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As the first light of day emerges, the solemn sound of the Last Post echoes through the early morning air at Canberra’s Australian War Memorial.
A solitary bugler stands vigilantly by the Stone of Remembrance, bathed in gentle light, with the poignant inscription beside him: “Their name liveth for evermore.”
Anzac Day occupies a revered position in the hearts of Australians, serving as a time for the nation to collectively pause and pay tribute to those who have served in wars and military operations.
Many Australians view the Anzac spirit, shaped during the Gallipoli campaign—an eight-month-long unsuccessful effort alongside British forces to seize Constantinople (now Istanbul)—as a reflection of the values they hold dear: courage, camaraderie, and selflessness.
However, in recent years, this day of remembrance has sparked deeper reflections and more challenging questions about accountability, military culture, and the true nature of what the nation is being asked to commemorate.
In 2020, the landmark Brereton Report found credible evidence of 39 unlawful killings by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, sending shockwaves through the country and prompting a broader reckoning over Australia’s conduct in war.
Then, earlier this month, came the arrest of former Australian Special Air Service corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, who was charged with five counts of the war crime of murder. Roberts-Smith strenuously denies wrongdoing and has vowed to fight the charges.
His public fall from celebrated war hero to accused war criminal strikes at the heart of a country that has long elevated its soldiers as symbols of national virtue.
As Anzac Day commemorations unfold today, his arrest raises an uncomfortable question: Can Australia honour military service while confronting alleged wrongdoing committed in its name?
Reckoning or betrayal?
The answer exposes a deep divide.
Supporters of Roberts-Smith — including Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson — have been quick to publicly back the former SAS corporal, framing the case as a betrayal of veterans.
“I don’t understand how it can be justified to spend more than $300 million to try for years to bring SAS veterans, who have served our country, towards criminal proceedings,” Rinehart said.
Hanson reiterated her “steadfast” support for the Victoria Cross recipient, saying she would not “abandon him like so many other politicians”.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott issued a more measured statement but questioned how an alleged “culture of brutality” had gone undetected by senior officers for more than a decade.
“It’s wrong to judge the actions of men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life,” he said.
Others argue the opposite — that accountability is essential to preserving the military’s integrity.
Writing for the News Corp tabloids, conservative commentator Andrew Bolt asked those “angrily defending” Roberts-Smith if they were okay with Australian soldiers shooting unarmed prisoners.
“Defending Roberts-Smith is being made a test of our patriotism. But my patriotism is not measured by my loyalty to a Victoria Cross winner who may — or may not have — committed the five war crimes in Afghanistan for which he was charged,” Bolt wrote.
Greens foreign affairs spokesperson David Shoebridge said Roberts-Smith’s arrest was a “moment of accountability” and that “no one should be above the law”.
“From the Brereton Report onwards there has been a gaping hole in the accountability for what happened in Afghanistan,” he said.
Many others, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, declined to comment, saying they did not want to prejudice criminal proceedings.
Speaking after Roberts-Smith’s arrest, Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett said the investigation had been “undertaken thoroughly and meticulously”.
“The alleged conduct related to these charges is confined to a very small section of our trusted and respected ADF (Australian Defence Force),” she said.
“The overwhelming majority of our ADF do our country proud.”
A complex legacy
Among veterans who fought in more recent military campaigns, including Iraq and Afghanistan, the debate is less ideological and more personal.
Many are torn between dissonant feelings of pride for their service and dismay for the results.
The Iraq War, launched by the United States in 2003 with Australia as a coalition partner, has been broadly criticised for being driven by false claims that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.
The outcomes of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan two years prior have also been queried. The invasion was launched in response to the September 11 terror attacks in 2001, with the primary objective of destroying the Islamist militant organisation al-Qaeda and overthrowing the Taliban regime.
Eamon Hale is an RSL Victoria state executive and a veteran of both wars.
He acknowledges the complex legacy of both but stands by the conduct of his fellow veterans.
“I think if [the public] understood what we were doing over there and how remarkable the Australian soldiers were, they’d be really proud of us,” he tells SBS News.
He points to the work Australian troops did helping Afghan girls attend school.
