Contesting Anzac Day in Australian Film

The Subversion of Australia's National Identity Myth in Australian Films on Disability

The following is an extract from a manuscript initially completed while the author was a SAR Research Fellow at Australia’s National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA]. It was never published, though the manuscript was - as stakeholder obligation - provided to the NFSA. The extract is released in advance of the manuscript’s forthcoming (pending) independent publication.

2.2 Wartime Disability and the Subversion of the Anzac Legacy

Of all Australia’s national identity myths, Anzac is the most treasured. The yearly commemoration of a wartime defeat (at Gallipoli in 1915) is said to honour the valour and sacrifice of men sent to war for their country. From commemoration to its current significance as national day of remembrance, the so-called Anzac legend lay in the notion of the unique characteristics of the Australian (and New Zealand) troops, as Australia’s first official war historian Charles Bean mythologized in the publication Anzac to Amiens:

“Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valor in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat” (Bean C 1946; p. 181)

Occurring just 15 years after Federation, the Gallipoli defeat signified the first expression of an Australian presence on an international level – the confirmation of nationhood:

“The Gallipoli campaign was the beginning of true Australian nationhood. When Australia went to war in 1914, many white Australians believed that their Commonwealth had no history, that it was not yet a true nation, that its most glorious days still lay ahead of it. In this sense the Gallipoli campaign was a defining moment for Australia as a new nation, but also a key moment in the evolution of a particular image of Australian masculinity.” (Bongiorno F quoted in Australian Government nd)

When Professor Manning Clark in A History of Australia published accounts of immoral behaviour by the supposedly valorous troops – sex orgies, brawling, police skirmishes, brothel frequency resulting in venereal disease – it was incorporated into the “larrikin” concept of Australian masculinity epitomized in the work of CJ Dennis (Australian Government nd). The underlying myth of Australian masculinity – from hero to “rat-bag” – was established by the Anzac legend.

Within the Crisis of Disablement genre thus, the Anzac legend was one more fundamental identity myth responsible for a disabling socialization. Here, the Anzac legend was deconstructed, and eventually subverted and rejected, in films which explore the Anzac legend’s relationship to the disabled war veteran. Indeed, the wounded / disabled war veteran was a cultural enigma – an Australian hero whose sacrifice in the line of duty ironically made his subsequent physical impairment representatively the embodiment of the disabled, dependent Other. This irony was used to assess Australian cultural and moral hypocrisy, the sociological construction of gender, and the disablement of the individual in deference to a mythic ideal in, firstly, 1974’s Between Wars, and secondly 1978’s Break of Day. Both of these films evoked disability – psychological and physical, respectively – in order to subvert and criticize official Australian national identity mythification / socialization processes specifically surrounding Anzac Day.

Between Wars was Australian film’s first consideration of the Anzac legend as a legacy of parochialism and intellectually conservative and repressive conservative conformity (O’Regan 1996; p. 197): of socialization to constructed mythification. It told the story of Dr. Edward Trenbow (Corin Redgrave) who after wartime experience in 1918 becomes interested in the psychological disability known as “shell shock” (psychotic symptoms, fatigue and emotional dislocation resulting from war stresses). Against a background of social change from World War One to World War Two, Trenbow’s introduction to matters of psychology and psychiatry comes when he discusses matters with a German prisoner of war, a psychiatrist who introduces him to the works of Sigmund Freud, whose theories on child sexual development (the Oedipal complex in particular) were despised by Australian Christian authorities in particular as immoral.

Trenbow soon marries and takes up work in a psychiatric hospital but by the onset of the Great Depression in 1932 takes up a practice as a GP in a coastal town, becoming an alcoholic (by then qualified in Australian film in terms of its relation to the culturally disabling nature of Australian identity myths and thus associated with disability) and although well-respected in the community, experiences disintegrating communication with his wife and child. By 1941 and in the city he is again involved in wartime psychiatric practice. Politicized in his anti-war efforts and attending an Australia First meeting which is raided by the police, he is shocked when his son enlists and prepares for duty in World War Two.

