THE TERM ‘HISTORY wars’ is best known in Australia for summing up the fierce debate over the nature and extent of frontier conflict, with profound implications for the legitimacy of the British settlement and thus for national legitimacy today.

That debate, though hardly resolved, is now taking something of a back seat to a public controversy focused on Australia’s wars of the twentieth century and particularly on the war of 1914–18, called the Great War until the Second World War redefined it as the First.