Cirrus@Austlit

'The ‘Imperial struggle’ at the heart of the Anzac legend, increasingly cherished as a myth of nationhood, is something that the Australian community has ‘learned to forget’, to borrow Mark McKenna's memorable phrase.  As Hutchinson observes in Settlers, War and Empire in the Press, Australia's imperial origins as a penal colony have also become part of ‘a strange and curious past’ as Britain has distanced itself from the Commonwealth. Harder to reconcile, however, has been the history of Indigenous–settler relations. ‘Though the sun formally set on Britain's empire some time ago’, writes Hutchinson, ‘the structure of settler colonialism remains. Modern Australia remains a product of Aboriginal dispossession’ (p 195).'  (Introduction)