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