Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World: Anzac @ 100 9811640181, 9789811640186

Citation preview

Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World Anzac @ 100 Danielle Drozdzewski Shanti Sumartojo Emma Waterton

Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World

Danielle Drozdzewski • Shanti Sumartojo Emma Waterton

Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World Anzac @ 100

Danielle Drozdzewski Department of Human Geography Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

Shanti Sumartojo Monash University Caulfield East, VIC, Australia

Emma Waterton School of Social Sciences Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-16-4018-6    ISBN 978-981-16-4019-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World  1 Introduction   2 What Are Geographies of Commemoration and Why Are They Important?   4 Tropes of Anzac   7 Commemoration in a Digital World  11 The Volume’s Structure  16 References  19 2 Epistemology of Memory 25 A New Mode of Address  26 An Epistemology of Memory  31 Bodies In, and Of, Memory  34 A Methodology for ‘Thinking-with’  37 Methods for Digital Commemoration  39 Photo Elicitation and Videoed Interviews  40 Modes of Analysis  45 Conclusions  47 References  48 3 Encounters with Anzac in a Digital World: Tropes and Symbols, Spectacle and Staging 55 Commemoration as Encounter  56 Encountering Anzac Symbols and Tropes  57 v

vi 

Contents

An Anzac Medal Storyboard  58 Rosemary Is (Not Only) for Remembrance  61 Anzac Trope = (Digger + Mateship + Australianness) x (Political Work~)  64 Anzac as Spectacle, Anzac as Staged  68 Anzac Through the Screen  72 Conclusions  75 References  77 4 Digital Presence and Absence 81 Framing Presence and Absence in the Digital World  82 Anzac and Family Connections  85 Absent Anzac: Multiculturalism and Weakening Genealogies  91 Conclusions  98 References 100 5 Digital Feelings105 Expanding the Semiotic: Feeling Commemoration in a Digital World 106 More or less Digital Feelings: Ceremonial Encounters 107 Circulating Feelings: The Extension and Expansion of the Commemorative Setting 114 Feeling Anzac Differently and Digitally 116 Non-conforming Feelings: Digital Protest and CounterNormative Expressions 120 Conclusions 123 References 124 6 Using Geography to Think-Through and Towards New Commemorative Frontiers127 Anzac Futures 128 Three Vignettes 132 Danielle 132 Emma 135 Shanti 139 Anzac@100 Refracted through Anzac 2020 141

 Contents 

vii

A New Agenda for Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World 143 Commemorative Continuities 145 References 146 Index149

About the Authors

Danielle  Drozdzewski  is Associate Professor of Human Geography at Stockholm University. Her research interests traverse cultural geography, memory studies and qualitative research methods. Her particular research focus relates to exploring the relationship between memory, place and identity; using a geographical lens, she has investigated how cultural memory and geographies of ethno-cultural identities and national identities play out across different spatial settings and temporalities. She is also interested in people’s interactions with memorials in everyday locations and how a politics of memory influences memory selection in post-war and post-totalitarian states. Her recent books include: Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict (co-­ edited with Sarah De Nardi and Emma Waterton, 2016) and Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches (co-edited with Carolyn Birdsall, 2019). She is the current Editor-in-Chief for the journal Emotions, Space and Society. Shanti Sumartojo  is Associate Professor of Design Research and a member of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. Using sensory, visual and design ethnographic methodologies, she investigates how people experience their spatial surroundings, including both material and immaterial aspects, with a particular focus on the built environment, design and technology. Her recent books include Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods (co-authored with Sarah Pink, 2018) and the edited volume Experiencing 11 November 2018: Commemoration and the First World War Centenary (2020). ix

x 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Emma Waterton  is Professor in the Geographies of Heritage at Western Sydney University, in the School of Social Sciences. Her research interests in the field of heritage studies have developed across four key areas: (1) unpacking the complex set of relations that constitute the discourse of heritage and its erasures; (2) understanding heritage encounters via the application of theories of affect; (3) pioneering experimental approaches for data capture; and (4) critically exploring the intersections between heritage and practices of social governance, particularly with regard to social inclusion and community engagement. She is author or editor of twenty-two books, including Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (2010) and The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism (co-­authored with Steve Watson; 2014). She is the current Editor-in-Chief for the journal Landscape Research.

Abbreviations

AAG AFL ABC ABS Anzac AWM WWI WWII

American Association of Geographers Australian Football League Australian Broadcasting Corporation Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian and New Zealand Army Corps Australian War Memorial First World War Second World War

xi

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. (Source: Emma Waterton) Anzac Day Dawn Service, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 25 April 2018. (Source: Danielle Drozdzewski) Blurred digital image of Anzac 2020 broadcast. (Source: Danielle Drozdzewski) Washing up on Anzac Day. (Source: Lori) A storyboard of Anzac Day preparations. (Source: Tom) (Acknowledgement to Thomas Drozdzewski for assistance with laying out the storyboard) Rosemary preparation for Anzac Day, 2018. (Source: Judy) Digger in slouch hat on Melbourne Anzac Day advertisement. (Source: Dan) ‘So many white chairs’ (Daisy). ( Source: Connor) Frontier Wars Protest, Anzac Day, 25 April 2018. (Source: Frank) Becky’s great-grandfather’s medals. (Source: Becky) Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, Australia. (Source: Kelly) Esky ready for post-run Anzac Day BBQ. (Source: Connor) Connor’s narrative about melding the everyday with Anzac Day, digitally. (Source: Connor) Men of the 1st Cheshire Regiment crossing the Rhine in Buffaloes at Wesel, 24 March 1945 (Source: Imperial War Museum (BU 2336)) Anonymized Tweet from Anzac Day 2020. (Source: Shanti Sumartojo)

8 11 16 44 60 63 66 71 84 89 110 118 119 138 142

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World

Abstract  In this introductory chapter, we outline three key points of distinction in our examination of geographies of commemoration in a digital world. First, we discuss our characterization of geographies of commemoration and its importance. Second, we outline our approach to tropes of Anzac, and explain how these tropes link to memories, places and experiences of Anzac  and how they play out and transform, or not, in and through a digital world. Third, we detail our position on geographies of commemoration in a digital world, proposing that the digital constitutes opportunities to influence how we remember. Our discussion threads along the productive value of the digital, and how it reveals in the dialogues between concepts of commemoration and ethnographic methodologies and how these operationalize through commemorative geographies. Keywords  Commemoration • Digital • Politics • Identity • Anzac • Australia/n • Memory

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3_1

1

2 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Introduction Commemoration, it seems, is always in the headlines. Whether it takes the form of solemn and official state ceremonies, rowdy marches through city streets or tense standoffs over urban statuary, who, what and why we remember the past is never far from public attention. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which formed the backdrop to writing this book, the public gatherings that are central to many forms of commemoration became particularly controversial, as the desire to commemorate together took on new physical risks and political meanings. One response to this challenge  was to find new ways to commemorate at a distance, gatherings that inevitably travelled online. While this digitality is not new, the complexities of representation, ways of being present and the strong feelings that inhere in commemoration have been particularly highlighted because of the new risks associated with physical proximity. Commemoration, as an expression of collective memory, had to grapple with new risks and implications borne of that collectivity. This book addresses these complexities by considering some of the ways that the digital world has figured in forms of commemoration since the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is aimed at scholars of memory studies, as well as geographers, historians, political scientists, designers, media, heritage and cultural studies scholars and others interested in how the persistent and enduring practices of commemoration play out in a digital world. As geographers, our shared entry point into this area of research is the argument that ‘the digital’ constitutes opportunities to influence geographies of commemoration, necessitating that we better understand and investigate commemoration in a digital world. We show that the productive value of the digital reveals itself in dialogues about how we come to know memory, especially as related to geographies of commemoration. To get there, we employ ‘thinking-with’ methodologies that attend to the experiential worlds of commemoration (after de la Bellacasa, 2012). We position our distinctive geographical intervention on commemoration around digital worlds within the larger corpus of scholarship that interrogates memories of nation as stories of the past. Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World contributes to this rich debate through its distinctly geographical focus, which enables a theoretical and methodological (re)framing of commemoration towards how people experience it through encounters with different places—material and otherwise.

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

3

The volume locates these encounters with commemoration within the core geographical concepts of ‘place’ and ‘identity’, and it facilitates further interrogation of the role of power in representations of memory. As developed in Chap. 2, we advance a new epistemology of memory that theorizes an energetic understanding of memory-work as experienced through its connective fibres to place and identity, and as felt and encountered through its materialities, affects and the body. In attending to multiple forums, media, and practices of commemoration, afforded by, in and through the digital world, we stand to gain access to a range of new insights into how memory and identity fold together, providing a lively perspective on the resulting political implications of state-led commemoration. Furthermore, adopting a geographical perspective with strong feminist leanings enables us to loosen the orthodox ties to/of the historicity of commemorative tropes, to create the space necessary to reconsider official narratives as they are experienced, felt, and (re)represented in people’s everyday lives. This book develops around three critical pillars: (1) geographies of commemoration; (2) the commemoration of Anzac in contemporary Australia; and (3) the digital world. This opening chapter establishes our conceptual underlay across these three concepts. It also charts a chapter-­ by-­chapter outline, thereby signposting how we have inter-knitted these larger threads together through our empirical material. Before progressing further, however, it is prudent to clarify what this book does not do: it does not attempt to provide a history or politics of Anzac. If such an exercise is even possible (and we are not sure that it is), there is already a considerable literature that collectively, and amply, covers a lot of this ground, and we touch on numerous key texts from this collection below. While Anzac, as a well-established Australian cultural trope, provides a vibrant case study, the book presents findings that relate to Anzac by ‘thinking-with’ its geographies, and through it as a commemorative event, in the digital world. In other words, it exemplifies our arguments without being our argument, which is to say that we do not provide descriptive or definitive ‘findings’ as such about Anzac. Instead, as scholars working within and across human geography, and influenced by an affective and emotional turn in that discipline, we argue that understandings of Anzac memory, as we explicate in this book, will always be a partial and in process knowledge. In the book we also avoid providing a specifically ‘digital’ analysis of the commemoration of Anzac that somehow sits independently of other ways of commemorating. While we refine our usage of the term ‘digital’ in a

4 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

further section of this chapter, we are keen to declare from the outset that we do not consider digital forms of commemoration as something separate to other forms of commemoration—material, hybrid, or otherwise. Rather, we see the ubiquity of the digital world as something that means that commemorative symbols, activities, and gatherings travel across and between online and offline realms, to the degree that it no longer makes sense to differentiate them. Using the phrase ‘more or less digital’, Merrill et al. (2020a: 5) have explained that commemoration is not only more or less digital because the ubiquity of digital technology continues to grow globally. … but also [because it is] constituted by elements that can themselves be individually conceived of as primarily digitally or non-digitally constituted.

We concur with Merrill et al’s (2020a) assertion and approach the digital in this book through their terms of reference. With these caveats laid bare, we turn next to positioning our focus on geographies of commemoration.

What Are Geographies of Commemoration and Why Are They Important? This book sits within an established (Ashplant et al., 2000; Dwyer, 2004; Foote & Azaryahu, 2007; Johnson, 1995; Osborne, 2001; Till, 2005), as well as vibrant and flourishing, geographical scholarship focused on commemoration (De Nardi et al., 2019; Drozdzewski et al., 2016; Jones & Garde-Hansen, 2012; Saul & Waterton, 2018; Wallis & Harvey,  2018; Waterton, forthcoming). Across this scholarship, geographies of commemoration are broadly understood as being, concerned with the dynamic and productive relationship between place, memory, the state and its histories and people, and usually focus on particular sites or regular events that are organized, maintained or sponsored by official bodies. (Sumartojo, 2020: 1)

In determining what we mean by ‘particular sites’ and ‘regular events’, these most commonly relate to material markers—such as war memorials and/or museums—and calendar events of the state’s remembrance of war and/or conflict. Commemoration is thus often directed towards remembering territorial subjugation and the service, suffering and contribution of those implicated in that war and conflict. Walter (2001: 495) has

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

5

reasoned that ‘when death fractures the body social, one human response is to gather together, to re-embody the society whose strength has been weakened by death’. Elsewhere we have written extensively on how nation-based memories of war link to national identity (Drozdzewski et al., 2016; Drozdzewski et al., 2019). Put simply here, ‘war and conflict so often punctuate the continuity of a nation’s memory timeline and leave memories of wounding, trauma and suffering, regardless of victory or defeat’ (Drozdzewski et al., 2019: 252). Remembrance of war and conflict in a nation’s past is a means to venerate lives lost for the nation (Anderson, 1991). However, because commemoration involves the regular and ongoing (re)telling of an event at a particular site, it also means that the nation must choose and reinforce its ‘official’ version of shared collective and/or national identity of that event. This ‘politics of memory’ refers to how a memory event is chosen, referenced and represented in national rituals and public discourse (Connerton, 1989; Mitchell, 2003; Hodgkin & Radstone, 2003; Huyssen, 2003). The state uses culturally familiar tropes and prompts to create, and then invoke, memory narratives of/at nation-based events. Narratives of commemoration thus remain culturally influential to characterizations of the nation, with collective memories of war shaping national identity and conceptions of belonging to the nation (Finney, 2002; Gillis, 1994). Belonging to the nation has become critically important in an age of highly mobile, digitally fluent, globally focused and increasingly diverse nation-based communities. Nations rely on memory to assert collective identity and strengthen national resolve because they draw together the focus of diverse and spatially separated members towards common and shared ideals. The importance of our geographical focus on commemoration is its spatial and connective focus. In 2012, Jones & Garde-Hansen (2012: 10). Claimed that memory is ‘always bound up with place, space, the body, practice and materiality. It is of geography and geography of it’. We very much agree with this assertion and, as geographers, direct our concern towards the operationalization of commemoration as part of a relationship between the nation’s memory and identity, attending to how this relationship takes up space, and with what geopolitical outcome for politics, people and place of the nation. Here, we attempt to tap into what Hoskins (2018: 9) has identified as commemoration’s capacity to be ‘dynamic, imaginative, and directed in and from the present. And how this dynamic holds across the spectrum of strata of memories, of the individual or the multitude’. By thinking through how memory, identity and place intersect, we therefore attend to the diversity of participating individuals and

6 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

the uncertainty of what might yet occur in the national register. Such explications, and related futurity, are crucial for not only conceptualizing the nation, but also for becoming part of that nation and feeling a concomitant sense of belonging. Certainly, not all individuals share, adopt or experience state-led memory narratives in the same way (Drozdzewski, 2015). Moreover, the collective identity/memory narrative may indeed become less inclusive and tenable over time and with changes in population composition (Soutphommasane, 2012). Yet, dissenting, or non-­ participatory, voices are rarely heard because they fail to cleave apart the shared narrative of collectivity (Reynolds & Lake, 2010). We contend that in much of the memory-based scholarship investigating the intersections of politics, people and place, a representational focus on memory’s meaning has detracted from a wider focus on the many different forms of encounter and engagement with commemorative events and place. Such difference can manifest in dissent or disconnection, but also includes diverse forms of participation that may sit alongside or challenge normative commemorative scripts (see Waterton & Watson, 2015). These other possibilities are revealed, we assert, when we shift our theoretical lens towards thinking-memory-with non- or more-than-­ representational, affective and emotive tones. Waterton (2014: 824), an early innovator of this approach, has reasoned that, ‘this is a style of thinking that foregrounds explorations of feeling, emotion and affect and places emphasis on how these are negotiated and experienced through a recentred imagining of the body’. While explorations of the politics of memory, including those with a geographical inflection, are hardly new, the orientation adopted herein towards the experiential, sensory and emergent distinguishes it from other scholarship investigating commemoration and remembrance, because we have sought to include a spectrum of different encounters with the geographies of commemoration in our analysis. For example, and as we discuss in further detail in ‘Methods for digital commemoration’ in Chap. 2, participation in this research project was not contingent on participants attending an official commemorative event. Rather, participation was predicated on how each participant encountered and experienced the national narrative during a given time frame either side of the official commemorative event. In opting for this strategy, we sought to tap into the different possibilities of encounters with those narratives and, as its corollary, of the nation too. Irrespective of whether such encounters occur before, during and after a national commemorative event, as Edensor and Sumartojo (2018: 553) have argued,

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

7

nationhood is emergent in everyday life, is reproduced continuously and is intimately entangled with the sensations, routines, material environments, public encounters, everyday competencies, memories, aspirations and a range of other affective and embodied qualities that comprise how we understand and inhabit our worlds.

Tropes of Anzac As will become clearer in Chap. 2, this volume draws primarily from our investigations of a specific performance of commemoration: Australia’s Anzac Day commemorations in 2018 (Anzac @ 100). This finely tuned focus is supported by our existing corpus of individual research on Anzac and our ongoing interest in the intersecting relationship between memory, place and identity more broadly. Annually, on 25 April, ‘Australians are called to remember the fateful dawn landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) at Gallipoli, Turkey in 1915’, under British command, at a place now referred to as Anzac Cove or Anzak Koyu (Drozdzewski, 2016: 3) (see Fig. 1.1). Though Turkey succeeded in repelling the invasion, ‘the valour of Australian and New Zealand troops in defeat’, as Rowse and Waterton (2019: 265) have argued, ‘became an important national myth for both nations’, for whom 25 April is a national holiday. In Australia, the focus of our investigations, Anzac Day is earmarked as ‘the day all Australians come together in remembrance’ (AWM, 2020a). Local, regional and national ceremonies are held at dawn, including one held at the Anzac Commemorative Site on the Gallipoli Peninsula to replicate the 1915 dawn landing. A range of other rituals are performed to commemorate the loss of life at Gallipoli, as well as honour all Australians who have died in service ever since. Such performances also act as an opportunity to pay respect to those who continue to serve Australia in a military capacity. Polletta (2004) has argued that the effectiveness of an instituted commemorative ritual lies in whether (or not) it is rooted in the lived practice of communities. Continued popular support for Anzac Day in Australia1 is clearly evidenced through healthy crowds at parades, hallmark civic attention and government funding and endorsement,2 all of which are indicative of a depth of interest in Anzac (Sumartojo, 2015; McKenna, 2014). Indeed, the First World War (WWI)  centenary from 2014 to 2018 saw participation in Anzac commemorative events from thousands of people, worldwide, with its penultimate commemorative event, Anzac@100,

8 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 1.1  Anzac Cove, Gallipoli. (Source: Emma Waterton)

providing the focal point for this research project. A press release from the Minister of Veterans’ Affairs estimated that 38,000 people attended the Dawn Service at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 2018 (Chester, 2018). Commenting on that crowd estimate, the Australian War Memorial Director, Dr. Brendan Nelson, stated: ‘The attendance at this year’s Dawn Service shows the enduring connection so many people have to Anzac Day and what it represents for our servicemen and servicewomen— and indeed for all Australians’ (AWM, 2018). As with geographies of commemoration outlined in the previous section, a well-established literature relates to the practice and performance of Anzac Day in Australia, its importance to the collective memory of the nation, and the (re)production and maintenance of its culturally familiar tropes (see for example: Donoghue & Tranter, 2014; Brown, 2014; Holbrook, 2014; Inglis & Brazier, 2008; Seal, 2004). For instance, tropes of Anzac encompass courage, heroism, mateship, hardship, and sacrifice, and have become nationally cherished ‘Australian’ characteristics (Phillips

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

9

& Smith, 2000: 204; McKenna, 2010; Donoghue & Tranter, 2013, 2014; Thomson, 2019). The observance and repetition of Anzac tropes, especially as connected to its commemorative events, has long been used to encourage a sense of collective belonging and mass identification within and across the Australian nation (Reynolds & Lake, 2010), and, as germane to some putative notion of a shared identity among the members of the nation and to an individual’s sense of ‘being’ Australian (McDonald, 2010). In addition to the role of the mass media in narrating an effective Gallipoli story, and ‘the role of political leaders in legitimating’ and reinvigorating Anzac Day, Donoghue and Tranter (2018: 91–92) have contended that Anzac Day is, ‘both an expression of elite attempts at hegemonic control and an expression of national unity’. Furthermore, they have argued that ‘the heroic representation of Anzacs by the cultural elite is a crucial factor’ in Anzac’s enduring influence (Donoghue & Tranter, 2018: 92). At the heart of their position is political work undertaken to strongly associate the Anzac narrative as coterminous with the birth of the nation (Donoghue & Tranter, 2018), a viewpoint raised nearly a decade earlier by Reynolds and Lake (2010). Such political work is effective and affective. In 2013, 90 percent of participants surveyed on the topic of ‘Australianness’ identified Anzac with national identity (Donoghue & Tranter, 2013). More recently, Waterton and Gayo (2021: 80–81), through their explorations of Australia’s heritage field more broadly, recorded a range of participant responses that exemplify these dimensions of Anzac identity, such as the following: Every Anzac Day we get them [our children] up and go to the morning service and get them to the march and not let them forget what generations before us did to give them what they’ve got today. (Lynne, cited in Waterton & Gayo, 2021: 80) Well, around Anzac Day I spend a lot of time crying because it’s so powerful. I feel very thankful for what our soldiers have done for us. You couldn’t be Australian unless you … you hear the Last Post3 and you have to well up. There’s nothing like it. (Heath, cited in Waterton & Gayo, 2021: 81, emphasis added)

Our continued intrigue with Anzac lies in the affective and connective capacities of the Anzac narrative, and particularly the power of Anzac tropes such as the Last Post, to generate such emotive responses. This

10 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

intrigue extends to exploring how such affects have been politically engineered to elasticize the relevance of Anzac from past to present generations of Australians (Nelson, 1997), and cement it so firmly as representative of Australian identity. In our view, the politics of Anzac certainly stretches across that ‘dynamic and productive relationship between place, memory, the state and its histories and people’ (Sumartojo, 2020: 1). As illustrated across the subsequent chapters in this book, the outcomes and influences of this politics of memory are our central concern, as opposed to the politics of memory itself or the history of Anzac, or the component parts of its commemorative performances. We think it is necessary to be specific about our position on Anzac here, for three clear reasons: (1) we have already extensively discussed the politics of memory of Anzac elsewhere (Drozdzewski, 2015; Drozdzewski & Waterton, 2016; Sumartojo, 2016); (2) we remain respectful of the multiple forms of engagement with Anzac; and (3) we remain cautious of the heightened sensitivity that the discourse on Anzac generates. Accordingly, we use the case study of Anzac @100 to advance a new approach to geographies of commemoration, one that builds on the many recent approaches of these shared events that consider how people experience them, through a combination of bodily sensation, affect, memory and imagination. We do so by outlining a new epistemology of memory (Chap. 2), drawing out examples from different aspects of Anzac commemoration, and consistently attending to how the digital world is implicit in a new refiguring of commemoration. The intention of this book is to ask how memories, places and experiences of commemoration play out and have, or have not, changed and transformed in and through a digital world, and  we take Anzac as the example that we will use to explain our points. Van Dijck’s (2007: 358) contention that ‘people become aware of their emotional and affective memories by means of technologies’ has strong resonance with the high levels of curatorial staging at the Australian War Memorial’s Dawn Service, for example. Over the past decade, Anzac Day ceremonies have grown in attendance numbers, but they have also developed into high-tech audio-­ visual commemorative spectacles incorporating traditional and material hallmarks, such as the Last Post, to livestreaming, video projections from service personnel and voice recordings from the Gallipoli landing (see Fig. 1.1). If ‘the ritual of the Dawn Service is inextricable from the visual, aural and spatial environment in which it occurs’ (Sumartojo, 2015: 274), then

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

11

Fig. 1.2  Anzac Day Dawn Service, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 25 April 2018. (Source: Danielle Drozdzewski)

that visual, aural and spatial environment have become increasingly geared towards the generation of a distinct atmosphere of remembrance, for example, through the ‘purposeful use of illumination’ … ‘to cut through darkness and emphasize narrative elements, as in the projections on the façade of the memorial, or the big screens that display the words to hymns at the appropriate moments’ (see Fig. 1.2) (Sumartojo, 2015: 282). The interweaving of digital technologies into Anzac commemoration provides us with an opportunity to better understand how commemorative practices develop temporally, how innovative and embodied research methodologies ‘think-with’ digital devices, and how we now irrefutably ‘remember in terms of connectivity’ (van Dijck, 2007: 9).

Commemoration in a Digital World In this book, our spatial reference to ‘the digital’ purposefully positions geographies of commemoration as neither wholly material nor digital, but as connected and encountered through the confluence of digitality that shapes, embodies and permeates our experiential worlds. While we further develop connectivity (and encounter) in our next theoretical chapter, the notion of connectivity offers an apt starting point to begin the discussion of the book’s third and final conceptual pillar—the digital world. We live

12 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

in a connected digital world. As Garde-Hansen et al. (2009: 24, emphasis added) have so clearly articulated, ‘at an individual level, the personal and the public are […] interwoven via digital technologies that mediate so much of the everyday, yet which also extend the continuous present out to edges of the personal and collective horizons of time/space’. Further, Hepp (2016: 919, emphasis added) points out that ‘digitalization and related datafication interweaves our social world even more deeply with this entanglement of media and practices’. Here, Garde-Hansen et al.’s use of ‘interwoven’ and Hepp’s concept of ‘entanglement’ reinforces that the digital is now so ubiquitous it is an unremarked-upon feature of daily life. Merrill et  al. (2020a)  have taken this further in their discussion of the ‘more or less digital’, whereby the digital is now a feature of our everyday lives to such an extent that it means that all of our activities, including commemorative ones, are now always somehow digital, even if this takes different forms and prominence from moment to moment. It follows that, even speaking of ‘entanglement’ might  represent the digital as a strand that is somehow distinguishable from the non-digital, a task which  we agree is often nigh but impossible. In the digital world, we scroll, tag, text, email, like, locate, and record on our smartphones; we track steps, routes, speed, health, sleep, and distances on connected apps and wearable technologies. We also store and archive these happenings on clouds, servers, hard drives. Perhaps more importantly, our relationships, intellectual efforts, desires, memories, anxieties and aspirations are not only expressed digitally, but they are also constituted in and with digital technologies and systems. Clearly, we have progressed well past the notion of the digital invoking simple(r) associations with the Internet and/or social media. Rather, and as Frith & Kalin (2016: 49) have reasoned, ‘mobile applications contribute to users’ embodied sociotechnical practices [that are] embedded within digital networks’, which Gane and Beer (2008: 77) have argued create ‘archives of the everyday’. The digital world is one in which our social and digital worlds are ‘inseparable from and ultimately dependent on processes and resources of technological mediation’ (Jansson, 2017: 6). With this in mind, our exploration of Anzac geographies of commemoration asks how our research participants, and we as researchers, encounter, experience and understand commemoration using the tools and technologies already ubiquitous in our everyday lives and how thinking differently about such commemorative practices and knowledges shapes our engagements with/ in the digital world.

