Federation to the Second World War : Australian identity and Anzac

Teaching the story of Federation inevitably prompts classroom discussions about why we are so unmoved by the process compared to, say, the celebration of Anzac as an exercise in Australian nation-building. Yet, as previous chapters have demonstrated, the idea of 'Australia' has been contested over time, even in the political act of Federation. And contesting the predominantly settler-colonial imagining of Australian identity is becoming more urgent in the light of a greater recognition of Indigenous history, as we have seen in Chapter 2. Against these reworkings of national identity, Anzac continues to stake its claim, largely through a mythologising of the original Anzac 'story', a process of nation-building in 1915 that has come down to modern-day Australians as something timeless, while remaining largely settler-colonial in tone.