Most damningly, while these alleged incidents may have taken place amid Australia’s longest war, none of them took place in the heat of battle. The victims, according to the report, were “non-combatants or no longer combatants”, their murders covered up by techniques including planting weapons on bodies.

There were even instances in which new soldiers were egged on to shoot a prisoner to achieve their first kill, the “appalling practice known as blooding”. Huge chunks of the 531-page report have been redacted, including a section described as “possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history”.

For some, the report will be hard to reconcile with the deification of the Australian military and the Anzac spirit that is so inextricably intertwined with the country’s national identity. Already the corrective has begun. There are articles telling us it was only a “small number of soldiers”, and reminders that Australian military personnel have taken their lives as the fallout from these revelations clouds sky and heart – a prophylactic against a long overdue interrogation of the Anzac mythos.

This obsession with the military isn’t just problematic, it creates the situation detailed at excruciating length in the report. We construct borders, then build weapons to preserve or tear down those constructs. We train humans to kill other humans, then wield outrage when killings somehow occur outside approved parameters.

“Lest we forget,” we are told every year, in Australia and beyond. But when it comes to the legacy of conflicts, the rush to preserve memory makes it all too easy to blur the line between remembrance and celebration. The former is a solemn reminder of sacrifice, the forlorn hope that the horrors of the past will not be repeated; the latter is a commitment to our capacity as a species to visit violence upon one another, until we are all dust.