Gareth Evans' extract / introduction to the Festival of Ideas
First published in The Age iPad edition, 15 June 2011
The sense of national identity is never stronger than when countries are at war with each other, at imminent risk of war, or remembering war. Even in this mercifully laid-back country of ours, where front-porch flagpoles are almost as absent as they are omnipresent in the United States, it is the events at Anzac Cove nearly a century ago which, more than anything else, still seem to captur –not least for the younger generation who flock there in extraordinary numbers now every April–the national sense of what it is to be Australian. And we are not the only country in which a strongly war-forged sense of identity has been based not so much on military triumph as adversity.
Print
