We Remember - Australia's Story

The American Historical Review, 1996

Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 2017

Comillas Journal of International Relations, 2015

Australian memory of the Great War has always been expressed most enthusiastically in the rituals of Anzac Day: an occasion that recognises the anniversary of the Australians' first battle of the war in Turkey on 25 April 1915. In the decades after 1914-1918, the devastating effects of the war were assuaged in part by the pride that Australians felt in the fighting reputation of their soldiers. By the 1960s the rituals of Anzac were in noticeable decline. Young Australians were hostile to the values of the Great War generation and believed that the commemorative practices of Anzac Day glorified war. Despite the widespread belief that Anzac Day would die with the last of the old veterans, it has staged a remarkable resurgence. This can be explained by the remaking of the Anzac legend, from a myth anchored in British race patriotism and martial nationalism to one that speaks in the modern idiom of trauma, suffering and empathy. What remains of the original Anzac legend is the belief commonly held by contemporary Australians that their national consciousness was born at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. La memoria australiana de la Gran Guerra siempre se ha expresado de modo más efusivo en los ritos del día de Anzac: un acontecimiento que reconoce el aniversario de participación en la primera batalla en la Guerra de los australianos en Turquía, el 25 de abril de 1915. En las décadas tras los años 1914-1918, los efectos devastadores de la Guerra se apaciguaron en parte gracias al orgullo que los australianos sentían en la reputación de sus soldados como combatientes. En la década de Australian war memory; Anzac Day; Anzac legend; martial nationalism; trauma.

Much of the work undertaken in the area of historical remembrance makes links with broader debates about national identity. As Heisler (2008) argues, this is because processes of national identity formation often look for a moment in the past that can be fleshed with testimonies of survival and ‘overcoming’ significant hardships. Borrowing James Wertsch’s (2008: 60) terminology, these can be described as ‘schematic narratives’ that simplify complex histories and efficiently organize – through repetition – how individuals ought to think and respond to a nation’s past. Such narratives often simultaneously construct a set of core national characteristics (such as courage, mateship, perseverance and the Anzac spirit) that surface and resurface in contemporary debates, with key places and events foregrounded as essential to the ‘birth’ of those characteristics. For Australia, it is often Gallipoli and the Kokoda Campaign that are looked to for reminders of the Australian national character, and these are sites that today have become the focus of pilgrimage tours that seek out the Anzac legend. As a number of scholars have highlighted, museums and memorials are often utilised as ‘tools’ in the construction and maintenance of this sort of memory. While much has been written on the recollections of Gallipoli and the Kokoda Trail within the Australian imaginary – and the work both do in representing contemporary Australian identity –, less scholarly attention has been channelled towards understanding them beyond their representational nature. In this chapter, we suggest that Gallipoli and the Kokoda Campaign are not representations in and of themselves; rather, to borrow from Curti (2008: 108), they are ‘performed and felt between, in and through bodies and thus always work through entangled forces of emotion, affect and memory’. With this in mind, our purpose is to explore the interpretive strategies employed at the Australian War Memorial, especially those designed to ignite processes of embodied remembering. The evocative power of such strategies, we argue, lies in the invitation they extend to visitors to feel something as they reflect on the horrors of war. These registers of affect are woven into the fabric of exhibitions themselves, as well as the narratives they impart, and while not always immediately expressible, trigger deeply felt, physical and visceral responses that emerge as visitors react to atmosphere and, oftentimes, a sense of haunting. By way of data, we examine the memorial narratives of Gallipoli throughout the Memorial, as well as the new audio-visual installation that narrates the Kokoda Campaign. Both, we argue, draw upon the same schematic narrative and explicitly target atmosphere and emotion in ways that pluck at the affective registers of belonging and nostalgia.

Every year Australia and Canada commemorate the Gallipoli Campaign and the Battle of Vimy Ridge respectively. Phrases like "nation forming" and "birth of a nation" have become predictable inclusions at commemorations and ceremonies along with words like "immortalised", "legends" and "sacred". This thesis examined how the Gallipoli Campaign and the Battle of Vimy Ridge were fundamentally different yet the current rhetoric and mythology attached to the commemorations are identical.

Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2016

Warfare tourism' represents an increasingly significant dimension of contemporary tourism. This paper provides a fresh perspective on participation in 'warfare tourism' by investigating the behaviour and experiences of a living veteran and his son returning to two theatres of war in which the veteran had served in the Royal Navy during World War Two. Active interviews with the two family members were used to gather rich data regarding the two extended trips, which had been funded by 'Heroes Return', to Australia in 2012 and Sri Lanka in 2013. The findings indicate that some of the facets of visiting the fallen at other dark tourism sites, such as empathetic identification and personal connection, are also very relevant to trips shared between the living. However, with the living these contribute to a powerful co-created experience in which 'closer' bonds between the travellers can be developed. Furthermore, whilst the experiences at times represented 'bittersweet' nostalgia for the veteran, they also provided the son with the opportunity to 'look through his father's eyes' from both a past and current perspective. Given that there will be war veterans as long as conflicts exist, the results have valuable messages for all those dealing with veterans in the future. *The phrase 'lest we forget' was originally penned by Rudyard Kipling in his 1897 'Recessional' poem, and is sometimes added as a post script to Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen'. 'For the Fallen' was written during the first months of World War One, and published in The Times newspaper on 21 st September 1914. The lines 'Lest we forget' and also 'We shall remember them' (from 'For the Fallen') are sometimes seen on war memorials and used in commemorative material on war remembrance days, especially in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Portal, special issue, Fields of Remembrance, vol. 7, no. 1., 2010

On 26 June 2008 the minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Alan Griffin, announced that ‘Battle for Australia Day’ would be commemorated on the first Wednesday in September; this proclamation fulfilled a Labor Party election promise and followed a ten-year campaign by returned soldiers and others to commemorate the battles that constituted the Pacific War. The very recent consecration of this day enables an examination of the dynamics of the processes involved in the construction of national commemorations. The aim of this article is to identify the various agencies involved in the process of ‘remembering the Battle for Australia’ and the channels they have used to spread their message; to trace the political and historical controversies surrounding the notion of a ‘Battle for Australia’ and the conflicting narratives to which they have given rise; and to outline the ‘chronopolitics’: the shifts in domestic and international politics that ‘over time created the conditions for changes in the memoryscape and, sometimes, alterations in the heroic narrative as well’ (Gluck 2007: 61).