In an interview in September last year, former Education Minister Alan Tudge responded to critiques of Anzac Day in the Australian National Curriculum as follows:

Instead of Anzac Day being presented as the most sacred of all days in Australia, where we stop, we reflect, we commemorate the hundred thousand people who have died for our freedoms … it’s presented as a contested idea …

He went on to further characterise dissent as un-Australian, arguing that the day represents in fact ‘not a contested idea apart from an absolute fringe element in our society,’ and that the values it stands for are ‘sacred’.

The supposed sacrality of ANZAC ideology (mythology) underpinning Anzac Day as national holiday is also the subject of a critical 2015 essay by Peter Cochrane in The Griffith Review in which he cites Christina Twomey’s positioning of ANZAC military discourse in relation to ‘the rise to cultural prominence of the traumatised individual.’  As well as informing academic histories, this conceptualisation of (national and individual) ‘trauma’ also characterises several films contesting ANZAC ideology in an Australian cinema of disability that emerged within the Australian Film Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s—though they are rarely granted retrospective attention.

Before outlining this seldom acknowledged aspect of our cinematic history, let’s consider Australian screen’s most famous depiction of this twofold ‘trauma’ in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), the veneration of which saturates even contemporary film assessments. Take, for instance, Nick Prescott’s account in The Conversation:

The ANZAC experiences in the First World War arguably cemented post-colonial Australian ideals of mateship, bravery and love for country … These attributes are genuinely — one might even say lovingly — treated in mythic fashion… Gallipoli retains its focus on the emotional and psychological effects of war throughout the film; from the families left behind to the deep friendships torn asunder by death and violence, every character and situation in the film helps construct Weir’s portrait of innocence lost.

Such reverence towards Weir’s film reinforces Tudge’s idea of the ‘sacred’: it cements the Gallipoli campaign as a national ‘coming of age’, the tragedy of which is noble, heroic self-sacrifice (the death of Archie, a champion runner). What is absent from such considerations, however, is any comparison to the other Australian films referencing Gallipoli and ANZAC mythology made shortly prior to Weir’s film which not only do not endorse ANZAC ideology as sacrosanct but also contest and de-construct this nationalistic ‘innocence lost’ through a social model of disablement/disability.  Specifically, Ken Hannam’s Break of Day (1976) but also Kevin Dobson’s The Mango Tree (1977), Michael Thornhill’s Between Wars (1974) and Italian-Australian Giorgio Mangiamele’s Beyond Reason (1970).  

Together, these films progressively examined sociological disablement in relation to psychological trauma as a direct result of Australian traditional values.  From apocalyptic anti-psychiatry (in Beyond Reason) to a critique of disabling militarist conservatism as both stifling (in Between Wars) and pathologically patriarchal (in The Mango Tree), these films undermined the nation-building objective that had previously characterized Commonwealth Film Unit productions in particular.  This radical trend culminated in Break of Day’s explicit subversion of the underlying cause of this disablement: ANZAC mythification.

These films evoked disability in a way that exposes the ANZAC militarism later mythologised by Weir as a façade—a form of sociological ‘disablement’ concealing in patriotic national identity construction what Lowy Institute military fellow James Brown later described as ‘a military operation that was barely more than a disaster.’

Where Gallipoli famously immortalised its tragically heroic champion runner as shot dead while running—his nobility preserved in a final freeze frame that enshrined him in Australian cinema as the eternal runner—Break of Day had, in stark contrast, depicted its Gallipoli veteran as disabled, requiring assistance to walk, let alone run. In an Australian cinematic tradition in which disability (especially mobility impairment) signified—as early as Ken G Hall’s The Squatter’s Daughter (1933)—an inability to contribute to nation-building, and thus a judgement of worthlessness upon the disabled person as Other, its complex evocation by Hannam problematises ANZAC ideology as progressively destabilising, alienating.

Psychologically traumatised, the limping protagonist morally wavers between the progressive freedom represented by the possibility of a Bohemian lifestyle (with a free-living urban woman) and the bourgeois traditionalism of marital stagnation in adherence to Patriarchal Christian ‘family values’. The critical reading of the protagonist in this context was, as Beryl Donaldson stated upon the film’s original theatrical release, that of ‘a small-town moral coward’. However, this moral cowardice is positioned by Hannam in relation to wartime trauma as individualised disability, signified by the limp, while the cane symbolises the nationalism celebrating such traumatic disability as noble heroism: ANZAC mythology becomes therefore emblematic of social disablement.

