Two great Anzac Day posts on Pearls & Irritations

Update 25 April 2025: from the Main Stream Media but an excellent piece from Paul Daley of Guardian Australia.

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Beneath the usual Anzac Day froth and bubble, which always looks rather like what we got last year, some alternative views stand out in 2025.

Douglas Newton’s article is headed, ‘Anzac voices – voices of warning’, and he writes,

The Anzac story warns us of what may happen to a small country that offers unfaltering loyalty to a great power. That loyalty can degrade to servility. Those in uniform pay the price.

The voices at the top remind us: war can incite recklessness. Our leaders may debase themselves before our allies and spend carelessly our young people’s blood.

Also in Pearls & Irritations is Geoff Davies, under the headline, ‘ANZAC Day: Honour the dead, spurn the myths and militarism’, and he says,

ANZAC Day is an occasion to honour those who died fighting for Australia.

That central purpose has become thickly encrusted with other agendas – to tell a version of Australian history, to parade the armed forces and their weapons, to glorify “heroic” actions, to promote a vision of a hostile world and, covertly or not, to promote militarism and the manufacturing of arms.

Douglas Newton has written a number of articles for Honest History and Defending Country over the years, most recently a review of Steve Vizard’s book, Nation, Memory and Myth: a New View of the Old Gallipoli Story.

25 April 2025