Anzac legend

The ANZAC spirit or ANZAC legend is a concept which suggests that Australian and New Zealand soldiers possess shared characteristics, specifically the qualities those soldiers allegedly exemplified on the battlefields of World War I. These perceived qualities include endurance, courage, ingenuity, good humour, larrikinism, and mateship. According to this concept, the soldiers are perceived to have been innocent and fit, stoical and laconic, irreverent in the face of authority, naturally egalitarian, and disdainful of British class differences. A body of Australian scholarship argues that the Anzac legend functions as a national origin myth that displaces and silences the history of frontier violence and dispossession of Aboriginal Australians.