bigger than ANZAC

James Brown is a former Australian soldier who has written a book called "ANZAC's long shadow".

He has pointed out that Australia is planning to spend much more than Britain on memorials of World War 1. He thinks some of this would be better spent to help returning Austrlian soldiers today, rather than what he calls "a festival of the dead, which sometimes looks like a military Halloween."

Not unusually for his generation, he has his religious reference wrong, he means a military All Saint's Day, not the pagan festival for keeping evil spirits away.

I remember the contempt in which Anzac Day was held in the Sixties and Seventies, partly because of the Vietnam war where Australia was fighting at the time. Today the sentiment has swung in the opposite direction, too far in my opinion. I have a hunch that the biggest memorial of all the events during the centenary of the 1914-18 war will not be at the Somme, Ypres, Tannenberg, but at Gallipoli, in particular the ANZAC involvement in that campaign. I think many of the planned memorials in Britain and Europe are concerts or art exhibitions, not actually events at the sites of the battles. On the other hand, many thousands of Australians are planning to visit Gallipoli in 2015.

I think there are a number of reasons for this:

• Australia has been de Christianised. We don't have the tradition of visiting the graves of relatives on All Saints' Day, and Good Friday has become the busiest day of fun during the Easter holidays. People crave a meaningful celebration, and the Anzac Day dawn service has become a secular memorial.
• Countries like Britain and France have much longer histories than Australia. The Great War is significant, but it is only part of their history. However Gallipoli happened only 15 years after the creation of the nation of Australia, so it has become linked with Australian nationalism.
• Gallipoli happened almost 100 years ago, so there is little direct emotion involved for living Australians recalling soldiers they never met. It is not as traumatic as funerals for people we know.
• It happened on the other side of the world, which for Australians automatically gives it more significance. People in Britain and France have spent their lives travelling along the Western Front, so it is not quite as exotic.