Director Michael Thornhill was a film critic who had initiated the film in collaboration with author Frank Moorhouse originally for CFU production in 1970 before securing AFDC funding. Thornhill purposely sought to detach viewers from Trenbow, often framing him interacting with others and taking a passive role, listening to their input. Ultimately, his quiet subversion is suppressed by the off-screen Australian authority, a restrictive government evoked from the outset through mentions of the Curtin government’s police-state like authority, Commonwealth Bank foreclosures on farmers, ABC censorship and the rise of neo-fascist movements and nationalism in Australia (Flaus 1974). Throughout the film, director Thornhill alludes to the bureaucratic powers of Australian authority and the difficulty in either resisting or changing them. In this, Freud’s theories are a radical discourse that goes against deeply held Australian Patriarchal Christian values, which the class-conscious Establishment would seek to protect through social suppression and ideological censorship: including any discussion of matters of sexual psychology – which Trenbow encounters as he treats a nymphomaniac.

The sexual repression of the times, and its authoritarian Christian basis, is alluded to in a remarkable scene in Between Wars: the German prisoner delivers a lecture on Freud and writes on a blackboard “children are sexual” and “unconscious mind” but when a senior Australian officer demands entry, Trenbow springs up and erases the word “sexual” from the board before the stern and hostile Establishment figure can gain entry. Indeed, in this way the film essays the officially suppressed incorporation into Australian intellectual circles of Freudian psycho-analysis, Trenbow remarking that political activism also can have its causes in childhood aggression. The film’s characterization of Trenbow by Corin Redgrave was said to mark a distinctly Australian malaise and curiously remote inactivity – this victim of socialization pressures was a trapped man, in his isolation disabled by the society that would restrict his free expression and control his intellectual growth:

“the noble acquiescent; he’s hounded by circumstances and events and heroic causes at which he finds himself unwillingly the centre… Corin Redgrave exudes exactly the right air of an idealist bewildered by what he is championing, and even more by the reactions of those about him.” (Harris M 1974)

In a subtle way, he too is a disabled anti-hero, though his disablement is sociological, perhaps manifesting itself causally in his alcoholism.

Beginning with war scenes set in 1918, Between Wars is the first Australian film to critically examine and dramatize the Anzac Legacy. Here, psychological disability is introduced as the result of war but unacknowledged by an Australian ideal of heroism which sees disability purely as weakness, a value that the Commonwealth Film Unit (CFU) had long associated with socio-economic “burden” in deference to medical model definitions of disability. The protagonist is introduced as a doctor in the medical wards on the front, assigned to diagnose those cases – with no apparent physical injury – which are beyond the grasp of the medical physicians. The symptoms exhibited are a cross-section of psychotic manifestations, from constant sobbing to the rigid posturing of severe catatonia. Symbolically, this represents Australia’s first reckoning with psychological disability, as a direct result of the same nation-defining action that created the fundamental identity myth of the Anzac. Once again in the Crisis of Disablement film, the disabled figure is a counter-identity myth, here contextualized as the suppressed sociological consequence of the Establishment’s national mythification of the Anzac Legacy.

The doctor proceeds with a medical examination and concludes that it is “shell shock” only to be told that recent dispatches from headquarters (the same officer class who do not see active combat duty) prohibit reference to, or diagnosis of, “shell shock”, told in effect that psychological disability is a non-concept. When the doctor then re-describes the case as “nervous paralysis” he is told that field hospitals do not accept nervous cases for treatment. Indeed, he is soon told that there are wounded patients that need his attention and that these cases are not wounded, the unstated reason being cowardice (in itself a stigmatized form of dishonour that would affect the subsequent Break of Day where a supposed war hero is revealed to have shot himself in the foot). Disability as the result of a war wound is consistent with myths of heroism, for the visibility of disability here is a confirmation of Australian identity in terms of self-sacrifice for the nation. Psychological disability, with no wound to signify self-sacrifice, is an aberration to that same identity and cannot be absorbed into the mythification process.

As Trenbow is transferred to a home in Britain, the commanding officer makes clear Australia’s official policy on psychological disability as a result of war experience: “cowards and other riff-raff who want to shirk their responsibilities”. Psychological disability has no validity to a military authority and cultural system which equates a “sound mind” with war heroism under stress and responsible human worthiness – Australians simply cannot show weakness, hence the presumption that psychological distress as a result of wartime experience is a form of cowardice. American cinema had explored just this same issue in a controversial scene in the Academy Award winning 1970 biopic Patton where General Patton (George C. Scott) slaps a “shell shock” victim in the face and demands that this coward be removed from a ward of those heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice, symbolized by their physical wounding and subsequent disability. While the psychologically disabled veteran became a symbol of cowardice, the physically disabled veteran thus became a symbol of wartime heroism: the iconography of disability in such a context being precisely the function of the limp as locus for subversion in the subsequent Break of Day.

