Anzac Day in Australia (and New Zealand) is a holiday to remember those who’ve died or fought in wars (usually overseas), sacrificing their lives or at least their health and sanity so that we might continue to live our lives free from foreign invasion. Which is ironic.
Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and the date of the holiday, 25 April, is the anniversary of the Anzacs landing at Gallipoli in WW1. First Nations people fought too, even though they technically weren’t citizens and on their return still weren’t allowed to vote.
I’ve tended to view Anzac Day as a glorification of war—but then I didn’t have close family members who fought. My great-grandfather died as a result of his injuries in WW1, so I never met him. A great uncle served in Malaya. On my in-laws’ side an uncle was screwed up by Vietnam, and another grandfather ‘was never the same’ after his war experience.
Of course it’s convenient to forget that we’ve also had war on this soil, and it started in 1788—a series of frontier wars against the First Nations inhabitants as white colonisation began and extended across the land.
Foreign invasion by the British. Massacres. A genocide that continues today through extremely high rates of First Nations incarceration, deaths in custody, ongoing child removal (which these days is contracted out to private organisations), and a much shorter life expectancy than average.
Today we pay at least lip service to the First Nations peoples by acknowledging them at the start of formal events, and sometimes asking them to perform Welcome to Country ceremonies, where they expressly give us permission to use spaces that are traditionally theirs (i.e. specific parts of this whole stolen continent).
On Anzac Day 2026, thanks to the rise in ultra-right nationalism, ex-serviceman Uncle Ray Minniecon was actively heckled at a dawn service in Sydney while acknowledging Country.1 The following poem is about that.
- Similar disrespect happened elsewhere on Anzac Day in both 2025 and 2026. ↩︎
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