Memorialising Gallipoli: Manufacturing Memory at Anzac

The memorials of Gallipoli have not lost their power to move, confront and often even inspire their visitors. Their meanings are re-visited, even re-invented by each successive generation of Anzac pilgrim and, contrary to the simplistic mono-dimensional readings of some historians, the Peninsula’s commemorative landscape remains a site of fierce contestation. Pacifist and patriot, back packer and bereaved all interpret it differently. Moreover, the memorials of Gallipoli continue to alert us to different cultures of commemoration; Christian, secular and Islamic, Turkish, British, French and Australian

Set in Stone?:

Memorials to white explorers and pioneers long stood (virtually) unchallenged in the heart of Australia’s towns and cities. By occupying civic space, they served to legitimise narratives of conquest and dispossession, colonising minds in the same ways ‘settlers’ seized vast tracts of territory.  The focus of this article is a memorial raised to the memory of three white explorers, ‘murdered’ (it was claimed) by ‘treacherous natives’ on the north west frontier. It examines the ways that historians and the wider community took issue with this relic of the colonial past in one of the first encounters in Australia’s statue wars. The article explores the concept of ‘dialogical memorialisation’ examining the way that the meanings of racist memorials might be subverted and contested and argues that far from ‘erasing’ history attacks on such monuments constitute a reckoning with ‘difficult heritage’ and a painful and unresolved past. It addresses the question of whose voice in empowered in these debates, acknowledges the need for white, archival based history to respect and learn from Indigenous forms of knowledge and concludes that monuments expressing the racism of past generations can become platforms for truth telling and reconciliation

A future for the past : the state of children's history /

A future for the past : the state of children's histor

ANZAC Day with Bruce Scates

This ANZAC Day will be unlike any other in living memory. But wherever we are, we can still come together and reflect. Come together this ANZAC Day for a special online event with Professor Bruce Scates, ANU historian, author and producer of the series ‘Australian Journey’. In this interactive broadcast, Bruce will present a vivid look at how our nation remembers war, and tell the stories of men and women touched by it

'Letters from a pilgrimage': reflection on the 1965 return to Gallipoli

This article examines Ken Inglis’s journey to Gallipoli in 1965, marking the 50th anniversary of the Landing. It involves a detailed consideration of his earliest writings on this subject, drawing on unpublished manuscripts held by the National Library. The article uses this study as an opportunity to examine the character and method of Inglis’s historical writing and situate this early work within the corpus of a larger body of scholarship. It contrasts Inglis’s nuanced and carefully argued account – his ethnographic approach to the gathering of testimony, close observance of ritual and language and the bold sweep of his writing – with the less searching and more reductionist approach taken by some subsequent critics of Gallipoli pilgrimage. One of the article’s key concerns is to consider how the character of commemoration has changed over time: it compares and contrasts this first large-scale return to Gallipoli (over 300 World War One veterans embarked on the ‘Jubilee Pilgrimage’) with more recent journeys to Anzac. It argues that with the passing of the generation that witnessed the Great War, ‘Anzac’ has lost much of its historical specificity and that the increasingly performative aspects of commemoration have served to overwhelm its original meanings