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

13

Our position on researching in the digital world distinguishes this project from other memory-work concerned with ‘digital commemoration’ per se. Indeed, we delineate this position to establish the boundaries of the book’s analyses, but also in the hope of advancing the focus of ‘the digital’ in other memory studies scholarship. The varied approaches to ‘the digital’ in memory studies traverse concerns of: ‘studying remembering in digitally mediated contexts’ (Allen, 2018: 190); ‘a cultural field that involves the accumulation of mnemonic capital given value through mnemonic labour’ (Reading & Notley, 2018: 243); creating an ‘agenda for mapping these transformations, their consequences, and of potential ways forward through the interrelated lenses of connectivity, archaeology, economy, and archive’ (Hoskins, 2018: 6); ‘digital memory as an ‘iconomy’ that defines the relationship between personal narratives and cultural/political economies in a globalized digital age’ (Garde-Hansen & Schwartz, 2018: 219); and, ‘the past’s relationship to the present through digital media technology’ (Garde-Hansen et al., 2009: 4–5). Among this scholarship, ‘the digital’, more often than not, is located as something that sits alongside, or in addition to, the study of memory, as a separate contextual and/or analytical category and as a transformative agent to normative archiving that portends ‘the loss of the security of vision that the past once afforded’ (Hoskins, 2018: 5–6). In contrast, approaching memory-work as occurring within and through a digital world champions its inseparability as an analytic category or agent for change, and as indistinguishably interwoven not only within commemorative practices and performances, but also within everyday life. Hoskins’ (2018: 8) argument that the ‘digital has unsettled the past: embedded in connectivity it has new unpredictable life and memory’s future has been destabilized by its escape from the once relatively reliable finitude of media’ positions the digital, we think, as something ‘done-to’ memory, and memory studies more generally. This approach predicates, or in some cases is predicated on, the idea that digital memory-work is somehow risky, unsettling (Hoskins, 2018; Garde-Hansen et  al., 2009; Kansteiner, 2017; Wilson, 2009), and even perhaps rogue (de Kosnik, 2016). In our view, a certain level of counter-productivity underlies approaching the digital as an outside and externalizing force because we cannot divorce the present digital world from our activation and engagement of

14 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

the past. Nor can we separate ‘digital communications technologies and the practices and processes of remembering’ from each other (Merrill et al., 2020b: 9). To put it more firmly, the present digital world has taken ‘on the values associated with our new media technologies, such as immediacy, instantaneity, aggregation, connectivity, and importantly, mobility’ (Frith & Kalin, 2016: 48). As Pink et al. (2017: 379) have argued, ‘the digital is not separate from other forms of experience in the world, but it is relational, our ways of engaging with it are multisensory, and it accompanies us through the everyday world’. Yes, these technologies are sometimes scary in their newness, and they have provoked us to take pause and remain attentive and mindful of how ‘digital memory is structured by certain linguistic, cultural and social relations’ and how it is agentic (Garde-Hansen & Schwartz, 2018: 217). Yet, we argue that they should be viewed as part of how we now live in a connected digital world, one that offers opportunities to flesh out this ‘connectivity to new communities’ past and present (Garde-Hansen & Schwartz, 2018: 217) and their ‘myriad of rhizomatic connections, digital as much as non-digital’ (Merrill, 2017: 38). In the examples in this book, therefore, we do not seek to identify where, or through which technologies, the digital manifests. We do not make an argument for whether or how a particular technology (such as a television, camera, or big screen) is or is not ‘digital’. Rather, we trace the effects and affects of the digital world as an inseparable part of the dynamics of daily life, including the practice of commemoration. This position does not place the digital at the centre of our inquiry, or privilege it above any other force that might be at play in these commemorative examples. Rather, we pursue digital ebbs and flows, their presences, and invisibilities too, across diverse examples of Anzac @100. The terrain of memory studies is certainly vast, and we are thus cautious and cognisant of the differing interdisciplinary perspectives for interrogating the digital within memory-work. Nonetheless, we hope that thinking-­ with the digital world in memory studies research will facilitate opportunities to consider what might emerge, form and dissipate around public memory events, such as Anzac Day. For example, how can we extend past ‘simply addressing the materialization of histories’ towards thinking productively about how our digital world affords ‘new kinds of relationships with human and non-human actors’ (Garde-Hansen & Schwartz, 2018: 219). Thinking about memory in a digital world can not only expand our analyses of memory but compel us to consider how we do our memory research, too (see for example: Arrigoni & Galani, 2019;

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

15

Drozdzewski & Birdsall, 2019; Merrill, 2017; Merrill et  al., 2020c; Osborne, 2019; Sumartojo & Graves, 2018). Emblematic of this approach is Merrill et al.’s (2020a) recent research on the Manchester bombings. To capture the imbricated and connective relationship of the commemoration of the bombings in the digital world, they proposed that commemorative atmospheres are ‘simultaneously digitally and non-digitally constituted to some degree’ and, as quoted earlier in this chapter are, always ‘more or less digital’ (Merrill et al., 2020a: 550).  In Chaps. 3, 4 and 5, we directly address how our efforts to think-with the digital world played out in relation to our case study of the 2018 Anzac Day commemorations, which included events that unquestionably took place in and through a digital world. Accordingly, for the participants, Anzac Day 2018 was more or less digital, in different ways. Whether they attended events in person or chose not to participate in any official event, their embodied engagement and encounters with Anzac were mediated through a smartphone, sent to us via email and then revisited in recorded video interviews, all of which were core components of our research process. But beyond that, many of these activities were akin to what they would have been doing even if they had not participated in our project: posting on social media, watching online broadcasts, sending emails and text messages and taking photos or making videos are all part of everyday activities, and would have been part of the ‘Anzac experience’ just as they had been in previous years. Moreover, their ‘personal digital archive connect[ed] memories to places and places to memories’ of those Anzac events, and created an ‘active practice of place-based digital memory’ (Frith & Kalin, 2016: 48). Our efforts to research the geographies of Anzac commemoration at the centenary of WWI deliberately used the category of the digital to advance new conceptual understandings of Australian national identity and future geographies of Anzac. As we write this book during the COVID-19 pandemic, the connectivity of the digital world has never felt so unequivocally palpable. As referenced in Chap. 2 and further discussed in Chap. 6, we watched a very different Anzac Day unfold in 2020 (if we were even aware of it at all), on mobile devices, television screens and Twitter feeds, while spatially isolated in our homes in different parts of the world. This commemorative event was a markedly different experience from our emplaced fieldwork two years earlier (Fig. 1.3). Furthermore, as we sifted through our collected research materials, connected back to literatures and sent drafts between continents, we produced digital data

16 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 1.3  Blurred digital image of Anzac 2020 broadcast. (Source: Danielle Drozdzewski)

assemblages through our ‘configurations of discourse, practices, data, human users and technologies’ (Lupton, 2016: 336). At this moment, we feel as though that the digital world has never been more patently a part of our individual and collective research on the geographies of commemoration.

The Volume’s Structure In the last section of this chapter, we provide an outline that shows how the three above-mentioned ‘pillars’ of this book—geographies of commemoration; Anzac; and the digital world—interweave throughout the discussions still to come. In doing so, we show how drawing these three aspects together makes a powerful case for a new way of thinking about commemoration that can account for the complexity, diversity and richness of the digital world, in all its manifestations. To our minds, this is an approach that, as yet, has only been partially explored and thus, as a consequence, there remains something underdeveloped in terms of the field’s momentum, particularly when it comes to better understanding the digital world and our place within it as scholars concerned with memory and identity. This approach, then, is the volume’s chief ambition: to channel a

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

17

clear and deliberate focus onto the digital world such that the scope of memory-work is irreversibly altered, thereby requiring a new geography of commemoration. In the next chapter (Chap. 2), we commence this agenda-setting project with the development of a distinct and novel theoretical contribution to this scholarship, one that takes its lead from a blend of positions originating in areas of the geographical literature, such as feminist thought and more-than-representational thinking. Proposing a ‘new epistemology of memory’, we use Chap. 2 to argue that we know about memory through its connective fibres to place, to identity, and as felt through the body, and moreover that these links are ongoingly made and remade in more or less digital ways. Moreover, we suggest that our new framework for thinking about the generation of memory-knowledge can account for how geographies of commemoration cross so many disciplinary pathways, position the decisive representational and non- and more-­ than-­representational capacities of memory, and, identify how power is implicated in the politics of remembering. In delimiting the parameters of this research, we use Australia’s Anzac Day as an example of a commemorative event and the digital world as its spatial boundary. Across the analytical chapters in this book (Chaps. 3, 4 and 5), we explore our own and our research participants’ accounts of this national commemorative event in 2018. Using our epistemology of memory as well as a methodology for ‘thinking-with’ memory in a digital world, both developed in Chap. 2, in each subsequent chapter we explore three distinct intersections of our participants’ Anzac encounters through the digital world. First, we argue that the digital potentially constitutes how we remember and therefore how we must now understand and investigate commemoration. Second, we identify that the digital also influences the longevity of what we are remembering today, and how we draw the past into our present-day commemorations and make them available into the future. Finally, we exemplify how the digital world affords us the opportunity to understand commemorative events and their geographies through their connectivity to memory, place and identity. In Chap. 3 we take this framework forward to an analysis of Anzac Day in Australia in 2018. In the first of three empirical chapters, we use this part of the book to focus on how Anzac is encountered through its tropes and symbols, showing how these play out in our research participants’ lives along sensory and affective trajectories. Using the digital screen as a link, and the broadcast of Anzac services from around the world, we also show how these symbols of Anzac are staged and transformed into a

18 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

multimedia spectacle that is communicated, experienced, archived and made sense of through digital means. Chapter 4 takes a more intimate and familial turn, building on Maddrell’s (2013) notion of ‘absence presence’. Here, we explore how Anzac is felt and valued as a part of ongoing family connections, including how such connections play out down the generations, paying particular attention to how objects, stories and remembrance activities are entangled with relationships with close friends and family. At the same time, we consider the absence in the mainstream Anzac narrative of non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, and of genealogical links that are decreasing over time. We argue that with the increasing distance from the first Anzac event, an inevitable ‘absence’ within and to Anzac is steadily diminishing its reach and importance for most Australians, despite official efforts to shore up its remembrance. Building on the arguments crafted in Chaps. 3 and 4, we use Chap. 5 to directly intervene in debates about the affective qualities of Anzac, exemplifying this important aspect of our epistemological position introduced in Chap. 2. Focusing on how Anzac feels, we consider the extension and expansion of the commemorative setting by digital means, and the affective encounters that this setting  enables. We also consider what we call ‘non-conforming feelings’, those that erupt from digital protest and counter-normative responses to Anzac, sometimes with abusive and alarming outcomes. Our final contribution to the volume, Chap. 6, is based on the premise that crucial elements are missing from the way commemoration has conventionally been framed and discussed in the academy over the past few decades. We therefore use these concluding words to underscore the specifics of our argument whilst also reinforcing our call for a new agenda for geographies of commemoration in a digital world, one that exposes Anzac and other commemorative events to refreshed and critical thinking. Principally, therefore, we use Chap. 6, alongside the analyses detailed across the overall volume, to acknowledge the expanded demands of commemorative research in a digital world, taking into account: how digital technologies play into the simultaneously intimate and collective nature of state-sponsored remembrance; how digital technologies afford a more rapid circulation and accretion of commemorative tropes and symbols; how an acknowledgement of the body and all of its senses opens up the domain of commemorative thinking to the affective, the performative and

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

19

the feelings that inhere within; and, how new temporalities of commemoration are made possible in a more or less digital world.

Notes 1. As noted earlier, New Zealand also marks this occasion, but it is understood and expressed quite differently. The new empirical research in this book is focused on Australia. 2. The Australian Government committed approx. AUD$312 million to activities to commemorate the Anzac Centenary (Aust. Gov, 2014). 3. ‘In military tradition, the Last Post is the bugle call that signifies the end of the day activities. It is also sounded at military funerals to indicate that the soldier has gone to his final rest and at commemorative services such as Anzac Day and Remembrance Day’ (AWM, 2020b).

References Allen, M. (2018). Memory in Technoscience: Biomedia and the Wettability of Mnemonic Relations. In A.  Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 190–214). Routledge. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. Arrigoni, G., & Galani, A. (2019). From Place-Memories to Active Citizenship: The Potential of Geotagged User-Generated Visual Content for Memory Scholarship. In D. Drozdzewski & C. Birdsall (Eds.), Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches (pp. 145–168). Palgrave Macmillan. Ashplant, T. G., Dawson, G., & Roper, M. (2000). The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics. In T. G. Ashplant, G. Dawson, & M. Roper (Eds.), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (pp. 3–85). Routledge. Australian Government. (2014). Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund Public Grants Program Round 2 Guidelines 2014–2018. Press Release from the Attorney-General’s Department, Ministry for the Arts, Canberra. Retrieved July 22, from https://www.arts.gov.au/sites/default/files/anzac-­centenary-­ arts-­and-­culture-­fund-­public-­grants-­program-­round-­2-­guidelines-­2014-­2018. pdf?acsf_files_redirect Australian War Memorial. (2018). Strong Crowd Numbers for Anzac Day Dawn Service. Retrieved July 22, from https://www.awm.gov.au/media/press-­ releases/anzac-­day-­2018 Australian War Memorial. (2020a). #ANZACATHOME Anzac Day 2020. Retrieved July 21, from https://www.awm.gov.au/anzacathome

20 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Australian War Memorial. (2020b). The Last Post. Retrieved July 22, from https:// www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/customs-­and-­ceremony/last-­post Brown, J. (2014). Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of our National Obsession. Black Inc. Chester, D. (Minister for Veterans’ Affairs). (2018, April 25). Australians Show Strong Support for Anzac Day Commemorations. Press Release, Department of Veteran Affairs, Canberra. Accessed July 22, 2020, from http://minister.dva. gov.au/media_releases/2018/apr/va024.htm Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press. de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2012). ‘Nothing Comes without Its World’: Thinking with Care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216. Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2013). The Anzacs: Military Influences on Australian Identity. Journal of Sociology, 17, 1–15. Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2014). The Anzac Myth and Australian National Identity (pp. 1–5). E-IR. Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2018). Exploring Australian National Identity: Heroes, Memory and Politics. Emerald Group Publishing. Drozdzewski, D. (2015). Retrospective Reflexivity: The Residual and Subliminal Repercussions of Researching War. Emotion, Space & Society, 17, 30–36. Drozdzewski, D. (2016). Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia’s Multiculturalism? Australian Geographer, 47(1), 3–10. Drozdzewski, D., & Birdsall, C. (2019). Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches. Palgrave Macmillan. Drozdzewski, D., & Waterton, E. (2016, April 20). In Remembering Anzac Day, What Do We Forget?, The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ in-­remembering-­anzac-­day-­what-­do-­we-­forget-­57629 Drozdzewski, D., De Nardi, S., & Waterton, E. (2016). Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict. Routledge. Drozdzewski, D., Waterton, E., & Sumartojo, S. (2019). Cultural Memory and Identity in the Context of War: Experiential, Place-based and Political Concerns. International Review of the Red Cross, 101, 251–272. Dwyer, O. J. (2004). Symbolic Commemoration. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(3), 419–435. Edensor, T., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Geographies of Everyday Nationhood: Experiencing Multiculturalism in Melbourne. Nations and Nationalism, 24(3), 553–578. Finney, P. (2002). On Memory, Identity and War. Rethinking History, 6(1), 1–13. Foote, K., & Azaryahu, M. (2007). Toward a Geography of Memory: Geographical Dimensions of Public Memory and Commemoration. Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 35(1), 125. Frith, J., & Kalin, J. (2016). Here, I Used to Be: Mobile Media and Practices of Place-Based Digital Memory. Space and Culture, 19(1), 43–55.

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

21

Gane, N., & Beer, D. (2008). New Media: The Key Concepts. Berg. Garde-Hansen, J., & Schwartz, G. (2018). Iconomy of Memory: On Remembering as Digital, Civic and Corporate Currency. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 217–233). Routledge. Garde-Hansen, J., Hoskins, A., & Reading, A. (2009). Introduction. In J. Garde-­ Hansen, A.  Hoskins, & A.  Reading (Eds.), Save As ... Digital Memories (pp. 1–21). Springer. Gillis, J.  R. (1994). Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship. In J. R. Gillis (Ed.), Commemorations the Politics of National Identity (pp. 3–24). Princeton University Press. Hepp, A. (2016). Pioneer communities: collective actors in deep mediatisation, Media, Culture & Society, 38(6), 918–933. Hodgkin, K., & Radstone, S. (2003). Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. Routledge. Holbrook, C. (2014). The Anzacs: The Unauthorised Biography. NewSouth. Hoskins, A. (2018). The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 1–24). Routledge. Huyssen, A. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press. Inglis, K. S., & Brazier, J. (2008). Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (3rd ed.). Melbourne University Press. Jansson, A. (2017). Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach. Routledge. Johnson, N. (1995). Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 13, 51–65. Jones, O., & Garde-Hansen, J. (2012). Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming. Palgrave Macmillan. Kansteiner, W. (2017). Transnational Holocaust Memory, Digital Culture and the End of Reception Studies. In T.  S. Andersen & B.  Törnquist-Plewa (Eds.), European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception (pp. 305–344). Brill. de Kosnik, A. (2016). Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. MIT Press. Lupton, D. (2016). Personal Data Practices in the Age of Lively Data. Digital Sociologies, 335–350. Maddrell, A. (2013). Living with the Deceased: Absence, Presence and Absence-­ Presence. Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 501–522. McDonald, M. (2010). ‘Lest We Forget’: The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention. International Political Sociology, 4, 287–302. McKenna, M. (2010). Anzac Day: How Did It Become Australia’s National Day? In M. Lake, H. Reynolds, M. McKenna, & J. Damousi (Eds.), What’s Wrong

22 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (pp. 110–134). University of New South Wales Press. McKenna, M. (2014). Keeping in Step: The Anzac ‘Resurgence’ and ‘Military Heritage’ in Australia and New Zealand. In S. Sumartojo & B. Wellings (Eds.), Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (pp. 151–167). Peter Lang. Merrill, S. (2017). Networked Remembrance: Excavating Buried Memories in the Railways beneath London and Berlin. Peter Lang. Merrill, S., Sumartojo, S., Closs Stephens, A., & Coward, M. (2020a). Togetherness after Terror: The More or Less Digital Commemorative Public Atmospheres of the Manchester Arena Bombing’s First Anniversary. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3), 546–566. Merrill, S., Keightley, E., & Daphi, P. (2020b). Introduction: The Digital Memory Work Practices of Social Movements. In S. Merrill, E. Keightley, & P. Daphi (Eds.), Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilising Mediated Remembrance (pp. 1–30). Palgrave Macmillan. Merrill, S., Keightley, E., & Daphi, P. (2020c). Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilising Mediated Remembrance. Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, K. (2003). Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory. Urban Geography, 24(5), 442–459. De Nardi, S., Orange, H., High, S., & Koskinen-Koivisto, E. (2019). Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. Routledge. Nelson, H. (1997). Gallipoli, Kokoda and the Making of National Identity. Journal of Australian Studies, 21(53), 157–169. Osborne, B. S. (2001). Landscapes, Memory, Monuments, and Commemoration: Putting Identity in Its Place. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 33(3), 39–77. Osborne, T. (2019). Biosensing: A Critical Reflection on Doing Memory Research through the Body. In D.  Drozdzewski & C.  Birdsall (Eds.), Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches (pp. 63–85). Palgrave Macmillan. Phillips, T., & Smith, P. (2000). What Is ‘Australian’? Knowledge and Attitudes among a Gallery of Contemporary Australians. Australian Journal of Political Science, 35(2), 203–224. Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D., & Heyes LaBond, C. (2017). Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography. Visual Studies, 32(4), 371–381. Polletta, F. (2004). Can You Celebrate Dissent? Holidays and Social Protest. In A.  Etzioni & J.  Bloom (Eds.), We Are What We Celebrate: Understanding Holidays and Rituals (pp. 151–177). New York University Press. Reading, A., & Notley, T. (2018). Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 234–250). Routledge. Reynolds, H., & Lake, M. (2010). What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. University of New South Wales Press.

1  GEOGRAPHIES OF COMMEMORATION IN A DIGITAL WORLD 

23

Rowse, T., & Waterton, E. (2019). Invasion, Resistance and the Binary Structure of Australia’s Military Heritage. In L.  Bamblett, F.  R. Myers, & T.  Rowse (Eds.), The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital and Australian Cultural Fields (pp. 265–284). Aboriginal Studies Press. Saul, H., & Waterton, E. (2018). Affective Geographies of Transformation, Exploration and Adventure: Rethinking Frontiers. Routledge. Seal, G. (2004). Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. University of Queensland Press. Soutphommasane, T. (2012, April 23). Where Does Anzac Day Fit in a Culturally Diverse Australia? Sydney Morning Herald. Sumartojo, S. (2015). On Atmosphere and Darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service. Visual Communication, 14(2), 267–288. Sumartojo, S. (2016). Commemorative Atmospheres: Memorial Sites, Collective Events and the Experience of National Identity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(4), 541–553. Sumartojo, S. (2020). New Geographies of Commemoration. Progress in Human Geography, 0309132520936758. Sumartojo, S., & Graves, M. (2018). Rust and Dust: Materiality and the Feel of Memory at Camp des Milles. Journal of Material Culture, 23(3), 328–343. Thomson, A. (2019). Popular Gallipoli History and the Representation of Australian Military Manhood. History Australia, 16(3), 518–533. Till, K.  E. (2005). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. University of Minnesota Press. Van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford University Press. Wallis, J., & Harvey, D. (2018). Commemorative Spaces of the First World War. Routledge. Walter, T. (2001). From Cathedral to Supermarket: Mourning, Silence and Solidarity. The Sociological Review, 49(4), 494–511. Waterton, E. (2014). A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect. Geography Compass, 11, 823–833. Waterton, E. (forthcoming). A Coda for the ‘Left Behind’. In G. Jaramillo and J.  Tomann (Eds.), Transcending the Nostalgic. Deindustrialised Landscapes across Europe. Berghahn. Waterton, E., & Gayo, M. (2021). The Elite and the Everyday in the Australian Heritage Field. In T.  Bennett, D.  Carter, M.  Gayo, M.  Kelly, & G.  Noble (Eds.), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions (pp. 66–82). Routledge. Waterton, E., & Watson, S. (2015). A War Long Forgotten: Feeling the Past in an English Country Village. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 20(3), 89–103. Wilson, S. (2009). Remixing Memory in Digital Media. In J.  Garde-Hanson, A. Hoskins, & A. Reading (Eds.), Save as … Digital Memories (pp. 184–197). Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Epistemology of Memory

Abstract  In this chapter, we proffer a new epistemology of memory. We discuss why we think this new epistemology of memory is necessary, and we link this requisite to the complexity of geographies of commemoration. This complexity relates to the in-depth place-based acumen required to comprehend the complicated geopolitical terrain of the sites, places and events of commemoration. Integral to our approach has been an embodied and mindful cognisance of our own positions within/on memory research (including about Anzac), and how we have often felt our research, as much as we have thought about it. We detail a methodology and method geared towards a ‘thinking-with’ approach, one that crosses disciplinary boundaries, and operates between and within layers of memory/ place/identity, to thinking-with-body across material and digital spaces. Keywords  Epistemology • “Thinking-with” • Embodied • Encounter • Body • Experiential

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3_2

25

26 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

A New Mode of Address The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, and drawing from the existing literature on the geographies of commemoration, we lay the conceptual groundwork for the book’s key argument: that our turn to the digital demonstrably advances the scope of memory-work and therefore requires a new geography of commemoration. In theorizing and attuning to the broader field of commemoration, we seek not only to incorporate positions and technologies from representational, non- and more-than-­ representational geographies, critical heritage studies, and from memory-work encompassing affect, atmosphere and experience, but to also proffer a new position on memory, a new heuristic that we refer to in this volume as a new epistemology of memory. Second, and using this newly developed epistemology, we detail the methodological approach employed through this research to contextualize the empirical material provided in Chaps. 3–5 and to explicate the operationalization of our new epistemology of memory. Before we launch into theoretical terrain, however, it is necessary to explain why we propose the renewed way of thinking about the memory-­ work detailed in this book. Given that an epistemology broadly encompasses the ways of knowing about a certain subject or theme and how to reach and operationalize this knowledge, the epistemology of memory advanced here draws from, and acknowledges, the different subject and disciplinary positions of the volume’s authors. Epistemology also finds expression in our personal subjectivities as researchers, and as individuals who live in a world where national categories still hold strong. While we address our positions in more length in Chap. 6, this brief introduction here situates us in this research and reveals how part of what we ‘think-­ with’ is the intellectual and personal resources we bring to this book’s analyses. Danielle’s research investigates how geography contributes to commemoration and memory studies to explore how a politics of memory and identity operationalizes spatially. Danielle’s family arrived in Australia as displaced persons after World War II (WWII) from Poland. Her interest in commemoration stems from questions of the inclusivity of national memories to/for migrant communities, but also to the geopolitical and nationalistic push to anchor shared and collective narratives of a nation’s past to its present, regardless of the (increasing) dissimilarity of the members of nation states, past and present. Though she learned about Anzac

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

27

Day at school, alongside her majority Anglo-Celtic classmates, even from a young age she remembers feeling as though Anzac was someone else’s history, despite Australia being her, and her parents’ country of birth. She continues to be intrigued by the seeming necessity to ‘fit’ Anzac to all Australians; as a white middle-class Australian, if she could not comfortably ‘inherit’ this history, how can other non-White Australians, overseasborn or otherwise, adopt and/or fit this narrative. Her personal and professional positions intersect in asking how elastic is the Anzac narrative to change across a now diverse Australian population. Shanti’s research focuses on repositioning geographies of commemoration to account for, and encompass, affect, atmosphere and the experiential world. She is also interested in accounting for the multivalent work that is done by digital data and technologies in our everyday worlds. She has a long-standing interest in questions of national identity, in part because of her own multi-national and biracial background, and her experiences of living, working and raising a family across several countries. Although she was born in Australia, she did not grow up there, so was not exposed to Anzac narratives throughout her life and does not ‘feel’ them in the way that many other people, including some of the research participants in this book, explained to her. Anzac fascinates her because of its ubiquity and familiarity in the country with which she identifies most closely, and its unique place in the Australian national imagination. Emma’s research, which focuses on the geographies of heritage, revolves around an attempt to expand traditional notions of ‘the semiotic’ so as to include those momentary intrusions, or transformations, that bring wider histories into relation with affective and subjective feelings. Her family history is punctuated with stories of war, with her maternal grandfather serving on the submarine HMS Satyr and her paternal grandfather part of the Merchant Navy during WWII. Her Great Aunt Harriet was awarded an OBE for her work as a nurse in WWI and her Great Uncle Lenny is one of six names found on a small brass plaque in the village church where she was born. That small English village is similarly potted with memories of war, rendering the past always present. A haunting. When Emma arrived in Australia at the age of 12 (after living for nine years in Hong Kong), she was met with a distinct yet strangely familiar remembrance of war. Anzac commemorations were distinct in that they appealed to a very particular moment in WWI, built around an amphibious invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Yet they remained strangely familiar

