War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition

Kevin Blackburn’s War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition (Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics) was published this month. The book argues that there has been an Anzac sporting tradition which has intertwined the language of sport and war since the First World War. Its origins are in late Victorian and Edwardian ideas of masculinity extolling prowess on the sports field as fostering prowess on the battlefield. The remnants of these early twentieth-century ideas remain in the twenty-first century when sport seems to have appropriated Anzac Day and looms large in the Anzac tradition.