AUSTRALIA
The Age
April 22, 2012
Opinion
Paul Daley
Few countries are much good at exploring their darker sides. We wait for ugly boils to surface and lance them in the hope they won’t recur, long before we look for the causes.
The great social injustices of Australia’s recent past fit awkwardly with the way we’d define ourselves as a nation. We have found that definition in Anzac because the legend – of the supposedly egalitarian digger and of endurance – is an easily adaptable metaphor to our sport, the arts and politics.
Many historians and social observers in the 1960s and ’70s predicted the Anzac myth and legend would decline in cultural influence as the men of the 1st Australian Imperial Force became extinct. But the reverse may actually have happened as they become more idealised.
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