28 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

because, though they overlapped with her own lived experiences, those distinctive Anzac war memories were shaped differently and thus never fully laid claim to her body. As a collaborative, we recognize that our ‘knowledge is always partial and [our research] practice is often infused with passion’ (Aitken & Valentine, 2006: 8). That passion, and our personal and discipline trajectories, ground our knowledge and require us ‘to take responsibility, to speak from somewhere, to be answerable for what we learn and how we see’ (Hanson, 1992: 574). While we have all worked across a wide spectrum of memory studies, human geography and heritage studies, the epistemology we propose here contributes to, and develops, each of our contributions to memory scholarship but also draws focus on how we do our memory research as an inseparable part of that same research. That is, we are firm in the assertion that concept and method should be considered together and that the inherent meaning(s) and ways of knowing our memory research are made through subjectivities—our own, our participants and different kinds of bodies. These subjectivities are always partial and incomplete (cf. Rose, 1993) and are influenced by the governance of memory by institutions including, but not limited to, the academy, governments and other regimes (democratic and totalitarian). A politics of memory pervades our subject positions and the social frameworks of memory in which we are situated (cf. Halbwachs, [1926] 1992). Recently, Johnston et  al. (2020: 3) reminded us that ‘the personal is political’ and that this position is a ‘well-­ established feminist theoretical tool’. In keeping a close cognisance with our subject positions and the role of power, our epistemology of memory is grounded in a long tradition of feminist geographers ‘rethinking key geographical concepts’ (Johnston et al., 2020: 3). This (re)thinking, occasioning a new epistemology of memory, is necessary because of the complexity of geographies of commemoration. This complexity relates to the in-depth place-based acumen required to comprehend the complicated geopolitical terrain of the sites, places and events of commemoration. Further, it pertains to recognizing interconnections between and within memory, place and identity as not merely representations and material remnants marked in calendar rituals, monuments, memorials or the pages of history books. Rather, these interconnections are assemblages of felt experiences (Drozdzewski, 2021a, 2021b), embodied in bodies and spaces, wounded cities and landscapes (Till, 2012). They are constituted affectively. They can be nostalgic and

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

29

traumatic, perhaps even simultaneously as Ratnam and Drozdzewski (2020) have shown. They can be individual and collective with the ‘sensory experience of commemoration … shared amongst people’ (Sumartojo, 2020a: 4; see also Waterton & Watson, 2015a; Halbwachs, [1926] 1992). Our research experience within the current frames and fields of memory-­work, however, renders these frames deficient in the necessary elasticity required for more fulsome explorations of the intersectionality of memory-work across the spectrum of its representational, non- and more-­ than-­representational, affectual and emotional, as well as digital and material, layers and frames. Further, these existing frames are often characterized by deep-rooted and binary thinking—material/immaterial, material/digital, representational/non- and more-than-representational, mind/body. As such, we depart from Winter’s (2006: 11) treatment of ‘historical remembrance’ as a ‘discursive field, extending from ritual to cultural work of many different kinds’, instead seeking to get underneath this ‘discursive field’ to the lives and understandings of the people who animate and enact it. In the closing words of her conversation with Altınay and Pető (2015: 396), Marianne Hirsch called for ‘a shift in attention and methodology’ in memory studies ‘outside official structures of commemoration’. This shift, she reasoned, should be accompanied by greater engagement with feminist analyses because of its capacity ‘for a connective scholarship that enables different histories to illuminate each other and to explore their interconnections without implying that they are comparable’ (Altınay & Pető, 2015: 389). Starting from Hirsch, then, and also taking a lead from Gillian Rose (1993: 4) and her influential text, Feminism and Geography, we contend that ‘to think [memory and] geography—to think within the parameters of the discipline in order to create [memory-work and] geographical knowledge acceptable to the discipline—is to occupy a masculinist subject position’. By choice, we seek to position this book’s theoretical ground outside established terrains of/for thinking about memory with the intention of homing in on the interconnections, subjectivities and relationalities between and within the layers of complexity mentioned in the last paragraph. Nearly three decades ago, Susan Hanson (1992: 573), in her Presidential Address to the American Association of Geographers (AAG), argued that ‘both feminism and geography have a facility for seeing connections-­between the small (the everyday) and the larger policy making agenda, as well as among events and processes occurring at different geographic scales’. To read, hear, feel, attune to and explore the multiple

30 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

and fluid inter- and intra-connections of these layers we need novel lenses; we provide these lenses in our new epistemology of memory, which prioritizes researching the connective work between and within layers of memory. Such connective work also compels us to look at, through and with the medium of memory (re)production, transmission and maintenance to understand how it is anchored in everyday life and its environments, objects, habits, people, rhythms, forms of connection and affective intensities and lulls. We seek to research memory from the inside, so to speak, within everyday life, where it is felt and shared. While memory research, by nature of its chronological remit, necessitates us to think of, with and about the past, the digital has forced a step change. The (re)production and transmission of national collective memory through the use of digital technologies, and our own use of digital devices at memory events and sites, both extends and changes existing practices of in-situ national memorialization and transforms visitation experiences at commemorative events. Moreover, the ubiquity of digital technologies in our everyday lives draws commemoration into our private realms in new ways. It has compelled what Hoskins (2018: 1) has called ‘an ontological shift in what memory is and what memory does, paradoxically both arresting and unmooring the past’. Through a digital presence, memorials and other forms of memory-work have the capacity to transcend tangible and nation spaces, alter normative commemorative practice as well as trouble normative ‘relationship[s] between mundane everyday screen-based practices and digital [national] citizenship’ (Gómez Cruz & Sumartojo, 2018: 342). Moreover, the ubiquity of digital technologies means that commemoration is now at work at the intimate scale of everyday life in new ways, making the digital world extremely in its rich conceptual and empirical territory from a feminist geographical perspective, as explained above. In highlighting the digital world as the medium through which different commemorative practices refract, our intention has been not to demarcate the digital from material forms of commemoration. Rather, and borrowing from Pink et al. (2016: 1), we contend that the ‘digital and the material are not separate but entangled in the same processes, activities and intentionalities’. Working across digital and material spaces ‘necessitates careful attention to the co-constitutive experiences of working with technology, complicating “simple models of subject and object” (Crang, 1997: 366)’ (Richardson, 2018: 254). Just as feeling, embodiment and atmosphere cannot be investigated nor ‘read’ separately to material memorial spaces, the digital intersects geographies of commemoration in ways

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

31

that make it impossible but also illogical to separate as distinct references points or frames of analysis. As Pink (2017: 2) has asserted, we need to think past a digital and material binary in the research process and instead refocus towards how the digital emerges ‘within research and within everyday environments, rather than as being applied to our investigations’. Indeed, it is more useful now to think of our lives as being always ‘more or less digital’, as the boundaries between these two categories become indistinguishable (Merrill et al., 2020b).

An Epistemology of Memory Motivated to think differently about how we approach, encounter, position and understand memory-work, here we establish the possibilities for knowing that memory research, and how. We take stock of Young and Temple’s (2014: 2) assertion that ‘a researcher’s epistemological position is more than an interesting esoteric philosophical conundrum. It is vital to an examination of the quality of a research study and its relative influence, for whom, in what contexts, and why’. Starting from the position that it is critical to recognize how we (re)produce knowledge and qualify this knowledge, this epistemology is as much an exercise in reflexivity of practice and process as it is an opportunity to advance how memory research could be undertaken. In some ways, our position here may be likened to a standpoint epistemology in its proximity to a feminist remit of knowing in ‘other’ ways—especially through the body—as well as its attentiveness to the role of power in memory-work. While these are certainly characteristics that assemble in knowing memory research, we prefer to err against providing a prescriptive or all-encompassing framework ‘uncritically accepted as part of a particular way of knowing’ (Aitken & Valentine, 2006: 10). As Code (1991) has asserted, in reference to claims for a solely feminist epistemology, ‘feminists cannot participate in the construction of a monolithic, comprehensive epistemological theory removed from the practical-political issues a theory of knowledge has to address’. In a similar vein, the conceptualization of memory adopted through this book has looked between established positions and binaries—social constructivism, interpretivism, materialism, realism and hermeneutics, for example—for points of connection because valuing connectivity is ‘vital to understand the complexities of the relationship between “experience”, “knowledge” and “reality”’ (Zalewski, 2003: 3).

32 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Accordingly, we posit that an epistemology of memory attends to points of connectivity between memory, place and identity with emphasis on how we come to know of such connectivity. Importantly, digital technologies make these links evident and understandable in new ways. Connectivity locates in bodies, memorial spaces, commemorative events, but also across digital fora. The digital two-minute silence on Anzac Day 2020, for example, epitomized the movement of Anzac commemoration online during the COVID-19 pandemic (we discuss this in Chap. 6). Yet, as Pink et al. (2017: 374) contended well before 2020’s social distancing mandate, ‘digital materiality of our everyday worlds is continually emergent’. Certainly, the digitalization of commemorative events has compelled participants to perform and experience commemoration across an array of interactive mediums—seeking connectivity to the memory of the event by crafting and facilitating ‘a specific experience of the event, entangling media, space and commemorative narrative’ (Sumartojo, 2015; Gómez Cruz & Sumartojo, 2018: 342). Across different commemorative platforms: regular, bodily performed rituals act to connect participants together in commemorative moments, and provide a sense of connection to people they imagine have performed or will perform the same ritual in the past or future. Those points of connection are crucial in the formation and maintenance of (imagined) national communities. (cf. Anderson, 1991; Drozdzewski et al., 2019: 263)

Connectivity in the geographies of commemoration is both cause and effect. Connectivity in commemoration is sought to connect present-day populations with the memory/ies of places and people (local, national, global) of the past. These connections to the past are always sought as a purposeful choice and with political purpose (Dwyer & Alderman, 2008; Mitchell, 2003). Wagner-Pacifici (2015: 23) has argued that ‘it is a mistake to treat the commemorative moment as a form of memory … instead it is part of the same historically-extended event being commemorated’. She insists that ‘the memorial, the speech, and the museum are only provisionally congealed moments of the events themselves’ (Wagner-Pacifici, 2015: 23). The effect and affect of commemoration plays out in peoples’ relationships with different commemorative events—individual and/or collective. A key aspect of this connective work is the role of affect in

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

33

how things come to be understood as national, and how these understandings course along and are energized by affect; in other words, how an object, symbol, event or story becomes affecting because it is understood in a national frame. (Sumartojo, 2020b: 582)

As Dittmer and Waterton (2018: 709) have identified, ‘commemorative atmospheres emerge from the specific spatial arrangements engineered into national events, and subsequently impact the political subjects who attend, and whose bodies help compose such events’. This scholarship identifies the important but complex and emergent participation of affect in the differential meaning and value of commemoration for people. At the scale of the nation, strong connective and affective bonds to commemoration are particularly sought to strengthen cultural tropes and secure adherence to national narratives of identity among diverse and spatially dispersed populations (Anderson, 1991). However, with the inherent dynamism that affect carries is a sense of possibility or potential, routes to less settled versions of commemoration are always emerging via how remembrance plays out in people’s lives, and what it means to them. Commemorative events affect participants, generating at the very least rumination on memory and possibly the nation and national identity. As Lagerkvist (2014: 361) has argued, ‘[t]he spatiality of commemoration is furthermore underlined by the places that seem connected through the witnessing acts as well as through ceremonies across the globe’. Mills’ (2017: 1183) proposal of a cultural geopolitics highlights this connective work, such that meaning-making, embraces the embodied, affective dimensions of meaning making; brings attention to the material and located circumstances of textual production and interpretation (Rose, 2007); and links textual production and interpretation to lived experiences in material environments. (Megoran, 2006; Fregonese, 2009; Dittmer & Gray, 2010)

Extending Mills’ cultural geopolitics to memory requires us to attune to its points of connectivity, so that we know how and what these connective tissues are, where they may manifest and how they proffer a different, and potentially more fulsome, way for understanding the complex geographies of commemoration. To grasp the answers to these questions, it has been necessary for us to think inductively and deductively across the range of memory-work in our research, looking to and for ‘how we come into

34 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

contact with objects and others’ (Ahmed, 2014: 208). In this search, we recognize that there is not one way to ‘know’ about memory (or geographies of commemoration per se), but rather that it is everywhere different in its effects and affects because ‘different bodies have access to and experience research encounters differently’ (Militz et al., 2020: 430). In other words, the body is ‘an active agent in making knowledge’ (Crang, 2003: 499). Thus, in seeking to know more about how memory/ies transect and traverse memory sites differently, we have increasingly turned to embodied research methodologies and methods, as we discuss next. Bodies In, and Of, Memory Bodies can be disruptive, unruly, reflective and productive in their capacities to compel diverse thinking about how memory is operationalized and operationalizes spatially (see for example: Coddington & Micieli-­ Voutsinas, 2017; De Nardi, 2014; Gensburger, 2019; Osborne, 2019; Whitehead & Bozoğlu, 2016). In foregrounding a multi-modal connectivity in this epistemology, we concomitantly specify that we have come to know our memory-work better through an increasing attentiveness to ‘the body’ or bodies. Attention to the role of bodies in memory research spotlights the inter-connectivity of memory-work as well as the inextricability of us, as authors, from the (re)telling of this memory-work. ‘Knowledge and knowledge production are embodied’, as Longhurst (2004: 1) has argued: researchers are embodied subjectivities (see also Catungal, 2017). Our embodiment links our situated knowledges to and through the sites, people and places that we research and recount. Heeding Noxolo (2009: 61), in this epistemology of memory we acknowledge ‘a responsibility to engage in a politics of embodied positionality, which defines the context and, to some extent, the content of academic writing’. This admission extends also to choices we make about how we represent that research. We choose method pathways and writing styles that seek to relay closeness and affect through experience, which contrast reportage of memory encounters with facts and figures of representation. Such affectual writing is, as Militz et al. (2020: 430) have recently disclosed, ‘a tool to recall affectual intensities and to inspire resonance between researching, researched, and reading bodies’. It is, of course, not just the researcher’s body implicated in a turn to embodied research methodologies and methods. By thinking memory through bodies, we consider the effects and affects not just of our own

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

35

bodies but of our participants’ bodies, visitors’ bodies at memorial sites, bodies buried or commemorated at memory sites, bodies passing through everyday memorial sites, the bodies (individual and of a community of people) that memory sites are built for and not including ‘Othered’ bodies, the bodies that occupy space at official events at memory sites, bodies that guard memory sites, the bodies that occupy spaces of memory in otherwise forgotten sites, bodies that access digital memory sites and the bodies that appear on these sites. In her influential work on bodies, Robyn Longhurst (2004: 5) has contended that bodies are ‘always in a state of becoming with places’; she goes on to suggest that this point was (and is) ‘still frequently overlooked by many social theorists’. Despite a flourishing scholarship on embodied research methods, foregrounding the body in memory-work still juts up against a preference for material and representation-­based memory-work, or a proclivity towards representing representational things (Andrews, 2020). Yet, it is so difficult, we would argue, to know how memory operates at a particular site, for example at a war memorial, without feeling memory at that site, too. Indeed, this knowing about memory occurs both in the sensing and feeling through the body and thinking on the purpose, politics and materiality of that site. We contend that we cannot know memory without knowing both. There are myriad possibilities for bodies to implicate geographies of commemoration. Why? Because bodies feel. And, importantly, because commemoration is purposefully constructed to incite us to feel. These feelings embody memory sites, and ‘are made possible and activated in different spatial, cultural and geopolitical contexts’ (Drozdzewski, 2021a: 136). As Dittmer and Waterton (2016: 176) have argued, commemoration is ‘materialized in bodies as a result of those bodies’ participation in multiple (and often competing) assemblages of national heritage’. Drawing on Anderson’s (2018) notion of ‘representations-in-relation’, ‘we can frame the solemn architectures of cenotaphs, towers, and names listed on walls and rows of identical headstones as vibrant and affecting, working on our senses and our imaginations, whilst also representing both the individual dead and the national past’ (Sumartojo, 2021: 5). Waterton (2014: 824) has also contended that ‘explorations of feeling, emotion and affect and place emphasis on how these are negotiated and experienced through a recentred imagining of the body’. Accordingly, an attentiveness to the capacities of the body to know memory—in addition to and beyond its scope for thinking-on memory— requires a focus on ‘moments of encounter’ (Waterton & Watson, 2015b),

36 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

which takes our engagements with memory-sites way beyond the representational conventions that tend to accrete around them. Philosophically, this sense of ‘encounter’ is associated with Deleuzian interpretations of affect and the idea that bodily experiences, registered in feelings and emotions, are key to understanding our power to act when interacting with places and other bodies. Wilson (2017: 455) has suggested that ‘encounters allow a focus on the embodied nature of social distinctions and the unpredictable ways in which similarity and difference are negotiated in the moment’, and that ‘they also demand that we keep hold of how societal attitudes, discourses and categorizations shape and constrain them’. This attention to the body does not just encompass gauging, somehow, how bodies feel or sense memory sites, for example at its simplest whether the site made us feel sad, remorseful or guilty, but rather it demands that we consider how bodies connect to such sites. As we outlined earlier in this chapter, identifying and understanding these connections involves thinking laterally across and within the relationships between memory, place and identity. How bodies experience memory sites—materially, digitally or both—is frequently co-opted to accord with predefined and dominant memory narratives. Militz et al. (2020: 430) have contended that there is no ‘affectual connection outside of power’. Indeed, Reeves (2018) and Micieli-­ Voutsinas (2017) have both discussed the orchestration of points and moments of encounter of the body with the memory-site; purposeful design that directs mobilities through and around a memory-site, strategic placement of material objects and the use of light and sound to create atmosphere so that: Embodied encounters with absences and presences at the museological site generate experiential knowledges. These embodied knowledges are translated into emotional awareness—feelings—that teach visitors how to feel about the traumatic past. (Micieli-Voutsinas, 2017: 100)

In specifying the translation of an embodied experience to knowledge about how to feel memory, Micieli-Voutsinas (2017) substantiated the power of a politics of memory—through body and mind (see also Micieli-­ Voutsinas & Person, 2020). While not all bodies may respond and/or react to a politics of memory at all, synchronously or comparably, thinking about memory ‘encounters allow[s] a focus on the embodied nature of social distinctions and the unpredictable ways in which similarity and

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

37

difference are negotiated in the moment’ and how they ‘demand that we rethink the limits of the body, its capacities and thresholds’ (Wilson’s, 2017: 455–456). At this nexus of memory, encounter, body and place, a multitude of possibilities is revealed for knowing memory and its interconnections to places and identities, differently and with distinct nuance. Moreover, and as we will show, the entanglement of digital technologies in the skein of commemoration brings new articulations of connectivity into play. A distinct possibility enabled in the context of this book is drawing into focus how we encounter memory across material and digital places and spaces—and what these encounters can tell us about knowing geographies of commemoration in a digital world. This work acknowledges that commemoration is part of a world which is ‘always a changing mix of the digital and non-digital, continually shifting in their gradation of digitality and non-digitality’ (Merrill et al., 2020b: 5). It follows that the techniques we use to account for this quality are themselves digital, and also account for the digital world in our research participants’ lives. For many of those whose stories are recounted in this volume, the tropes through which Anzac is performed and practiced required certain forms of participation based on being present, including this presence being exercised, shared and or perceived digitally. We contend, then, that this (re)focus towards how bodies are implicated in the connectivity and context of memory is the crux of how we should start to know about memory in a digital world. Thus far in this chapter, we have introduced a new epistemology for memory-work, explaining how this epistemology foregrounds connectivity between and within memory, place and identity, and foregrounds the role of the body with/in memory encounters. In the next section, we move to the question of methodology, translating these conceptual positions into ‘styles’ of research or modes of enquiry, which in turn frame the type and structure of the questions we asked.

A Methodology for ‘Thinking-with’ Drawing from our epistemology of memory, the methodological position of this research uses the notion of ‘thinking-with’ as its pivot point. This idea of ‘thinking-with’ has made fleeting appearances through geographical, sociological and anthropological scholarship (see for example: Askins, 2017; de la Bellacasa, 2012; Youngblood Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lupton, 2016, 2019; McFarlane & Anderson, 2011; Pink, 2017). For

38 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

instance, Askins (2017: 121) has discussed how ‘thinking-with’ can bring ‘bodywork and writing together [as] a potent way to explore and come to new dimensions of knowledge’. Likewise, in adopting the phrasing ‘think with’, Youngblood Jackson and Mazzei (2012: vii, original emphasis) were compelled to ‘challenge qualitative researchers to use theory to think with their data (or use data to think with theory)’. Taking up this challenge, Lupton (2016: 336) has used ‘thinking-with’ to produce ‘configurations of discourse, practices, data, human users and technologies’. ‘Thinking-with’ thus beckons us towards the crossing of disciplinary boundaries, of thinking between and within layers of memory/place/ identity, of the potentialities of thinking-with-body across material and digital spaces; it ‘reveal[s] a commitment to a collective of knowledge-­ makers’ (de la Bellacasa, 2012: 202). Perhaps most importantly to this book’s project on geographies of commemoration, ‘thinking-with’ affords possibilities to consider the multiform practices of commemoration that span temporal, spatial, familial, national, material and digital spaces. ‘Thinking-with’ the digital, theoretically and methodologically, draws focus on an inextricable relationship between memory, place and identity, because it highlights (re)productions of memory in specific places, by individuals, and/or specific groups of people. It requires a research approach that attends purposefully to sensory and affective feelings, how these are made available for recall and reflection, and that enables the sharing of these feelings and understandings amongst researchers and research participants, and beyond. Drawing from Haraway, de la Bellacasa (2012: 200) contends that, ‘thinking-with creates new patterns out of previous multiplicities, intervening by adding layers of meaning rather than questioning or conforming to ready-made categories’. We gather components of our research ‘style’ from commonly used methodological approaches, including grounded theory, narrative, case study and ethnographic tactics, which we lean on most heavily. Through these approaches, we argue that thinking-with allows us to consider how we and our participants come to know, make sense of, and relate geographies of commemoration, especially those connected to Anzac Day, through a range of sensory and experiential mediums and sources. Echoing Pink’s (2009: 2) aspiration, we hope that this methodology encourages others, to be more explicit about the ways of experiencing and knowing that become central to their [memory-work] … to share with others the senses of place

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

39

they felt as they sought to occupy similar places to those of their research participants, and to acknowledge the processes through which their sensory knowing has become academic knowledge.

Integral to this methodology is a multimodal approach. To ‘think-­ with’, and differently, about Anzac commemoration through multiple lenses—representation, embodiment, absence, and the sensory—we incorporate an assemblage of visual, digital, sensory and narrative tools. While making and sharing photography featured prominently in the generation of research materials (as we will discuss in more detail below), visual images ‘always make sense in relation to other things, including written texts and very often other images’ (Rose, 2001: 11). Accordingly, in the next section, we detail the methods we employed, the technologies we used and the field sites we visited.

Methods for Digital Commemoration Pivotal to our choice of research methods was our standpoint that while commemorative sites and events can be read, they are also experienced and felt—particularly because, as previously mentioned, commemorative atmospheres are subject to purposeful attempts to design and curate them. Thus, sensory and affective methods capable of tapping into the experiential and embodied are crucial to understand how people approach Anzac viscerally. Notwithstanding our predilection towards embodiment and encounter in memory research, many Anzac tropes are performed and practiced through learned collective routines, some of which require certain forms of participation based on being active and present in the commemoration. Further, that ‘Anzac is a collective identity afforded an almost sacred level of security against critique’ (Drozdzewski, 2016: 6–7), meant that method choice had to be sensitive to the diverse forms of engagement with the Anzac narrative. Our own positions on established Anzac tropes and previous experiences on Anzac Day set contextual and conceptual foundations for how we approached, executed and reflected on the project (Drozdzewski, 2016; Drozdzewski & Waterton, 2016; Sumartojo, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017; Dittmer & Waterton, 2016; Waterton & Dittmer, 2016; Waterton & Gayo, 2021), and we also discuss this on a personal level in three vignettes proffered in Chap. 6. For this specific project, Danielle attended national services at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, in 2018. Previously,

40 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Danielle had attended Anzac Day services in Gosford, New South Wales, and also in Warsaw, Poland, in 2016. Shanti had been to previous services in Canberra in 2014 and at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance in 2015 and 2016. In addition to participating in a number of more local ceremonies in Australia in recent years, Emma had visited Anzac Cove and the Anzac Commemorative Site at Gallipoli in the immediate aftermath of Anzac Day in 2009, at which time she was very much aware of the sense of solemnity and commemoration that still hung in the air. Her more recent engagements, however, have been overshadowed by the afterlife of her experiences in Nepal during the Gorkha earthquakes, which first struck on the 25 April, 2015, while she was undertaking research of a different nature. Having grown up in Australia, both Danielle and Emma have also had a longstanding knowledge, beginning in childhood, of the cultural role the Anzac ‘spirit’ plays in Australia, and the sense of belonging to the nation it is supposed to engender. Across the research team, therefore, we have our own memories and experiences of Anzac to draw on, ones that in some cases paralleled our research participants. Our situated knowledges facilitated rapport between our research participants’ accounts and our own experiences; while we did not always share the same impressions, this rapport allowed an empathetic entry point to the interviews. In attempting to further smooth the research process, the incorporation of a visual component—composed of photo-­ elicitation and videoed interviews—provided strong connective foundations through which to discuss how participants experienced Anzac in their own terms. Photo Elicitation and Videoed Interviews The research project, which drew from a combined visual and narrative method to garner a range of research materials with participants, was conducted between April and May 2018. Our choice of the phrase ‘research materials’ is deliberate here—we see it giving due emphasis to the collective ways in which we and our participants creatively attended to our embodied and performative engagements with Anzac Day, to create layers of connected meaning. It is thus a phrase that communicates something important about the relational practice of ‘thinking-with’, as well as about the collective knowledges such processes produce—a ‘something’ that alternatives such as ‘data’ seem to omit. To borrow from de la Bellacasa (2012: 203, original emphasis), it is a phrase that, to us, acknowledges

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

41

multiplicity and the collective: ‘[i]nstead of reinforcing the figure of a lone thinker, the voice in such a text seems to keep saying: I am not the only one’. Moreover, the materials made by us and our research participants— photographs, notes and videos—were things that we could ‘think-with’ together, individually and as a research team, prompting new reflections and insights. Rather than a singular ‘capture’ of a moment in time, for example, these materials were instead ongoingly meaningful as our understandings developed and we were able to discuss and analyse them. Participant recruitment occurred through institution- and discipline-­ based list-servers, personal networks and a process of snowball sampling, through which we asked participants to recommend other people—friends or family—who might be interested in our research. In total, twenty-nine participants took part in the research project, all agreeing to share their encounters with Anzac Day in 2018. Of these, fifteen were interviewed by Danielle and fourteen by Shanti. Thirteen of our participants were in Canberra for Anzac Day, fourteen were in Melbourne, one was in Western Sydney, and one was offshore. The interviews were held as close to Anzac Day events as possible, with most lasting between thirty minutes and an hour. All participants signed a Research Ethics Approval and Consent Form administered by RMIT University,1 which permitted video recording of the interviews as well as consent to reuse participant photos as long as other people were not identifiable. Fourteen participants were male and 15 were female; they were between 20 and 70 years of age. The participants had diverse backgrounds, with some born overseas. We include these brief demographic details because they help position the multiple and existing understandings of Anzac, and commemoration more broadly, which participants brought to, and “thought-with” through the research process. We have not (re)produced empirical material from every research participant—in either narrative or visual form. The participant research materials chosen exemplify themes represented across many of the interviews. As in other studies that take an ethnographic approach, here we analysed all the visual and interview material, identified and collaboratively discussed the prominent themes, and then selected participant accounts that best exemplified those themes (Sumartojo et al., 2020). As such, we make no claim to provide a definitive account of Anzac Day on 2018. Instead, we use the empirical material from our participants to show how the concepts we deploy played out in their and our own experience, and in turn how these experiences spoke back to the conceptual framework.

