Our education in Anzac was all about Gallipoli, Simpson and his donkey, and bronzed diggers in slouch hats. It was history according to the director Peter Weir, and Mel Gibson was our Anzac Han Solo. Our generation's understanding of Anzac started with the opening scene of Archie on the racetrack and ended with the credits rolling. The first time I saw Gallipoli the movie I was too young to know what syphilis was or what those women had to offer the Anzacs in the flesh pits of Egypt. But I clearly remember hating the foppish British officers who ordered our boys over the top of the trenches to their death. There may have been Turkish in there somewhere, but I don't remember them. The Brits were the real enemy. It seemed as though Anzacs went to war, but they didn't kill anyone. They played cricket, sang songs and shared cigarettes with Johnny Turk and left good mates. We were hapless victims of the empire and lambs to the slaughter. Did we win the war? It seemed unimportant. Let's all have another Anzac biscuit. There was something clearly amiss. There had to be more to WWI than these cardboard heroes, but it felt 'un-Australian' to question the Anzac legend.

Challenging the sanctioned version of remembrance is a daunting prospect as we inch closer to the centenary of Gallipoli. Because unless you have a dead relative buried on the shores of Anzac Cove you can just pipe down, traitor. The diggers have become human shields against detractors. Because what kind of monster would dare to question the sacrifice of those brave men? When an angry correspondent accuses Professor Joan Beaumont, one of our most eminent military historians, of being a "stupid old woman" and an "un-Australian cow" for suggesting that some modern Australians view the Anzac legend as the last hurrah of the white Australian male, I stand no chance. The Anzac spirit has been co-opted to prop up our more recent war ambitions and hijacked by bigots and homophobes. You don't have to listen to talkback radio or scroll through the comments on news articles for too long before you find sentiments like 'my ancestors didn't fight and die at Gallipoli for gays to marry and for Muslims to take our jobs'. I couldn't understand why Australians on their secular pilgrimage to Gallipoli could be overcome with grief at the grave site to an ancestor they never knew. Then it happened to me. I suddenly had my own human shield and I didn't want to use him.

I told Professor Beaumont about weeping over the grave of my great, great, great uncle. She said "if what you feel is grief, we need another word to describe what the war widows and children felt in 1918". What my generation experiences as "grief" is not grief so much as a learnt nationalistic sentimentality based on myth far removed from the reality of that visceral, horrendous experience and the repercussions for those who lived through it. Anzac has fused with our identity. It's not going anywhere. But our selective collective amnesia needs to be challenged. If we are going to whisper 'lest we forget' as we wave the next generation off to war we need to do so unclouded by myth. And if our national story is so fragile that it shatters at the slightest provocation it's time to find a better one. Kate Aubusson's documentary Lest We Forget What? airs on ABC2 Sunday, April 19 at 8.40pm and ABC1 Wednesday, April 22 at 9.40pm