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Over the last twenty years, a period that corresponds to Pierre Nora’s ‘era of commemoration’, the anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli in 1915, when Anzac troops launched a vain assault on the Turkish-held cliffs, has been marked in Australia with renewed intensity. With the support of the government and the media for the ‘reinvention’ of this tradition, Gallipoli has acquired iconic status in the Australian imagination as the founding moment of nationhood. This article suggests some of the reasons why the Gallipoli story has come to have such power in the Australian imagination, examines the origins and nature of the myth and what aspects of ‘Australian identity’ it reinforces. It signals the role of elites in propagating the legend for their own (diverse) ends, the flexibility of meanings that can be attributed to the events providing fertile ground for self-interested re-interpretations, notably by politicians.