In his new practice Trenbow is assigned custody of a German prisoner of war whom they consider better used as a medical officer, and treated with the same respect. The German prisoner has read the banned works of Australian author Havelock Ellis as well as Freud: Trenbow’s revelation that Ellis is banned reinforces the rigid conservative conformity of Australian authority, as evidenced first in the assignation of psychological disability to mere cowardice. Trenbow’s treatment of a shell-shocked patient – blown through the air and landing on a German body split open by previous combat – perpetually retching is staged by director Thornhill so that the conclusive behavioural evidence of psychological disablement is immediately followed by a flashback to combat experience on the front, so as to contextualize the seeming behavioural aberration in terms of authentic lived experience in the stressful life or death situation of combat, undercutting the nationally vain-glorious self-aggrandizing of the Anzac Day mythification process. The glory, heroism and pride of the incipient Anzac ideal is suggested as the root cause of the stigmatization, isolation and alienation of the psychologically disabled war veteran, considered by the authority erecting the mythos of bravery and sacrifice (with heroism now evidenced by wounding and wartime physical disability) inferior cowards shirking their dutiful responsibilities as Australians. In this way, a social model of disability informed critique is tantamount to national subversion.

The implicit suggestion is that being Australian necessitates social inclusion on the basis of the acceptance of the standards of official government socialization. Such is an essential conformity of values which disavow any psychological manifestation beyond its conformed limitations of a strong, sound mind – the same standards of “reason” that migrant-generation director Mangiamele questioned in Beyond Reason. Inherent in this narrow definition of what could be termed “the reasonable adult” is the complete avoidance of any acknowledgement or discussion of matters pertaining to sexuality, hence the key scene in which Trenbow wipes off the word “sexual” from the blackboard text meant to illustrate the German psychiatrist’s lecture to Trenbow and his few like-minded associates about the theories of human sexuality in Freudian psychoanalysis. Australian authority is founded on the disavowal, suppression and regimentation of human sexuality (let alone any consideration of sexual difference or dysfunction from the similarly established norms of acceptable Australian socialization). This repression of sexuality occurs simultaneously to the creation of a legacy of masculinity founded on wartime heroism: the Anzac legend as a qualifying factor in the definition of an Australian national identity myth.

Trenbow returns to Australia interested in practicing psychology but not convinced that Freud is right: the implicit reason being that to accept Freud would be to correspondingly accept the primacy of sexuality in human psychological makeup – precisely the idea which the Australian government would ban and repress. It is here, back in Australia that director Thornhill then establishes precisely the acceptable Australian sexual socialization – marriage as a Christian institution, seen first as a couple rehearse the process for their wedding in front of the minister, a proceeding interrupted by Trenbow (reunited with his friend and medical professional played by Arthur Dignam, also with him in England) discussing the emptiness of ritual only to be told by the bride to be that it is important to them. Thornhill’s point here is that vacuous social ritual creates the illusion of social, moral and sexual order: its maintenance and populist mythification thus is essential for the preservation of that order, which demands ideological conformity. Socialization to marriage is the means of psycho-sexual repression of the individual. Once again in Crisis of Disablement cinema it is Australia’s patriarchal Christian values which disable the Australian individual by normalizing them to socially conformist ritual, the only escape from which is alcoholism. Thus, alcoholism is here seen as an inevitable end result to social disillusionment and individual powerlessness, the underside of the same Australian identity that erects impossible social ideals – marriage and Anzac heroism – to conform its citizens: and the “larrikinism” in the popularity of beer-drinking Guinness Book of Records holder Bob Hawke as Australian PM.

Any difference, whether in terms of sexual defiance or non-conformist psychological aberration (disability) is anarchic and threatening. In this, the film recalls the qualification of psychological disability in Beyond Reason. The suppression and censorship of deviant thought and expression is thus necessary to ensure the conformity of behaviour to the officially condoned socialized order of the day, which director Thornhill clearly reveals to be Patriarchal Christianity – ultimately Patriarchal Christianity is responsible for the cultural disablement and isolation of the Australian people, and the suppression of individuality in violation of what would later be acknowledged as human rights in Australia’s treatment of disabled people. In this way Between Wars is a key film in the evolution of Australia’s Crisis of Disablement genre as it was the first of the cycle to gain widespread critical acclaim and international distribution.

