In 1967 the historian Geoffrey Serle conjured a superb description of the overblown nationalistic hyperbole that had attached, limpet-like, to Anzac during his postwar youth: Anzackery. What a word for the bombastic myth making that has culturally amplified and enshrined Australia’s part in the botched invasion and attempted occupation of a small finger of the Ottoman Empire on 25 April 1915.

In 2013 another Australian historian, Stuart Macintyre, made a timely reprise of Serle’s Anzackery to challenge the latest generation of political leaders, public officials and largely unquestioning journalists who blithely perpetuate an absurd proposition: that our nationhood emerged not with Federation or amid 60,000 years of continuous Indigenous settlement, but with the deaths of 8700 Australians fighting under a British flag at Gallipoli.