Abstract:
This thesis is a comparative and transnational history of Anzac Day over the past fifty years. Although the ‘revival of Anzac’ has been interpreted as an enduring cultural expression of the trauma of the First World War within a national framework of identity and memory, this thesis suggests something different. Between 1965 and 2015, Anzac Day was transformed from a narrowly civic institution – premised on imperial, racial, and family ties – to a broad state project by which late-twentieth-century governments have reordered political citizenship. By examining personal, institutional, and textual interactions within and between Australia and New Zealand, we can see the antecedence of state structures and institutions in war commemoration. This process is detected in three crucial stages: the emergence of new political and cultural elites from the 1960s to 1980s; policies and performances of statehood through state cultural projects at the seventy-fifth anniversary of Anzac in 1990 and the repatriations of the Unknown Soldier (1993) and Unknown Warrior (2004); and finally, indigenous-state relations centred on the contest and collaboration of indigenous memories of war and violence since 2005. In making these transnational connections, this thesis re-envisions the history of the twentieth-century ‘memory boom’ and Anzac revival, exploring how reconfigured narratives of nationhood forged changes in the revisiting and reiteration of private and collective remembrances, structured by the needs and preoccupations of the contemporary state.