Trenbow is ordered to misrepresent asylum procedures in an official report to the Royal Commission on mental illness, ostensibly to protect the asylum from any culpability for human mistreatment in its experimental procedures, which Trenbow acquires responsibility for in his newfound position. Interestingly, when the German psychiatrist sends a letter of his visit to Australia – following the termination of a Professorship in Chicago – Redgrave’s friend Dignam says that the visit will “stir up a hornet’s nest in this colonial backwater” indicative of the growing movement amongst Australia’s intellectual community against the socialized order, perceived as regressive and repressive, stifling progress in both learning institutions and on an inter-personal level in terms of acceptable sexual expression. The imprisonment of the psychologically disabled, by now symbolic in director Thornhill’s view of the suppression of individualist humanism (as initiated by Freudian psychiatry) in Australian institutions is the reality framing the facades of order and their manifestation in empty social rituals such as practiced by “decent” society.

Ken Hannam’s subsequent Break of Day furthers this in direct reference to the populist mythification of Anzac Day: it concerned a man torn between dilemmas of personal freedom and personal security, between an incipient Bohemian lifestyle with a free living urban woman the comforting trappings of a staid bourgeois existence with his banal country wife. Critic Beryl Donaldson dismissed the protagonist as “a small-town moral coward” (Donaldson 1977, p. 361); in effect, this moral cowardice is signified amongst other psychological aberrations, by the character’s limp, the physical disability being shorthand for a character defect which the film holds is a consequence of his wartime experience. Set during the establishment of Anzac Day as a national holiday, the film thus offers a parallel to evocation of a changing Australian social order in the previous Between Wars. Likewise, the sense of a man scarred by his wartime experience evokes the discussion of the psychological disability known as “shell shock” which infiltrated Between Wars. In its representation of disability Break of Day, however, critiques Australia’s mythification of war experience positing Anzac Day as the glorification of events which disabled a generation of men.

Beginning with an evocation of the Gallipoli campaign, the film cuts to a memorial cannon in a remote outback small town community as dawn breaks – Australian identity is here evoked in terms of its militaristic legacy. A trapper (Andrew McFarlane) is hunting rabbits when he comes upon the rented residence of a woman (Sara Kestelman) new to the community. At the outset, McFarlane’s limp is barely even noticeable although in a heated moment by the fireplace he complains of his leg getting in the way and indeed walks with the aid of a cane. More so than the unnoticeable limp, the cane serves as an index of disability, a condition of sociological and emotional disablement as a result of Australia’s wartime culture, signified by the prominently placed memorial cannon. As McFarlane and Kestelman spend more time together, he begins to react differently to his pregnant wife and the domestic future he has lined up.

The Anzac Day memorial is depicted as a core event in Australian national self-definition: as a veteran tells a story, the local pub goes quiet and listens to his tale, briefly interrupted by the coughing of a veteran disabled by exposure to gas, the first major use of chemical warfare being in the trenches of World War One. War is thus paradoxical: both a disabling and heroic action in Australia’s past – however, the veteran’s story is too much for the protagonist and he walks out before it is finished, returning to shoot and trap rabbits. The local pub is a core centre of activity on Anzac Day, soldiers reliving their experiences as they get so drunk they can barely stand, yet another equation of disability with the role of alcohol in Australian cultural self-definitions of masculinity. It’s a truly harsh evocation of Australian patriotism, one that equates the national holiday with a disabling national shame; although as an indictment of Australian culture Break of Day is not a patch on Wake in Fright where alcoholism is truly indicative of a loathsome national identity.

Murdoch University Communications Studies lecturer Tom O’Regan would later characterize the nature of director Hannam’s uniquely Australian cultural subversion of identity myth in Break of Day:

“Each national space also organizes its own varieties of nationalism, and myth and symbols complex… The invention of tradition in each country can look remarkably similar in intent but the content varies from country to country. Themes of communal solidarity can mean duty in Germany and mateship in Australia, as represented in Gallipoli and debunked in Hannam’s Break of Day. If military involvements are part of the cultural repertoire of many nations, differences occur within the same general form such as which kind of military campaign, whether it was a defeat or victory, or conducted on home or foreign shores. Gallipoli was an offshore defeat…” (O’Regan T 1996; pp. 193-194)

Indeed, Hannam was criticized for his staging of Gallipoli in terms of small skirmishes instead of full-scale assaults. Though Hannam explained this as a deliberate choice – staging the early morning landings rather than the mass assaults of later in the day – his subversion of the myth of mateship and heroism inherent in the Anzac legend depended primarily not on the evocation of wartime experience as epic spectacle but on the counter identity myth of the disabled anti-hero, the victim of a socialized culture of disablement, being constructed piece by piece, film by film, in the Crisis of Development genre.

