Related Papers
White, L. (2010) ANZAC Day and Nationalism: The Sacred Place of this ‘One Day of the Year’ in Contemporary Australia. In A. Hede and R. Rentschler (eds.) Reflections on ANZAC Day: From One Millennium to the Next. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Press, pp 31-46.
Leanne White
Anzac Day meanings and memories : New Zealand, Australian and Turkish perspectives on a day of commemoration in the twentieth century
2009 •
George Davis
Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: Towards a History of Australia’s National Day in History Compass, vol. 10, issue 7, July 2012, pp. 523-536
2012 •
Leah Riches, Simon Sleight, Martin Crotty, Graham Seal
Abstract Over the last hundred years, Anzac Day (25 April), the anniversary of the initial landing of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915, has captured the Australian and New Zealand national imaginations. The day remembers the first significant engagement involving Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the First World War. This article is an early report of a major project that will chart Anzac Day’s origins, development and contested meanings. It is both an historical study, tracing changes in commemoration and remembrance over time, and an investigation of the ways in which Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day in the present day. It will interrogate the shaping of historical sensibility by exploring the complex connections between personal and collective remembrance. One of the challenges to understanding Anzac Day is dealing with the multiplicity of meanings of such a large-scale, diverse and now venerable (in modern Australian terms) observation. It will also examine the neglected subject of Anzac Day’s observance outside the Australia and New Zealand – in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Pacific – where it has long played a role in expressing the identities of Antipodean expatriate communities.
In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization
Introduction: Indigenous Performance and Global Imaginaries
2017 •
Helen Gilbert
Indigenous arts, simultaneously attuned to local voices and global cultural flows, have often been the vanguard in communicating what is at stake in the interactions, contradictions, disjunctions, opportunities, exclusions, injustices and aspirations that globalization entails. Focusing specifically on embodied arts and activism, this interdisciplinary volume offers vital new perspectives on the power and precariousness of indigeneity as a politicized cultural force in our unevenly connected world. Twenty-three distinct voices speak to the growing visibility of indigenous peoples' performance on a global scale over recent decades, drawing specific examples from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific, Scandinavia and South Africa. An ethical touchstone in some arenas and a thorny complication in others, indigeneity is now belatedly recognised as mattering in global debates about natural resources, heritage, governance, belonging and social justice, to name just some of the contentious issues that continue to stall the unfinished business of decolonization. To explore this critical terrain, the essays and images gathered here range in subject from independent film, musical production, endurance art and the performative turn in exhibition and repatriation practices to the appropriation of hip-hop, karaoke and reality TV. Collectively, they urge a fresh look at mechanisms of postcolonial entanglement in the early 21st century as well as the particular rights and insights afforded by indigeneity in that process.
White, L. (2008) Indigenous Australia and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games: Mediated Messages of Respect and Reconciliation. In J. Ali-Knight, M. Robertson, A. Fyall and A. Ladkin (eds.) International Perspectives on Festivals and Events: Paradigms of Analysis. Oxford: Elsevier, pp 97-106.
Leanne White
The 'NZ' in Anzac: different remembrance and meaning
Philippa Mein Smith
This article examines differences of emphasis in Australia and New Zealand in the rituals of Anzac Day, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915. Whereas Anzac Day in New Zealand is solemn, with a focus on the laying of wreaths and services at war memorials and churches, in Australia the day is distinguished more by marches of returned servicemen, cheered by large crowds. By exploring the emphasis on different components of what are shared rituals, on the march of the veterans and the laying of wreaths, the article aims to outline and explain how and why Anzac Day is more funereal in New Zealand. It proceeds to highlight the ‘NZ’ in Anzac through a study of myth, ritual, memorialisation, heroes, and reinvention, and finds that, contrary to accepted views, the conscription debate in Australia is insufficient to account for this divergence of emphasis in Anzac formalities from 1916. Rather the article suggests that the coincidence of the South African War and Australian Federation at the dawn of the twentieth century, different nationalisms, and political, social, and cultural disparities between the dominions provided the context for divergent scripts of remembrance and meaning enacted in Anzac Day rituals since the First World War.
Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary
Anzac, Race and Empire: memorialising soldiers and warriors in Australia
2018 •
Ben Wellings
The memory of the First World War has a central place in Australia’s national consciousness. Despite its mainstream appeal, however, it masks an ambiguous relationship with the history of empire and its racial and cultural inequalities. In this chapter we use the example of the memorialisation of Australian Indigenous military service people, or ‘black Diggers’, to unpack the complex cultural politics of Empire and race in the Anzac centenary. We argue that the treatment of race in the Anzac narrative, and the strong mainstream association of Anzac with Australian national identity, shapes not only how Indigenous war service is remembered, but also defines the scope for Australians to come to grips with its settler-colonial history. By examining the tensions involved in commemorating and memorialising Indigenous Australians and warfare, this chapter traces the way that Anzac competes with and obscures unsettling Indigenous memories of conflict in the narrative of Australian nationhood whilst simultaneously prescribing the acceptable bounds of Indigenous memory of national conflict. However it notes that a more subtle account of Australia’s pasts emerges at different scales, in particular at the city, rather than federal, level of government.
Me Haka I te Haka a Tānerore?: Māori ‘Post-War’ Culture and the Place of Haka in Commemoration at Gallipoli
Hemopereki Simon
This article is a extensive discussion from a Māori perspective into issues around the use of Māori cultural items, in particular haka, to commemorate the fallen in WWI. Embedded in the are key theories of cultural memory, ‘war culture’ and ‘post-war culture.’ The research outlines the differences between European and Indigenous war and post war cultural practices focusing on Māori. It seeks to understand the reluctance of Turkish officials to see haka being performed when it was apparently banned from ceremonies in 2005. It outlines the media reporting on the issue and the subsequent reintroduction of haka in August 2015 at the centenary of the Chunuk Bair battle. It unpacks deep problems inherent with using such items as they are vehicles of cultural memory. These memories carry with them deep seeded issues in relation to colonisation and the military. It highlights problems around the cultural assimilation of haka and Māori and the lack of support from wider New Zealand for protecting Te Reo Māori (Māori language). It holds that there is a place for haka in commemoration and that Māori need to be mindful of Turkish cultural sensitivities as haka was used to wage war against them. However, it explores a counter-argument to that in that haka and cultural items can be used in post-war culture to promote understanding and peace while recognising the tikanga concept of mana whenua. It points out the words of Atatürk about the embracing of those who fought at Gallipoli as the sons of Turkey. It asks Turkish officials to recognise that under no circ*mstances is the performance of cultural items meant to cause offence and that Turkey’s multicultural nature should recognise the practice as indigenous religious practice. As such it questions the role of Turkish officials approving Māori cultural items for commemorative ceremonies. Lastly, it opens avenues for further research into the issues raised.
White, L. (2014) Cathy Freeman and Australia’s Indigenous Heritage: A New Beginning for an Old Nation at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. In S. Gammon, G. Ramshaw and E. Waterton (eds.) Heritage and the Olympics: People, Place and Performance. Oxfordshire: Routledge, pp 35-52.
Leanne White
Journal of Sociology
The Anzacs: Military influences on Australian Identity
2013 •
Bruce Tranter
