THE Anzac legend has been found wanting because it is too militaristic, too white and lacks gender diversity, according to what passes for the intelligentsia in Australia.
On the eve of the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli this week, leftist cultural warriors have been upping the tempo of their attacks on the “Anzac myth”.
■ Historian Joan Beaumont declares Anzac is “the last hurrah of the white Australian male”.
■ ABC Radio National presenter David Rutledge claims there are “strong parallels” between the Anzacs who left for Gallipoli in 1915 and the jihadists who leave Australia today to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
■ Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen describes Anzac Day as merely “celebrating slaughter”.
■ Peter Stanley, War Memorial senior historian-turned Australian National University academic, declares the Anzac tradition is an “essentially minority interest” that excludes “non Anglo-Saxon Australians”.
■ Carolyn Holbrook, a Monash University research fellow, links the “triumphant nationalism of the Anzac myth” with Nazi atrocities and a “belief in the superiority of the British race” in her book Anzac, the Unauthorised Biography, published last year.
■ Another attack tome What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, edited by historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, denigrates the Anzac tradition as a socially divisive “cult”, and “White Australia’s creation myth”.
These insults can be found in historian Dr Mervyn Bendle’s excellent new book Anzac and its Enemies, to be published this week by Quadrant Books. (Disclosure: I sit on the board of Quadrant Magazine).
The former James Cook University senior lecturer has painstaking catalogued the escalating attacks on Anzac over the past century and explained why they have all been such a stunning failure.
