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