Anzac Day isn’t what it used to be – 111 years on, what place does it have in modern Australia?

‘As Gallipoli reaches ever further into the past, the less relevant Anzac Day arguably becomes for multi-racial and increasingly secular Australian society,’ Paul Daley writes. Photograph: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

The pageantry and celebratory nature of today’s Anzac marches are a far cry from the gatherings of sombre recollection that characterised this day in the decades after the first world war.

That was when the veterans of Australian involvement in the botched invasion of, and later retreat from, Gallipoli, were still very much alive and those who’d died in the misadventure remained hauntingly vivid in the memories of surviving comrades in arms and the families who’d lost them.