42 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

In the photo-elicitation component, we requested participants take at least ten photographs in the 24-hour period before and after the main Anzac commemorative moment, usually the Dawn Service, to reflect their encounters and experiences with Anzac. Participants were asked to use their own smartphones, but they could also opt for using another digital photographic device if they preferred—the ‘quality’ of the image was not important; rather, we were keen for them to use a digital technology that was already part of their normal lives to make the images. For many, the photos drew from their physical participation in an official commemorative event. But for others not physically attending services, encounters with Anzac-related material and media, as well as a full spectrum of otherwise everyday and non-Anzac Day routine practices, were included. Participants emailed their photographs to Danielle or Shanti ahead of their scheduled interview, which was audio and video recorded, and mostly undertaken in person.2 Looking together at their images, the interviews followed similar open-ended questions that structured the conversation, with all participants asked variations of the following questions: • What is this a photo of? • Why did you take the photo? • Why is it important and what does it tell you about Anzac Day? • How does it make you feel? While attending to these questions for each of the participants’ photos, this loose structure allowed us as researchers to ask additional questions and for the participants to nominate what they thought was most interesting about their Anzac Day. Participants looked at, referred to and reflected on their photographs, one by one, connecting their discussion with Danielle or Shanti to the details of the image. This research strategy, both in terms of the content of their photos and the discussion that ensued, meant that they could nominate their own terms for what they did and how they made sense of and understood Anzac Day. By centering our conversations on the photographs, research participants were not being asked to discuss their attitudes or experiences of Anzac Day in the abstract, but rather to ground their impressions in the details depicted in the images. This approach made it possible for participants to ‘share and access elements of everyday experience that would not be accessible through traditional verbal interviews or participant observation’ (Pink & Sumartojo, 2018: 839). Not only was this method a form of ‘thinking-with’ digital

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

43

visual materials that connected different layers of place, memory and identity, it was also a chance for us as researchers to ‘think-with’ the participants in the research encounter as we considered each image and through them, the varied experiences of Anzac Day. A precedent for this photo-elicitation technique of commemorative sites was Shanti’s research of French memory site, the Camps des Milles. Discussing the use of a similar photo-elicitation method in that project, she points out that ‘when we ask research participants to take photographs of something, we are asking them to attune to their environments in directed and particular ways that they may not have not done before’ (Sumartojo, 2019: 28). People may have thought about Anzac Day at length in the past, but being asked to reflect on it as part of a research process introduced a new form of scrutiny that likely built on, but may have also surpassed, previous considerations. The use of photographs to explore everyday life is well-established (Rose, 2001, 2007). By asking participants to decide for themselves what they wanted to share with us about their Anzac Day, we could glimpse at the many ways the commemorative event was entangled with other aspects of their lives, rather than treating it as an abstract, decontextualized category. In this way we could highlight the connectivity of geographies of commemoration with everyday life, bringing our methodology into dialogue with the epistemology we advocate. Indeed, many of our participants related the role of mundane tasks, such as washing up, gardening, socializing or exercising, as part of their ‘Anzac experience’, showing how our understandings of national commemorative events cannot be divorced from everyday habits and routines (see Fig. 2.1). Fleeting or previously unremarked aspects of life become available for analysis in the research context, but also for reflection for our participants ‘[bringing] to the fore normally unspoken dimensions of experience, meaning and knowing’ (Pink, 2013: 95). In this research approach, the value of the visual image lies as much in the image itself, as it does in the reflection and shared discussion about the image; for instance, the researcher might ask about something that the participant has not focused on in taking or thinking about the image before. Precisely because their role in the research interview was to enable shared consideration, the photographs therefore make new knowledge possible about something that may seem familiar, routine or unremarkable. This everyday component connects to our epistemology of memory because it makes the ‘minor’ and connective aspects of the geographies of

44 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 2.1  Washing up on Anzac Day. (Source: Lori)

commemoration both visible and available for analysis. Indeed, Erin Manning (2016: 7) insists on attending to the ‘minor’ because it is a register that ‘makes felt the unsayable in the said, brings into resonance field effects otherwise backgrounded in experience’. This analytic stance pulls against approaches that centre commemorative events themselves and thereby begin with more representational or discursive material; rather, it ‘foregrounds how our own embodied experiences, emotional responses and empathizing emerge in relation to both the footage and our encounters with the participants as we view and talk about the footage with them’ (Pink et al., 2017: 379).

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

45

Modes of Analysis Working digital imagery into biographical interviewing, Buckle (2020: 82) discovered that ‘different digital performances can add new perspectives and spatial context without distancing personal stories from their source’. Likewise, in our research we found that our participant-generated material gave rise to a fresh set of analytical categories that complicated the conventional discourse about national commemoration, as we will show in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5. Because our approach invited participants to create newly reflexive understandings about Anzac Day, by both photographing and then engaging in detailed discussion of those photographs, our data highlighted how knowing about (Anzac) memory implicated the body and its encounter with the commemorative event, as well as the avenues connecting participants’ broader, everyday understandings of Anzac to their photos. Our epistemological and methodological positions inevitably influenced our mode of data analysis. ‘Thinking-with’ our research materials involved looking past a solely textual analysis (for example in interview transcripts) and attending to ‘how people talk[ed] about and evaluate[ed] places, experiences and situations, as well as what they’ said (Wiles et al., 2005: 89). This tactic was vital because ideas about memory ‘are never only “located” in Cartesian space … they are communicated across and through spaces and places, and travel through and with personal and shared emotions, memories, and affects’ (Till & Kuusisto-Arponen, 2015: 294). Recognizing that we know memory through embodied encounters, we therefore acknowledge that (re)productions of this knowledge express in more-than-textual capacities. This position also  connects with Waterton and Watson’s (2014) conceptualization of the ‘semiotic landscape’, and their attempts to broaden the parameters of analysis so as to include the more-than-representational, or the embodied state beyond discourse. While remaining interested in traditional notions of the semiotic (discourse, language and visuality), Waterton and Watson (2014) encourage the incorporation of immediacy, performance, engagement, feelings and affect, thus challenging us to expand our analysis to include the surfaces we touch, the things we see and read, our reactions to objects and interpretative interventions, the smells, the crowds, the weather and the improvised sounds made by others as we move through spaces of memory. Unsurprisingly, participant photos provided a valuable non-textual source of information and starting point for discussion. Yet, the videoed

46 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

interviews also afforded us an opportunity to better understand participant’s gestures, expressions and tone of voice in their explanations of those photos. The ‘video trace’ allowed us to ‘think-with’ not only what they said, but also how they said it (Sumartojo & Pink, 2017). This analytic approach drew from Sumartojo and Graves’ (2018: 335) research at Camp des Milles, mentioned earlier, in its imperative to move ‘beyond simply thinking about what the site could have been like to feeling it in both a corporeal and affective sense’. Such feelings, lodged in the body through memory, are also expressed corporally through gesture, tone and movement. The connections between the empirical detail of the images and the associated affective intensity become accessible because of the use of photographs and other forms of digital research materials that participants and researchers create together during the research process. Moreover, the use of photo elicitation with video interviews in this way allowed people to reflect and make sense of their experiences of commemoration after the fact. This process enacted a research ethics that, while steered in the interview by the researcher, allowed participants to share their memories and feelings in ways that they felt were best. Analytically, that we were looking between, as well as within, the research materials meant that we ‘embraced the jagged edges of collaboration on emotions, affect and space’ (McDuie-Ra et al., 2020: 9). As three independent researchers we all approached the  research materials from different positions and, in practice, this meant that we shared and talked through the materials as a research team, identifying congruent themes to pursue further and assigning themes based on researcher expertise. We accepted that we all approached ‘understanding’ the interview materials differently, but that this difference was analytically productive. For example, Shanti preferred watching and editing the interview videos to reflect on and represent thematic development. Danielle deployed NViVO as an analytic tool to look across all the participant cohort, while Emma identified unifying themes across the text. Cumulatively, our analytical approach cannot be written into a neat description of how we made sense of our materials as a whole dataset and across the whole research team; rather, we take our cue from Militz et al.’s (2020: 434) position that ‘critical collective reflection, among diversely positioned researchers, is one vital way to push further the analysis of the structures of power and inequalities that continue to bias geographic knowledge production’. Furthering this point, we contend that this extended consideration of research ‘position’ towards and including data analysis rarely surfaces in accounts of how

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

47

qualitative research materials  makes it from its visual and/or narrative form coherently to the page and through researcher collaboration.

Conclusions In their recent paper on collaborative ethnography, McDuie-Ra et  al. (2020: 7) have argued that: Each researcher brings their own affective biography into reading the space, revealing dimensions that may be unnoticed or imperceptible to our collaborators … these experiences are read from a particular positionality and articulated through our own cultural-linguistic repertoires.

This quote seems a fitting way to end a chapter that began with a provocation to think differently, and perhaps more deeply, about how we can know about memory and the entanglement of digital technology in this effort. The epistemology of memory that we have advocated for here is never divorced from our own positions, and is always connected to sensorial and affective capacities of memory as felt through our bodies, including the bodies of us as researchers. In massaging this epistemology into a methodological framework for our research project, the notion of ‘thinking-­with’ seemed to promulgate the type of connection that valued the multimodal and more-than-representational knowledges generated in memory encounters. As de la Bellacasa (2012: 203) has argued, ‘“[t]hinking-­with” makes the work of thought stronger, it supports its singularity and contagious potential’. This potential became the ground upon which we explored the geographies of commemoration. We assembled methods of photo-elicitation and in-depth video interviews, both in person and on one occasion Skype, and pursued a collective analytical process that emerged as we went. We undertook a process of (de)construction, building on existing knowledge sources and making sense of the connected character of geographies of commemoration across our participants’ experiences and our own as individuals and as a research team. In the empirical chapters that follow, we delve into what we discovered about these connected geographies of commemoration, beginning in Chap. 3 with encounters with Anzac in a digital world.

48 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Notes 1. At the time of the research, April 2018, Shanti was employed at RMIT in Melbourne. 2. One participant interview was conducted via Skype.

References Ahmed, S. (2014). Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Aitken, S., & Valentine, G. (2006). Ways of Knowing and Ways of Doing Geographic Research. In S. Aitken & G. Valentine (Eds.), Approaches to Human Geography (pp. 1–12). Sage. Altınay, A.  G., & Pető, A. (2015). Gender, Memory and Connective Genocide Scholarship: A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 22(4), 386–396. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. Anderson, B. (2018). Cultural Geography III: The Force of Representations. Progress in Human Geography, 43(6), 1120–1132. Andrews, G.  J. (2020). Health Geographies III: More-Than-Representational Pushes and Expressions. Progress in Human Geography, 44(5), 991–1003. Askins, K. (2017). Are We Sitting Comfortably? Doing-Writing to Embody Thinking-With. In P.  Moss & C.  Donovan (Eds.), Writing Intimacy into Feminist Geography (pp. 118–128). Routledge. de la Bellacasa, M. P. (2012). ‘Nothing Comes without Its World’: Thinking with Care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216. Buckle, C. (2020). Touching, Scrolling and Swooping: Performing and Representing Migrant Stories through Geospatial Technologies. Geoforum, 111, 83–93. Catungal, J.  P. (2017). Feeling Bodies of Knowledge: Situating Knowledge Production through Felt Embeddedness. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 108(3), 289–301. Coddington, K., & Micieli-Voutsinas, J. (2017). On Trauma, Geography, and Mobility: Towards Geographies of Trauma. Emotion, Space and Society, 24, 52–56. Code, L. (1991). What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Cornell University Press. Crang, M. (1997). Picturing Practices: Research Through the Tourist Gaze. Progress in Human Geography, 21(3), 359–373. Crang, M. (2003). Qualitative Methods: Touchy, Feely, Look-See? Progress in Human Geography, 27(4), 494–504.

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

49

Dittmer, J., & Gray, N. (2010). Popular Geopolitics 2.0: Towards New Methodologies of the Everyday. Geography Compass, 4(11), 1664–1677. Dittmer, J., & Waterton, E. (2016). Embodied Memory at the Australian War Memorial. In D. Drozdzewski, S. de Nardi, & E. Waterton (Eds.), Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict (pp. 169–188). Routledge. Dittmer, J., & Waterton, E. (2018). ‘You’ll Go Home with Bruises’: Affect, Embodiment and Heritage on Board HMS Belfast. Area, 51(4), 706–718. Drozdzewski, D. (2016). Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia’s Multiculturalism? Australian Geographer, 47(1), 3–10. Drozdzewski, D. (2021a). Locating the Embodied Interconnections in Performative Geopolitics, Invited Book Panel Response to ‘The Geopolitics of Memory: A Journey to Bosnia’. Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(1), 134–137. Drozdzewski, D. (2021b). The Role of a Politics of Memory and the Digital, in Reframing the Commemoration of Polish Independence. In S.  Sumartojo (Ed.), Experiencing 11 November 2018: Commemoration and the First World War Centenary (pp. 57–70). Routledge. Drozdzewski, D., & Waterton, E. (2016, April 20). In remembering Anzac Day, What Do We Forget?, The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ in-­remembering-­anzac-­day-­what-­do-­we-­forget-­57629 Drozdzewski, D., Waterton, E., & Sumartojo, S. (2019). Cultural Memory and Identity in the Context of War: Experiential, Place-Based and Political Concerns. International Review of the Red Cross, 101, 251–272. Dwyer, O.  J., & Alderman, D.  H. (2008). Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors. Geojournal, 73(3), 165–178. Fregonese, S. (2009). The Urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the Urban Environment in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1976). Political Geography, 28(5), 309–318. Gensburger, S. (2019). Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris 2015–2016. Leuven University Press. Gómez Cruz, E., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Mobile Screens and the Public Event: Screen Practices at the Anzac Day Dawn Service. Continuum, 32(3), 335–344. Halbwachs, M. ([1926] 1992) On Collective Memory. University of Chicago. Hanson, S. (1992). Geography and Feminism: Worlds in Collision? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(4), 569–586. Hoskins, A. (2018). The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 1–24). Routledge. Johnston, L., Datta, A., Hopkins, P., Silva, J. M., & Olson, E. (2020). Introduction: Establishing, Placing, Engaging and Doing Feminist Geographies. In A. Datta, P. Hopkins, L. Johnston, E. Olson, & J. M. Silva (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies (pp. 1–14). Routledge.

50 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Lagerkvist, A. (2014). 9.11  in Sweden: Commemoration at Electronic Sites of Memory. Television & New Media, 15(4), 350–370. Longhurst, R. (2004). Bodies. Taylor and Francis. Lupton, D. (2016). Personal Data Practices in the Age of Lively Data. In J. Daniels, K. Gregory, & T. McMillan Cottom (Eds.), Digital Sociologies (pp. 335–350). Policy Press. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2636709 Lupton, D. (2019). The Thing-Power of the Human-App Health Assemblage: Thinking with Vital Materialism. Social Theory & Health, 17(2), 125–139. Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press. McDuie-Ra, D., Ho, E. L.-E., Jakimow, T., & Somaiah, B. C. (2020). Collaborative Ethnographies: Reading Space to Build an Affective Inventory. Emotion, Space and Society, 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100683 McFarlane, C., & Anderson, B. (2011). Thinking with Assemblage. Area, 43(2), 162–164. Megoran, N. (2006). For Ethnography in Political Geography: Experiencing and Re-imagining Ferghana Valley Boundary Closures. Political Geography, 25(6), 622–640. Merrill, S., Sumartojo, S., Closs Stephens, A., & Coward, M. (2020). Togetherness after Terror: The More or Less Digital Commemorative Public Atmospheres of the Manchester Arena Bombing’s First Anniversary. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3), 546–566. Micieli-Voutsinas, J. (2017). An Absent Presence: Affective Heritage at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum. Emotion, Space and Society, 24, 93–104. Micieli-Voutsinas, J., & Person, A. M. (2020). Affective Architectures: More-than-­ Representational Geographies of Heritage. Routledge. Militz, E., Faria, C., & Schurr, C. (2020). Affectual Intensities: Writing with Resonance as Feminist Methodology. Area, 52(2), 429–436. Mills, A. (2017). The Cultural Geopolitics of Ethnic Nationalism: Turkish Urbanism in Occupied Istanbul (1918–1923). Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(5), 1179–1193. Mitchell, K. (2003). Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory. Urban Geography, 24(5), 442–459. De Nardi, S. (2014). An Embodied Approach to Second World War Storytelling Mementoes: Probing beyond the Archival into the Corporeality of Memories of the Resistance. Journal of Material Culture, 19(4), 443–464. Noxolo, P. (2009). ‘My Paper, My Paper’: Reflections on the Embodied Production of Postcolonial Geographical Responsibility in Academic Writing. Geoforum, 40(1), 55–65. Osborne, T. (2019). Biosensing: A Critical Reflection on Doing Memory Research through the Body. In D.  Drozdzewski & C.  Birdsall (Eds.), Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches (pp. 63–85). Palgrave Macmillan.

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

51

Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sage. Pink, S. (2013). Doing Visual Ethnography. Sage. Pink, S. (2017). Technologies, Possibilities, Emergence and an Ethics of Responsibility: Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research. In E. G. Cruz, S.  Sumartojo, & S.  Pink (Eds.), Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research (pp. 1–12). Palgrave. Pink, S., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). The Lit World: Living with Everyday Urban Automation. Social & Cultural Geography, 19(7), 833–852. Pink, S., Ardèvol, E., & Lanzeni, D. (2016). Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology. Bloomsbury. Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D. & Heyes LaBond, C. (2017) Empathetic Technologies: Digital Ratnam, C., & Drozdzewski, D. (2020). Detour: Bodies, Memories, and Mobilities in and Around the Home. Mobilities, 16, 1–19. Reeves, A. (2018). Mobilising Bodies, Narrating Security: Tourist Choreographies at Jerusalem’s Holocaust History Museum. Mobilities, 13(2), 216–230. Richardson, L. (2018). Feminist Geographies of Digital Work. Progress in Human Geography, 42(2), 244–263. Rose, G. (1993). Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. Rose, G. (2001). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (1st ed.). Sage. Rose, G. (2007). Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (2nd ed.). Sage. Sumartojo, S. (2014). Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail. In S. Sumartojo & B. Wellings (Eds.), Nation, Memory, and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (pp. 291–306). Peter Lang. Sumartojo, S. (2015). On Atmosphere and Darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service. Visual Communication, 14(2), 267–288. Sumartojo, S. (2016). Commemorative Atmospheres: Memorial Sites, Collective Events and the Experience of National Identity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(4), 541–553. Sumartojo, S. (2017). Tweeting from the Past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary@ ABCNews1915. Memory Studies, 13(4), 1–16. Sumartojo, S. (2019). Sensory Impact: Memory, Affect and Sensory Ethnography at Official Memory Sites. In D.  Drozdzewski & C.  Birdsall (Eds.), Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches (pp.  21–37). Palgrave Macmillan. Sumartojo, S. (2020a). New Geographies of Commemoration. Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520936758

52 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Sumartojo, S. (2020b). National Potential: Affect, Possibility and the Nation-in-­ Progress. Environment & Planning C: Politics & Space, 38(4), 582–584. Sumartojo, S. (2021). Reframing Commemoration at the End of the First World War Centenary: New Approaches and Case Studies. In S.  Sumartojo (Ed.), Experiencing 11 November 2018: Commemoration and the First World War Centenary (pp. 1–15). Routledge. Sumartojo, S., & Graves, M. (2018). Rust and Dust: Materiality and the Feel of Memory at Camp des Milles. Journal of Material Culture, 23(3), 328–343. Sumartojo, S., & Pink, S. (2017). Empathetic Visuality: Go-Pros and the Video Trace. In E.  Gómez-Cruz, S.  Sumartojo, & S.  Pink (Eds.), Refiguring Techniques in Digital-Visual Research (pp. 39–50). Palgrave Pivot. Sumartojo, S., Pink, S., Duque, M., & Vaughan, L. (2020). Atmospheres of Care in a Psychiatric Inpatient Unit. Design for Health, 4(1), 24–42. Till, K. E. (2012). Wounded Cities: Memory-Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care. Political Geography, 31(1), 3–14. Till, K. E., & Kuusisto-Arponen, A.-K. (2015). Towards Responsible Geographies of Memory: Complexities of Place and the Ethics of Remembering. Erdkunde, 69(4), 291–306. Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2015). Reconceptualizing Memory as Event: From ‘Difficult Pasts’ to ‘Restless Events’. In A.  L. Tota & T.  Hagen (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (pp. 22–27). Routledge. Waterton, E. (2014). A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect. Geography Compass, 11, 823–833. Waterton, E., & Dittmer, J. (2016). Transnational War Memories in Australia’s Heritage Field. Media International Australia, 158(1), 58–68. Waterton, E., & Gayo, M. (2021). The Elite and the Everyday in the Australian Heritage Field. In T.  Bennett, D.  Carter, M.  Gayo, M.  Kelly, & G.  Noble (Eds.), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions (pp. 66–82). Routledge. Waterton, E., & Watson, S. (2014). The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism. Channel View Publications. Waterton, E., & Watson, S. (2015a). A War Long Forgotten: Feeling the Past in an English Country Village. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 20(3), 89–103. Waterton, E., & Watson, S. (2015b). Methods in Motion: Affecting Heritage Research. In B.  T. Knudsen & C.  Stage (Eds.), Affective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Affect (pp.  97–118). Palgrave Macmillan. Whitehead, C., & Bozoğlu, G. (2016). Protest, Bodies, and the Grounds of Memory: Taksim Square as ‘Heritage Site’ and the 2013 Gezi Protests. Heritage & Society, 9(2), 111–136.

2  EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEMORY 

53

Wiles, J. L., Rosenberg, M. W., & Kearns, R. A. (2005). Narrative Analysis as a Strategy for Understanding Interview Talk in Geographic Research. Area, 37(1), 89–99. Wilson, H.  F. (2017). On Geography and Encounter: Bodies, Borders, and Difference. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 451–471. Winter, J. (2006). Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press. Young, A., & Temple, B. (2014). Approaches to Social Research: The Case of Deaf Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved July 18, 2020, from https://www. oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:os obl/9780199929535.001.0001/acprof-­9780199929535-­chapter-­3 Youngblood Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. Taylor & Francis Group. Zalewski, M. (2003). Feminist Epistemology. In R. L. Miller & J. Brewer (Eds.), The A-Z of Social Research (pp. 114–117). Sage.

CHAPTER 3

Encounters with Anzac in a Digital World: Tropes and Symbols, Spectacle and Staging

Abstract  In this chapter, we examine Anzac tropes and symbols and consider their relations to Anzac events through, across and within a digital world. We explain what it means to ‘think-with’ Anzac and unveil a range of different encounters with it by our research participants. We explore how Anzac conjures feelings of collectivity, connecting people to each other and to the nation. Homing in on its affective and sensory dimensions, we close the chapter with a consideration of Anzac as a commemorative spectacle. We discuss how digital technologies are used to record commemorative events, and how Anzac is encountered through the screen. Both make clear the myriad ways through which a digital world shapes our engagement with, and understandings of, the symbols and stories of Anzac. Keywords  Anzac • Commemoration • Digital world • Visual ethnography • National identity • Tropes

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3_3

55

56 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Commemoration as Encounter The first of three empirical explorations, this chapter begins a deep articulation of the geographies of commemoration, using Anzac in the digital world as its moment of encounter. Describing such moments as ‘encounters’ immediately locates our thinking within the company of a few key scholars. First and foremost, we take up Wilson’s (2017: 451) argument that ‘encounter is a conceptually charged construct that is worthy of sustained and critical attention’. Whilst they do not specifically locate their notion of ‘encounter’ in the digital world, we also accept Bull and Leyshon’s (2010: 126) proposition that ‘individuals are always encountering their own lives, in places and in moments’, with any encounter thus becoming a ‘momentary alignment between person and place’, as DeSilvey (2012: 47) has described it. This notion also gels with Waterton and Watson’s (2014, 2015, see also Watson & Waterton, 2019) discussions of ‘encounter’ within the field of heritage, through which they have attempted to take the term beyond representational conventions and towards a melding of ‘force’ and ‘affect’, thus homing in on those momentary interruptions that ‘strike the body as immediately as they stir the mind’ (Massumi, 2015: x). Our engagement with the notion of encounter in this chapter includes this sense of immediacy, with our participants attempting to relay such feelings—to themselves and to us as researchers—to better understand and link their own encounters to familiar experiences in the cognitive domain. Of course, recalling an encounter presupposes that ‘something’ has been encountered. In the context of this book, that ‘something’ relates to Anzac tropes and symbols, and their use in the staging of Anzac events as spectacles of commemoration. While such tropes and symbols—and their assembly into events—conjure materialities of Anzac and seemingly steer us towards representation-based analysis, in this chapter, as noted above, we pull out other connective threads instead. Indeed, we consider that encounters can tell us something ‘about difference and are thus central to understanding the embodied nature of social distinctions and the contingency of identity and belonging’ (Wilson, 2017: 452, emphasis added). In ‘thinking-with’ how our participants encountered commemoration, and in turn thinking through the geography of such encounters, a far more nuanced story about commemoration is  revealed, one intertwined with connections to the digital world that surface in affective pulses and sustain a relationship between memory, place and identity.

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

57

At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Anzac is rich with tropes and meanings that cannot be divorced either from the symbols of Anzac in their many textual, archival, visual and material forms, or from the specific experiential encounters that many of our participants described to us. Tropes, as opposed to and in addition to socially and culturally familiar Anzac symbols, are words that carry associated meanings with them. As McManus and Gibbs (2008: 530) have explained, [t]ropes are turns of phrase used to embellish, or the figurative use of, an expression. They come in many forms, with the more familiar including metaphor, metonymy and the better-known examples of euphemism, hyperbole and simile … Tropes are not value-neutral. They offer important insights into perceptions, and how we understand the world.

In developing understandings of the place(s) and practice(s) of commemoration in the digital world, this chapter is the first of three to illuminate the range of ways in which our research participants connected to Anzac, both across and through digital technologies. We begin this process by showing how we can move beyond understanding commemoration as a symbolic act, or one that is limited to discursive construction, which is an argument we continue to develop in Chaps. 4 and 5. Instead, by beginning with the notion of encounter, and locating that encounter in the digital world, we carefully illustrate how our epistemology of memory, outlined in Chap. 2, plays out in the specific case of Anzac commemoration in 2018. In the next section, we discuss how encounters with Anzac symbols and tropes demonstrate connection with commemorative events in and through our everyday lives—including our digital worlds—but also how commemorative events relay out into spaces and identifications with the nation more generally.

