Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation—Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts

The subject of this paper, in the first instance, is a discursive coup d'état, a metaphorical flourish of considerable material and political consequence. In determining the meaning of men's deeds, women's procreative capacities were at once appropriated and denied. Men's deeds--their Landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915--were rendered simultaneously sacred and seminal. 'A nation was born on that day of death.' The paper also examines women's campaign to achieve for citizen mothers the rewards and recognition for their national service won by citizen soldiers. When women in the post-war period campaigned for motherhood endowment as an income, for economic remuneration for their service to the state, they did so by equating it with military service. The travail of the mother--the suffering, injury and death--equalled that of the soldier.