac? Is Anzac an easier history to stomach than one of colonial dispossession closer to home? A narrative of bravery and pride, albeit in the ruins of defeat, contrasts favourably with more uncomfortable truths of land wars with indigenous peoples, “Invasion Day”, and the Stolen Generation. It is certainly a boon to politicians who can wax theological on a topic of public interest, universally supported by the electorate and raised above partisan complaint.
Remembrance is complex because it entails forgetting: the public imagination can only fit so much, which has implications for truth and the historical record. We only have to look at the eagerness of the Turkish government to accommodate the Anzac centenary, all the better to forget that other far harder centenary, the Armenian Genocide.
The significance of Anzac is therefore as ambiguous as the spirit which it invokes; revealing incongruencies between past and present, history and myth.
Yet on April 25, throngs of Kiwis and Australians, myself among them, will mark the heroism and humanity of men who went away to war one hundred years ago – some to fight for God, some for King, some for Country, and some for just a bit of adventure. The Anzacs would likely have been baffled by all the fuss made by these dubious youths, but in an age of cynicism, in which the search for meaning is so often vapid and kitsch, we grasp for something transcendent. Surely that’s something to celebrate. Rowan Light hails from New Zealand and is studying history at the University of Auckland. He is attending the Anzac Centenary celebrations at Gallipoli.