The Australian Experience: Peak Commemoration?

Der Gipfel des Gedenkens? Australien und der Erste Weltkrieg

 

Abstract: Anzackery. Has the culmination of the centenary years Australians have been exposed to and leading in to the Centenary of Armistice finally hit a road block? Can it be that even for this nation — one that so strongly attaches its sense of national identity to its participation in World War I — citizens have reached Peak Commemoration? Will the overt Anzackery finally be the undoing of community support for these commemorative events? Public acts of commemoration, as has been seen over the centenary anniversary years, are closely intertwined with matters of public history, official sites of memory, monuments and memorials, and national identity. This post examines commemoration and links to teaching for historical consciousness in schools.
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-13130.
Languages: English, Deutsch


Anzackery. Has the culmination of the centenary years Australians have been exposed to and leading in to the Centenary of Armistice finally hit a road block? Can it be that even for this nation — one that so strongly attaches its sense of national identity to its participation in World War I — citizens have reached Peak Commemoration? Will the overt Anzackery finally be the undoing of community support for these commemorative events? Public acts of commemoration, as has been seen over the centenary anniversary years, are closely intertwined with matters of public history, official sites of memory, monuments and memorials, and national identity. This post examines commemoration and links to teaching for historical consciousness in schools.

The Centenary Years: An Introduction

Internationally, the centenary anniversary years of World War I (WWI) attracted much political, media, and public interest, spanning 2014 to the recent anniversary of Armistice on 11 November, 2018. Australia has spent more on WWI commemorations than any other nation; it is and remains an important component of the nation’s sense of identity. An estimated amount of $552 million[1] was spent, and the single most costly nation-building activity was the Sir John Monash Centre,[2] a museum and interpretive centre, at Villers-Bretonneux.

This Centre, although criticised before it opened for planning to be too celebratory, its brief was to “recall our victories as much as our defeats”[3] is actually sombre in tone, tells the horrific stories of soldiers’ experiences in their own voices, and the immersive visual, light, and sound technology can leave visitors feeling unsettled. Sounds and experience of war, as much as they can be recreated in an artificial environment, are told with limited sanitisation. The Centre does not fall into the familiar pattern of celebratory commemoration discourses. It does not pander to those domestic Australian tourists travelling abroad who expect a jingoistic experience of Australia’s involvement in WWI.

Australia’s commemorations of WWI are often symbols of intensified national identity. Funding for events and projects commemorating rarely attracts mainstream opposition. While government spending and Anzackery attitudes, that is the celebratory “use and promotion of the Anzac[4] legend, especially in ways seen to be excessive or misguided”[5] have been repeatedly criticised; on the whole this has remained on the fringes of public discourses.

The TYFYS Debacle

When airline company Virgin Australia announced[6] it would acknowledge veterans on flights before take-off and planned to offer priority boarding for them as a Thank You for Your Service (TYFYS) style initiative, the company did not expect a negative reception. Announced with the hashtag #ThanksForServing and coming immediately after the very successful international Invictus Games, a sporting event set up for ill and injured soldiers[7], it would seem the stage was set for public support of this plan.

In what appeared to be more a thought bubble than a sophisticated marketing strategy, the reaction was swift and vitriolic. Backlash from veterans centred around several factors: a) not wanting to be identified as a veteran; b) feelings of not being deserving of this type of recognition; c) being tokenistic or too closely mimicking American culture; and d) preference for more meaningful and material support for mental health issues and post-service employment.

Mehran Nejati declared, “veterans’ representatives described the idea as embarrassing, tokenistic and opportunistic…Virgin Australia was fatally misreading the local culture by thinking it could import an American practice out of step with the Australian temperament.”[8]

Fresh in Our Memories Failure

This is not the first time that a company has failed to understand the public’s mood. Woolworths supermarket’s 2015 Anzac xDay advertising campaign backfired tremendously. The commercialisation of Anzac Day, coined as Brandzac Day[9] by critics, was not successful and the supermarket giant withdrew its campaign. With a tagline Fresh in Our Memories and the strategic positioning of the Woolworths logo, shoppers were bombarded with a series of posters. The blatant appropriation of soldiers, was immediately seen as distasteful.

Commemoration as an Act of Historical Consciousness

Putting aside recent national and international debates on monuments and memorials, which Lévesque has claimed “symbolize the new history war”, commemoration features strongly in Australian schools. It would be unusual for a school not to hold an assembly or service that commemorates WWI and subsequent wars. Even when it is not included in the official curriculum almost all schools engage in commemoration activities, such as making poppies, organising assemblies, marching in parades, or observing a minute’s silence—students are annually exposed to practices of commemoration.

Historical consciousness “pertains to the basic human inclination to make meaningful interconnections between the past, the present, and the future. Historical consciousness also has a moral dimension in that narratives of historical change and continuity are at some level also narratives about moral rights and wrongs, interpreted against the background of present-day values and norms.”[10]

It can be used as a point of entry to teach issues of commemoration in the context of each locale. Asserted by Lévesque, in a discussion on monuments, this topic too “could benefit from competencies of historical consciousness as opposed to general politizisation.”[11] Doing so would enable a clear framing of commemoration and avoid accusations of overt political bias.

