Peter Weir's 1981 film Gallipoli can be called an "Australian classic" in every sense of the phrase. The impact and effect this film has had on the psyche and outlook of several generations of Australians has been significant. While it can be argued that every Australian is aware of the ANZAC legend and the events that occurred on Turkish beaches in 1915, Weir's film encapsulates and embodies a cultural myth that is now propagated as fact and embraced as part of the Australian identity contemporary. . The film projects a sense of Australian nationalism that has grown since the 1970s and focuses on what it "means" to be an Australian in a postcolonial country. In this way Gallipoli embodies a sense of 'Australianness' through the depiction of friendship and through the stark contrast between Australia and Britain. The sense of mythical Australia is further projected through the cinematic representation of the outback and the way in which Australia is presented isolated from the rest of the world. These characteristics combined create not only a sense of nationalism, but also a mythology arising from the ANZAC legend as depicted in the film. Gallipoli was released in 1981, developed and filmed in the post-Robert Menzies, post-Vietnam War period, when Australia sought to reconsider and artistically represent its post-colonial strain. Reflecting anxiety about Australia's so-called national identity, the film is deeply rooted in the nation's local mythology and “imbues the overt rhetoric of nationalism. The film emerges from a historical period in Australian cinema in which funding was once again available for films dealing with explicitly Australian content and themes.” Gallipoli embodies and projects a now...... middle of paper......es, Oxford: Routledge.Lucas, Rose. “The gender battlefield: sex and death in Gallipoli”. Gender and war; Australians at war in the twentieth century. Ed. Damousi Gioia e Lago, Marilyn. CUP Archive, 1995. 148-178. Network. May 2, 2014.MacLeod, Jenny. Gallipoli: making history. Oxford: Routledge, 2004. Print.McFarlaine, Peter and Ryan, Tom. “Peter Weir: Towards the Centre”. Cinema Papers 16:4 (1981): 6-22. Network. May 2, 2014.Melksham, Trevor. “What kind of men are these? Peter Weir's Gallipoli as an expression of Australian civil religion. Diss. University of Sydney, 2005. Web. 1 May 2014.Rattigan, Neil. Images of Australia. Texas: SMU Press, 1991.Raynor, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print.Sutherland, Romy. “Commanding the Waves: The Films of Peter Weir.” The Senses of Cinema website. 2005. Network. May 1 2014.