ANZAC Day
<p>Before dawn on 25 April 1915, boats carrying Australian and New Zealand soldiers grounded on a narrow beach below steep cliffs on the Gallipoli peninsula, in what is now Turkey. The men had been aiming for a gentler stretch of coast further south; in the dark they had drifted, and they came ashore beneath ground that gave every advantage to the Ottoman defenders above them. Within hours the cove was a killing field. ANZAC Day, marked each year on 25 April across Australia and New Zealand, takes its date and its name from that landing, and over more than a century it has grown from the mourning of one campaign into the most solemn day in both nations’ calendars.</p>
<h2 id="gallipoli-and-the-landing">Gallipoli and the landing</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The Gallipoli campaign was conceived as a way to break the deadlock of the First World War by forcing the Dardanelles, the strategic strait guarding the sea route to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. A naval attempt failed, so in April 1915 a land invasion was launched, with British, French, Australian, New Zealand and Indian troops among the Allied force. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the formation whose initials gave the day its name, came ashore at the cove that would become known as ANZAC Cove.</p>
<p>The plan unravelled almost at once. The terrain was a maze of ridges and gullies, the Ottoman resistance under commanders including Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, was fierce and well placed, and the campaign settled into eight months of trench stalemate in appalling heat, with dysentery and flies as deadly as the shellfire. The Allied forces were finally evacuated over the winter of 1915 to 1916, the withdrawal itself conducted so quietly that it was one of the campaign’s few clear successes. The cost had been enormous: tens of thousands of Allied dead, including more than 8,000 Australians and around 2,700 New Zealanders, set against even heavier Ottoman losses defending their own soil.</p>
<h2 id="the-brisbane-clergyman-who-built-the-day">The Brisbane clergyman who built the day</h2>
<p>A military defeat does not become a sacred anniversary on its own; someone has to shape it. In the case of ANZAC Day, much of that work was done by Canon David John Garland, an Anglican clergyman in Queensland. On 10 January 1916 he was appointed honorary secretary of the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee of Queensland, the body that endorsed 25 April as the date to be observed, and he threw a formidable organising energy into giving the day a fixed and dignified form.</p>
<p>Garland is credited with devising much of the ceremony that Australians and New Zealanders still follow. He pressed for the wreath-laying at memorials, the special church services, the returned-soldiers’ luncheon and, most enduringly, a period of silence to remember the dead, an idea he is said to have drawn from the practice of prayer. Crucially, he wanted a commemoration that everyone could attend regardless of religion, which is why ANZAC Day services have a distinctly non-denominational character. His insistence on a solemn rather than triumphal tone helped ensure the day honoured loss rather than glorified war, and it is largely his framework that has carried the observance across more than a century.</p>
<h2 id="what-the-day-commemorates-now">What the day commemorates now</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>ANZAC Day no longer belongs only to Gallipoli. Within a few years of the First World War it had widened to honour all Australians and New Zealanders who served and died in that conflict, and it has since expanded again to remember those who have served in every war, conflict and peacekeeping operation since. The Gallipoli landing remains the symbolic origin, but a veteran of Vietnam, Afghanistan or a United Nations mission is honoured on the same morning as the men of 1915.</p>
<p>The day occupies a place in the two nations’ sense of themselves that is hard to overstate. The qualities attached to the original ANZACs, endurance, ingenuity, a wry humour under pressure and above all loyalty to one’s comrades, the much-quoted “mateship”, were folded into a national self-image during the twentieth century. Historians have long debated how far that image flatters reality and how far it was constructed afterwards, but its emotional grip is undeniable, and for many it makes 25 April feel like the truest national day either country has.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-commemorated">How it is commemorated</h2>
<p>The day’s most distinctive ritual is the Dawn Service, held in the half-light to echo the hour of the landing. Crowds gather in darkness at war memorials, from the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and Auckland’s cenotaph down to small towns where a handful of people stand by a country monument, and fall silent as the sun comes up. The bugle calls of the “Last Post” and “Reveille”, the recitation of the Ode of Remembrance, taken from Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen”, and a period of silence form the heart of the service.</p>
