In this talk, I discuss how the Anzac Legend and Anzac Day war commemoration have been implicated in the settler colonial project of Australia. The Anzac Legend and Anzac Day are generally framed in the media and public discussions as being disconnected from colonisation and, more recently, they have been mobilised to promote the Reconciliation agenda. In this talk I look at how the Anzac Legend has functioned as Australia’s myth of origin to conceal the history of the Frontier Wars and the extent to which Indigenous inclusion in official war commemoration can reconcile Indigenous-Settler relations.
Federica Caso is a lecturer in International Relations at La Trobe University. Her research examines questions of gender and race in the military, war, and peacebuilding. Currently, she is pursuing two projects. One is on the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation in Australia, which is culminating with her book Settler Military Politics, to be published in 2024 in the series Advances in Critical Military Studies by Edinburgh University Press. The other is on Australia's Women, Peace, and Security Agenda and Feminist Foreign Policy in the Pacific.
