We are probably too close to the resurgence of Anzac to fully understand its causes and dynamics. Carolyn Holbrook’s Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography tackles this important question by tracing ‘the history of an idea’ from the Second Boer War of 1899–1902 to today. Drawing on academic histories, newspapers, soldiers’ memoirs, fiction, film, family history, and the processes of political commemoration, Holbrook shows the ‘historical contingency’ of war memory: in other words, the degree to which the memory of the Great War, ‘far from being anchored to the events of 1914–18 ... has drifted on the currents of Australian history’, and ‘various ideologies and beliefs have washed through Australian history and tinted our war memory’. Today, thanks to the global trend to depict soldiers as victims rather than killers, Australian war memory is ‘an unlikely amalgam of nationalist sentiment and trauma psychology’.

This contingency of war memory has been evident since the Second Boer War, Holbrook’s first case study. This rather nasty imperial conflict generated considerable public enthusiasm in Australia, since it offered the chance to ‘prove’ that the male colonial stock had not deteriorated in the antipodes. But the new Commonwealth government was too preoccupied with establishing the institutions of the new nation to play a significant role in commemorating the losses of this war. It is only now, more than a century later, that there are plans to install a memorial to the Boer War on the national mall of remembrance, Anzac Parade, Canberra.

The Boer War, then, was not a ‘nation-making war’ in the sense that the Great War proved to be. But even the war of 1914–18, which is routinely now associated with ‘the birth of the nation’, did not generate Australian nationalism in a form that we would recognise today. Rather, national pride in the Australian Imperial Force’s achievements was positioned within loyalty to the British Empire, the inspiration for Australians’ initial commitment to the war. Hence, Ernest Scott, the author of the official history volume that dealt with the home front, was more intent on affirming British imperial unity than showcasing national distinction. The general editor of the series, Charles Bean, with his more triumphal sense of Australian identity, drew the book back from its biased approach, but, Holbrook concludes, Bean’s views on the importance of British heritage in Australia’s development differed from Scott in emphasis rather than substance.

The contestation inherent in remembering the Great War was manifest also in the memoirs and novels that ex-servicemen published in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The German author Erich Maria Remarque’s famous All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) angered many Australian veterans, for whom traditional literary forms, with their affirmation of race, empire, and nation, were preferable to brutalist realistic fiction. Australian writings of the 1930s generally continued to depict the war as a tragic event that was ultimately ennobling.

Such traditional modes of remembering the Great War were challenged, particularly after 1945, by a group of scholars for whom class was more important than war in shaping the Australian character and nationalism. But this more radical Australian historiography, articulated notably by Brian Fitzpatrick, Russel Ward, Ian Turner, and Geoffrey Serle, was overtaken in the 1970s. Marxism declined as a meta-narrative, while feminist critiques challenged the misogyny of the bush legend, so skilfully articulated by Ward, and the Anzac legend, which was in some ways heir to this vernacular cultural imagery.

Radical historiography also had no place in the memory ‘boom’, which exploded nationally and globally from the mid-1970s on. With good reason Holbrook argues that the new nationalist mood was fuelled by two immensely popular works: Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years (1974), which ‘laid the foundation for a new consensus of Great War memory’, and Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981), which over subsequent decades socialised young Australians into a mythic representation of that campaign.

The memory boom also owed much to the explosion of family history in the digital age. With military databases available online, individuals could personalise the memory of the Great War and connect their family history with the wider national narrative of Anzac. This ‘bottom up’ memory-making, which Holbrook argues was particularly strong in Australia, intersected with the ‘top down’ embrace of war memory by Australia’s political leaders. From the prime ministership of Bob Hawke (1983–91) on, Australian governments invested significant funding in ‘pilgrimages’ of veterans to sites of war memory, new war memorials at home and overseas, extensive galleries at the Australian War Memorial, and a plethora of educational materials that articulated a positive interpretation of Australia’s military history.

The memory of the Great War, therefore, has been far from static and fixed over the past century. Rather, Holbrook shows that Australian thinking about the Great War, like all collective memory, has been shaped by the values and ideologies of successive cohorts of Australians. It is a limitation of her book that we get no sense of how the thinking of any particular cohort – be it ex-servicemen, academics, or politicians – changed across the century, since the cohort changes with each chapter.

The book’s title also is unfortunate, if catchy. This is not a biography (whatever that might be) of the Anzac legend. The function that ‘Anzac’ performs as a signifier of national identity is more complex than the thinking of any single group of Australians. It almost certainly owes its place in Australian political culture to a symbiotic interaction between the various cohorts that Holbrook treats discretely. She implies this when she concludes her chapter on politicians and commemoration by saying that they ‘did not initiate the Anzac revival and their influence over its quantum can be overstated’. Yes, but whence then did the revival arise? And what explains the emotional power of the memory of the Great War for Australians in the early twenty-first century? Holbrook has made a valuable contribution, but the debate about Anzac’s dominant, even excessive, place in the national political culture needs to continue.