Commentary If ANZAC Day is secular Australia’s one day of “religious observance,” Barry Humphries might have been one of our only secular patron saints, embodying the culture’s virtues, or at least what we thought were our virtues. While throwing the Anzacs and Humphries together in one paragraph might seem as surreal as some of his…

A statue of a historical figure in Sydney’s northwest was defaced while Australians gathered to commemorate ANZAC Day The words, “Here stands a mass murderer who ordered genocide,” was spray painted onto the statue of Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth governor of New South Wales, at McQuade Park in Windsor. Macquarie’s statue was doused in red…

War creates cultural collisions. In Si Sheppard’s militaristic comparison and contrast of Ottoman soldiers and those of Australia and New Zealand, the cultural divisions are easy to notice even before the collision. Sheppard utilizes battles from World War I in his book “ANZAC Soldier Versus Ottoman Soldier: Gallipoli and Palestine 1915–18” to point out the…