BigFooty Forum

Every year around ANZAC Day, football audiences are saturated with images and analogies drawn between war and footy. Since the first ANZAC Day match was held in 1995 the Australian military have been embroiled in foreign war zones from East Timor to Afghanistan to Iraq. The promotion of ANZAC Day in the sporting context is generally divorced from any critical analysis of those engagements. The discussion—to the extent it occurs at all—has collapsed into hackneyed language where football and war are said to share courage, mateship (as though that is a peculiarly Australian virtue) and teamwork. A concerted effort to skirt over or bowdlerise the reality of World War One in Australia—one of the bitterest chapters in Australian history—has virtually become an industry, in politics and in sport.

In 2006, under the auspices of the Australian War Memorial's Travelling Exhibitions Program the federal government funded a touring exhibition entitled Sport and War. Festooned with medals, photos and stories about the significance of sport among Australian soldiers fighting overseas, one particular poster stood out.

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