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Peter Stanley, Jeffrey Grey, Carolyn Holbrook, Ken Inglis, Tom Frame and others explore the rise of Australia's unofficial national day. Does Anzac Day honor those who died pursuing noble causes in war? Or is it part of a campaign to redeem the savagery associated with armed conflict? Do the rituals of April 25th console loved ones? Or reinforce security objectives and strategic priorities? Contributors explore the early debate between grieving families and veterans about whether Anzac Day should be commemorated or celebrated, the effect of the Vietnam War, popular culture's reflection on the day and our political leaders' increasing profile in public commemorations.

In Australia as elsewhere, shared annual commemorative ceremonies such as those on Anzac Day, 25 April, help to connect residents to particular versions of the nation, to the past and to each other. This article investigates what can be gained by pairing the concept of commemoration - a set of practices and narratives that draw together national identity, collective and individual memory, grief and mourning, regular ritual, collectivity and material, aesthetic representations of war and death - with atmosphere and its dynamic combination of space, sensory experience, affect, individual memory and experience and the material environment. It introduces the notion of 'commemorative atmospheres' to explore how such events 'feel', arguing that spatially-specific affective experience can work to connect individuals to the nation. The article builds on scholarship that explores how memorial sites symbolically express aspects of national history and memory, linking this to accounts of how atmospheres can be constituted by architectural form and the material and aesthetic aspects of space. It uses recent research on Australian Anzac Day ceremonies to identify the different spatial elements that contribute to the moods of these events, and explores how these interweave with first-hand experience of the ceremonies and established national narratives. It also considers the sensory perception of commemorative events, identifying how these aspects link to discursive elements, helping to frame national identity for attendees at these ceremonies and potentially for a wider national audience.

Celebrating Australian WW1 nurses: but do weapon manufacturers funding the Australian War Memorial preserve their honour?

Australia's first ANZAC Day commemoration in April 1916 has attracted the attention of a number of historians and has been subject to a wide variety of interpretations. Rather less has been written about the subsequent commemorations during the war years. By 1917, public sensibilities were changing and social divisions were widening, especially in the wake of the conscription debates. ANZAC Day in 1917 and 1918 were less a salve to the wounds which fractured Australia, than it was a symptom of them. While the commemoration was rarely, if ever, critiqued, it lost meaning for that significant portion of the population who did not endorse conscription, resisted enlistment and who felt increasingly disillusioned, exhausted and ambivalent, not to say hostile, to the nation's war effort and its effects.

For decades, left-wing historians have persistently maintained that the Great War was a series of mistakes and was ultimately meaningless. Author Mervyn F. Bendle's latest book explores the origins of such thinking, writes Aline Le Guen

In 1942, after a series of directives from General MacArthur's Headquarters, the Allied Geographical Section (AGS) was formed with the task of compiling all the available geographical intelligence on the largely unmapped and underexplored south-west Pacific area. During its lifespan (1942-45), the AGS produced 3 major types of publications: Terrain Studies; Special Reports; and Terrain Handbooks. The Terrain Studies were the most important and complex works, designed to give the most comprehensive information. Thus, they contained text, diagrams, photographs and various sized and coloured maps. In 2012, Monash University Library initiated a project to digitise its substantial collection of Terrain Studies and make them available via the Monash University Research Repository to complement its online collections for the ANZAC Centenary. This paper explores a number of aspects of the project: its genesis; challenges, given the format of the material; the scanning process; metadata creation and changing geography (role of gazetteers); how it complements existing WWI exhibits; and methods of access.

Attendees who are physically present at events are not the only consumers of events. Indeed, in many cases, the number of people who watch an event via its telecast far exceeds the number of people attending the event. In this context, gaining information about event telecast audiences is as critical as gaining information about event attendees. However, most of the research undertaken on understanding event consumers has focused on attendees who are physically present at events. Very little is known about how consumers of the telecasts of events compare with attendees at events. This research aimed to address this knowledge gap and identify whether consumers of a telecast event were similar to, or different from, those consumers who attend events in person in terms of their demographics, psychographics, and behavioral intentions. The focal event for this study was a large-scale national commemorative event in Australia and New Zealand. Data were collected using an online questionnaire from a purposive sample (n=1,152) comprising both Australian (58%) and New Zealand (42%) residents, of which 580 of the entire sample were attendees at the event and 572 participated in the event via their telecasts. The results show that the two cohorts (1: event attendees and 2: event telecast participants) with an interest in the event show significant differences. Event attendees and event telecast participants are different in terms of gender, experience with the event/telecast (first-time participation, number of prior events, and number in party), motivations, emotions experienced, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions regarding the event/telecast. However, the two cohorts did not differ on age, education, household income, or their levels of patriotism. This study contributes to the event management literature as it extends our knowledge of consumers of events and provides a comparative analysis of event attendees and event telecast participants of a large-scale event. These findings provide valuable insights for event and telecast planners as well as other stakeholders about the two cohorts of event participants. The study is novel because it reports on data collected from both Australians and New Zealanders about this event rather than focusing on just one country, as previous research has tended to do.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine Anzac Day commemoration in schools during World War 1.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical research from newspapers and education department publications is used to illustrate key themes in these commemorations.FindingsDespite claims made at the time that school commemorations did not promote militarism, the available evidence proves the fallacy of these assertions. Moreover, schools became very significant sites for the institutionalising of Anzac Day and shaping it in quite specific ways.Originality/valueWhile other authors have examined the militarisation of schools in Australia in the early decades of the 20th century, no study has focussed on schools specifically in relation to Anzac Day.

Australia's first ANZAC Day commemoration in April 1916 has attracted the attention of a number of historians and has been subject to a wide variety of interpretations. Rather less has been written about the subsequent commemorations during the war years. By 1917, public sensibilities were changing and social divisions were widening, especially in the wake of the conscription debates. ANZAC Day in 1917 and 1918 were less a salve to the wounds which fractured Australia, than it was a symptom of them. While the commemoration was rarely, if ever, critiqued, it lost meaning for that significant portion of the population who did not endorse conscription, resisted enlistment and who felt increasingly disillusioned, exhausted and ambivalent, not to say hostile, to the nation's war effort and its effects.

This article explores the evolution of a verbatim play, 'Seeking Joe Civilian', from its origins as an idea to its execution as a rehearsed performed reading in its first draft form. The play began as a conventional telling of the Anzac story in order to attract funding; it failed to do so. Still in proposal form, the decision was taken to continue with the idea but to adapt it to what was perceived as a shift in public consciousness over the period referred to as the Anzac century. This was a period of massive political investment in the Arts and communities designed to generate stories and events that would celebrate the national identity located within the Anzac story as told from a World War I perspective. The intention was to diffuse the Anzac story, to relegate it to the past and foreground modern soldiers. But in the performed reading this did not happen. The Anzac story proved resilient; in our imaginations our modern soldiers, as our actors, became universal. The Anzac story embraced our modern soldiers as well. But what the play did expose was an even more significant intervention: the personal opportunism embedded in politically-driven campaigns of commemoration.