Anzac and Gallipoli are the novelist's terrain as much as the historian's

Paul Daley - The Guardian

For too many Australian authors the Anzac centenary is little more than a marketing opportunity, but Steve Sailah’s A Fatal Tide is a subtle challenge to the mythologisers

It is ironic that Australia pays such credit to the defending Turks at the Australian war memorial, yet offers no official deference to the Indigenous people who sought to defend their continent from invasion in 1788. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP

Wednesday 5 November 2014 

I am deeply cynical about the plethora of books on Australia’s involvement in the first world war, Gallipoli in particular, that are flooding our bookstores as Australia marks what it parochially calls the Anzac 100 centenary.

The centenary ought to be, for those inclined, a time of sombre reflection upon the evils – and in the case of the ill-named “great war”, utter pointlessness – of armed conflict. Yet for too many Australian authors the centenary will present as little more than a marketing opportunity – a chance to ride a tide of mythology and legend from which little, if anything, can be learnt about the truth of what war does to humanity.

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