<p>Later in the morning, veterans and serving personnel march through cities and towns, the ranks of the old wars thinning year by year while their descendants increasingly march in their place wearing inherited medals on the right breast. Mourners wear a sprig of rosemary, which grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula and has been linked with remembrance since antiquity. Services are also held at Gallipoli itself, where Australians, New Zealanders and Turks gather at ANZAC Cove in a spirit of shared mourning that turns a former battlefield into a place of reconciliation.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-food-and-the-afternoon-ritual">Symbols, food and the afternoon ritual</h2>
<p>Beyond the ceremonies, the day has its own familiar emblems: the rising-sun badge of the Australian Imperial Force, the red poppy, the rosemary sprig and the silhouette of the lone, slouch-hatted soldier. The ANZAC biscuit, made from oats and golden syrup and famously containing no eggs, recalls a hard-keeping biscuit associated with the war years; its recipe is one of the few foods whose name is protected by regulation in Australia.</p>
<p>The afternoon belongs to two-up, a gambling game played by spinning two coins and betting on whether they land heads or tails. Illegal to play in public on almost every other day of the year, it is permitted on ANZAC Day in much of Australia, a legal exception made specifically to honour the troops who played it in the trenches and camps of the First World War.</p>
<h2 id="a-day-that-has-known-controversy">A day that has known controversy</h2>
<p>ANZAC Day has not always been observed with the near-universal reverence it now commands, and its meaning has been contested at several points. Between the world wars some returned soldiers and pacifist groups worried that the commemoration risked glorifying war rather than mourning it, a tension Garland’s solemn framework was partly designed to hold in check. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, attendance had dwindled and the anti-Vietnam-War movement made the day a flashpoint, with critics arguing it celebrated militarism. From 1981 onward, feminist groups staged protests at some services to draw attention to women raped in war, leading to arrests and heated public debate. More recently, Indigenous Australians and their supporters have campaigned for the frontier conflicts of colonial settlement to be remembered alongside the overseas wars. That the day has weathered all of this and emerged with larger crowds than ever, particularly among the young, suggests its core appeal lies somewhere deeper than politics, in the simple act of standing for the dead.</p>
<h2 id="a-day-among-the-calendars-days-of-conscience">A day among the calendar’s days of conscience</h2>
<p>ANZAC Day is the most powerful but not the only day the calendar sets aside for reckoning with the cost of conflict. It shares its underlying purpose with observances such as the <a href="/specialdate/day-of-remembrance-for-all-victims-of-chemical-warfare/">Day of Remembrance for All Victims of Chemical Warfare</a>, which marks one of the First World War’s most terrible innovations, and it sits alongside the wider hope expressed by the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-of-sport-for-development-and-peace/">International Day of Sport for Development and Peace</a>, whose aspiration toward peace is the same one Garland built into the silence at the heart of the dawn ceremony.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The word ANZAC is protected by law in both Australia and New Zealand. Using it commercially without permission, even on a biscuit tin, has been an offence since 1916, which is why genuine ANZAC biscuits are sold as “biscuits” and never as “cookies”.</li>
<li>The “father of modern Turkey”, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, commanded Ottoman forces against the ANZACs at Gallipoli; words attributed to him welcoming the Allied dead as “now lying in the soil of a friendly country” are inscribed at the memorial site.</li>
<li>Two-up’s legality on 25 April is a deliberate exemption written into law, making ANZAC Day one of the only times the game can be played openly in pubs and clubs across much of Australia.</li>
<li>The Dawn Service tradition is thought to have grown partly from a stand-to, the wartime routine in which troops manned their positions at dawn, the most likely hour of attack.</li>
<li>Although Gallipoli was a defeat, the evacuation in late 1915 was so skilfully managed, with rifles rigged to fire automatically and men slipping away in silence, that the Allies withdrew tens of thousands of troops with almost no casualties.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>It is a strange thing for a nation to fix its proudest day on the anniversary of a defeat, and that strangeness is precisely what gives ANZAC Day its weight. There is no victory to celebrate, no enemy to denounce, only the memory of ordinary people who endured something terrible and, in many cases, did not come home. Canon Garland understood that a day built on silence and loss would last longer than one built on triumph, and the century since has proved him right. Each dawn on 25 April asks the living to stand in the dark for a few minutes and consider what was paid, and the quiet insistence of that question, rather than any answer it offers, is what keeps drawing the crowds back to the cold beaches and country memorials year after year.</p>
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