As McFarlane enters into a love affair with Kestelman, at her instigation, she wants to paint him in uniform, “the true spirit of Anzac” as she refers to him. However, his middle class, bourgeois domesticity has attractions of its own and he is drawn to the stability and the social status conferred by a traditional marriage and family existence, such as would be evoked throughout Australian history in the Christian refrain “family values” – the caveat being that Australian cinema in the Crisis of Disablement cycle would in turn frequently expose the dangerous façade of Patriachal Christian socialization founded on these principles. It is in this trend in Australian cinema in general that Break of Day stands apart, exploring the appeal of the bourgeois existence in tandem with the evocation of disability and disablement which consumed Australian cinema of the 1970s especially.

Tender but leisurely paced, the film ultimately concerns one man’s moral reckoning: the choice between sexual adventure and sexual familiarity, between excitement and stability. In the tradition of such films as The Silence of Dean Maitland, sexual secrets cannot be kept for long in a small town and gossip soon spreads. Kestelman’s friends, financially affluent art patrons, drive up to visit her, one of them having a slight stutter although he introduces Kestelman to his betrothed, indicating that his disability has not hampered him: indeed, he seems to lack the self-consciousness that so affects McFarlane. Incidental stutters had featured sporadically in isolated moments in Australian film but it was not until The Real Thing in 2002 that the stutterer became the protagonist in a film about disability.

McFarlane falls as he wanders home after a night boozing with the visitors; the fall triggers a memory / flashback to his wartime experience as an Anzac, these reveal that he shot himself in the foot in order to be sent home as one who was wounded in the line of duty. This explains his introspection in those previous scenes in which his disability is highlighted by Kestelman: his limp is thus a constant reminder of his cowardice, hence his earlier reluctance to be with the “heroes” and genuinely disabled soldiers on Anzac Day. What disables him is paradox: the Anzac legend seemingly confirmed by his limp is subverted by the reasons for that limp – the disabled war veteran here is a faux indication of the national identity which is, like Kestelman’s painting, a mere icon.

The Mango Tree, set in the same small town environs following the end of World War One as Break of Day sought to examine the conception of “innocence” and “experience” from a perspective informed by early Australian Patriarchal Christian values. The film depicts its clergyman character in terms of histrionic piety and hypocrisy: the venerated decent man of God here is a brutally self-righteous monster who beats a woman to death and kills a police officer come to arrest him for sexual violence. In this The Mango Tree is unusual in that it caricatures Australia’s “wowserist” heritage, from the Women’s Temperance movement to the moral charlatanism of the Priest.

The depiction of the mad religious Patriarch is thus ironic as the film concerns women socialized to the religious values embodied by what is revealed to be a mad, hypocritical murderer. Indeed, the Bible infiltrates the lives of most of the women here, the elderly Matriarch boasting that it contains much of worth. In this, the film is about the legacy of Christian Australia. Ostensibly one of the “quality” period films characterized rather dismissively as “the AFC genre” the film sought the evocation of early C19th Australian small town living as a portrait of incipient nationalism. It evoked the same formative period as did Break of Day and with a similarly quiet subversion, exploring the disabling nature of authority figures, from the schoolteacher to the preacher, entrusted with imbuing Australia’s Patriarchal Christian socialization: in that, it renders visible the rigid authoritarianism responsible for discipline and morality that was offscreen and inferred throughout Between Wars.

Disability is represented here in terms of alcoholism: delirium tremens, referred to as “the horrors”, affecting the Robert Helpmann character, known as “the professor”, an alcoholic with pneumonia who is taken in by the central family. Madness is evoked as a hereditary condition, those afflicted by mental illness / psychological disability referred to as “touched” or “mad”, foremost amongst them said to be the preacher. The first casualty is a local woman, taken away as “mad” and sent to “the loony bin” leaving her daughter to fend for herself. When a man expresses concern to the daughter and says he merely wanted to offer a “Christian hand”, she remarks that she “knows where it would be given half the chance” implying the sexual hypocrisy behind Christian authority, though she apologizes to the man concerned. Patriarchy and Christianity are the twin codes of socialization here, religion in this context, like the school, epitomizing the Australian “establishment”: socialization according to the repressive institution.

