ABSTRACT
This essay focusses on the life and memories of Fred Farrall, one of about twenty Melbourne working class veterans of the Great War whom I’ve interviewed […].2 I don’t pretend that Fred Farrall was a typical ‘digger’ [another nickname of the Australian soldiers], far from it. The search for national character has been one of the obsessive dead ends of Australian history-writing, and in this essay I won’t be analysing the extent to which the Anzac legend is an accurate representation of the ‘typical’ Australian soldier.3 I’m more interested in the interactions between Anzac legend stereotypes and individual soldiers’ identities, in the experience of difference as well as conformity, and in the ways that ‘typical’ can be oppressive. I want to assess the relationship between Fred Farrall’s memory of the war and the national mythology which publicly defines his experience as a soldier, and to use his case study to make sense of the general relationship between individual memory and collective myth.