Encountering Anzac Symbols and Tropes The practice and performance of commemorative geographies of Anzac involves the (re)production of socially and culturally familiar symbols and experiences of Anzac. There are, of course, a plethora of Anzac symbols, including poppies, rosemary, the rising sun insignia, the lone bugler’s Last Post, the Ode to Remembrance, and war service medals, as well as the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, the Flame of Remembrance and Pool of Reflection, all located within the Australian War Memorial, one of the

58 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

country’s most popular tourist attractions. Rather than providing an exhaustive list here, we will endeavour to show how some of these symbols provided points of connection to Anzac memory for our participants. Freeman et  al. (2016: 3–4) have reasoned that ‘we rarely remember through ideas only, but rather through our encounters with things and through embodiments and disembodiments collected in material traces and objects’. As such, we distinguish our discussion of Anzac symbols here not by recognizing them as material representations of memory, but, in borrowing from Freeman et al. (2016), as embodiments and disembodiments of Anzac materialities. In pursuing this argument, we acknowledge that these symbols and experiences can provide recognizable touchstones that compel us to engage in commemorative events via sets of learned, conventional and accepted modes of encounter. The ubiquitous acceptance of, for example, bowing our heads in a silent gesture of solemnity and reverence to the dead during particular moments in Anzac ceremonies illustrates how certain symbols are (re)produced in bodily ways. For some people, this knowledge comes from prior embodied experiences of being at an Anzac Day event, through familial genealogy (as we discuss in Chap. 4), or from watching Anzac Day television broadcasts. In other words, Anzac comes to be ‘known’ through specific moments of encounter, moments that are located in space, time and relationships with others, as many of our participants recount. At the same time, knowing about Anzac is also generated and reinforced through encounters with Anzac symbols and tropes, and particularly how they may assemble together in a processual memory, as we discuss below. An Anzac Medal Storyboard A recurrent Anzac symbol featured in our participants’ photographs and narratives were their own, or their relatives’, war service medals. Undoubtedly, these are solid material markers of memory. Their visceral heaviness in the hand, their weight when attached to the chest, the tactile feeling of their embossed insignia(s), the change in texture in the ribbon, and the sharpness of the fastening pin, all provide sensory entry points to the memories that connect to those medals. Through their materiality, such medals also carry both haptic and narrative memory. That medals, as Anzac symbols, are most commonly worn for Anzac Day, means that a further thread of embodied memory travels its course as the bearers of

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

59

these medals proceed through sequential practice of preparing to wear them on ‘the day’. Figure 3.1 is an Anzac medal storyboard of a participant, Tom, whose step-wise process of preparing for Anzac Day demonstrates how his Anzac medals are more-than their materiality. Indeed, the medals are connected to an embodied and experiential memory, activated annually on Anzac Day. The sensory capacity of the body is integral to how memory, in this example, is activated; Tom recounted riffling through the cupboard for the box of medals and then reaching for the right hat, but also the actions of brushing the hat as part of the Anzac Day preparation process. Further, and after identifying these Anzac symbols as his ‘tokens’ for the day, he expressed how they made him feel and the energy they provided for him on the day. For Tom, that particular affective experience, precipitated by the myriad connections and steps made from retrieving the box, stretched to the recognition of a related sensation of respect by the end of the day. Danielle undertook her interview with Tom in a busy public setting; everyday noises of shoppers, traffic and children punctuated the recorded audio. When Danielle re-watched the video footage of the interview section detailing Tom’s Anzac preparation, she isolated the dialogue and removed the background noise. In doing so, she was able to identify clear changes in Tom’s posture, pose and diction, as he narrated this dialogue and the feeling his Anzac tokens generated for him. Revisiting the interview through its digital video trace (Sumartojo & Pink, 2017) meant that we could nuance the narrative line of ‘connective geographies’ by also identifying and incorporating Tom’s associated kinesics into our analysis. During the interview and while describing the medal’s box, the hats and the brush, Tom was mostly looking down at these photographs on his iPad, pointing to the various elements of the photographs as his story progressed. But his posture shifted in the final part of the narrative. He sat more upright, looked directly at Danielle, and the words ‘respect’ and ‘street cred’ were uttered with audible inflection and with a small pause after each word; his eyebrows raised, and his eyes opened wider. Here, Tom’s gestures and expressions showed how the moment of encounter with Anzac objects was as much an embodied and affective one as it was symbolic. Watching back the video-recorded interviews ‘informed the writing and understanding process by way of analysing atmospheres, bodies, senses and the material’ (Ratnam, 2019: 26). Moreover, being able to ‘slow down, freeze and repeat events that might otherwise pass by

60 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 3.1 A storyboard of Anzac Day preparations.  (Source: Tom) (Acknowledgement to Thomas Drozdzewski for assistance with laying out the storyboard)

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

61

conscious attention’ (MacPherson, 2010: 8) helped Danielle consider the complex encounter with memory objects that she and Tom shared. Notwithstanding such affordances of the digital world, what we find especially intriguing in this example is how Tom’s feeling of respect references his own bodily perception of wearing the medals, rather than the wider context of the collective Anzac commemoration event. Of course, this collective commemoration provided the context and motive for Tom wearing his Anzac medals, yet his example shows that while ‘collective memories are vital’, they are, as Jones & Garde-Hansen, (2012: 12) have argued, ‘lived out in individualized contexts of everyday lives of bodies moving through the time and space of affective life’. As argued in Chap. 2, this position exemplifies the new epistemology of memory we advocate for in this book, one that is focused on the connections amongst and between memory, place, and identity, and, importantly, how those connections play out in a digital world. For many of our participants, the wearing of their medals on Anzac Day, and taking photographs of those medals as part of the research process, enabled their assembly within the connective and embodied commemorative knowledges of Anzac Day, which in turn were important for framing how they understood themselves as national. Of course, war service medals, as Anzac symbols, have different connective capacities to geographies of commemoration, especially for past and present service personnel and for the family members of those personnel (as we explore in Chap. 4), but also as a material manifestation of Anzac they pin together far more than metal and cloth. Our next example of an Anzac symbol encountered by our participants is one that also carries an affective charge, though it is not necessarily allied to the wearer or bearer having had links to war service. Nonetheless, its distinctive material and sensory properties enact powerful commemorative connectivities. Rosemary Is (Not Only) for Remembrance Ophelia’s words in Shakespeare’s Hamlet resonate viscerally in Anzac’s commemorative imaginary: ‘there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember’. Rosemary, with its distinctive aroma, spiky and waxy leaves, and thick woody stems, has long been used for its medicinal qualities, including to improve memory. The oil-based residue that remains on your fingertips after contact with a rosemary stem, especially if you have removed the leaves from that stem, provides a lasting olfactory reminder of such action. In Osborne’s (2019: 73) research on biosocial

62 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

and biosensory memory, she argues that, given that ‘sensory stimulation of a memory’ occurs ‘due to the positioning of the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus in the same neurological circuit’, the role of smell has been significantly under-investigated in memory scholarship. It seems fitting, then, that rosemary connects to, and is used in association with, large-­ scale collective commemorative events such as Anzac Day, in that its residual aroma is carried with its wearer long after the event itself. Importantly, rosemary has also been constructed as an Anzac symbol because it grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula, the site of the WWI battle that gave Anzac Day its date (Department of Defence, 2020, np). Sprigs of rosemary, often prepared and distributed by the Girl Guides Association and the Trefoil Guild,1  comprise visceral, olfactory and visual reminders of Anzac, and also connect the symbol to a place constructed as inaugurating Anzac’s commemorative geography. Two members of the Trefoil Guild who were involved in the preparation of rosemary sprigs for their distribution during the 2018 Anzac Day parade in Canberra, responded to our call for research participants. When Danielle asked one participant, Judy, why their photograph of baskets full of rosemary was important, and what it said about Anzac Day, she replied: it shows you what I’m involved with, what Anzac Day means to me, each of these photos has a meaning for Anzac Day. Anzac Day for me is a day of commemoration and going to Anzac Parade and serving the community, or serving the girl guides in whatever manner I can. (Judy, April 2018)

For Judy, the notion of service to the community was the overriding factor linking the Anzac symbol of rosemary to ‘their’ Anzac Day. The theme of service to the community was echoed by our other Trefoil Guild participant, who stated: ‘Anzac Day at Girl Guides is all about helping people’. The notion of ‘service’ is itself a recurrent theme through Anzac Day and is routinely coupled with military duty. Yet, for these participants, the service narrative that underpinned the collection, preparation and distribution of rosemary sprigs was seemingly decoupled from Anzac in that it was articulated as service to the community and as instilling feelings of satisfaction and contribution: ‘it makes me feel that I am part of the community, that we are doing something worthwhile’ (Judy, April, 2018). In this way, Anzac Day appeared to enable a service to community, rather than being the central focus of the preparation of rosemary sprigs. For these participants, this service extended well before the event itself; as

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

63

Margaret also explained, ‘I go on the radio every couple of weeks before Anzac Day and ask the people of Canberra to prune their rosemary and take it down to the Guide Hall’. That call out to collect and deliver rosemary begins the preparations. The next step is the very social event of preparing the sprigs of rosemary for distribution. As illustrated in Fig.  3.2, one of the volunteers wears gloves, while the other undertakes the job of stripping the rosemary with bare hands. Undoubtedly, there are strongly tactile and olfactory components to this part of the preparatory process. In describing it, and while rubbing their thumb across their forefinger as if feeling for the texture of the rosemary’s residue, Judy said, ‘it puts a resin on your finger, I mean you’ve got to wear gloves, but I can’t be bothered wearing gloves, I just use my fingers, but I have to scrub my fingers afterward’. The rubbing together of fingers evidenced remembering through the ‘involuntary responses to sensory perceptions in the present’ (Keightley, 2010: 57, see also Sumartojo & Graves, 2018). Among the many Anzac symbols that we could have included in this discussion of encounters with commemoration, rosemary affords us an opportunity to ‘think-with’ memory across a wider scope of entanglements with sensory and corporeal practices. While rosemary fastens Anzac memory to Gallipoli and to the places where it is worn during commemorative events, it also furnishes what Johnson (1999: 40) has called ‘precise types of connections’. The example of rosemary shows that the geographies of commemoration flourish in places and with people energetically and with resonance across multiple sensory palates.

Fig. 3.2  Rosemary preparation for Anzac Day, 2018. (Source: Judy)

64 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Anzac Trope = (Digger + Mateship + Australianness) x (Political Work~) In the previous account, we focused on rosemary’s sensory affordances and its role in enabling a shared community service. In doing so, we purposefully neglected to specify that in its appeal to remembrance, rosemary also associates with Anzac as a trope. In ‘thinking-with’ a lexicon of Anzac, we have sought to extend the focus beyond Anzac symbols alone in the hope of avoiding a blinkered representation-led description of what our participants chose to take pictures of and how they relate to Anzac (see Chap. 2); we also keep in line with our understanding of ‘moments of encounter’, as articulated at the start of this chapter. That is, by ‘thinking-­ with’ Anzac tropes and symbols together with our research participants, we unveil a range of possible encounters with Anzac, during the official ceremonies, in the days before and after Anzac Day, and through material and digital mediums that stretch across time, space and everyday life. In advocating for this focus, however, we do not seek to deny the discursive importance of Anzac symbols. Instead, we take stock in Twomey’s (2013: 89–90) research on the interrelation of trauma in the Anzac narrative and her contention that: appreciating the ‘complexity of popular beliefs’ about Anzac nationalism and Anzac Day, researched through surveys of pilgrimage and participation in Anzac Day ceremonies, is important work, but it does not go far enough. Such beliefs cannot be properly understood without some examination of the discursive world within which they occur.

Accordingly, in this section we follow some of our participants’ encounters with Anzac tropes in the digital world, fully recognizing the cultural meanings and values associated with them. We explore how these tropes held meanings of Anzac for our research participants, and how they were expressed through their digital images, their stories about these images, and the gestures and expressions they made during these narratives. To launch this discussion, we turn our attention to common Anzac tropes and how they are positioned and contextualized in both Anzac-­ related scholarship and the popular vernacular. In particular, we return to McManus and Gibbs’ (2008: 530) comment that ‘tropes are not value-­ neutral’ and, by the same token, to their further supposition that their analytical value lies in ‘the work that tropes and metaphors are being made

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

65

to do’ (McManus & Gibbs, 2008: 537, emphasis added). Tropes exercise a politics of memory because they are words with associated meanings. Anzac tropes allow us to glimpse at the (sometimes subliminal) operation of a politics of memory via the purposeful alignment of these tropes with identity making and nation-building. For example, the word ‘Digger’ is not only synonymous with the image of an Anzac (Seal, 2004); indeed, it has also come to invoke other Anzac tropes including courage, mateship, hardship and sacrifice (Phillips & Smith, 2000: 204; McKenna, 2010; Donoghue & Tranter, 2013, 2014). While the constructed Digger trope has been well addressed elsewhere (Seal, 2004), key to its mobilization as an Anzac trope has been (re)production of the image, with ‘the clean-cut, athletic Anzac and the larrikin digger both reflect[ing] characters originating from the Australian bush’ (Marti, 2018: 5). The everydayness of this imagined Digger is key to its connective influence upholding morality and virtue from past to present generations of Australians. As Ubayasiri (2015: 213) has argued, ‘the diggers of the “Great War” continue to define duty and courage in contemporary Australian society’, and continue to enjoy political support. For example, Holbrook (2016: 227) illustrates how ‘John Howard’s2 success in marrying the Anzac legend with “battler” politics was noted by his successors’, precisely because this Digger as Anzac, as an Australian struggling to succeed in difficult circumstances, connected past to present generations of Australians and also reached across the contemporary socio-economic divide. Tropes also conjure related symbols and images. For example, Marti’s (2018: 5) exploration of the Digger’s military-issue slouch hat explicates the effectiveness of using symbols and tropes to signal Australian nationhood because ‘the appearance of the slouch hat provided a constant reference to the Australian landscape’. The Digger trope can now be referenced outside of its Anzac context, for example to invoke everyday mateship or the hard-working Aussie battler, yet it is most regularly invoked in association with Anzac Day commemoration. Depicted in Fig.  3.3, this trope presented in a photograph by one participant, Dan, was taken in central Melbourne in the lead up to Anzac Day. The ubiquity of Anzac symbols and tropes can detract from how they connect to certain Anglo-Australian tropes that are also distinctly masculinist, white, Anglo-centric and homogeneous (Drozdzewski, 2016; Cochrane, 2015). As we discuss at length in Chap. 4, such connections are at odds with the diverse multiculturalism of contemporary Australia. This juncture point often means that challenges to the limits of Anzac tropes

66 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 3.3  Digger in slouch hat on Melbourne Anzac Day advertisement. (Source: Dan)

can be understood or felt as challenges to longstanding aspects of Australian national identity, as well as a refutation of the specific personal sacrifices of military service personal throughout Australian history. In ‘thinking-with’ the ramifications of the tight interweaving of Anzac symbols and tropes, and how they bond to an experience of Anzac Day, one participant, Sally, commented:

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

67

I think that is what people think of [at Anzac Day services], they think that it gives them this sense of solidarity, connection, community, and I think that is also why people don’t want to look, they don’t want to scratch the surface, they don’t want to ruin the magic of being here together as the light comes up once a year and then you don’t have to know really what it means, but there is a special feeling about thinking this is sacred. (Sally, April 2018)

Commentary such as Sally’s shows that what is at stake with Anzac goes beyond the specific details of the historical record or indeed the tropes that bind to contemporary Australian commemoration and culture more widely. Instead, as Sally suggested, critiques of Anzac strike at a valued experience of collectivity that connects people to each other and to the nation. Here, we can see our new epistemology of memory at work—connections to the past are understood and reinforced experientially, in affective and, as we have been arguing, sensory terms. Henry (2006: 10), in speaking about Anzac Day in New Zealand, has argued that ‘Anzac Day provides a spectacle; the extra ordinary spectacle of a panoptic host mobilized in examination over individuals who are being asked to judge and refashion their daily conduct’. On being at the Anzac Day service, another participant, Elizabeth, commented: ‘it’s just really taking a moment in my day to really reflect on where we have come from … really reflect on the sacrifice that has been made and is continued to be made by serving members and it’s just my way of acknowledging … I often come home just feeling very at peace, I find the service very moving’.

Here, participation in the spectacle is understood as recalibrating the self, an event through which people (re)locate themselves among the character values purported by Anzac tropes. To help this identification process, the ever-present image of the Aussie Digger takes strategic advertising space (see Fig. 3.3). And, as indicated in the quote in it and its reference to the ‘magic’ of the Anzac ceremony, such tropes and symbols work effectively, and with limited contestation, because they assemble with ‘traditional civic elements of commemoration, preservation and spectacle that motivate Anzac Day and its meanings’ (Seal, 2004: 6–7). As Daisy noted, for many it is about ‘ordinary people, common citizens [who are] thankful to the military, to the officials, to their service’. To scratch this surface—as Sally notioned—means also tarnishing a sense of collective belonging and mass identification with and across the nation.

68 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

In foregrounding the term ‘spectacle’ and linking it to collective experience and memory, we lay the groundwork for taking this discussion of Anzac symbols and tropes towards the next section on Anzac as staged and as spectacle. This ‘step’ hinges on the important political work performed by the above-mentioned tropes and symbols to shore up familiarity and certainty in the commemorative geographies of Anzac. Many Australians know, for example, that Anzac Day involves poppies, the Last Post, the Digger, rosemary, a two-minute silence, and so on. While such tropes and symbols are operationalized to impart the certainty of their repeated use—and no doubt because they also bolster the imagined Australian nation—what we have shown thus far is that encounters with these symbols and tropes can also tell us different, and more perhaps more nuanced stories. They tell us about the micro-geographies of encounters with them, and in so doing reveal themselves as place-based and deeply internalized. At the same time, they are also indicative of how the Anzac Day event itself can feature, albeit in the background, of those encounters. We deepen our attempts to bring further nuance to the concept of ‘encounter’ in the following section.

Anzac as Spectacle, Anzac as Staged Johnson’s (1999) scholarship on the spectacle introduces a lens through which we might come to better understand how spectacles interrelate with geographies of commemoration. In essence, she reasoned that by: analysing commemoration as a large-scale spectacle it is suggested that collective memory is maintained as much through geographical discourses as historical ones. Spectacle constructs the spatial and temporal limits to popular understandings of the past, and in so doing it underlines how universal principles of bereavement are locally mediated. (Johnson, 1999: 37)

The commemorative ‘spectacle’ is purposefully constructed to enhance the experience of a memory encounter, to make participants feel connected, by interlacing the nation’s past to their position in the present. Anzac Day as spectacle, however, moderates uncertainty because for the most part we know how the spectacle will be staged via selected tropes and symbols, and through well-established ‘Anzac rituals’ (Kitley, 1979). Indeed, notwithstanding the use of Anzac-specific tropes and symbols, much of its commemorative staging is not particularly unique to Anzac Day. Rather, an aspatial commemorative script operates across different

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

69

geographies to reproduce the commemorative spectacle, one that we regularly see unfolding in other national contexts. For example, in discussing the (re)production of a commemorative spectacle on May 4 in Holland, Birdsall and Drozdzewski (2018: 275) have noted that: [t]he presence of government and military personnel on stage also imparted the expected atmosphere of officialdom. Cumulatively, the flags, logo, live media, and security and State officials represent individual characters in the assemblage of commemoration. There is a certain level of expectation that these individual components form part of the totality of a national commemorative event, akin to what Mitchell (2003: 443) has termed both the ‘repetition engaged in various commemorative events and rituals’ and a ‘generalised social framework’ of war remembrance.

In attaching commemorative practice to geographical settings, organizers draw ‘upon familiar tropes and rhetoric, [such that] a range of geographically specific affective-discursive practices are recurrently put to work’ (McConville et al., 2017: 107). Beer’s (2009: 63) research on the Anzac spectacle and the politics of nationhood explicates the important locative function of the national service in Canberra, noting that it ‘is differentiated by a few unique features—notably the presence of the national Tomb of an Australian Unknown Solider is focused on by attending members of the public who file past and place red poppies inside the Memorial after the ceremony’. Confirming Beer’s assertion, one participant, Ray, commented on the import of the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in facilitating the connective cognitive work of war commemoration, reflecting that: ‘it could be one of us. Yeah, that’s the big thing for people, I think, one of the things why people go there [to the Tomb]’ (Ray, April 2018). Cumulatively, the effect of this staging is to shore up the expected outcome of Anzac Day, which maintains the connection of its narrative to an Australian collective memory and identity (Clark, 2017; Hawkins, 2015; McKenna, 2010; Martin Hobbs, 2018). This point about connecting Anzac Day to the Australian nation was echoed in discussions with Frank about their photograph of the Anzac Day staging set up on the parade ground in front of the Australian War Memorial. When asked why the photo of the commemorative preparations was important, Frank replied: I mean, it also shows the rationale behind it. I mean, every State needs something in some way like commemoration and memory, and this Anzac

70 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Day is a memory that is very strong and it is also nourished throughout the State and there’s the product of the commemoration of the First World War … you usually see it in monuments and shows on Anzac Day, I would say, it’s like, if you want to show somebody who is not Australian, like me, that Anzac Day is important to Australia then you go to a Dawn Service, especially in Canberra, and then you will know that it is an important thing. (Frank, April 2018)

While Frank verifies that encountering Anzac Day demonstrates its entrenchment in Australian national identity, his commentary also specifies location—‘especially in Canberra’. Of those interviewed in Canberra, photographs of the staging for Anzac Day were especially common (see Fig. 3.4). Several participants commented on this staging: This is just a photo of the lead up, of all the chairs and stuff in front of the war memorial, I live nearby so I basically go past here everyday and you sort of see the build-up [and this is the day before?], yeh, the day before … you sort of see the signs are going up about the road closures and then all of a sudden the chairs start turning up, and then you go past and the band is on the way up to have a bit of a practice … [I was] trying to get a photo of everything is all sort of getting ready to go. (Connor, April 2018) To me, its [the road barriers and chairs are] a sign that they are getting ready for something important, and, none of my family have been involved in war. (Margaret, April 2018) Yeah, um, one thing that interests me is like the white chairs because I, I was on the bus the day before and that day to [the] city, and yeah, I saw so many white chairs. (Daisy, April 2018)

Anzac as spectacle is certainly geared towards (re)producing a memorable experience, now replete with the use of high-tech audio-visual technologies, particularly during the Dawn Service, to exploit the darkness and silence of daybreak. Yet, these Canberra-based participants did not choose to image the digitality of the spectacle. Rather, their commemorative encounter began before the spectacle itself, recorded on their digital devices and recast in the interview by explaining how the staging and installation of temporary seating imparted the gravitas of something important. Whether or not we interpret the parade ground of the Australian War Memorial as an ‘everyday’ space, these Canberrans

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

71

Fig. 3.4  ‘So many white chairs’ (Daisy). ( Source: Connor)

encountered it through their everyday movements and routines. As Edensor and Sumartojo (2018: 556) have argued, ‘the everyday features of banal national space are unreflexively apprehended, yet there are times when they come into sharp focus’. Anzac Day as spectacle and as staged sharpens the focus here, but not, as we might have expected, with Anzacspecific tropes expressed through video projections, poppies, bugle calls or rosemary. Instead, ordinary plastic white chairs, roadside barriers and impending road closure signage signal and locate the commemorative moment. We see, feel and understand commemoration differently and through our diverse geographies as connected to our positions and the spaces and places they embody, reinforcing the importance of embodiment in the new epistemology of memory introduced in Chap. 2. As the examples in this section show, we encounter geographies of commemoration in a multitude of ways. That these encounters fall outside the remit of what might be considered normative reportage on Anzac should not detract from the fact that they still comprise a commemorative experience and help to ‘illuminate the relationship between individual and collective experience’ of Anzac (Sumartojo, 2020: 2). As we explained in Chap. 2, attending to the everyday and ordinary manifestations of collective national memory allows us to move beyond accounts that rely on representation alone and instead take in experiential and individual understandings. Moreover, thinking-with these objects, sensory experiences,

72 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

settings, and rituals opens a route to seeing how they connect across national and individual scales to constitute a rich and complex experience of commemoration. Moreover, and as we discuss in the next section, an important way in which these connections permeate into people’s lives is through digital technologies and platforms. Anzac Through the Screen The relationship between individual and collective experiences of commemoration operates through diverse mediums, including digital ones. While official commemorative spectacles locate commemoration in certain settings, and also in specifically designated national space(s) (Beer, 2009), encountering those geographies in the digital world frequently occurs through a screen. Had we written this book prior to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the notion of ‘Anzac through the screen’ may have held different novelty. Yet, Anzac Day 2020 was very different from any previous year, as Caso’s (2020) headline for the Lowy Institute testified—‘105 years on, a digital commemoration marks a very different Anzac Day’. In that article, Caso (2020, np) reasoned that ‘people will have to craft their own personal Anzac experience, which will be a test to the continued relevance and importance of Anzac Day in contemporary Australian society’; we discuss this further in Chap. 6. Caso (2020) also noted that forms of digital commemoration, Anzac-­ related or otherwise, were not altogether new. Sear (2016: 76), for example, has noted that ‘Australians experienced Anzac Day 2015 as an integration of online and physical experiences, and personally created as well as externally generated ones’. What Anzac Day 2020 did, however, was propel the commemorative encounter through the digital world to our screens in a much more widespread way. Even for those who would not usually attend a service in person, and who might instead watch the Dawn Service or one of the Anzac marches on television, participation was officially enabled and encouraged through active digital engagement, for example through the Australian War Memorial’s #AnzacAtHome campaign. Although the case study in this book is focused on 2018, we completed the writing in the context of the physical restrictions of 2020. This contrast means that we cannot, as scholars of memory, divorce what happened in 2020 from how we write about Anzac Day 2018. Indeed, Halbwachs (1992 [1926]: 53) made a similar point when he argued that:

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

73

one cannot in fact think about events of one’s past without discoursing upon them. But to discourse upon something means to connect within a single system of ideas our opinions as well as those of our circle. It means to perceive in what happens to us a particular application of facts concerning which social thought reminds us at every moment of the meaning and impact these facts have for it.

Keeping Anzac Day 2020 in mind, and ‘thinking-with’ how it refracts through different modes of encounter in our case study, this section draws focus on how engaging with Anzac through the screen mediates and affects the experience of this national commemorative moment. Key to ‘thinking-with’ Anzac through the screen is that we are not trying to determine whether our research participants somehow had the same or better digitized Anzac experiences compared with ‘in person’ ones. Rather, we are interested in how they expressed Anzac Day through the screen as helping to comprise ‘their’ encounter with Anzac without necessarily separating it from everything else that was happening on the day (in this vein see Hede et  al. (2018) for research comparing emplaced and televised Anzac experiences). For example, as Danielle talked to Mark about his photograph of a television showing scenes from Sydney’s Anzac Parade, it became clear how watching the official mid-morning parade on television was folded into Mark’s Anzac Day traditions. This image worked to reveal the aspects of the commemoration that were valued and important for him. Following his attendance at the local Dawn Service, Mark bought a coffee at the local cafe and proceeded home to make the same Anzac Day breakfast for himself and his family as he made every year. While making breakfast, he turned the television on to watch the parade. Our conversation about the television proceeded as follows: M: I always put the parade on, I always have the parade on on telly, and it’s a picture of the telly … the Sydney parade … I was taking photos of things I do during the day [Anzac Day], and that’s one of the things I do during the day, on the telly, at that point to it had the horses, which is good… D: so how long would you have that on for? M: …for its entirety (smiles)… D: And are you looking for particular things when you are watching, or recognize them from last year or?

