In this extract from his book On Patriotism, Paul Daley traces the arc of a once quiet and dignified commemoration to a modern sound-and-light show

The story of who we are – of where we came from and of the trails blazed by our ancestors – is everything. Even in my primary school years beginning in 1969, as our older siblings and cousins were burning draft cards and marching in the streets against Australia’s part in another imperial war, Vietnam, Anzac already seemed secure, though not nearly as ostentatiously so as today, in our slowly evolving national narrative.

In 1964, the year of my birth, Donald Horne sketched in his polemic The Lucky Country a lackadaisical Australia, neither boldly republican nor imperialist. He wrote that thanks, perhaps, to the rise and defeat of European fascism, nationalism “is now so hesitant that it no longer achieves self-definition. No one any longer tells Australians who they are, nor do they seem to care”.

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