“That’s now been taken away from them, and I think about that a lot,” he says.
I’ve got a four-year-old daughter now; if we were in Afghanistan, she wouldn’t be entitled to education. She wouldn’t be entitled to the sort of things that we take for granted.
The 2021 withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan brought the 20-year conflict to an end, creating a power vacuum that the Taliban quickly filled.
Since then, the hardline Islamist group has implemented what the United Nations described as the world’s “most repressive” regime for women, with girls being barred from education beyond the age of 12.
Following the fall of Kabul, Hale says some veterans “questioned their service and questioned what we did over there”.
“For me, it comes back to my pride in what my mates and I did. I still think it was worth it. I think what we did was remarkable,” he says.
Commemorating a ‘tough day’
Many current and former Australian service personnel, like Hale, also consider Anzac Day a time to remember colleagues who have died in the line of duty.
He says the commemoration is “sombre” but also a celebration.
“That’s a little bit controversial for some people, but I think about my mates who are no longer with us, these amazing men and women, whether they died overseas or died after coming home,” he says.
“I celebrate them … those of us who are still here have to live up to the standards they set, and those standards are the Anzac legend.”
Approximately 40,000 Australians served in Afghanistan and 17,000 in Iraq.
According to the Australian War Memorial, 47 Australians were killed in Afghanistan and five in Iraq.
More than 940,000 people were killed by direct violence in post-9/11 war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, between 2001 and 2023, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Phil Pyke, a 34-year veteran of the Australian Army, sees the day differently.
Pyke, who worked in strategic communications in Iraq, says for many years he avoided Anzac Day events, though he would still watch the broadcasts on TV.
“I’ve only now just started to get to feel more comfortable with it, and this year, I’m a guest speaker at a country service,” he tells SBS News.
He believes the day has become “jingoistic” and takes exception to the historic exclusion or marginalisation of Indigenous soldiers’ service during Anzac Day commemorations.
But he sees value in educating Australians about the reality of war.
It’s not about glorifying war. War is one of the most insidious acts that mankind can undertake.
Professor Andrea Phelps is the deputy director of Phoenix Australia Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health, which offers mental health support for veterans.
She tells SBS News Anzac Day can be a “tough day” for veterans.
“The memories and emotions are usually kept at bay, or at least not front of mind, and that comes to the fore,” she tells SBS News.
“I think it can also play a really important role in emotionally processing traumatic experience, really helping people to come to terms with what they’ve experienced.”
The evolution of the ‘Anzac legend’
For Hale and Pyke, Anzac Day carries pride but also discomfort, raising questions about how military service is remembered.
That discomfort is not new, argues Nicole Townsend, a lecturer in war studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. She says the current debate reflects a much older divide in Australian history.
Anzac Day was first commemorated in 1916, a year after the Gallipoli landings in Türkiye, where thousands of young Australian and New Zealand soldiers were killed fighting for the British Empire during World War One.
She says the earliest commemorations were a “solemn, commemorative experience around grief and loss”, but the meaning of the day has shifted over time.
Public support for Anzac Day reached a low point during the Vietnam War before resurging in the 1980s and 1990s, driven by films such as Gallipoli and growing numbers of Australians making pilgrimages to overseas battlefields.
Today, the Anzac legend sits at the centre of Australian national identity, with Gallipoli often framed as the birthplace of modern Australia.
That characterisation, however, has not been without its critics.
Published in 2010 to significant controversy, What’s Wrong with ANZAC? by historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds argued that the focus on the Anzac legend distorted Australian history, elevating military sacrifice above other defining achievements such as democracy, labour reform and social progress.
Townsend says there had long been resistance to what has become known as the “black armband” view of history — a term describing an overly negative interpretation of Australia’s past.
“There’s the idea that we need to focus on the good and not necessarily … the bad,” she tells SBS News.
“That’s not going away, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take a more critical lens to things.”
Townsend says the reverence lent to the Anzac legend made it harder to have honest conversations about war, military culture and the consequences of conflict.
A national survey conducted by UNSW Canberra last year found Australians overwhelmingly believed Anzac Day was important, with nearly two-thirds of respondents having attended at least one Anzac Day service, but few regularly engaged with Anzac Day activities.
