I have learned bookbot and ventured to campus! I got two physical books (crazy right?) and have dove into them. One is about the ANZAC myth and one is about the doughboy myth, I think both books are great and will be instrumental in writing my paper. I have been reading the books but also leafing through their bibliographies to find additional sources.
Graham Seal’s book “Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology” is an eye opener. Up until this book , I was using ANZAC and digger interchangeably. Seal, however, argues that although one has influenced the other and they weave in and out of each other, they have fundamentally different meanings. The digger myth is one of a hard working man, just a regular guy, who is going off to war to make a paycheck and make his country proud. Seal uses a lot of primary sources of soldier’s stories to describe what digger culture was like. The digger legend can be summed up as an authentic, down to earth folktale about the ordinary men who became heroes in war. On the other hand, the ANZAC story is one of a national identity and although it is derived from the digger folktale, it is becoming farther and farther removed from it as time goes on. ANZAC day is a public holiday complete with marches, ceremonies, and shared meals. ANZAC is the idea of the national identity, how one small country who just got independence was able to go to war and perform on the world stage. It does not necessarily include the stories of diggers that were actually on the battlefield, but rather a removed, romanticized memory of war.
The statue that I am using is one of a digger soldier. I believe that the digger folktale and the doughboy folktale are really similar stories (And the statues are similar too). But there is not an ANZAC comparison in the United States. The American identity was not formed by war and the stories brought back. World War 1 is barely remembered in the U.S. We don’t even have a separate public holiday for remembrance, just one large one to recognize all veterans of all American wars. This leads me to one of my big questions: How could two countries with similar folktales and statues honoring them, remember war so differently?