Australian military history is a landscape of legends, yet across the breadth of military heritage, accuracy and objectivity are often shunted aside so that tales bent on commemoration, veneration, and the idealization of Australian virtues can thrive. In this book, a team of renowned historians revisit the battles to expose a host of stubborn fantasies and fabrications that obscure the real story. Confrontational and clear-eyed, it goes beyond the indulgent, politicized, and emotionally charged rhetoric of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC)that sacrosanct idea in the Australian national psycheto find out exactly what it means to be Australian at war and proud of it.

Craig Stockings is a senior lecturer in history with the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defense Force Academy. He is the author of Bardia: Myth, Reality and the Heirs of ANZAC; The Torch and the Sword; and Zombie Myths of Australia Military History.