But while Anzac Day remains important, awareness of Australia’s involvement in recent conflicts is far less widespread.
Just 56 per cent of respondents were aware of Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan, while only half were aware of its role in Iraq.
Brad Manera, a senior historian and curator of the Anzac Memorial in Sydney, says fewer Australians had direct contact with military service, making it more important than ever to explain the significance of Anzac Day.
“There isn’t a veteran that … can tell war stories to the next generation in every house, and as a consequence … we’re having to teach people why there are still war memorials on the corner in every suburb in every country town,” he says.
Accountability or persecution?
That same debate over the legacy of military service and its centrality to Australian nationhood is now playing out against the background of the Brereton Report and the Roberts-Smith case.
Cameron Niven, a former ADF military police officer and lawyer with Soldier’s Legal Counsel, is a supporter of Roberts-Smith and acknowledges the case is “divisive”.
“I don’t think any [ADF member] would ever want to reflect on their service and be associated with members who have committed war crimes,” he says.
But he says it was a “far reach” to suggest that Roberts-Smith had committed war crimes because he lost his civil defamation case against Nine newspapers, which first published the allegations.
In the 2023 ruling, the Federal Court found on the balance of probabilities — a lower standard of proof than in criminal proceedings — that Nine’s reporting that Roberts-Smith was responsible for the unlawful killing of unarmed Afghan detainees was substantially true.
Roberts-Smith has not been convicted of any criminal offence and is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal court.
Niven criticises the broader Brereton inquiry and says Roberts-Smith’s supporters want a “fair judicial process” and greater transparency about how evidence was gathered.
“I think there is a lot wrong with how the Brereton Report was conducted. I think there is a lot wrong with how investigators undertook their duties and the techniques and methodologies used to extract information,” he tells SBS News.
Niven says many veterans feel abandoned by senior leadership and he knows of a “large number” handing back medals and boycotting Anzac Day because they no longer want to show support for the ADF.
I cannot foresee that any person who is aware of the proceedings involving Ben Roberts-Smith … could ever comfortably join the defence force and think that their interests and their well-being will be well represented and protected.
When the Brereton Report was released in 2020, Australian National University international law expert Donald Rothwell described it as the “most significant” inquiry of its kind in modern Australian history.
The 3,255-page document followed a four-year investigation by the inspector-general of the ADF into allegations of misconduct by special forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
It found credible evidence of 39 unlawful killings involving 25 Australian soldiers, as well as a culture of secrecy, cover-ups and “blooding” — a term to describe commanders ordering junior soldiers to execute Afghan prisoners to achieve their first kill.
Rothwell tells SBS News the Brereton inquiry remains globally significant.
“In terms of war crimes investigations, Australia is seen by many other countries who take these matters seriously to be setting the gold standard,” he says.
The report led then-prime minister Scott Morrison to establish the Office of the Special Investigator in 2021 to investigate possible criminal conduct and refer cases for prosecution.
Former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz became the first Australian soldier charged with a war crime under Australian law in 2023 over allegations he executed an unarmed Afghan man in Afghanistan.
Roberts-Smith is now the second and potentially not the last.
‘It’s not easy’
As Australians gather for dawn services and marches across the country today, the allegations of war crimes from the Brereton Report and Roberts-Smith’s case may cast a long shadow over commemorations.
Returned and Services League of Australia national president Peter Tinley tells SBS News Anzac Day is almost a “civic religion” for some Australians, carrying different meanings to different people.
“It’s very much how the individual sees the world and how they see the nature and character of what it is to be Australian and how that reflects in their Anzac spirit,” he says.
Tinley says criticism of the reverence lent to the Anzac tradition is valid, arguing the national story should continue to evolve.
“I’m a member of the council that runs the war memorial here in Canberra, and very proud to be on that, but I know that only tells one part of the Australian story,” he says.
He encourages Australians to use Anzac Day not only to honour sacrifice but also to reflect on the kind of nation they want Australia to be.
“It’s not easy, and nor should it be,” he says.
“But from it, you get a very good, cogent understanding, a sense of balance in our community, that actually provides resilience.”
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