My grandfather and father (WW2 in the navy) never went to the parades either. I asked Dad about that and he said he couldn't stand having all that sacrifice turned into a Jolly Day Out for the Kids. He did go to the pub though, as he put it, to NOT talk about it - just to drink some of it away with people that had shared in it.

Back when PM John Howard started really going the rah rah rah stuff about the ANZACs, it was notable that most of the WW1 veterans had died by then. So there wasn't much push back about making a cheerful nationalistic myth out of all that suffering. And the films.