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Further implications
Commemorations of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli have occurred since the year following the event; the extent and significance of these ceremonies have varied. However, it seems an exaggeration to suggest that fervour surrounding Anzac Day and its associated legends have been a determining factor in Australian politics and the shaping of Australia's international policy positions and military involvements. Studying the evolution of Australian attitudes to Anzac Day would rather suggest that attitudes toward it are shaped by contemporary reality.
Since the September 11 attacks of 2001 and Australia's involvement in the 'War against Terror', Australia's attitude toward the world has become more cautious and marked (through our involvement in Afghanistan) by what is now the longest military engagement in the country's history. The apparent universality and immediacy of the terrorist threat, as perceived by many within Australia, has helped to legitimise in the popular mind military actions against it.
A September 2014 poll found that 62 percent of Australians supported the federal government's decision to provide humanitarian aid and weapons - including 50 tonnes of small arms and ammunition - to forces opposing Islamic State militants. In this climate a heightened interest in Anzac Day celebrations is understandable. Australians feel a need to honour their war dead and perhaps to reassure themselves of their capacity to defend themselves.
However, any generalisation about popular attitudes toward Anzac Day have to remain just that as the day has a widely divergent significance for different groups within the community, seen as a shibboleth by pacifists and militarists alike. Anzac Day attitudes appear more a litmus test of the individual's views than a catalyst shaping those views.
An interesting subtext running through Australian attitudes toward Anzac Day has been a dramatic shift in popular feeling toward the military since the 1970s. The Vietnam War (1962 - 75) became, over its duration, arguably Australia's most unpopular military involvement. As the first widely televised war and one manned largely by conscripts, its barbarities were presented nightly on suburban television screens while many of the country's youth came to resent vehemently its potential demands on them.
The Vietnam War ended in defeat and was generally construed as a vicious, wasteful failure. Its immediate aftermath was a period of relative reluctance to become involved in further large-scale military action on the part of either the United States or Australia as its ally. Within Australia, withdrawing Australia's remaining troops from Vietnam was seen as a victory for the political Left and was one of the first actions of the Whitlam Labor Government. Paradoxically, popular hostility to the Vietnam War translated into popular indifference, if not hostility, to the returning troops.
By 1987 attitudes to the war had again changed: Vietnam veterans were given a welcome home parade in Sydney. Some 25,000 veterans marched to the cheers of several hundred thousand onlookers. Five years later, in 1992, a National Memorial for the Vietnam War was unveiled on Canberra's Anzac Parade.
Many of Australia's political leaders are either are of an age to remember clearly the treatment of returning Vietnam veterans. One of the marked changes since the end of the Vietnam period is that there is now a clear loyalty to the troops expressed from all sides of politics, irrespective of a particular political party's enthusiasm for a military commitment which an Australian government has made.
The widespread support for Anzac Day commemorations appears to be part of a general recognition that soldiers should be thanked rather than condemned for doing what their country has asked them to do.