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Over the last hundred years, Anzac Day (25 April), the anniversary of the initial landing of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915, has captured the Australian and New Zealand national imaginations. The day remembers the first significant engagement involving Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the First World War. This article is an early report of a major project that will chart Anzac Day’s origins, development and contested meanings. It is both an historical study, tracing changes in commemoration and remembrance over time, and an investigation of the ways in which Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day in the present day. It will interrogate the shaping of historical sensibility by exploring the complex connections between personal and collective remembrance. One of the challenges to understanding Anzac Day is dealing with the multiplicity of meanings of such a large‐scale, diverse and now venerable (in modern Australian terms) observation. It will also examine the neglected subject of Anzac Day’s observance outside the Australia and New Zealand – in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Pacific – where it has long played a role in expressing the identities of Antipodean expatriate communities.

This article examines the structural malleability of the dawn service and the appeal it subsequently has for adaptation Á or appropriation Á by interests with a need to express, validate or perhaps procure its strong appeal to popular nationalism. A brief account of the history and mythology of the dawn service is given to indicate its origins and development as the element of Anzac Day with the most consistently popular appeal. A morphology of the ritual structure of the event is provided, with illustrative examples from Western Australia, Queensland and Canberra to show the broad variety of format that the morphology allows, while still retaining what large numbers of Australians apparently consider its integral national significance. Two recent instances of adaptation of the dawn service to ostensibly non-Anzac observances for the Bali bombings and Australia Day are then discussed to illustrate the appeal of the morphology to both official and community interests. The article concludes by arguing that the morphological elements of the dawn service can be adapted into a diversity of ritual frameworks that reflect and reinforce the different but, in this case, intersecting imperatives of government and communities.

This book provides an overview and analysis of the global tradition of the outlaw hero. The mythology and history of the outlaw hero is traced from the Roman Empire to the present, showing how both real and mythic figures have influenced social, political, economic and cultural outcomes in many times and places.