74 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

M: I like picking up little bits of history, yeah, and recognizing that, I love seeing the kids in the bands and stuff. D: Do you notice a change in who you see, walk through over the years? M: Oh yeah, I can remember as a kid seeing diggers, I remember seeing a Boer War veteran one year. D: But you have never been in person, you always watch it on TV? M: Nup, yes D: and is there a reason for that? M: I just go local, and watch that on telly, and you know in the old days to when the kids were little, that used to be the only day they were allowed to get war toys out and play with them, they used to dig out all my old toy soldiers, which were stacked away in the basement. D: Do they watch it with you when you get up? M: Well people, they don’t have a choice if you want to be in the lounge, but, its on, and I’m cooking breakfast and we’re eating breakfast, mostly they would sit down for a little while and watch a bit. In this short dialogue, Anzac through the screen is recast as an embodied tradition, to which Mark connected cooking and eating his Anzac Day breakfast with his family, as well as the witnessing of generational changes to the Anzac marchers, and interlacing memories of his kids playing with his old toys. Its digitality is important in how it brings commemorative events to his lounge room, where it is unavoidable for other members of the household. This affordance is significant because of how it is configured with other activities, spaces, people and routines on Mark’s Anzac Day. This example shows how the digital world cannot be separated out from other aspects of Mark’s family life, nor is it more important than any of the other things he lists in his account. Rather, we can see how his Anzac Day morning was always more or less digital, with the digital aspects coming to the fore or receding into the background depending on where his attention is focused. In this example, we have privileged insight into how Mark constructs his knowledge about Anzac memory; the digital capacity of the screen affixes other threads into the Anzac narrative, threads that also have sensory and affective memory through eating and playing. Indeed, the discernible delight in Mark’s expression as he described watching the parade in ‘its entirety’ and that it was the ‘only day’ his kids were allowed to play with his war toys, imparted a lasting impression of how important the

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

75

wider connective and embodied threads of this Anzac knowledge were to the overall conception of the tradition itself. They also show that we should not dismiss the multiple forms of engagement with commemoration available in the digital world. Similar to Mark, other participants also watched Anzac through their screens and factored that experience as integral to their engagement with Anzac. Evidently, however, the geographies of commemoration are fluid. Our own experiences of Anzac Day in 2020, amid the pandemic, made this abundantly clear, through which we observed how the implications of #AnzacAtHome (re)formed how many Australians connected with Anzac through various screens (see Chap. 6). That so much of what we do in the digital world now takes place not only on our televisions or desktop computers but on mobile devices in our hands speaks volumes about the different capacities for ‘thinking-with’ what we are recording, watching, tagging and/or responding to. Moreover, that these actions all tangibly connect to a device in our hands powerfully underscores one of the key propositions of this book: that our embodied connection[s] to ‘place and memory become augmented by digital information’ (Frith & Kalin, 2016: 46) in the more or less digital world.

Conclusions We have used this chapter to reveal some of the ways in which encounters with the geographies of commemoration reverberate between material, visceral and embodied boundaries, leaving residue either digitally or otherwise in how our research participants understood Anzac. In staying with familiar Anzac symbols and tropes, we have not added detailed description on how these symbols and tropes operate within a politics of Anzac memory; we have also developed a wider and graduated narrative that considers how certain symbols—such as medals, rosemary and the televised march— connect across wider narratives of family, of community and of service, and leave palpable reminders of those connections through Anzac whilst not necessarily being about Anzac. In doing so, we advance and exemplify the approach discussed in Chap. 2, by foregrounding the ‘minor’, showing how things connect across different scales of place, memory and identity, and attending to the body, its senses and feelings. We also discussed how the use of digital technologies can engender a performative capacity in two distinct ways to explain how Anzac is configured in the digital world. Our first distinction is the use of digital

76 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

technologies to record and photograph commemorative events, which provided participants with the means to reflect on and circulate this material whilst also providing us with a photographic and video trace that facilitated our use of those ‘videos to analyse sensory articulations’ (Ratnam, 2019: 17). However, whilst digital materials were central to our methodology, they were valuable because of the rich accounts they enabled, as our research participants shared, reflected on and discussed their materials with us. Our second distinction explored how Anzac is encountered through the screen, and the ways in which the digital world continues to shape our engagement with, and understandings of, the symbols and stories of Anzac. Importantly, to do this we did not place digital technologies at the centre of our analysis, but rather treated them as part of dynamic and complex everyday lives—this approach is also evident in Chaps. 4 and 5. Much of our discussion of encounter in this chapter involved recalling what was palpably present for our research participants, and considering how that stretched and circulated across more or less digital realms, connecting Anzac as much to different configurations of everyday life as to a spectacular national event. In the next chapter, we develop this line of ‘presencing’ Anzac by focusing further on the importance of family relationships in enlivening Anzac commemoration. At the same time, however, we also consider what may be absent from its public narrative, particularly in terms of contemporary Australian multiculturalism. We continue to press for a new epistemology of memory that can account for the work that digital technologies do in connecting the individual, collective and national, while at the same time locating those connections in their embodied and relational articulations.

Notes 1. ‘Trefoil Guild is the adult section of Guiding which links members and former members; female members of the Scout Association and women who have not been Guides but who are prepared to make the Guide Promise’ (Girl Guides Australia, 2020). 2. John Howard was the conservative Liberal Party Primer Minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007.

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

77

References Beer, C. (2009). Spectacle, Urban Governance and the Politics of Nationhood: Canberra and the Production of Anzac Day Commemorations and Australia Day Live. Urban Policy and Research, 27(1), 59–72. Birdsall, C., & Drozdzewski, D. (2018). Capturing Commemoration: Using Mobile Recordings within Memory Research. Mobile Media & Communication, 6(2), 266–284. Bull, J., & Leyshon, M. (2010). Writing the Moment: Landscape and the Memory-­ Image. In C.  Brace & A.  Johns-Putra (Eds.), Process: Landscape and Text (pp. 125–148). Brill | Rodopi. Caso, F., (2020). 105 years on, a digital commemoration marks a very different Anzac Day. The Lowy Institute, 24 April, accessed on 26 July, https://www. lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/105-years-digital-commemorationmarks-very-different-­anzac-day Clark, A. (2017). The Place of Anzac in Australian Historical Consciousness. Australian Historical Studies, 48(1), 19–34. Cochrane, P. (2015). The Past Is Not Sacred. Griffith Review, 48. https:// griffithreview.com/articles/past-­sacred/ Department of Defence. (2020). Anzac Day. Retrieved July 29, 2020, from https://www.army.gov.au/our-­heritage/traditions/anzac-­day DeSilvey, C. (2012). Making Sense of Transience: An Anticipatory History. Cultural Geographies, 19(1), 31–54. Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2013). The Anzacs: Military Influences on Australian Identity. Journal of Sociology, 17, 1–15. Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2014). The Anzac Myth and Australian National Identity. E-IR, May: 1–5. Drozdzewski, D. (2016). Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia’s Multiculturalism? Australian Geographer, 47(1), 3–10. Edensor, T., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Geographies of Everyday Nationhood: Experiencing Multiculturalism in Melbourne. Nations and Nationalism, 24(3), 553–578. Frith, J., & Kalin, J. (2016). Here, I Used to Be: Mobile Media and Practices of Place-Based Digital Memory. Space and Culture, 19(1), 43–55. Freeman, L.  A., Nienass, B., & Daniell, R. (2016). Memory | Materiality | Sensuality. Memory Studies, 9(1), 3–12. Girl Guides Australia. (2020). Trefoil Guild. Retrieved July 29, 2020, from https://www.girlguides.org.au/join-­guides/trefoil-­guild/ Halbwachs, M. ([1926] 1992). On Collective Memory. University of Chicago. Hawkins, J. (2015). Anzac for Sale: Consumer Culture, Regulation and the Shaping of a Legend, 1915–21. Australian Historical Studies, 46(1), 7–26.

78 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Hede, A. M., Thyne, M., Josiassen, A., & Garma, R. (2018). Comparing Event Attendees and Their Telecast Audiences: A Case Study of a Commemorative Event. Event Management, 22(4), 555–569. Henry, M. (2006). Making New Zealanders through Commemoration: Assembling Anzac Day in Auckland, 1916–1939. New Zealand Geographer, 62(1), 3–12. Holbrook, C. (2016). Commemorators-in-Chief. In T.  R. Frame (Ed.), Anzac Day Then and Now (pp. 214–231). NewSouth Publishing. Johnson, N. (1999). The Spectacle of Memory: Ireland’s Remembrance of the Great War, 1919. Journal of Historical Geography, 25(1), 36–56. Jones, O., & Garde-Hansen, J. (2012). Geography and Memory: Explorations in Identity, Place and Becoming. Palgrave Macmillan. Keightley, E. (2010). Remembering Research: Memory and Methodology in the Social Sciences. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 13(1), 55–70. Kitley, P. (1979). Anzac Day Ritual. Journal of Australian Studies, 3(4), 58–69. McConville, A., McCreanor, T., Wetherell, M., & Moewaka Barnes, H. (2017). Imagining an Emotional Nation: The Print Media and Anzac Day Commemorations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Media, Culture & Society, 39(1), 94–110. McKenna, M. (2010). Anzac Day: How Did It Become Australia’s National Day? In H. Reynolds, M. Lake, M. McKenna, & J. Damousi (Eds.), What’s Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (pp. 110–134). University of New South Wales Press. McManus, P., & Gibbs, D. (2008). Industrial Ecosystems? The Use of Tropes in the Literature of Industrial Ecology and Eco-industrial Parks. Progress in Human Geography, 32(4), 525–540. MacPherson, H. (2010). Non-representational Approaches to Body–Landscape Relations. Geography Compass, 4(1), 1–13. Marti, S. (2018). ‘The Symbol of Our Nation’: The Slouch Hat, the First World War, and Australian Identity. Journal of Australian Studies, 42(1), 3–18. Martin Hobbs, M. (2018). ‘We Went and Did an Anzac Job’: Memory, Myth, and the Anzac Digger in Vietnam. Australian Journal of Politics & History, 64(3), 480–497. Massumi, B. (2015). Preface. In B. Masumi (Ed.), Politics of Affect (pp. vi–xvi). Polity Press. Mitchell, K. (2003). Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory. Urban Geography, 24(5), 442–459. Osborne, T. (2019). Biosensing: A Critical Reflection on Doing Memory Research through the Body. In D.  Drozdzewski & C.  Birdsall (Eds.), Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches (pp. 63–85). Palgrave Macmillan.

3  ENCOUNTERS WITH ANZAC IN A DIGITAL WORLD: TROPES AND SYMBOLS… 

79

Phillips, T., & Smith, P. (2000). What Is ‘Australian’? Knowledge and Attitudes among a Gallery of Contemporary Australians. Australian Journal of Political Science, 35(2), 203–224. Ratnam, C. (2019). Using Visual and Mobile Methods in the Home. Visual Ethnography, 8(1), 12–31. Seal, G. (2004). Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. University of Queensland Press. Sear, T. (2016). Dawn Servers: Anzac Day 2015 and Hyperconnective Commemoration. In B.  West (Ed.), War Memory and Commemoration (pp. 69–88). Routledge. Sumartojo, S. (2020). New Geographies of Commemoration. Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132520936758 Sumartojo, S., & Graves, M. (2018). Rust and Dust: Materiality and the Feel of Memory at Camp des Milles. Journal of Material Culture, 23(3), 328–343. Sumartojo, S., & Pink, S. (2017). Empathetic Visuality: Go-Pros and the Video Trace. In E.  Gómez-Cruz, S.  Sumartojo, & S.  Pink (Eds.), Refiguring Techniques in Digital-Visual Research (pp. 39–50). Palgrave Pivot. Twomey, C. (2013). Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: An Argument. History Australia, 10(3), 85–108. Ubayasiri, K. (2015). The Anzac Myth and the Shaping of Contemporary Australian War Reportage. Media, War & Conflict, 8(2), 213–228. Waterton, E., & Watson, S. (2014). The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism. Channel View Publications. Waterton, E., & Watson, S. (2015). A War Long Forgotten: Feeling the Past in an English Country Village. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 20(3), 89–103. Watson, S., & Waterton, E. (2019). The Spanish Imaginary: A Trilogy of Frontiers. In H.  Saul & E.  Waterton (Eds.), Affective Geographies of Transformation, Exploration and Adventure: Rethinking Frontiers (pp. 31–48). Routledge. Wilson, H.  F. (2017). On Geography and Encounter: Bodies, Borders, and Difference. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 451–471.

CHAPTER 4

Digital Presence and Absence

Abstract  In this chapter, we explore the theme of presence/absence, attending to how different layers of commemoration are made possible through the digital. We use new empirical material to explore the strong family connections that many people experience as central to their own Anzac commemorations, and consider the role of multiculturalism in demarcating a sense of presence/absence in both individual experience and broader Anzac narratives. Bringing the two together, we consider how an emphasis on family connection, as a key trope in the contemporary retelling of the Anzac legend, has the effect of questioning the link between Anzac and those Australians whose forebears cannot show a direct, familial relationship with a history of service. We show how this dualism both animates and unsettles core national narratives. Keywords  Anzac • Commemoration • Digital world • Multiculturalism • National identity • Absence/presence

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3_4

81

82 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Framing Presence and Absence in the Digital World In the previous chapter, we discussed how, and by what means, tropes of Anzac assemble and are encountered as part of commemorative geographies of Anzac in the digital world. In this chapter, we shift our focus onto another frame for Anzac: who and what is present in Anzac commemoration, but also where the absences lie. To do this, we use the paired lenses of family connections and contemporary multiculturalism in Australia to show that geographies of commemoration are as much a matter of emphasis and attention as they are of history and memory. Moreover, this theme of presence/absence shows how the different layers of commemoration discussed in Chap. 2, along with their imbrication in everyday life, are made possible by digital means. To make our case, the empirical material in this chapter details the links between individual experiences of commemoration and larger Anzac narratives, extending our discussion of who and what constitutes ‘Anzac’, commenced in Chap. 3 through the frame of spectacle. At the same time, we also continue to strengthen our overall argument about the distinctive characteristics and processes of commemoration in a digital world. Poststructural perspectives have informed much of what has been written about places of commemoration and their connections with cultural memory and identity (Alderman, 2003; Johnson, 1999; Sather-Wagstaff, 2011; Smith et al., 2011). Such scholarship details the relations of power that are implicated in any attempt to represent the past, and its authors have revealed implicit political meanings and associated processes of marginalization of those forgotten, absent and/or silenced in the commemorative process. These analyses stretch across the spatial locations of memorialization. Indeed, major commemorative events mostly occur at official sites of memory located in central, symbolic settings—such as the Australian War Memorial on Anzac Day or the National Service of Remembrance held at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, London. These are ‘places where groups of people engage in public activity through which they express “a collective shared knowledge” … of the past, on which a group’s sense of unity and individuality is based’ (Winter, 2009: 252). Moreover, such places of memory are often key materialities in the wider processes of nation-building, which is especially significant given that the nation-state remains ‘the most entrenched geocultural imaginary of the modern era’ (Winter, 2020: 3). The collective and cultural memories triggered and (re)produced by ‘being there’ are thus inflected with, and

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

83

influenced by, language, rituals and commemorations, and perform in a variety of processes that make past events meaningful in the present (see Waterton, 2020, forthcoming). Put differently, the power of commemorative sites is lodged in spatial cultures that stretch beyond memorialization alone. Stepping off from this notion of commemoration as linked to emplacement and turning to encounters with the affective and connective capacities of commemoration, this chapter ‘thinks-with’ the notions of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’. Taken together, the two serve as a reminder that any commemorative act is also always part of a larger and more complex assemblage that links individuals with a community, a region, a nation, and so forth, whilst distancing them from others, too. As we have been exploring thus far, such assemblages will often dissolve or contract the time and space between ‘pasts’, ‘presents’ and ‘futures’, resulting in a sort of agency that is ‘performed not only around what is there but sometimes also around the presence of what is not’ (Hetherington, 2004: 159; original emphasis). In other words, different ‘pasts’ are always already present and never exclusively ‘past’, to borrow from Hill (2015), such that they may survive and rear up, ‘provoked by something overheard or a scene, a place, an object, a tune, a scent even’ (Jones, 2015: 1). Danielle encountered an example of this absence/presence provocation on Anzac Day 2018 at the Australian War Memorial, when Frank commented on a Frontier Wars Protest being conducted on nearby Anzac Parade and along one part of the Anzac Day March (Fig. 4.1). The Frontier Wars refer to the violent encounters between British colonizers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples resisting invasion along the colonial frontier in Australia. The omission of the Frontier Wars from commemorative practices in Australia and, in particular, the Australian War Memorial, has been highlighted by historian Henry Reynolds (2013: 235) as an enduring example of the ‘great Australian silence’. It is conspicuous, or rendered present, by its absence; in other words, while it remains an integral part of Australia’s colonization, it is often held in reserve, there but never quite there, and purposeful work must therefore be done to render that ‘absence’ present. Commenting on a photograph that showed the protesters’ position outside of the official perimeter of the Australian War Memorial and the official marching route, Frank reflected on the presence of Indigenous voices in the marching column:

84 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 4.1  Frontier Wars Protest, Anzac Day, 25 April 2018. (Source: Frank) They were not part of it. Of course, they were outside which made [it as though they were] not so perceived, I think, by the people who are inside the parade. It was like an inside/ outside thing. And it also shows excluded [verses] inclusion of certain groups … I think this picture shows how Anzac Day works—its constructed and you leave certain things out and certain things you leave in. (Frank, April 2018)

In his discussion of how Anzac distracts Australians from grappling with the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the brutal violence of settler-colonialism, Mark McKenna (2014: 153) has stated that ‘against this history, the Anzac legend has appeared less controversial and divisive, a far more malleable history for the purposes of national communion than competing demands of invasion, settlement and sovereignty’. Leaving wider discussions of Indigenous dispossession and the Frontier Wars ‘out’, to paraphrase Frank, creates an absence, which in its creation and subsequent maintenance requires sustaining through a concomitant process of ‘disremembering’ (Bailey & Brawley, 2018; Drozdzewski, 2012; Reynolds, 2013; see also Rowse & Waterton, 2020). While forgetting is integral to a politics of memory, this example taps into a key outcome of such absence, the smoothing over of difference so that ‘the generalizing and inclusive nature of the narrative occludes real social and political differences and silences questions about inequality in contemporary Australia, and that silence occurs not only despite, but because of, attempts to render it inclusive’ (Mycock et al., 2014: 11).

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

85

To examine how presence and absence refract through other views shared by our participants of their Anzac encounters, the remainder of the chapter takes up two major themes: the strong family connections that many people experience as central to their own Anzac commemorations and the role of multiculturalism in mediating a shared national memory of Anzac. In taking up these themes, we attempt to deepen the story of ‘how commemoration engenders and co-constitutes affective and spatial encounters that build and lodge meaning in our bodies and imaginations, as well as how these feelings might be characterised as somehow collective’ (Sumartojo, 2020: 6), by looking at the operationalization of these two aspects of Anzac commemoration in the more or less digital world. In the previous chapter, we discussed the spectacle of Anzac commemoration, focusing on the interweaving of material and digital components and how this entanglement not only strengthened the symbolic heft of Anzac tropes, but how it connected affectively and materially with the lives of individuals. We also showed how the digital world extends the commemorative reach of Anzac, augmenting or amplifying its distinctive sensory and affective feel, a topic we return to in Chap. 5. In this chapter, we home in on individuals and how they connect personally to commemorative tropes and spectacles. We begin by bringing into view commemorative experiences of Anzac through families and in the digital world, which we use to illustrate how presence and absence play out in the reality of commemoration.

Anzac and Family Connections The centrality of family to Anzac commemoration cannot be overstated (Sumartojo, 2014; see also Waterton & Gayo, 2021). Indeed, it is a line of inquiry that continues to produce research forays seeking to explore the relationship between Anzac memory, national identity and family connections. One such recent example is provided by Waterton and Gayo (2021), who have detailed how this relationship cements the connective fibres of commemoration, bringing families together in the Australian context. Holbrook’s (2018: 20) research on family and WWI has likewise explored how the family history boom (beginning in the 1970s) fuelled increased interest in familial connections to Anzac, and was especially supported through ‘funding to institutions such as the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives for the digitisation of personnel records has created a nexus between family, military and nationalist history’. As Kilmister et al.

86 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

(2017: 2) have argued, ‘for most people, formal history is remote from their experiences, interests, and relationship to personal and family identity; the one notable exception, Anna Clark (2016) muses, is Anzac’. Early Anzac Days were conceived of as opportunities to mourn individual loss alongside other grievers, in a process that was sharpened by the distance of dead loved ones from relatives in Australia. This distance, as Holbrook (2018: 20) has argued, allowed ‘private family memories of a Great War1 descendant, or the grief of personal loss or misfortune’ to be ‘transposed onto the tragedy of the Great War’. The scale of loss from WWI meant that private and familial mourning quickly became synonymous with national mourning and loss. This ‘distant grief’, as Bart Ziino (2007) has termed it, was thereafter channelled into the many Anzac memorials erected in the years following WWI (Inglis, 1987), structures that remain ubiquitous in Australian cities but also in its regional and rural towns, and especially in smaller towns, where the war decimated whole families and communities. Ziino (2010: xx) goes on to discuss how the forging of connections between familial and national morning both reflected and strengthened shared Anzac narratives: Family history is also a part of the Great War: we must regard these memories of war as composing, as much as these may be composed of, complex and diverse national myths of war. For Australians at least, the nexus between family remembering and the public myth of Anzac remains mutually constitutive: Anzac frames and affirms family histories, while at the same time it is proving adaptable to the expanding variety of experiences that emerge in family histories.

Wensing (2020: 70) has argued that ‘linking individual sacrifice to national glory, emphasising family relationships, and listing names in the memorials’ serves to reinforce ‘notions of family and kinship, which in turn are [positioned as] foundational to the Anzac narrative’. Indeed, Anzac narratives are purposefully constructed to deploy the trope of ‘kinship’ to bolster contemporary relevance as people are encouraged to remember ‘their Anzac’. These familial remembrances now are often publicized, organized and composed digitally. In 2014, for example, the Victorian state government launched the campaign ‘I Will Remember’,2  which invited people to share photographs of themselves holding images of family members who had served in WWI (Anzac Centenary, n.d.). Participants were invited to ‘upload a tribute image’ for

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

87

inclusion in an online gallery and an ‘Anzac Centenary tribute poster’. The website explained how people might connect to this activity, and also how they might use it to connect to other current family members: Your connection may be a soldier who served on the front-line, a nurse who cared for the wounded, or even someone who worked on the home-front to support the war effort. As you delve into your own history, we encourage you to share these stories with your family so that they too gain an understanding of the service of their forebears. (Anzac Centenary, n.d.)