Break of Day’s iconoclastic subversion is systematic. Beginning with a depiction of the Gallipoli campaign, the film cuts to a memorial cannon in a remote outback small town community as dawn breaks for a ceremonial Anzac Day commencement—in a depiction of the process of militaristic national identity construction. The disabled protagonist, Tom (Andrew McFarlane) is hunting rabbits when he comes upon the rented residence of Alice (Sara Kestelman) who is new to the small community.  At the outset, his limp is barely even noticeable.  However, as the film progresses he complains of his leg ‘getting in the way’ and the use of the cane as a walking aid is thereafter more visible.. More so than the limp signifying trauma as disability, the cane increasingly serves as an index of sociological disablement, inherent in Anzac Day commemoration: social mobility and identity are defined by it.  As to the Australian values so celebrated, in the local pub the veterans talking of their wartime experiences get so drunk they can barely stand—a critique of the rampant alcoholism afflicting Australian masculinity as once again indexing social disablement.

This evocation of Australian patriotism (and parochialism) equates the national holy-day with a shamefully disabling, drunken, nationalistic shambles. Tom O’Regan later characterised Hannam’s uniquely Australian cultural subversion of ANZAC national identity mythology in Break of Day as follows:

Each national space also organizes its own varieties of nationalism, and myth and symbols complex … The invention of tradition in each country can look remarkably similar in intent but the content varies from country to country. Themes of communal solidarity can mean duty in Germany and mateship in Australia, as represented in Gallipoli and debunked in Hannam’s Break of Day. If military involvements are part of the cultural repertoire of many nations, differences occur within the same general form such as which kind of military campaign, whether it was a defeat or victory, or conducted on home or foreign shores. Gallipoli was an offshore defeat …

Indeed, Hannam was criticised for staging Gallipoli as a series of small skirmishes instead of full-scale assaults such as those later depicted by Weir in Gallipoli.  This was, however, deliberate.  Staging the early morning landings rather than the mass assaults that occurred later in the day enabled Hannam to subvert the ANZAC values of mateship, pariotism and lost innocence.  In denying vainglorious spectacle, Hannam instead languidly narrativized a literal and metaphorical disablement in direct parallel to the process of ANZAC national identity construction / mythification.

Hence the contesting of the sacrality of ANZAC.  As the disabled protagonist enters into an affair with the free-spirited woman (at her instigation), she asks to paint him in uniform, referring to him as ‘the true spirit of ANZAC’.  ANZAC ideology as represented in Tom’s portrait (as the hero who fought to enable Australian ‘freedom’ in Tudge’s view) is, however, ironically undermined.  Tom is far from free himself: indeed, the bourgeois social status conferred by acquiescence to patriarchal Christian ‘family values’ suppresses the individual ‘freedom’ supposedly fought (and died) for at Gallipoli and commemorated in iconographic falsehood. 

As the newly venerated Tom wanders home after a night boozing with Alice’s visitors, he stumbles.  This triggers a flashback to his wartime experience, the traumatizing event underlying what Alice described and painted as ‘the true spirit of ANZAC’, in effect rendering what Twomey described as the ‘cultural elevation’ underpinning ANZAC ideology.  Hannam’s iconoclasm is subversive, revealing that Tom shot himself in the foot in order to be sent home, pretending to have been wounded in the line of duty.  At once, the idealisation of tragi-heroic miltarism sustaining ANZAC mythification is debunked as he loses control of the cane and it can no longer sustain his balance, slipping away as he falls.  The true spirit of ANZAC as a national identity construct is exposed as a façade concealing a shameful military debacle.

Watching Break of Day today positions Weir’s Gallipoli as a reactionary response to the prior subversion of the ANZAC myth.  However, the popular and critical success of Gallipoli, and the launching of Weir’s international career, effectively erased Hannam’s critical and pre-emptive deconstruction from Australian film/media discourse.

Hence, in Bert Chapman’s FORCES Initiative paper on AUKUS published in April this year, the Gallipoli campaign is re-conceptualised in terms of the successful contribution of, specifically, Australian submarines. Thus, while Break of Day is yet to receive full retrospective, contemporary commemorative tributes to Gallipoli such as Prescott’s now situate Weir’s film being celebrated in the context of justifying another potentially disastrous (and disabling) Australian military blunder—only instead of ANZAC, it’s now AUKUS.