Irwin draws them in close. ‘It’s not lest we forget,’ he tells them, ‘it’s lest we remember. That’s what all this is about – the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.’

Kevin Rudd has pre-empted the findings of a United Nations investigation into chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians in Damascus, finding Assad guilty of the ‘most flagrant breach of international law’. Rudd is no doubt familiar with what a flagrant breach of international law looks like.

Over the last few decades, the rightward shift in the political culture has facilitated a rehabilitation of the Vietnam War, a process that, in Australia, has accompanied and built upon the re-fashioning of Anzac Day, as the extrication of the Great War from any historical context whatsoever paves the way for a similar un-remembering of Vietnam.