In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition by Kevin Blackburn
  • Helen Walpole
Blackburn, Kevin. War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. 135. Index. $67.50, hb.

Kevin Blackburn has delivered a detailed study of a complex aspect of the Australian national character in his book War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition. This is the second book in Martin Polley's "Studies in Sport and Politics" series for Palgrave Macmillan. In it, Blackburn extends his previous research into the nexus of war and nationhood, producing a focused investigation into the role of sport in the construction of the Australian "Anzac" identity.

The Anzac story is one of the key narratives to endure through the past century of Australian nationhood, taking as its genesis the first engagement fought by Australian troops in World War I, under the banner of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the Anzacs). Sent ashore at the wrong location, the Anzac troops landed at Turkey's Gallipoli Cove on April 25, 1915, and entered a doomed and bloody engagement on precipitous terrain. It was the young nation's first test in battle, and reports of the heroic, courageous [End Page 486] Anzacs firmly established the story as Australia's "coming of age." Through the following century, the Anzac mythology has underpinned Australia's attitudes toward war, masculinity, courage, and, arguably, national identity, all of which ebb and flow with the changing political and social norms.

While war is necessarily at the center of the Anzac tradition, Blackburn's meticulous chronology inspects the many ways that sport has informed the development of the Anzac myth. Beginning with the outbreak of WWI and charting a course through global and regional conflicts and peacetime alike, this comprehensive study addresses the multitudinous and often-contradictory ways sport is implicated in the Anzac tradition: to justify and to denounce the horrors of battle; to be wielded as either a moral bludgeon or a morale booster; to triumph over enemies and allies alike; and to both commemorate and disrespect the fallen.

Blackburn has researched across an impressive breadth of sources to unpick the evolution of the Anzac tradition, drawing on diaries, newspapers, minute books, transcripts, and authoritative secondary sources; but I regretted the lack of a bibliography to help navigate this comprehensive research.

The extreme depth of Blackburn's research sometimes comes at the expense of context: such intense focus on, for example, the changing attitudes toward the playing of sport on Anzac Day might have profited from a broader view that allowed a comparison with the morality of Easter sports carnivals during the same period. Likewise, the intense focus on a small selection of highly popular sports (mostly Australian football, cricket, rugby, and soccer) left a gap in the story of how contrasting sports (particularly martial sports such as equestrian, horseracing, and shooting, or archetypical Australian endeavors like surf lifesaving and sailing) or less athletically masculine sports (like lawn bowls) also influenced the development of the Anzac tradition.

This is a thorough and enlightening study, which sheds new light on a well-canvassed topic and adds valuable insight to our understanding of Australian identity.

Helen Walpole
National Sports Museum, Australia
...

pdf

Share