The 'Lost Generation' Concept Does Not Apply to Australia

The term “Lost Generation” specifically refers to the cohort of American (and some European) writers and artists who came of age during World War I and felt disillusioned by the war’s carnage and postwar society—figures like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein.

Australia does not have a “Lost Generation” in this literary/historical sense. While Australia suffered heavy casualties in WWI (over 60,000 dead from a population under 5 million), the cultural label “Lost Generation” is not used in Australian historiography. Australian war memory centers on the ANZAC legend, mateship, and national identity formation at Gallipoli and the Western Front.

If you’re asking about a generation affected by war, economic depression, or social change in Australia, historians discuss those as distinct phenomena (e.g., the “ANZAC generation,” the “Depression generation”), not the “Lost Generation.”