The official commemorations for Australian military personnel who’ve died on the battlefield or whose lives were marred due to war service have long been adorned with ecclesiastical language.

Friday’s services across the country are the most profound cases in point even though, after almost 110 years of Anzac Days, many Australians may have become culturally inured to the way our national remembrance has become – and remains – so imbued with religiously inflected rhetoric.

That’s why we will hear referenced, repeatedly on Anzac Day, the “spirit” of Anzac and of those killed on the battlefield, of their “sacrifice” and how death somehow transforms them into the “fallen” though not as often these days do you hear them referred to as the “glorious dead”. Surrounding it all will be Christian prayer.

When previously writing about the politics of commemoration I’ve referenced an Australian Vietnam veteran Jim Robertson who wrote a submission to the federal government ahead of the centenary of Anzac in 2015. His words are just as salient today.

He took exception to the term “fallen” (which I agree is something of a sanitisation of battlefield death) as used by........

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