While the reach and impact of this campaign was, in reality, fairly limited, it is an example that shows how commemorative practices are animated by family connection and kinship, and are typical of moves to fold private memories into ‘larger narratives of Australians as members of the same national ‘family’ and also infuse individual family histories with national narratives’ (Sumartojo, 2014: 291). In other words, the family itself is not only present as a means of engaging, it is also a crucial connection point and apparatus for presence in commemorative activity. Here, the ‘I Will Remember’ campaign sought to connect the family as a point of engagement with Anzac, presencing relatives from the past while concurrently presencing contemporary recognition of those relatives’ military service. The politics of identity at work in these sorts of examples are of course not limited to Anzac; in the Australian context, efforts are often made to connect family histories to other ‘prized’ narratives within broader Australian history, such as the First Fleet, free settlers and convicts (Tranter & Donoghue, 2003; Donoghue & Tranter, 2018; Waterton & Gayo, 2021). But not all narratives can be prized. As Waterton and Gayo (2021: 77) have observed, the ‘ability to establish a clear connection between one’s family and wider national narratives enables some … to see themselves very clearly in, and locate themselves as central to, particular Anglo-­ Australian national myths’, while others fade into the background. This oscillation between absences and conscious attempts at presencing reinforce and reflect what Maddrell (2013: 505) has called ‘absence-presence’, or a process of activation that emphasizes ‘the dynamic relationality of the two intersecting, but apparently oppositional, terms’. Although Maddrell uses this concept in a discussion of personal bereavement, at a collective level it also hints at what might be hidden when national narratives are defined in relatively narrow terms, and when those terms are overtly

88 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

presenced in the public domain. Focusing on public memorials, Mitchell (2003) has also discussed the inter-relationality of presence and absence, as such structures consolidate narratives of remembrance in terms that highlight a version of the past and often subordinate less powerful or more troubling accounts (see also Dittmer & Waterton, 2021). Certainly, the emphasis on ‘family’ in Anzac remembrance narratives remains strong. As discussed in Chap. 1, how Australians commemorate Anzac is powerfully shaped by the digital world, and the connection to stories and feelings related to family are no exception. Moreover, the temporalities of Anzac remembrance are digitally entangled, which in turn gives way to new ways of understanding Anzac’s relationship with family. This familial connectivity is illustrated in Becky’s account of her Anzac Day in April 2018, which she shared with Shanti. Becky’s great grandfather served in WWI in Egypt and France. With her interest piqued by conversations with her grandfather, during which she learned about her great-grandfather for the first time, Becky sought out more information about his wartime experiences. She started by listening to family stories, which she then followed up with research into her great-grandfather’s war records, held online. Accompanying this digital trace was an evocative material one: her great-grandfather’s WWI medals. As she showed Shanti a photo of them, she explained that she had not known that her father had the medals until the previous year, when he had brought them out to show her. The experience of sitting with her father, talking about this family history, and then connecting it through a Google search to more information about her ancestor, was, as she described, a ‘momentous occasion’. Her father had only recently sent her a photograph of these medals, and was considering having them properly mounted so that he could wear them to Anzac events in the future, which is a common practice at such ceremonies for descendants of war service people (see Fig. 4.2). While the ‘intersections of sensation, experience, and meaning that arise through our interactions with material forms’ (Freeman et al., 2016: 4) have been well-established elsewhere (see: De Nardi, 2017; Ratnam, 2020; Tolia-Kelly, 2004), the feelings exhibited here reference a transferability across and a link between material and digital spaces, thereby generating new relationalities and forms of connection. The imbrication of different traces, imaginaries and relationships bound up in commemoration in the digital world presence Anzac tropes and witness how they shift temporally and across mediums. Central to Becky’s narrative is how her

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

89

Fig. 4.2  Becky’s great-grandfather’s medals. (Source: Becky)

family’s history connects to Anzac; a connection articulated and made in the digital world through memory that is ‘active, subjective, organic, emotional, virtual and uncertain production of the past and present at the same time’ (Garde-Hansen et  al., 2009: 7). The material and digital in Becky’s story are all part of the same commemorative ‘thing’, and rather than attempting to disentangle it, we heed Hoskins’ (2018: 5) position that ‘the digital simultaneously affords a synchronic and diachronic unlimited depth of vision that at the same time makes us aware of the limits of the human capacity to arrest and to hold and to keep the archive’. Becky’s account of her great grandfather’s war record reinforces this point: I took that screenshot [indicates her great grandfather’s official military records] on Anzac Day after I got the picture of the medals so that I could sit down and actually go through it and tell my partner about it … so I spoke about his medals and then got his war records … and then showed all of his movements and when he was in the infirmary, when he had caught influenza … he was in there for 22 days in Egypt … and it gives you this lovely track record of everything he did in the years that he was over there. So, it

90 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

was really lovely to be able to read that, and that then led me on to researching my great uncles because I never really knew a lot about them. I knew one had perished in Gallipoli and another in the Dardenelles … it was really nice to be able to read all that about these people I had obviously never met, but had heard stories about. (Becky, April 2018)

The digital sharing of photos makes a kind of virtual presence available that would not have been possible without the ready circulation of images. But more than that, the digital records allowed Becky to trace her great grandfather’s movements from Egypt to France, to learn of his time in hospital and the brigades that he served with. The war record and its digital presence was an opening, a springboard for an ongoing exploration that grew to take in other relatives, and even her partner as she discussed her discoveries with him. She was able to satisfy her newfound curiosity at ‘superhuman speed’ (Connerton, 2009: 5), connecting her family’s word-­ of-­mouth record to other—and at that point unknown to her—parts of the story. The digital affordances of online records shaped how she was able to not only engage with some of the detail of a past life, but also conceptualize it as discoverable, traceable and connected to other stories of other lives, ‘enriching what had once been a purely archival narrative with a vernacular memory’ of individual family members (Scates, 2019: 208). Becky’s family’s Anzac story resonates with Pink et al.’s (2016: 10) notion of digital materiality, an emergent process of the digital and material constituting not ‘an end product or finished object’, but something newly revealed. In the late 1980s, Pierre Nora famously proclaimed that national memory relies on the archive and the processes by which it continuously makes the past relevant to the present. He argued that ‘modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image’ (Nora, 1989: 13). Trace, recording and image, all functions and contents of the archive, take on new meanings in the digital world ‘as they are collected, catalogued, accessed and circulated faster and to a wider audience’ (Sumartojo, 2017: 2). Moreover, as Keightley and Schlesinger (2014: 745) have argued, ‘[r]apid changes in digital technologies, the greater availability of historical materials online, and increasing digital connectivity … have kept the processes that constitute mediated social memory in flux’, as new understandings emerge from the circulation and use of archival material in the digital world. Becky’s account reminds us of the ready accessibility of her

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

91

ancestor’s war records and how living in ‘an information society that is a digital archive’ enabled new understandings of her family history to spool together with her relationship with her father and great grandfather (Brouwer & Mulder, 2003: 6). Moreover, this newly discovered family history was framed as national precisely because of its presence in official records whose digitization was prioritized by the WWI centenary (Holbrook, 2018). Thus, the digital archive made it possible for Becky to get a sense of the Anzac past in her present-day life through her great grandfather’s record in ‘the national mythscape’, which had the effect of ‘blur[ring] boundaries between the past and present, with particular implications for the affective intensity of … history’ (Sumartojo, 2017: 7). Shanti’s conversation with Becky shows the stacking together of the more or less digital realms as they combine into a multivalent and multi-­ temporal commemorative experience centred around family connection to Anzac. The photograph of service medals and a screenshot of a war record that Becky shared both helped her to understand and constitute her relationships with her father, grandfather, great grandfather and great uncles (even if she had never met them) and encouraged ‘the forging of an empathic connection between subject and reader’ (Holbrook, 2018: 4). This concatenation of objects, papers, digital images, family stories and relationships were then embodied in her participation, alongside her father, in an Anzac Day ceremony. This encounter with Anzac commemoration did not ‘happen’ in just one spatial setting or event; rather, it ranged across and braided together different spaces, relationships and technologies of (re)production and sharing, across more or less digital strands. Overarching and binding it all together was a valued and special emotional relationship with her father that, for Becky, ventured into new areas. As she explained to Shanti: ‘Being able to share that [knowledge] with my father … was really important, and for us to share that Dawn Service together when we had both never done that was really beautiful’.

Absent Anzac: Multiculturalism and Weakening Genealogies If the family is a common trope in Anzac commemoration, then this trope only extends to some families, in certain times. By this we mean that some family connections may be rendered hidden or marginalized in service to wider (and changing) social agendas, only for those desires to later find

92 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

social support (Barnwell, 2018: 453). For example, family connections to a known convict from Australia’s colonial era are now seen as an enormous source of pride after enduring a period for which such connections were perceived as shameful. As Jones et  al. (2012: 257) have reminded us, ‘absence and presence have been and continue to be particularly potent political tools, utilised to reinforce particular power relations, narratives and control over space … [and absence] demarcates territory where acts, people and ideas cannot belong’. With regard to Anzac, it has traditionally been those families (and people) with Anglo-Celtic backgrounds that occupy the centre of Anzac memory, while the position of other, culturally diverse Australians has been far less certain. Even within a nation of multiple ethnic identities, a culturally specific version of Anzac remains a bulwark of Australian identity, a mainstay according to many historians (Donoghue & Tranter, 2014; Brown, 2014; Holbrook, 2014; Seal, 2004). As Drozdzewski (2016: 3) has argued, Anzac ‘upholds the memory of an event historically rooted to an offshore location and links national identity to British heritage’. Indeed, a readily identifiable element of Anzac memory, as McDonald (2010: 299) has pointed out, is its reliance on ‘essentialist images of a white and colonial past’. Contemporary Australian multiculturalism is a largely successful government policy of post-war growth (Ratnam, 2019) that has transformed Australia in the one hundred years since Federation and the original Anzac landing in Gallipoli (Reynolds, 2010). The incumbent tension in locating Anzac’s history alongside Australian history is that at the time of WWI, mainstream Australian identity was overwhelmingly white and Anglophone.3 This population composition was enormously different to that of Australia during the Anzac centenary in 2018. Although similarly high levels of migration were recorded in both Australia’s first country-­ wide census in 1911 (32 per cent) and that of 2016 (33.3 per cent) when counting those born overseas, ‘country of birth’ has diversified considerably (ABS, 2020).4 Indeed, unlike in 1911, by 2019 ‘every single country from around the world was represented in Australia’s population’ (ABS, 2020). Yet Anzac ceremonies have always had trouble fitting into  non-­ Anglo stories, despite the appearance in 2014 of a cast of ‘new’ characters in the Chinese, Indian and Indigenous diggers. Instead of successfully extending Anzac to include non-White Australians, Bongiorno (2014) has argued that recent moves to include Australians from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds into the Anzac story makes this narrative even more resistant to challenge or transformation and has whitewashed their experiences,

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

93

colouring them all in military ‘green’ and thereby erasing (or ignoring) a history of discrimination and prejudice. Multiculturalism niggles at the white Anglo-Celtic presence in Anzac in at least two ways: first, in terms of the historical participation of non-white Australians in WWI (and other conflicts since then); and second, in the diverse composition of the contemporary Australian population. Both factors unsettle the dominance of a white Anglo-Celtic Anzac because they attest to absence. Despite its multicultural diversity, Australia still draws heavily on Anzac memory as an exemplar of national identity, begging the question of what happens ‘when we do not, or cannot, identify with the Anzac narrative genealogically or nationally by means of our country of birth?’ (Drozdzewski, 2016: 2). Indeed, Australia’s former Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, seemed uncertain about the inclusivity of Anzac when he commented that ‘some people of immigrant background may struggle to understand the meaning of Anzac Day and how they should relate to the Anzac tradition’ (Soutphommasane, 2014: 2). As a teenager, he struggled to find a way that Anzac ‘could have meaning for [him]’ (Soutphommasane, 2012: np). Such reflections were echoed a year late in 2015 by Kuranda Sevit, former Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, who recalled feeling torn on Anzac Day as a child growing up in Australia, unable to choose between identifying with the Turks and identifying with the Anzacs (Rowse & Waterton, 2020). However, it is important to acknowledge that the inclusivity of Anzac memory is sometimes flexible enough to facilitate inheritance of the collective national narrative. For example, Sevit (2015: np) wrote, ‘as a Muslim, a Turk and an Australian’, he no longer felt so conflicted, pointing instead to an elasticity in the narrative that had enabled him to remember Gallipoli as, a conflict that saw the loss of many innocent lives and devastated families and loved ones; a battle that ultimately had no consequence to the outcome of the war; a period in our collective history about compassion, empathy, mateship and wisdom; and a time that helps us to reflect on the futility of war.

Similar sentiments regarding ‘fitting-into’ Anzac and the elasticity of the narrative were echoed by one of our research participants who stated that while having no ‘emotional connection’ to Anzac Day, having migrated to Australia, she regarded Anzac Day as a day that ‘should be about just commemorating your war dead’ (Pam, April 2018). However,

94 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

the dominant and present Anzac narrative means that some memories and positions fit well into that narrative, especially those of family war service that form a powerful connection with historical wartime experiences. Others sit more awkwardly within the Anzac narrative due to their non-­ Anglo, minority positioning. A lack of familial connection to Anzac, and indeed the migrant heritage that many Australians enjoy, can disconnect a large swathe of the population from this collective national narrative, and thereby isolate them. For example, Pam went on to observe: I don’t emotionally connect to Anzac Day so when it becomes even more strident, it becomes even more like this [connected to Australian identity, it] is not something that I want to connect with, I’m not a nationalist, I have experienced racism, I know there are problems within our society and I, it’s just not something that I want to be part of. (Pam, April 2018)

Pam’s comment epitomizes how ‘the power of dominant memories depends not simply on their public visibility, but also on their capacity to connect with and articulate particular popular conceptions, whilst actively silencing or marginalizing others’ (Ashplant et al., 2000: 13). This example also shows the absence implicit in commemoration, when groups of people are disregarded or excluded from the articulation of national narratives. To take this argument further, we draw on an account of Anzac Day provided by Abbey, which we outline below. Through Abbey’s account, we illustrate how the digital world takes hold of absences and presences, and reshuffles them in new ways. Now in her late 20s and working in Melbourne, Abbey grew up in Sydney, where her family still lives. Abbey had relatives who were Anzacs, although when she thought about what her great-great-uncle would want her to do on Anzac Day, she told Shanti that ‘[h]e probably wanted to be in bed and not landing at Gallipoli, so I might be in bed in memory of him’! Even so, Anzac Day, for Abbey, invoked thoughts of him and other family members who had served in WWI. As a child, she had participated in the Air League,5 which meant she had marched on numerous Anzac Day occasions and subsequently found herself critiquing people’s marching styles and clothing when watching such events as an adult. Her past experiences were expressed, for example, in her implicit sense of what was ‘inappropriate’ at such events, such as the off-the-shoulder dresses or uncomfortable footwear she observed others

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

95

wearing. This observance is an example of Clark’s (2017: 26) argument that moments of ‘inheritance are overwhelmingly personal … people’s engagement with the Australian story is framed by personal experience, rather than the overt presence of an innate, official and abstract national history’. Abbey’s sentiments demonstrate that some Anzac tropes are more-than-material and can become embodied knowledge through experiential memory (Drozdzewski, 2018). These embodied Anzac tropes ‘are continuously at work in our experience and are constitutive of its very fabric’ (Casey, 2000: 149). Although she no longer regularly attends Anzac Day ceremonies, Abbey retained a strong sense that it is important to be respectful as an audience member, and to reflect this respect in comportment and clothing. Abbey had, however, attended an Anzac Day march in 2018, which she described to Shanti. Her account started with the day before, when she and her partner travelled to Sydney specifically to attend the mid-morning march, in support of her partner’s father. He was marching on behalf of his own father who had served in the Chinese National Army. Because of the difficulties in confirming wartime records, the group representing the Chinese National Army had only found out a few weeks before Anzac Day that they would be able to join the official ceremony—thus, their status as ‘official’ participants had only recently been verified. Abbey explained how she stood on the parade route, waiting, with her partner, his mother, and her own mother, in the humid, sunny Sydney weather, as the long march passed by. As they waited, her partner checked the march order online, trying to figure out when his father’s group would appear. She felt hot and uncomfortable in her jeans, tired from the travel and late night the day before and maybe a little bit bored. Finally, the group they were waiting for came into view. The marchers were all descendants of WWII Chinese Defence Force members and, as they walked, they carried with them a sign which Abbey described as saying: ‘we helped Australia in World War Two, history of Chinese National Army, with dates, divisions, battles and flags’. She relayed to Shanti that her partner had made the following observation: a lot of [the marchers] were wearing sunglasses because the march is televised but there’s still a wariness about the communist government in a lot of areas, particularly if you are marching for the nationals, so they were semi-­ attempting to hide their identity that way. (Abbey, April 2018)

96 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

There was an ambivalence in this gesture, a desire to be visible in their remembrance of their family’s war service, but still remain difficult to identify in the light of contemporary global politics. A form of ‘absence-­ presence’ was also reflected by Abbey’s Chinese-Australian partner, who Abbey described as having ‘never felt part of the Anzac Day tradition because it’s very Anglo, and so I don’t know if he’d even actually been to a march before. He was just going, oh, look at that, look at that, this is great!’ For him, the event was a novelty—a feeling shared by some of our other participants, too—and a chance to support his father; for Abbey, however, it carried other meanings. Despite the heat and tedious waiting, Abbey was still affected by the march and was at times seemingly surprised by the strength and nature of her emotional reactions: I’m just like, I’m slightly bored, I’m slightly too hot. And then people would walk past … carrying the portraits … that had been taken off the mantlepiece, they were marching in someone’s stead, and I was just crying behind my sunglasses because I found that very affecting. (Abbey, April 2018)

As her partner’s father passed by, Abbey recounted how ‘we waved, we clapped, which is what you do, and then waited until they had walked past a certain point and then we left’. These affective and sensory experiences— the lull of waiting, the humid discomfort, the sudden intensity of sadness, the excitement of novelty and the relief of departure—are of course not unique to multicultural understandings of Anzac. While they do not in themselves reflect a singular non-Anglo perspective on commemoration, they do show how Australian multiculturalism, exemplified in this case in one Chinese-Australian family, interweaves through shifting commemorative practices and also how it is overlain by entrenched sentiments and experiential memories of Anzac. After the march, Abbey, her partner and their mothers all went for a Chinese meal in central Sydney’s Chinatown. The restaurant was busy, as usual, and although Abbey’s party were not wearing anything to indicate that they had been to the march, like medals, an Australian flag, or a symbolic sprig of rosemary (see Chap. 3), many others around them were; Abbey was able to look around and easily see these markers of Australian national identity and Anzac Day. Here, in the restaurant, Abbey considered the visibility and presence of Anzac, explaining,

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

97

it’s one of the few times you see a range of different people all wearing something that signifies they were a part of something like that … I would have felt more a part of it if I had been wearing something, but I definitely identified myself with the people who were wearing something that showed that they were a part of it. (Abbey, April 2018)

This ‘presencing’ of Anzac extended to the meal itself, something she photographed in full awareness of the situation: a small Australian flag stuck into a Chinese dessert on a passing trolley. As Abbey’s account illustrates, the digital world clearly extended and consolidated the existing commemorative dynamics, through the widespread availability of official war records, the online availability of the march order, and the mainstream broadcast of memorial services and other events. It also made space for less well-known stories, enabling these to be shared and reflected upon in new ways, forming connections to other countries and their traditions. Abbey’s account also picked up the theme of deepening family connections over time, in ways similar to those described by Becky towards the start of the chapter. However, Abbey’s Anzac Day experience with her Chinese-Australian partner and his family shows the complexity of the relationship amongst family, Anzac and multiculturalism. The complexity of such relationships become clearer when ‘thinking-with’ Maddrell’s (2013) notion of ‘absence-presence’ and considering the encounters with Anzac memory expressed in Abbey’s account, which comprised knowing memory through distinct things—medals, marching, digital archives, uncomfortable heat, particular foods, and so on. While this apprehension of memory coalesced around the commemoration of something absent— absent Anzacs, absent family members, absent service personnel—as Maddrell (2013: 505) has reminded us, [a]bsence is not merely a ‘presence’ in and of itself, but rather the absent is evoked, made present, in and through enfolded blendings of the visual, material, haptic, aural, olfactory, emotional-affective and spiritual planes, prompting memories and invoking a literal sense of continued ‘presence’, despite bodily and cognitive absence.

Moreover, and as we argued in Chap. 2, a new epistemology of memory that can account for the sensory and material, and how these aspects are articulated and travel on more or less digital trajectories, is necessary to fully apprehend how commemorative absence and presence play out together in a digital world.

98 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Conclusions A sense of absence often lodges in our bodies and feelings, rendering itself concomitantly present and thus powerfully affecting. In the context of commemoration, this dualism becomes especially clear when we examine the relationship between multiculturalism and Anzac. Although multiculturalism remains largely absent in Anzac tropes, it is a commonplace sensory and affective reality of everyday Australian life for many people, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ annual summary Migration, Australia, makes clear (ABS, 2020; see also Edensor & Sumartojo, 2018). This dis-­ inclusion is at odds with the treatment of Anzac as a form of kinship, an alignment that can suggest that those who are not in the Anzac ‘family’ are not properly Australian. The emphasis on family connections as a key trope in the contemporary telling of the Anzac narrative has the effect of questioning the link between Anzac and those Australians whose forebears cannot show a direct, familial relationship with a history of service (Sumartojo, 2014). The co-existence of Anzac and multiculturalism is shared in the same ways as other cultural and historical artefacts via the circulation of digital images, broadcasts and archival material that pull together different times in new ways and at speed. These are often bound by kinship, and pulse along digital lines in emails, phone calls, WhatsApp messages and Facebook pages. Indeed, social media plays a crucial role in delineating spaces outside mainstream narratives, providing space for public critique and debate. The examples showcased in this chapter detail precisely how the digital world refracts in the constitution, and through the commemoration, of ‘new kinds of relationships with human and non-human actors’ (Garde-­ Hansen & Schwartz, 2018: 219), particularly those foreshadowed in Chap. 1. As we have shown, digital images, messages and archives are an important part of commemoration, as are our encounters with a range of other vectors for affect, such as the weather, parent–child relationships and a shared meal. In this chapter, we have advanced our argument about the importance of ‘thinking-with’ the digital world by showing how it plays into the ongoing absence-presences in Anzac, and have outlined how these dualisms are particularly evident in the family relationships that both animate and unsettle a core national narrative. This absence/presence relationship not only illustrates the complexity of commemoration, but also traces some of the empirical detail of how it is expressed in more or less digital ways, reinforcing our advocacy for a more expansive

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

99

epistemology of memory that considers embodiment, affect, the experiential world and relationality (see Chap. 2). By focusing on family and multiculturalism in both Anzac tropes and the experience of Anzac commemoration, we have also shown how the different layers of commemoration can stitch together, highlighting that this is so often done by digital means. This stitching puts the digital at the very heart of commemorative activity, treating it not so much as something entangled in remembrance—in the sense that it could possibly be disentangled—but rather showing its articulation in a world that is almost always somehow more or less digital, as we have been arguing. In Chap. 5, we continue along similar lines of inquiry but shift our focus to how commemoration feels. Our focus on feeling provides a continuation of the account of Anzac we have developed thus far, moving from the issue of representation in Chap. 3 to the absence-presence of family and multiculturalism in this chapter, exploring in each case how these aspects are made, and made sense of, with and through digital technologies. In the following chapter, we advance this core argument by attending to sensory and affective experience, describing the connections people feel to Anzac, how these feelings are made and circulated by digital means, and what happens when unsettling feelings such as protest, or even mere inattention adhere to commemorative events.

Notes 1. The ‘Great War’, is often used to reference WWI. 2. The ‘I Will Remember’ photo gallery displays only 97 images, a small number given the state’s population of around 6.5 million and the common claim that Anzac is relevant to all Australians. 3. At the 1911 Census, the overseas-born population comprised: 59.6% from the United Kingdom, 18.4% from Ireland, 4.4% from Germany, 4.2% New Zealand and 2.7% Chinese, 0.9% Italians and Americans, respectively and 0.9% from India. In total, nearly 90% of the population came from predominately ‘white’ countries (ABS, 2010). https://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/ library/pubs/bn/sp/migrationpopulation.pdf 4. In 2019, the top 10 countries of birth for those Australians born overseas comprised: 13% from England, 9% from China; 9% from India; 7% from New Zealand; 4% from the Philippines; 3% from Vietnam, 3% from South Africa, 2% from Italy, 2% from Malaysia and 2% from Sri Lanka (ABS, 2020). 5. The Australia Air League is a youth organization for school-aged children with an interest in aviation.

100 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

References Alderman, D. H. (2003). Street Names and the Scaling of Memory: The Politics of Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr within the African American Community. Area, 35(2), 163–173. Anzac Centenary. (n.d.). I Will Remember. Retrieved May 15, 2020, from https://anzaccentenary.vic.gov.au/iwillremember/gallery/ Ashplant, T. G., Dawson, G., & Roper, M. (2000). The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics. In T. G. Ashplant, G. Dawson, & M. Roper (Eds.), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (pp. 3–85). Routledge. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2010). Migration to Australia Since Federation: A Guide to the Statistics. Retrieved July 22, 2020, from https://www.aph.gov. au/binaries/library/pubs/bn/sp/migrationpopulation.pdf Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2020, April 28). Australia’s Population: Over 7.5 Million Born Overseas. Media Release. Bailey, M., & Brawley, S. (2018). Why Weren’t We Taught? Exploring Frontier Conflict through the Lens of Anzac. Journal of Australian Studies, 42(1), 19–33. Barnwell, A. (2018). Hidden Heirlooms: Keeping Family Secrets across Generations. Journal of Sociology, 54(3), 446–460. Bongiorno, F. (2014). Anzac and the Politics of Inclusion. In S.  Sumartojo & B.  Wellings (Eds.), Nation, Memory, and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (pp.  81–98). Peter Lang. Brouwer, J., & Mulder, A. (2003). Information is alive. In J. Brouwer & A. Mulder (Eds.), Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data (pp. 4–7). V2_Publishing. Brown, J. (2014). Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of our National Obsession. Black Inc.. Casey, E. (2000). Remembering. Indiana University Press. Clark, A. (2016). Private Lives, Public Histories. Melbourne University Publishing. Clark, A. (2017). The Place of Anzac in Australian Historical Consciousness. Australian Historical Studies, 48(1), 19–34. Connerton, P. (2009). How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge University Press. De Nardi, S. (2017). The Poetics of Conflict Experience: Materiality and Embodiment in Second World War Italy. Routledge. Dittmer, J., & Waterton, E. (2021). Naval-Gazing: The Popular Geopolitics of Affect and Maritime Heritage. In M. Mostafanezhad, M. Córdoba Azcárate, & R. Norum (Eds.), Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect and Imagination (pp. 145–165). University of Arizona Press. Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2014). The Anzac Myth and Australian National Identity. E-IR, May: 1–5.

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

101

Donoghue, J., & Tranter, B. (2018). Exploring Australian National Identity: Heroes, Memory and Politics. Emerald Group Publishing. Drozdzewski, D. (2012). Knowing (or Not) about Katyń: The Silencing and Surfacing of Public Memory. Space and Polity, 16(3), 303–319. Drozdzewski, D. (2016). Does Anzac Sit Comfortably within Australia’s Multiculturalism? Australian Geographer, 47(1), 3–10. Drozdzewski, D. (2018). Memory, Movement, Mobility: Affect-Full Encounters with Memory in Singapore. Media Theory, 2(1), 245–265. Edensor, T., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Geographies of Everyday Nationhood: Experiencing Multiculturalism in Melbourne. Nations and Nationalism, 24(3), 553–578. Freeman, L.  A., Nienass, B., & Daniell, R. (2016). Memory | Materiality | Sensuality. Memory Studies, 9(1), 3–12. Garde-Hansen, J., & Schwartz, G. (2018). Iconomy of Memory: On Remembering as Digital, Civic and Corporate Currency. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 217–233). Routledge. Garde-Hansen, J., Hoskins, A., & Reading, A. (2009). Introduction. In J. Garde-­ Hansen, A.  Hoskins, & A.  Reading (Eds.), Save As … Digital Memories (pp. 1–21). Springer. Hetherington, K. (2004). Secondhandedness: Consumption, Disposal, and Absent Presence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(1), 157–173. Hill, L. (2015). Human Geography and Archaeology: Strange Bedfellows? Progress in Human Geography, 39(4), 412–431. Holbrook, C. (2014). The Anzacs: The Unauthorised Biography. NewSouth. Holbrook, C. (2018). Family History, Great War Memory and the ANZAC Revival. Social Alternatives, 37(3), 19. Hoskins, A. (2018). The Restless Past: An Introduction to Digital Memory and Media. In A. Hoskins (Ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (pp. 1–24). Routledge. Inglis, K. (1987). Men, Women, and War Memorials: Anzac Australia. Daedalus, 116(4), 35–59. Jones, O. (2015). ‘Not Promising a Landfall…’: An Autotopographical Account of Loss of Place, Memory and Landscape. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 1–27. Jones, R., Robinson, J., & Turner, J. (2012). Introduction. Between Absence and Presence: Geographies of Hiding, Invisibility and Silence. Space and Polity, 16(3), 257–263. Keightley, E., & Schlesinger, P. (2014). Digital Media—Social Memory: Remembering in Digitally Networked Times. Media Culture & Society, 36(6), 745–747. Kilmister, M., Bennett, J., Ford, M., & Debenham, J. (2017). Treading on Sacred Ground? Confronting the Anzac Myth in Higher Education. History Compass, 15(8), e12395.

102 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Maddrell, A. (2013). Living with the Deceased: Absence, Presence and Absence-­ Presence. Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 501–522. McDonald, M. (2010). ‘Lest We Forget’: The Politics of Memory and Australian Military Intervention. International Political Sociology, 4, 287–302. McKenna, M. (2014). Keeping in Step: The Anzac ‘Resurgence’ and ‘Military Heritage’, in Australia and New Zealand. In S. Sumartojo & B. Wellings (Eds.), Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (pp. 151–167). Peter Lang. Mitchell, K. (2003). Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory. Urban Geography, 24(5), 442–459. Mycock, A., Sumartojo, S., & Wellings, B. (2014). The Centenary to End All Centenaries: The Great War, Nation and Commemoration. In S. Sumartojo & B.  Wellings (Eds.), Nation, Memory, and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (pp.  1–24). Peter Lang. Nora, P. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire. Representations, 26, 7–24. Johnson, N. C. (1999). The spectacle of memory: Ireland’s remembrance of the Great War, 1919. Journal of Historical Geography 25(1): 36–56. Pink, S., Ardèvol, E., & Lanzeni, D. (2016). Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology. Bloomsbury. Ratnam, C. (2019). Fitting Refugees into the Normative Narrative of Australian Multiculturalism. Urban Geography, 40(8), 1198–1209. Ratnam, C. (2020). (Re)creating Home: The Lived and Gendered Experiences of Tamil Women in Sydney, Australia. In N. Kandasamy, N. Perera, & C. Ratnam (Eds.), A Sense of Viidu: The (Re)creation of Home by the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Australia (pp. 119–135). Gateway East Singapore. Reynolds, H. (2010). Are Nations Really Made in War? In H. Reynolds & M. Lake (Eds.), What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (pp. 24–44). University of New South Wales Press. Reynolds, H. (2013). Forgotten War. NewSouth Publishing. Rowse, T., & Waterton, E. (2020). The ‘Difficult Heritage’ of the Native Mounted Police. Memory Studies, 13(4), 737–751. Sather-Wagstaff, J. (2011). Heritage That Hurts: Tourists in the Memoryscapes of September 11. Left Coast Press. Scates, B. (2019). How War Came Home: Reflections on the Digitisation of Australia’s Repatriation Files. History Australia, 16(1), 190–209. Seal, G. (2004). Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. University of Queensland Press. Sevit, K. (2015, April 20). What do Muslims Think about Anzac Day?, Sydney Morning Herald. Smith, L., Cubitt, G., Fouseki, K., & Wilson, R. (2011). Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Entanglements. Routledge.

