ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the screen texts and related mythmaking celebrations that draw on the connection between lostness and heroism: a concept in the Australian context that has largely been defined by sorrow, subordination and untimely death. As more recent literature suggests, Australia’s sense of nationhood has been disproportionately built on the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) legend of defeat and suffering. Veterans and lost heroes of the Vietnam, Korean, Iraq and Afghanistan wars are rolled into Anzac Day commemorations, but always with the 1915 fated Gallipoli assault on Turkish forces at its root. The increasingly commercialised site of the massacre, the Gallipoli Peninsula (Gaba Tepe, Anzac Cove), caters to school groups and tourists who make the pilgrimage each year. Interestingly film and television didn’t critically embrace these and related military losses until the 1970s. There are of course celebrated ‘legends’ who boast victory and accomplishment, but even the most fêted - Australian elite athletes - are repeatedly linked to war heroes. This chapter will explore the historical and screen mythologising of these men, or ‘our boys over there’ as they were affectionately known - a collective of na ve young adults who still clearly carry the archetypal symbolism of the displaced child.
