  The functional integral of the massless Schwinger model in $(1+1)$ dimensions
is reduced to an integral in terms of local gauge invariant quantities. It
turns out that this approach leads to a natural bosonisation scheme, yielding,
in particular the famous `bosonisation rule'' and giving some deeper insight
into the nature of the bosonisation phenomenon. As an application, the chiral
anomaly is calculated within this formulation.
