Silent Heroes

The war has made of Australia - a young community without traditions - a nation ... W.M. Hughes in a foreword to Patrick MacGill, The Diggers, London, 1919. By 1919 this was a received idea which had its source in the first dispatches from Gallipoli. During the war it was developed by newspaper editorials on Australian troops and popular books such as C.J. Dennis's Moods of Ginger Mick (1916); soon afterwards it was given its classic formulation by C.E.W. Bean in The Story of Anzac: The First Phase (1921). Subsequently its significance has been examined by many historians, including Inglis, Serle, Manning Clark, Robson, Horne, Souter and Gammage, and although it has been revised and qualified, it has never been denied. Sixty years or more after the events that inspired it, the idea was re-examined and upheld by W.F. Mandie in almost the same terms as it had been formulated by W.M. Hughes.1