The ANZAC Tribulations at Gallipoli in Recent Australian Children’s Literature

Generations of Australian children have been presented with iconic fi gures and values associated with the events of 1915 at Gallipoli and involved in the ritual practices of remembrance exemplifi ed by Anzac Day ceremonies throughout a corpus of children’s literature which ranges from picture books for pre-schoolers to young adult fi ction. This paper aims to broadly identify the narrative strategies at work in a selection of recent stories of brave animals helping the Aussie boys under fi re or paeans to the duty of personal and communal remembrance and to examine them in a larger context of national self-representation. From 1916 and the fi rst commemorations of the Anzacs’ fruitless deployment on the Gallipoli peninsula a few months before, to the current remembrance eff orts, there have been important fl uctuations throughout the past century in the way these World War One events have been acknowledged and appraised by the Australian public as well as by its political leaders and the country’s intellectual fi gures. In the context of the current centenary events program, the children’s book industry has been especially active in Australia (and in New Zealand in a smaller capacity). While the Australian federal government was allocating generous funding to the production and circulation of educational resources supervised by the Department of Veterans’ Aff airs, the corpus of local children’s literature dealing with various aspects of the Anzac myth was also signifi cantly enlarged, with illustrated texts, Young Adult stories, graphic novels, and a sizeable delivery of picture books – a category which will be the main focus of this presentation. A similar publishing endeavour can be observed in Britain, concentrated around the poppies of European battlefi elds as visual symbols of remembrance. However, with a distinct ritual practice organised around Anzac Day each 25th of April, a few themes and images connect the creative strategies of several dozen Australian picture books: this article will concentrate on the animal protagonist as a narrative and emotive proxy, and on the collective memory mobilised through dawn services, veterans’ marches and artefacts.