ABSTRACT
This chapter describes two versions of the legend which have been influential in the public struggle for the memory of the ‘Anzacs’. Charles Bean, the Australian official war correspondent and historian of the First World War, and founder of the Australian War Memorial, did more than anyone to create the dominant Anzac legend. Bean’s writing and recent Anzac films are only two examples of the ways in which the experience of Australians at war have been made into a potent national legend. Deeply repressed experiences or feelings may be discharged in less conscious forms of expression, in past and present dreams, errors and Freudian slips, body language, and even humour, which is often used to overcome or conceal embarrassment and pain. For many oral historians, psychology is an alien theoretical world, vaguely perceived in the ways that the ‘unconscious’ and ‘repression’ have entered everyday conversation.