Taking Seixas’ ideas,[12] the following are suggestions for the classroom.

They (questions) are not just about the past: they form a link between the past, present, and future.
How have current commemoration and remembrance activities changed and stayed the same in key time periods since WWI? Have changing perspectives on commemoration been influenced by the occurrence of other conflicts such as World War II, Vietnam, and the ongoing military operations in the Middle East?
They are naturally occurring questions in our culture today. They are not just historians’ questions: they are everybody’s.
Teachers can facilitate students’ understanding about the types of memorials in their local area and where they are positioned: what are examples of incidental history that can be observed when encountering memorials and monuments. What do the visual representations of the monuments say about the socio-political context of the time?
At the same time, precisely because of […] cultural traditions […] though they are natural to ask, they are more difficult to answer.
Teachers could pose the question, “What do you think the reaction would be if the school’s principal cancelled Anzac Day ceremony and why do you think people would react like that?”

_____________________

Further Reading

  • Holbrook, Carolyn. “Are we brainwashing our children? The place of Anzac in Australian history,” Agora 51, 4 (2016): 16-22.
  • Innes, Melanie and Heather Sharp, “World War I commemoration and student historical consciousness: A study of high-school students’ views,” History Education Research Journal 15 (2018): 193-205.
  • Parkes, Robert J.. Interrupting History: Rethinking Curriculum After ‘The End of History’. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

Web Resources

_____________________
[1] Paul Daley, “Australia’s lavish spending on Anzac memorials cloaks a more distasteful reality,” The Guardian, November 11, 2015 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2015/nov/11/lavish-spending-first-world-war-commemorations-cloak-distasteful-reality (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[2] See the official website of the Sir John Monash Centre, https://sjmc.gov.au/ (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[3] Nick Miller, “$100M Monash Centre to form entry point to France’s Western Front,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2018 https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/100m-monash-centre-to-form-entry-point-to-france-s-western-front-20180413-p4z9cg.html  (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[4] Anzac Day is national day for Australians and New Zealanders; originally in remembrance of the (failed) invasion of the combined countries’ Army Corps into Turkey in 1915, it now symbolises involvement in all wars. For official government information, visit https://www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/anzac-day  (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[5] Amanda Laugesen, “Word watch: Anzackery,” Australian National University, 2015, http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/word-watch-anzackery  (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[6] Anne Davies, “Virgin Australia announces US-style plan to honour veterans on every flight,” The Guardian, November 4, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/nov/04/virgin-australia-honours-veterans-on-flights  (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[7] Mehran Nejati, “Leaping before listening: Why Virgin Australia gets called a publicity hound,” The Conversation, November 16, 2018,  https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/startupsmart-marketing/virgin-australia-publicity-hound/  (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[8] For information about the origins and purposes of the Invictus Games, see https://invictusgamesfoundation.org/ (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[9] Conor Duffy, “ ‘Brandzac Day: Historian criticises ‘new low in commercialisation of Anzac’,” ABC News, April 16, 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-15/critics-disgusted-by-‘vulgar’-commercialisation-of-anzac-day/6395756 (last accessed 18 December 2018).
[10] Niklas Ammert, Silvia Edling, Jan Löfström, and Heather Sharp, “Bridging historical consciousness and moral consciousness,” Historical Encounters Journal 4, 1 (2017), 3, http://hej.hermes-history.net/index.php/HEJ/article/download/76/54 (last accessed 10 November 2018).
[11] Stephane Lévesque, “A new approach to debates over Macdonald and other monuments in Canada: Part 1,” Active History November 6, 2018 http://activehistory.ca/2018/11/a-new-approach-to-debates-over-macdonald-and-other-monuments-in-canada-part-1/ (last accessed 16 November 2018).
[12] Peter Seixas, “What is historical consciousness?”, in To the Past: History Education, Public Memory, and Citizenship in Canada, ed. Ruth. W. Sandwell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 15-16. 

_____________________

Image Credits

View To Sir John Monash Centre From Villers Bretonneux Australian National Memorial © 2018 Heather Sharp.

Recommended Citation

Sharp, Heather: The Australian Experience: Peak Commemoration? In: Public History Weekly 6 (2018) 40, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-13130.

Copyright (c) 2018 by De Gruyter Oldenbourg and the author, all rights reserved. This work may be copied and redistributed for non-commercial, educational purposes, if permission is granted by the author and usage right holders. For permission please contact the editor-in-chief (see here). All articles are reliably referenced via a DOI, which includes all comments that are considered an integral part of the publication.

The assessments in this article reflect only the perspective of the author. PHW considers itself as a pluralistic debate journal, contributions to discussions are very welcome. Please note our commentary guidelines (https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/contribute/).


Categories: 6 (2018) 40
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2018-13130

Tags: , ,

Pin It on Pinterest

undefined
undefined
undefined
undefined
undefined