Remembrance Day, commemorated annually on 11 November since 1919 to honour all Commonwealth war dead, has arrived again.

But a century after the first world war began, I think it is well and truly time to reflect on how it is, precisely, that we commemorate those killed. It’s certainly time we stopped spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pointless new monuments to the Anzacs and to focus, instead, on the living.



Don’t get me wrong. Sixty seconds of solemn reflection on the 11th minute of every 11/11 about the true horror of war and its unquantifiable human cost, is a good thing. For most of us, given that the dead of the first world war have been so for so very long, “remembering” them has always been an abstract notion.



But perhaps that has only served to enhance the potency in Australia (and New Zealand) of the story of Anzac – the myth and legend of which has gathered like moss during successive decades about the (mostly) men who went and fought and died.



It was undoubtedly a momentous event for this new federation, as evidenced by the way Australia has chosen to commemorate parochially, as “Anzac 100”, rather than reflect on what was, after all, a global conflagration that cost many other nations far more dearly.

From Australia’s then population of some five million, more than 416,000 Australian men – about half of all those eligible – enlisted. Of the 331,000 deployed, some 60,000 were killed. More than 155,000 were wounded. This excludes the psychologically and emotionally damaged – the tens of thousands who returned with the crippling affliction, unacknowledged for another 60 years and still stigmatised today, of post-traumatic stress disorder.



PTSD remains the scourge of contemporary Australian soldiers, not to mention the millions of civilian victims of conflict that are still being fought today. Just like after the first world war when the legacy of combat (morphine addiction, domestic violence, drunkenness, lingering venereal disease and the shame of disfigurement) festered behind tens of thousands of bolted-shut suburban front doors across the wide brown land, the pain of today’s returned servicemen remains hidden from view.



I once sat opposite a retired national RSL president at a private lunch. We talked military history.



I told him about my encounters with the plights of modern veterans – about the many suicides and the addictions, of the bureaucratic nightmares many experienced in order to have their war damage acknowledged.



He responded that he simply did not “believe” in post-traumatic stress disorder and that in his day the men had just “got on” with it.



PTSD, of course, is not a matter of belief but fact – like climate change or the extinction of the dinosaurs.



But then belief – or suspended disbelief – is central to the Anzac story and Australia’s creation myth. This country has been telling itself the story for a long time now, in a quasi-religious language that deifies the “sacrifice” and “spirit” of Australia’s white-hatted soldiers, especially the “fallen”, never just the “killed”. It cloaks the more distasteful reality of ruined lives, mortal and moral imperfection and evisceration.



Which brings us back to the monetary cost of commemoration over the four years of Anzac 100. A figure calculated by the organisation Honest History estimates it at approximately $552m of mostly federal, state and territory money.



In June the Honest History secretary, David Stephens, calculated that the Anzac 100 spend equated to $8,800 to commemorate each Australian soldier killed in the first world war compared with $109 per British fatality and $2 for each German.

The question our politicians need to answer is: why?

The spending on Anzac 100 includes some $100m on a Sir John Monash “interpretive centre” on the European western front. I recently wrote of the behind the scenes disquiet among military historians, bureaucrats and some politicians over the purpose and cost of the centre.

Last April Tony Abbott, while visiting the Villers-Bretonneux memorial to the 46,000 Australians killed on the western front in the first world war, announced the plan but sources insist this project did not receive federal cabinet approval.

Building has not yet commenced. Malcolm Turnbull, it is said, may have a more iconoclastic view of Anzac and its place in national creation mythology than Abbott. It would take negligible political cost for Turnbull to ditch Abbott’s centre (much as he junked, with cabinet approval, Abbott’s ridiculous decision to reinstall knights and dames into the Australian honours system).

In the eternal search for spending cuts, $100m ($88.5m in capital cost, $11.5m in concept design and planning) is no small saving from a decision that would further contrast Turnbull, culturally, ideologically, with Abbott.

As James Brown, the former army officer, Iraq veteran and author of the acclaimed book Anzac’s Long Shadow recently pointed out, every dollar spent commemorating a long-dead soldier was not spent on a needier, living veteran.

“We’re spending millions on monuments which catalogue every death in world war one yet until last year no one was tracking the number of returning modern veterans taking their own lives,” Brown said.

“There are direct opportunity costs: $88m from the defence budget spent on a museum in France is $88m not going towards weapons training or personnel costs.”



Let’s, by all means, remember the dead – but spend on the living.