Hence, the mad preacher is compared to the local schoolteacher, a sadistic disciplinarian whose approach represents the conformist cultural disablement then evoked in the Crisis of Disablement genre – beating conformity into adolescents at the expense of their individualism, a theme returned to in 1982’s Fighting Back, where a teacher beats an unruly, developmentally disabled youth in order to make him “fit in”, which he consider his prime responsibility as a teacher. Alcoholism here is again construed as both an Australian legacy and a disability, destroying the individual psychologically and in turn removing them from social function: in this it is also compared and contrasted to madness as a psychological disability. Just as alcoholism is presented in terms of its role within Australian socialization, so too other aspects of this socialization process contextualize the film – specifically, relations between the sexes as geared towards marriage. The film’s leisurely depiction of the rhythms of small town existence belie a sense of the entrapping nature of it all, in the end stressing “its destructive capacities for prejudice and the limitation of opportunity” (McFarlane 1987; p. 62). On this note, opportunity is stifled by the very same socialization to patriarchal Christianity that the town’s values are founded on: such extends the Crisis of Disablement from urban to rural Australia.

However, it is the portrayal of the mad preacher which unites the twin themes of disability and disablement: the force of Patriarchal Christian socialization robs others of their right to self-determination, his demented self-righteousness evidence of his psychological disability. The Mad Patriarch, however, is a rare figure in Australian film and critics felt this portrayal was over the top and bordered on caricature – within the film’s histrionic assessment of disability and disablement though, caricature is perhaps a necessity. In this way, it is the caricatured religious madman who disables others – he brutalizes a young girl because he considers her the result of her parents’ sin, a sin confirmed by the incarceration of the mother as “mad”. After shooting a police officer, the preacher becomes a raving madman and is shot down, an event that makes the young protagonist (Christopher Pate) admit that he cannot believe in God anymore, the film assessing the growth of atheist non-conformity in the rejection of a Patriarchal Christian belief. Ironically, with his abandonment of religious faith comes his first affair, with an older woman: sexuality is seen in terms of the abandonment of religion, the disabling force.

Like Break of Day, The Mango Tree features a disabled war veteran, a pilot, his limp necessitating his walking with a cane. Once again, the limp here signifies the Anzac legend as the physical and psychological scarring of war, shorthand for the experience of wartime disablement. Ironically, soldiers returning bring with them an influenza virus which causes a pandemic, the film now exploring the notion of disablement though illness – in effect, The Mango Tree offers a full profile of the various forms of disability and disablement in Australian film as they were considered at that time. In that respect it is an intriguing evocation of the importance of notions of disability in an Australian film identity, the film aspiring to be a distinctively Aussie experience. In that the film ends with Pate leaving the town, The Mango Tree also manages to be a coming of age film, paralleling its young protagonist to the fate of the nation, its future dependent on the turning away from religion and escape from tradition to seek new horizons and experiences in the world: i.e. of the expression of the individual right to self-determination against the disabling conformism of Patriarchal Christianity.

Though removed from direct reference to the Anzac legend and period setting, the contemporary-set 1985 A Street to Die re-worked the figure of the disabled soldier in terms of the Vietnam War’s use of Agent Orange. Here, the long-term carcinogenic effects of the chemical precipitate a disabling fatal illness. Indeed, disability as a result of illness was not uncommon in Australian film, especially Australian children’s films in the wake of the Czech Alan Marshall adaptation I Can Jump Puddles. The important note introduced by A Street to Die was the literal depiction of a Crisis of Disablement in the visualization of the deteriorating body, here a stereotypically masculine body. In that the Vietnam veteran was for a long time excluded from incorporation into the Anzac legend, A Street to Die’s depiction of progressive illness-related disablement used the evocation of government denial of responsibility (refusing to pay compensation for soldiers disabled by Agent Orange related illness) to suggest that the nation’s desertion of the disabled Vietnam veteran was a betrayal of the cultural vindication of the wounded or disabled soldier within the sentimentalized construction of the Anzac tradition as a (disabling) national identity myth.

REFERENCES

Australian Government nd; “Anzac Day”; Culture.gov.au: Australian Government Culture Portal; viewed online; 23/05/2010; http://www.acn.net.au/articles/anzac/

Bean C 1946; Anzac to Amiens; Halstead Press; Sydney.

Harris M 1974; “Between Wars”; The Australian; 16/11/1974.

O’Regan T 1996; Australian National Cinema; Routledge; London.