Every year thousands of Australians make the long trip to Gallipoli in Turkey to attend the Anzac Day Dawn Service on April 25th. In recent years, it is not the old, but the young who have been setting out in ever larger numbers on this pilgrimage to the battle ground where so many of their forefathers lost their lives in 1915. For many young Australian, male and female, it is a rite of passage. For Australia, the Anzac story has become the nation’s creation story.

This paper explores from a gender perspective the meanings layered on to the Anzac story, and asks how selective remembering of a failed military campaign, executed by men whose individual stories are largely forgotten, could emerge as powerful source of Australian imaginings of nation-hood. It considers why this particularly male creation story appears to resonate even more with Australians today, particularly the young, than in the past. Drawing on the WWI and Anzac exhibitions at the Australian War Memorial, insightful discussions with its staff and a reading of the literature on the subject, I will try to make sense of the Anzac myth in the context or our broader study of gender and war memorialization and commemoration.