‘The Little Boy from Manly grows up’, John Lack. ed., Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings by K.S. Inglis, History Department, University of Melbourne, 1998, pp. 9-12; first published, The Age, 24 April 1964
Discusses early Australian attempts to find a national day and a national hero. Anzac Day filled the vacuum.
The Little Boy from Manly [an 1885 cartoonist’s personification of the colonies] had grown up into the Digger. His feats removed from Australia’s national culture, said a returned soldiers’ journal, “a larrikin sense of inferiority, on whose inspiration the broad arrow blot of England’s savage convict system was a worrying obsession. Only a deal of good blood could erase this ancient stain; the pure blood of a free manhood”. (p. 12)
Note that this compilation includes a checklist of more than 60 articles or books on Anzac written by Inglis from 1964 to 1996.
