The Australian right has long staked a proprietary claim over the nation's First World War experience, holding up the "diggers" as models of conservative virtue.
They didn't question their government's policies, or protest in the streets, or put their hand up for welfare — they just got on with the job (supposedly) of defending Australia and the British Empire.
During the John Howard years (1996-2007), the jingoism associated with Australia's "Anzac heritage" was especially pronounced.
Ironically, it culminated in the desecration of the Anzac beachhead in Turkey when a bitumen road for package-tour coaches was built at the insistence of Australian government officials.
Many military historians and archaeologists raised concern about the changes to Gallipoli's original landscape, but their objections were overruled.
As an historical site per se, Gallipoli meant nothing to Howard. What really mattered was its role as a contemporary venue for the mass celebration of televised flag-waving nationalism — with the Prime Minister, of course, at the centre of events.
"We think we're pretty good — and we are", Howard said in 2007.
Amid all this self-congratulatory hype, it was all too easy to overlook that many of the Australian soldiers who actually fought at Gallipoli and other theatres became anti-war pacifists and/or socialists as a result of their experiences.
One of these Australian "winter soldiers" of WWI was Captain Hugo Throssell of the 10th Light Horse.
In 1914, Throssell was a 29-year-old farmer, mounted militiaman and the youngest son of a former conservative premier of Western Australia. A true believer in the morality of the war, he landed as a junior officer at Gallipoli just in time to participate in the infamous charge at the Nek, where his regiment suffered severely on August 7, 1915.
The survivors were later ordered to attack at Hill 60, another hopeless objective.
It was at Hill 60 that Throssell won his Victoria Cross, the only such medal ever awarded to a serving member of the Light Horse. While recovering from wounds sustained in the battle, Throssell contracted meningitis and he was sent home via London for a three-month leave of absence in 1916.
During his stay in London, Throssell met the love of his life — Katharine Susannah Prichard, a Fijian-born Australian expatriate socialist, feminist organiser and writer. It was a watershed moment.
Through Prichard and her circle of comrades, socialist ideas exerted a profound influence on Throssell, who began to realise that he and his fellow soldiers were pawns in the clash of capitalist-imperialist empires, dying for no good cause.
Back in Australia, Throssell was accorded celebrity status and authorities made it clear that he was expected to tour the country in an effort to boost falling recruitment levels.
Subjected to endless questioning by journalists, Throssell was increasingly repulsed by the propaganda machine that sanitised and glorified the brutal realities of trench warfare.
However, in the face of overwhelming social pressures, Throssell was still unable to express his dissent openly. He returned to active duty with the 10th Light Horse in the Middle East, brimming with inner conflicts (which were greatly exacerbated when his brother Ric was killed in Gaza in April 1917).
By August 1918, Captain Throssell was in the grip of a psychological crisis, euphemistically described as "NYD." (Not Yet Diagnosed) in his service record. He was returned to Australia, ostensibly to help with the government's recruitment campaign.
Throssell and Prichard married in 1919 and moved to Western Australia.
In July of that year, Throssell publicly declared at a victory parade in his hometown of Northam, Western Australia, that the suffering he had seen in the war had turned him into a pacifist and a socialist.
This declaration was met with stony silence — a taste of things to come. From that moment on, the mainstream media that had helped to manufacture Throssell's image as a warrior-hero turned against him, ridiculing him as a naive dreamer. Leftists, on the other hand, hailed Throssell's display of moral courage.
Throughout the 1920s, Throssell and Prichard remained prominently associated with the left, and spoke out in support of a variety of progressive causes.
In retaliation for his support of striking workers, radical womens' groups and indigenous rights, a vengeful conservative establishment subjected Throssell (whom they regarded as a class traitor) to relentless personal and professional persecution.
The high price that Throssell paid for his involvement in the war and his subsequent anti-war stand was starkly revealed in 1933, when he lost his battle with unresolved trauma and committed suicide.
Had he not also won the Victoria Cross while serving at Gallipoli, Throssell's name — like those of so many other soldier socialist converts — would have been forgotten.
As it is, Throssell's prominent association with the Victoria Cross has assured him a place in the history books — but the story of his post-war political activism is rarely mentioned, and even then only as an embarrassing quirk.
Not surprisingly, VC-winner Throssell's rejection of the capitalist system that produced war then and produces war now is an aspect of Australia's WWI history that right-wing commentators never seek to highlight.