Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia's Multiculturalism?

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Rebecca Cross and Associate Professors Emma Waterton and Elaine Stratford for their thoughtful comments and direction on the manuscript. Thank you to Professor Chris Gibson for the opportunity to contribute to the Thinking Space series.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The stand-out exception to this observation is Prime Minister Keating (1991–96). Keating still focused on war commemoration as central to Australian national identity, but he sought to shift the focus from Anzac and Gallipoli—which he saw as anti-Republican and thus heavily linked to Britain—towards Kokoda, and Australia's role in the Pacific.

2 Bean was also the driving force behind the establishment of the Australian War Memorial.

3 Tess Lea (2014) reminds us that Darwin was indeed the first Australian city to endure a foreign attack. During the Second World War, 64 Japanese raids were undertaken on Darwin and its harbour as well as 33 raids on other places in Northern Australia, including Broome. There were an estimated 900 deaths from targets on land and in the sea. While not discounting the significance of this foreign incursion, it was very different in scale to that experienced by post-Second World War migrants from major European metropolises.

4 My narrative pertains to white Australia, post-European settlement. Seldom acknowledged, and largely without any memorialising, is the massacre of Indigenous peoples on their own territory through colonisation that Reynolds (2013) has termed the forgotten war, the Frontier War.

5 Wellings (2014) argues that the outspoken critics of policies for diverse immigration such as Geoffrey Blainey and Pauline Hanson quelled the notion that multiculturalism could define Australia as a national identity. The defeat of the 1999 referendum for a republic suppressed republicanism, while controversy surrounding the 1988 Bicentennial of European colonisation and the ongoing resistance of the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments to apologise to Indigenous Australians for the dispossession of their land mollified reconciliation as a marker of Australian national identity.