How and Why Do Australians Commemorate The Anzac Experience?

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How and Why Do Australians Commemorate The Anzac Experience?

        When reflecting on the Anzac experience, it is met with feelings of honour, pride, respect and patriotism. The Anzac ordeal has been commemorated mainly through Anzac Day and its various events and war memorials such as the Australian War Memorial, because of tradition, friendships formed during the war and the fact that World War One was Australia’s first major military campaign as a country.

The Anzac experience was probably best described by John Mansfield in his book entitled, “Gallipoli”,

"Those who wish to imagine the scene must think of twenty miles of any rough and steep sea coast known to them, picturing it as roadless, waterless, much broken with gullies, covered with scrub, sandy, loose, and difficult to walk on, and without more than two miles of accessible landing throughout its length. Let them picture this familiar twenty miles as dominated at intervals by three hills bigger than the hills about them, the north hill a peak, the centre a ridge or plateau, and the south a lump.

Then let them imagine the hills entrenched, the landing mined, the beaches tangled with barbed wire, ranged by howitzers and swept by machine guns, and themselves three thousand miles from home, going out before dawn with rifles, packs, and water-bottles, to pass the mines under shell fire, cut through the wire under machine-gun fire, clamber up the hills under the fire of all arms by the glare of shell-bursts, in the withering and crashing tumult of modern war, and then to dig themselves in, on a waterless and burning hill while the more numerous enemy charge them with bayonet.

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And let them imagine themselves enduring this night after night, day after day, without rest or solace, nor respite from the peril of death, seeing their friends killed, and their position imperiled, getting their food, their munitions, even their drink, from the jaws of death, and their breath from the taint of death, and their brief sleep upon the dust of death.

Let them imagine themselves driven mad by heat and toil and thirst by day, shaken by frost at midnight, weakened by disease and broken by pestilence, yet rising on the word with a shout and going forward to ...

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