The story of who we are – of where we came from and of the trails blazed by our ancestors – is everything. Even in my primary school years beginning in 1969, as our older siblings and cousins were burning draft cards and marching in the streets against Australia’s part in another imperial war, Vietnam, Anzac already seemed secure, though not nearly as ostentatiously so as today, in our slowly evolving national narrative.

In 1964, the year of my birth, Donald Horne sketched in his polemic The Lucky Country a lackadaisical Australia, neither boldly republican nor imperialist. He wrote that thanks, perhaps, to the rise and defeat of European fascism, nationalism “is now so hesitant that it no longer achieves self-definition. No one any longer tells Australians who they are, nor do they seem to care”.

“The very lack of any definite nationalism, of statements on who Australians are and where they stand in history, cannot be wholeheartedly deplored in an age that has seen so much horror and cruelty unleashed in the name of nationalism,” he wrote.

Despite this careless (or dozy) Australian sense of self, this lack of concern with nationalism, Horne nonetheless identified Anzac – “the Festival of the Ordinary Man – as an understated yet critical tenet of identity. It was, he wrote, perhaps because “the whole process of achieving nationhood [through a bloodless Federation] was so easy that, it was not until men died, if quite irrelevantly, and in a minor and unsuccessful campaign, that Australians felt they had earned their way into the world”.

National birth had, it seemed, not only skipped 60,000-plus years of Indigenous continental habitation, it had also failed to incorporate Federation in 1901, an event that almost 12 decades later still sits in the outer stalls of public consciousness as little more than a big Coag meeting with beards.

Anzac Day, Horne reckoned, was “an expression of the commonness of man (even death is a leveller), of the necessity for sticking together in adversity ... It is not a patriotic day but ... a ‘tribal festival’, the folk seeing itself as it is – unpretentious and comradely”.

Twenty-six years after the book that (despite his four subsequent novels and many non-fiction works) defined his legacy as a writer and public intellectual, in a long recorded interview with Film Australia’s Australian Biography project, Horne defined nationalism as meaning “that you’re a patriotic chauvinist, which means that you believe that your country is superior to other countries. There’s no harm in people thinking that we’ll win the Admiral’s Cup, we’ve got Ayers Rock [Uluru] and so forth. That doesn’t do much harm but it ... can become nasty and xenophobic”. Anzac Day, in Horne’s words, was “not a patriotic day” back around the time of my birth and that of his book. But things have since changed a great deal.

All the original Anzacs have gone. Most of their children are in their seventies and eighties, their grandchildren in their fifties and sixties. After my generation passes, there will be no living Australian memory of the soldiers who fought in World War I –nobody left to remember the ageing Anzacs on the trams, ferries and buses, worse for wear but for the most part dignified after commemorating together at their modest sunrise services before carrying on to play two-up in parks and pubs across Australia on their one day of the year.

Their lives will be rendered with ever less human complexity, to become more storied and honed by an already vast army of mythologists. They will be further rendered soldier white hats who either stoically endured or who gave national birth while dying in battle, all the while bequeathing us fellow countrymen and women with supposedly unique characteristics of courage, ingenuity and mateship – traits that European/Australian myth has overlooked in all its enemies from the Ottomans, Germans and Japanese to the tens of thousands of Indigenous warriors and civilians slaughtered right here in the name of white settlement.

Back when Horne wrote his book, there was no rolling TV coverage of, and elaborate commentary on, the Anzac parades in the capital cities, events that lured a few thousand people in the sixties and seventies. Perhaps two or three hundred would turn up for the dawn services at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra – where crowds of 35,000 and 50,000, respectively, fronted on Anzac Day 2018.

But then again, 25 April 2018 represented peak Anzac – three-quarter time in a 51-month, $600m carnival of Australian World War I commemoration that ends on 11 November: Remembrance Day. What was, when Horne wrote his 1964 book, a day of folksy, thoughtful reflection has been transformed into a permanent commemorative sound-and-light show. Any capacity for quiet reflection on the 62,000 who died in World War I, or the 102,000 defence personnel who’ve perished in all of this country’s overseas operations, has been drowned out amid the type of boisterous jingoism and exclusive you-flew-here-we-grew-here style of nationalism that has imbued Australia Day with ever greater potency since the 1988 bicentenary.

Australia’s spending on commemoration during the four years of Anzac 100 (this country’s official commemorative program) has dwarfed that of other participant nations in World War I, even though other countries experienced many more combatant and civilian deaths. Australia has spent the equivalent of almost $9,000 for every soldier killed, compared with far lower spending by the United Kingdom ($110m, or $109 on each of its 1.01 million dead), New Zealand ($31m, or $1,713 on each of its 18,100 soldiers killed) and Germany (2.8 million fatalities, $6m total, $2 on each).

In the decades after the Great War, the returned services organisations had greater affinity with the conservative side of parliament. Today, no political party monopolises commemoration. Consecutive Labor and Coalition governments and their leaders over the past three-and-a-half decades (with the exception of Paul Keating) have increasingly clung to and conflated the Anzac myth with national foundation and identity. Anzac 100 has flourished, the ridiculous commitments to its funding announced, bolstered or unchallenged under prime ministers Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Rudd again, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and now Scott Morrison.

Cover of On Patriotism by Paul Daley

In 2015, the historian Peter Cochrane wrote, “Drape ‘Anzac’ over an argument and, like a magic cloak, the argument is sacrosanct”. A long tradition of obscurant political bipartisanship has protected Anzac’s mythology and funding. It still shrouds Anzac with immunity from scrutiny over all manner of things – from the questionable proposition that Gallipoli is the foundry of the nation and its character, to the acceptance by Anzac’s shrine, the Australian War Memorial, of funding from weapons manufacturers to commemorate our dead in foreign conflicts, while stubbornly ignoring the frontier wars that claimed, by some estimations, more Indigenous lives on this very continent than those of Australian soldiers killed between 1914 and 1918.

This is an edited extract from On Patriotism by Paul Daley, out 29 October from MUP. RRP $14.99, Ebook $9.99.