Esprit Anzac

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. The Anzac spirit also tends to capture the idea of an Australian and New Zealand "national character", with the Gallipoli Campaign sometimes described as the moment of birth of the nationhood both of Australia and of New Zealand. It was first expressed in the reporting of the landing at Anzac Cove by Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett; as well as later on and much more extensively by Charles Bean. It is regarded as an Australian legend, although its critics refer to it as the Anzac myth. The British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett provided the first reports of the landing at Anzac Cove by the newly formed Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). His report was published in Australia on 8 May 1915: They waited neither for orders nor for the boats to reach the beach, but, springing out into the sea, they waded ashore, and, forming some sort of rough line, rushed straight on the flashes of the enemy's rifles. Ashmead-Bartlett's account of the soldiers was unashamedly heroic: There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights... General Birdwood told the writer that he couldn't sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials (The Australians) were happy because they had been tried for the first time and not found wanting. Also in 1915, in response to the reporting of the efforts of the Australian troops, the Australian poet Banjo Paterson wrote "We're All Australians Now", including the verse: The mettle that a race can show Is proved with shot and steel, And now we know what nations know And feel what nations feel.