4  DIGITAL PRESENCE AND ABSENCE 

103

Soutphommasane, T. (2012, April 23). Where Does Anzac Day Fit in a Culturally Diverse Australia? Sydney Morning Herald. Soutphommasane, T. (2014). Contribution to the Australia Defence White Paper 2015. Retrieved January 20, 2016, from http://www.defence.gov.au/ Whitepaper/docs/231-­RaceDiscriminationCommissioner.pdf Sumartojo, S. (2014). Anzac Kinship and National Identity on the Australian Remembrance Trail. In S. Sumartojo & B. Wellings (Eds.), Nation, Memory, and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (pp. 291–306). Peter Lang. Sumartojo, S. (2017). Tweeting from the Past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary@ ABCNews1915. Memory Studies, 13(4), 1–16. Sumartojo, S. (2020). New Geographies of Commemoration. Progress in Human Geography. 0309132520936758. Tolia-Kelly, D. (2004). Locating Processes of Identification: Studying the Precipitates of Re-memory through Artefacts in the British Asian Home. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29, 314–329. Tranter, B., & Donoghue, J. (2003). Convict Ancestry: A Neglected Aspect of Australian Identity. Nations and Nationalism, 9, 555–577. Waterton, E. (forthcoming). A Coda for the ‘Left Behind’. In G. Jaramillo and J.  Tomann (Eds.), Transcending the Nostalgic: Deindustrialised Landscapes across Europe. Berghahn. Waterton, E. (2020). Memorialising War: Rethinking Heritage and Affect in the Context of Pearl Harbor. In S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. KoskinenKoivisto (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place (pp. 237–248). Routledge. Waterton, E., & Gayo, M. (2021). The Elite and the Everyday in the Australian Heritage Field. In T.  Bennett, D.  Carter, M.  Gayo, M.  Kelly, & G.  Noble (Eds.), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions (pp. 66–82). Routledge. Wensing, E. (2020). Crafty Commemoration: Vernacular Responses to the Centenary of World War One. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Canberra, Australian National University. Winter, J. (2009). Historians and Sites of Memory. In P.  Boyer & J.  Wertsch (Eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture (pp.  252–268). Cambridge University Press. Winter, T. (2020). Geocultural Power: China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Geopolitics. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1718656 Ziino, B. (2007). A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War. University of Western Australia Press. Ziino, B. (2010). A Lasting Gift to His Descendants: Family Memory and the Great War in Australia. History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past, 22(2), 125.

CHAPTER 5

Digital Feelings

Abstract  In this chapter, we interrogate how commemoration is felt in a digital world. Adopting the phrase ‘digital feelings’, and focusing on sensory and affective experience, we explore how feelings help constitute meaning in Anzac rituals and activities, and, moreover, how they are composed and circulated in different ways via a range of digital media. We show how feelings of, and about, Anzac can be palpable, intense and passionate, as much as they can be messy, tempestuous, inconvenient and disruptive. Importantly, this complexity includes more resistant or dissenting emotions that do not necessarily conform to longstanding commemorative practices and narratives. In attending to digital feelings, we reinforce our argument about the epistemological entanglement of affect, embodiment and discursive meaning that characterizes the complex geographies of commemoration. Keywords  Anzac • Commemoration • Digital feelings • Emotion • Absence/presence • Banal nationalism • Identity politics

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3_5

105

106 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Expanding the Semiotic: Feeling Commemoration in a Digital World This chapter interrogates how commemoration is felt in a digital world. Focusing on sensory and affective experience, it explores how such feelings help to constitute meaning in Anzac rituals and activities, and also how they are composed and circulated in different ways via a range of digital media. As outlined in Chap. 2, our research methods are geared towards illustrating how digital technologies entangle in the many ways that Anzac Day is experienced, understood and reflected  upon (and often  in hindsight). This chapter brings more empirical material to this orientation. Throughout the chapter, we approach what we refer to as ‘digital feelings’ in three distinct ways. First, we consider how feelings generated at and by Anzac Day services and events are made and circulated by various digital media, attending to how these connected (or distanced) people from Anzac Day 2018 in different ways. In ‘thinking-with’ the digital, we home in on the presence and effects of social and other digital media in the lives of our participants, and the feelings that accompany their use. We consider how materials such as images, documents and objects symbolic of Anzac Day are created, shared and discussed via digital means, including media broadcasts, bringing nuance to the theoretical framework constructed in Chap. 2. Adding life and vibrancy to our attempts to ‘think-­ with’ digital technology, these participants’ accounts also illustrate how technology makes feelings of Anzac possible, and how those feelings are inextricable from our digital worlds. Advancing our discussion of the digital in encounters with Anzac, commenced in Chap. 3, a crucial pivot in this chapter is our consideration of how such encounters connect to ways of feeling and making sense of Anzac affectively. Here, the new digital materialities of Anzac ‘things’ enable feelings and reflections to emerge, taking Anzac narratives forward in new ways that are deeply personal yet shared, and connected to other, similar ‘things’. Second, we turn our attention to how emotional connections between attendees and aspects of Anzac Day ceremonies manifest in the digital world. As has been argued elsewhere, one clear way that emotional connections are produced in Anzac is through the particular sensations associated with the darkness of the Dawn Service and a discursive link with the fragile bodies and wartime experiences of Anzac soldiers at Gallipoli (Sumartojo, 2015). These bodily sensations are not unique to Anzac, and there are  corollaries in other national commemorations, for example

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

107

through the quiet stillness of two-minute silences or the spontaneous applause from the crowd as veterans march by. As we discussed in Chap. 3, the spectacle of Anzac includes a range of light, sound and broadcast production technologies that assemble to create a sense of proximity between the public and the narrative material being displayed. These help to constitute, and are constituted by, a mix of sensory and affective feelings that in turn configure into commemorative atmospheres, enhancing the emotional impact of these large public events (Sumartojo, 2016). Official understandings of Anzac are clearly framed in affective terms, both because of the Anzac discourse itself, and in the articulation of that discourse in official ceremonies, often through digital means. In addition, these ceremonies and their associated feelings and affects are not just confined to the Dawn Service but extend into other familiar events on the day, such as the major football match held annually in Melbourne in the afternoon of Anzac Day. The third distinct component of our framework for thinking about ‘digital feelings’ is our focus on how emotional connections to Anzac operationalize through and in the digital world. Here, we engage with digital protest and counter-normative expressions, including inattention to Anzac, both on social media and its connection to the offline realm. In particular, we explore Anzac in the lives of those participants who, in 2018, did not attend a ceremony or mark the day in some other way, but instead got on with normal everyday activities. Nevertheless, even when they were not directly focused on Anzac, it still was part of their mundane engagements with digital technologies. We begin by outlining the relationship between Anzac feelings and the digital world.

More or less Digital Feelings: Ceremonial Encounters There is no question that for many attendees at Anzac ceremonies, emotions run high. Clark (2017: 33) has reasoned that ‘public and collective commemorations such as Anzac create that experience of ‘communitas’, or emotional collectivity … because people bring their own sensibilities and connections to the day’. In further congruence with the capacity of Anzac ceremonies to generate ‘feelings’, Frame (2016: 252) has argued that those who participate in such events are moved by the experience and feel connected to something that is much larger than themselves. He goes on to ask if there is ‘more to commemoration than

108 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

that’? In his provocation, Frame (2016) nudges at questions about the purpose of commemoration and how the generation of feelings therein matter. We contend that only by attending to how commemoration is felt in the digital world can we locate how intimate experiential and sensory memories become part of who we are, defining not only ourselves but where we have been and with whom. Such feelings and memories, we argue, are entangled with dynamic individual emotions as well as shared moods. One participant, Kelly, explained the shifting notions of individual and collective feelings entangled with Anzac in the following terms, using the laying of a wreath for a deceased relative as an example: so here [laying the wreath] for me it would be more personal, and then 10 minutes later its more social/national. It’s this constant changing feeling of … changing between the personal and the family and the nation and the state, and Anzac Day is a really good example of that for me. (Kelly, April 2018)

National commemorative events like Anzac illustrate how a politics of memory is operationalized, calling people together in redolent memorial environments and employing sensorial prompts to connect individuals with memory narratives championed by state authorities. Importantly, these events shape how remembrance feels as much as how it is understood. Such affects reverberated through the collective feelings recounted by many of our research participants, and are exemplified by Kelly who stated: ‘it’s just the feeling that everybody is showing respect’. Affective intensities thus swell and ebb in well-known ceremonial rhythms and spaces; and such feelings are composed and activated digitally as much as they are experienced spatially, materially or through bodily sensations. If people attune to, and experience, Anzac feelings on significant dates alongside other people, then these are also inescapably experienced and made sense of in the online world. In this section, we deepen our approach for ‘thinking-with’ Anzac feeling by engaging with existing work on digital media logics, affect cultures and publics, as well as ‘more or less digital’ commemoration. van Dijck and Poell (2013: 1) have provided an excellent starting point in identifying the programmability, popularity, connectivity and datafication of social media that is ‘gradually invading all areas of public life’, and the capacity of social media to transform the reception of information in particular ways. Taking up the case of Anzac commemoration, Sear (2016:

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

109

71) has furthered this line of inquiry by pointing out that ‘digital “code” is a new actor on the commemorative stage, enabling and influencing how people participate in commemorative activities’. The digital thus draws new people to commemoration in ways that link the past, present and our futures in novel ways. Drawing on Hoskins and O’Loughlin’s (2010) notion of the ‘connective turn’, Sear takes this further still, by arguing that the new digital propinquity of commemoration draws people together, brings distant war sites closer and thus enables a piercing of the ‘porous digital present’ by the past (Sear, 2016: 70; see also Hoskins, 2018). Hoskins (2011: 23–24) has considered the implications of digital media for memory studies at length. His principal argument is that social media now form a ‘new digital ecology’, where they are ‘actually part of memory: inseparable from memory through the connections we make with them’. These connections, or what Sear (2016) has referred to as ‘hyperconnectivity’, thread together in different temporalities and spatialities, and with diverse peoples; they are also subject to the social media logics, structures and algorithms that van Dijck and Poell (2013) have discussed, in  terms of their expanding reach and influence as they connect people online. Digital feelings thus both circulate and help to constitute the atmospheres central to Anzac memory and that continue to maintain its importance. Again, Kelly explained this atmosphere with eloquence, pointing to the combination of the setting, music and a sense of mourning, all of which invoke feelings of sadness, particularly when framed by the knowledge of previous events in the same place: At these ceremonies, there’s kind of like a rule that you’re not allowed to cry … everyone has to sort of look down and you have to pretend … if you look at old videos of the opening of the Shrine [of Remembrance, in Melbourne], they play that [hymn ‘Abide with Me’] and … every time I hear that, I think about this big crowd … of 30,000 people at the opening of the Shrine [in 1934] and they were playing that and they were singing that, and I think that probably the crowd sang it as well, people knew … and I think, oh my goodness, how sad, all of these people, so many people would have had someone … close to them, you know, their husband or their brother or something, killed in the war or they were there, they fought in the war and they’re singing this hymn. There’s a whole crowd, it’s so sad! (Kelly, April 2018)

110 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

For Kelly, Anzac Day is undoubtedly emotionally charged. As she sat with Shanti in a university office discussing her photographs, she was visibly moved even in the context of the interview, recalling the sound of a poignant hymn at the Dawn Service and the feelings it evoked (see Fig. 5.1). She had a strong sense of connectedness to family members who served in WWI as well as one of her aunts who, as young child, had been at the opening of the Shrine. Like Becky in Chap. 4, Kelly holds firm views about appropriate behaviours at commemorative ceremonies, and those views played out in the photographs she took. For example, her photograph of the Eternal Flame at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance prompted a sense of annoyance as she recounted how people had thrown coins into the lit cauldron, not understanding its intended purpose as a memorial, and instead treating it as a sort of wishing well. Even though she imagined that people probably did this out of respect, she still bridled at the lack of understanding of the Flame’s symbolism and purpose. But beyond her reflections on her attendance at the 2018 Dawn Service, Kelly’s account also shows how these feelings were made in and through engagement with reproductions of an earlier event, captured in digital images and film footage of the opening of the Shrine of Remembrance in 1934. This digitally available material enabled Kelly to imagine the experiences of others in the same place decades earlier, eliciting empathy, sadness

Fig. 5.1  Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, Australia. (Source: Kelly)

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

111

and even tears. Digital archival material was central to her understanding of Anzac, a narrative that came alive through people who had attended ceremonies in the same place but long ago. There is a clear echo here of the notions of past and present, presence and absence discussed in Chap. 4, a haunting that is articulated through the fact that no place or event ‘vanishes utterly, leaving no trace’ (after Lefebvre, 1991: 164). Instead, such hauntings have the capacity to turn an absence into a ‘pressure on the body … a physical presence that is felt and thereby affects’ (Gordillo, 2014: 31), in this instance transporting Kelly beyond the timeframe of April 2018, and connecting her to the national scale by way of the experiences of others in the same setting years before. In this example, decades-­ old images made accessible by digital technologies both enabled and formed part of a powerful emotional connection to the past that thickened her contemporary Anzac experience. The commemorative temporality of the ‘past-into-the-present’ (Jones, 2011: 876) was more emotionally resonant because of the way digital images supported imagination and empathetic connection (we return to the discussion of archives in Chap. 6). The recollection of video footage of previous Anzac Day ceremonies that Kelly referred to above shows the value of longstanding digital recordings of this significant national event. Every year, the broadcast media televise national and local ceremonies with Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), providing the most comprehensive coverage. In a demonstration of the role and importance of this broadcast, many of our research participants included a photograph of a television screen in their materials, either of the Dawn Service or the mid-morning march (see also the section on ‘Anzac through the screen’, Chap. 3). Watching Anzac Day on some sort of screen is, for some, as much a tradition as going to the Dawn Service is for others. This ‘digital’ tradition connects to memories of Anzac Days past, and to the people and places included in its viewing. As Felicity recalls, ‘[a]s kids we … we would get up and watch the Anzac Day march from start to finish on the ABC, every Anzac Day, because my Grandma marched, and we watched to spot Grandma’ (Felicity, April 2018). The importance of the ABC as the official national broadcaster means that almost the whole of Anzac Day is committed to coverage of ceremonies, beginning with the official national service in the capital city of Canberra, and then travelling around the world to live coverage of the Gallipoli Dawn Service in Turkey, and the annual dawn service at Villers-Bretonneux in northern France, the site of the Australian National Memorial on the former Western Front.

112 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Some of our research participants reported having this broadcast on all day, or dipping in and out of it at different times (see Chap. 3). Another important broadcast watched by many of our participants, especially those in Melbourne where it originated, is the mid-afternoon Australian Rules Football (AFL) match, played annually between the same two teams—Collingwood and Essendon—at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This match always adopts a similar Anzac Day ‘script’, with Anzac-specific designs on players’ uniforms and an opening programme that includes military personnel, a two-minute silence and the playing of the Last Post by a lone bugler. The match itself exemplifies how Anzac Day is woven into everyday life, or, in other words, how prominent moments of national commemoration so easily morph into more ‘banal’ (Billig, 1995) forms of nationalism. For some participants, such as Felicity, it is a more muted though consistent engagement: ‘I would normally have it [the match] on. I wouldn’t say I’d sit there and actively watch it, but it would be on in the background and you’d be checking in to see what the scores are’ (Becky,  April 2018). For others, however, the match is an essential part of Anzac Day. As Becky notes: ‘I’ve always watched the Anzac Day match. I think it is really important; it’s very moving. I know a lot of people who don’t support those teams [but] will still watch the Anzac Day match … I would say, apart from the Grand Final, it’s probably the most important football match of the year’. Another participant, Chris, discussed this interweaving of football and Anzac Day with Shanti at length. In 2018, she watched the match with her son, as she does every year, even though, to echo Becky, neither of the teams they support play on Anzac Day. She described the scenes of the opening programme preceding the match to Shanti in the following ways: an extreme close-up of a soldier and then a female soldier saluting, and then the Collingwood supporters … [the football] is as much a public moment of commemoration as the Dawn Service in a way, its carried out with that much solemnity. It went on for maybe 10 to 15 minutes. It’s a significant, deliberate engineering of that moment to honour those who have laid down their lives for us, you get a lot of the same, you get ‘lest we forget’, you get the last post, there’s a lot there, it’s not just a peremptory national anthem, a few words, it’s quite elaborate …[and]. … having the Last Post played and the national anthem, I think it’s really important to reflect on our history and our culture and share that with so many people that love the sport as well, and I know a lot of people who don’t support those teams will still watch the Anzac Day match and still go

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

113

to the Anzac Day match as well because it’s just really important. (Chris, April 2018)

Chris went on to explain, more explicitly, how the football match taps into her feelings about Anzac Day, describing it thus: what’s interesting about it being televised, because I wouldn’t be at the Dawn Service, but I am here, kind of incidentally. So, it’s not just about the numbers but also, as a sports fan or as a member of a television audience, you find yourself also as part of a national commemoration. And I’m a complete sucker for the Last Post … I grew up as a girl when we commemorated, it was a church school and we always had commemoration of these events with the poppies and I’m enormously affected by any of those sorts of things. (Chris, April 2018)

Chris’ account of the 2018 Anzac Day AFL match—with the broadcast itself an example of the importance of digital technologies—gave her an opportunity to reflect on her own complex feelings about Anzac. She explained that while she would not attend a Dawn Service, her childhood experiences meant that the music and symbolism associated with it still have the capacity to move her. The above reflections are akin to what Marshall (2008: 38) has called ‘remembering through the senses’. The sensory experiences connected with watching the Anzac Day match figure palpably in how people understand and value aspects of the past (in this case, Anzac Day) through purposively constructed commemorative performances in the present (in this case, a football match). In this regard, and as Walsh (2008: 7) has noted, ‘[f]ootballers no longer merely live up to the ideal of Anzac, but became the Anzacs, the physical manifestation of soldier spirits embodying the particular qualities of mateship, courage and initiative’. Moreover, the ‘role of sport [has become] embedded in the masculine values of the national character that Anzac assumed after the war’ (Blackburn, 2016: 60). Indeed, the deliberate intertwining of these Anzac Day experiences works to shore up an established and especially masculinist Anzac trope of mateship (as discussed in Chap. 3) and wrap it in shared emotions and feelings. Our intention here is to not dispute or negate the emotional qualities of any of our participants’ experiences—they were clearly expressed as ‘moving’. Rather, we hope to show how the digital feelings of and about Anzac can also be co-opted by its politics. Anzac Day

114 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

experiences are felt: they may move people to cry or pause to hold back tears at an official service or at home, and they are associated with the elation of jumping up excitedly when one team scores, whether the seat be on a couch or in the stadium. Our bodies remember these emotions and connect them to Anzac Day memories, so the potency and power of deeply embodied memory resounds. Moreover, the creation and maintenance of ‘affective publics’ (Papacharissi, 2016), supported through digital media, pull together individual reactions to a public broadcast and a collective national narrative, as we discuss next.

Circulating Feelings: The Extension and Expansion of the Commemorative Setting Kelly’s, Felicity’s, Chris’ and Becky’s accounts relay individual feelings on and about Anzac Day, as well as making clear how digital technologies helped to constitute them and connect them to other people, places and times. Another key aspect of Anzac-related digital feelings is how these are shared and circulated. As mentioned in the previous section, research specifically directed at social media platforms has examined how feelings circulate on Anzac Day (Sear, 2016), but, in departing from these platforms and their role in discursive construction or maintenance, we instead asked our research participants to situate their everyday uses of digital media and technologies on Anzac Day. As such, we hoped to shift the focus of inquiry from social media platforms and their affordance of ‘connectivity’ (van Dijck & Poell, 2013) towards the feelings, understandings and experiences of the people who use them. Lori’s account provides a useful route into ‘thinking-with’ geographies of commemoration in the digital world. For Lori, Anzac Day is a public holiday and a chance to sleep in. Like Chris, however, television coverage of Anzac events remains important, even if attending a Dawn Service is not. As Lori noted: Although I slept in, I still watched Anzac Day celebration stuff on [breakfast television program] Sunrise … I would normally watch Sunrise of a morning anyway, so I didn’t go out of my way to watch it, but I still made an effort to keep up to date as to what had happened at all the ceremonies and stuff like that around Australia. But I didn’t go out of my way to actually get up to go to a Dawn Service. (Lori, April 2018)

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

115

Social media plays an important role for Lori, waking her early, even if she is trying to catch up on sleep. As she explained, Facebook is an established part of how she feels connected to her friends, and central to how they all communicate with each other and make shared plans. This extended to Anzac Day in 2018: I woke up on Anzac Day morning because a lot of my friends on Facebook were on a Facebook thread and they were talking, so my phone was going bzzz bzzz bzzz … Some of them were at the Dawn Service at the Shrine, some were at other dawn services, and I didn’t want to be that person to say ‘you guys woke me up’ because it almost sounded really disrespectful. So, although I haven’t found a way to celebrate Anzac Day, I don’t want to be overly disrespectful to it. (Lori, April 2018)

As Lori remarked above, Facebook provided a means to feel connected to her friends, but on Anzac Day this gave rise to annoyance at being woken by her vibrating smartphone. However, because Anzac in general also evoked feelings of respect and solemnity, she was conscious of not trespassing on her friends’ feelings by complaining about their posts. Instead, she wanted to remain ‘respectful’, even though she did not share the commitment to a sunrise start on a public holiday. Here, social media was completely entangled in Lori’s feelings on and about Anzac Day, with her annoyance at interrupted sleep tempered by respect for her friends’ remembrance. A critical element of this merging of social media and our own cognitive memory circuits of Anzac is what Hoskins (2011: 21) has identified as a dichotomy between memory ‘in-the-head’ and ‘in-the-world’. Such a delineation directs focus at individual, reflective or imaginative processes, as well as collective ones. Digital technologies, and in particular their affective qualities, give us a way to bridge these scales of commemoration. Having said that, our research participants could readily nominate a distinction between the online and offline realms, and this was most obvious via their use of social media platforms, especially Facebook. Returning again to Lori, although her annoyance at being woken early on a public holiday may not have been the usual feelings associated with her use of Facebook, it did illustrate how, because social media is already a part of many peoples’ everyday lives, it also gets pulled into Anzac commemoration. The importance of the social media platform for Lori was particularly

116 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

evident when Shanti asked if she could ‘imagine an Anzac Day without Facebook’: I would have no idea what anyone was doing. Literally. So, my friends are still at the stage where if you are not on Facebook, you pretty much don’t get invited to stuff, unless someone actively goes out of their way to remember that you’re not on Facebook and invites you. And if you’re not in this thread, or if you mute the thread, for any period of time, you might miss out on invitations to stuff. So, if there was no Facebook … generally you would have no idea. (Lori, April 2018)

This position—that the digital is embedded and interconnected— advances work on the circulation of feelings via social and digital media because it takes a perspective that does not put social media itself at the centre, instead locating feelings as important. That is, it attends to the existing feelings about Anzac (respectfulness), and the existing feelings about Facebook (crucial for connectivity) and shows how they come together in complex ways, such as annoyance but forbearance about Lori’s friends’ posts.

Feeling Anzac Differently and Digitally In her discussion of the use of Twitter to prompt political change, Papacharissi (2016: 320) developed the concept of ‘affective publics’ to explain how ‘networked publics mobilized and connected (or disconnected) through expressions of sentiment, as these expressions of sentiment materialize discursively through the medium of Twitter.’ She reasoned that these publics ‘assemble around media and platforms that invite affective attunement, support affective investment, and propagate affectively charged expression, like Twitter … affect becomes the drive that keeps them going’ (Papacharissi, 2016: 308). However, in our case, the ‘emotional alignment that gives rise to feelings of belonging’ (Döveling et al., 2018: 2) was highly contingent on existing attitudes and feelings about Anzac, and could easily fall out of sync as the other ongoing occurrences in people’s lives took place alongside their engagement with Anzac events. The methodological approach that this book adopts reveals this engagement in two distinct ways, as well as providing myriad other insights into how people ‘feel’ with and through digital technologies in Anzac commemoration.

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

117

Our first distinction, as we have been arguing throughout, is that Anzac is made and understood digitally not only in the online realm of social media, but in its utter interweaving with the offline world, more or less digitally. The two realms, in our view, cannot be cleaved apart. Indeed, it makes little sense to attempt such a separation because they are part and parcel of the same ongoing flow of experience in a ‘postdigital’ world (Berry & Dieter, 2015), where our feelings and understandings move easily across online and offline environments. However, while the bifurcation of these realms is increasingly meaningless, we, as researchers, must sometimes, somehow, seek to make such a division to posit conceptual or empirical claims, even if to artificially freeze and dissect the complex, dynamic and excessive experiential world. At the same time, our second distinction asserts that there are distinctive ways that digital technologies and media shape cultural narratives. Anzac is no exception. ‘Thinking-with’ affect provides us with a very useful way to understand how commemoration is now ‘more or less digital’. Such a framing reveals that the emotional connections between attendees and aspects of Anzac ceremonies are not limited to the commemorative sites themselves, or the official ceremonial aspects. Instead, these feelings emerge before and after Anzac events, extended and carried by smartphone photographs, social media posts, WhatsApp messages and other digital means. Put differently, digital technologies extend and expand the commemorative setting of Anzac beyond 25 April and the public memorial sites where people gather annually, and these extensions contribute to the emergence of new expressions of the Anzac narrative. For example, one participant, Connor, talked about going to the Dawn Service and then trying to use the remainder of the public holiday to do something he enjoyed. The two photos below (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3) relate to this melding of the everyday into Anzac Day, while his narrative also traced how his activities, and those of his friends, left digital footprints. In this regard, as Frith and Kalin (2016: 52) have noted, ‘checking in, when understood in relation to digital network memory, show how every emplacement is an expansion [where] the past draws forth the present; the present draws on the past’. These emplacements indeed leave ‘sticky’ digital traces of commemorative events (after Ahmed, 2014), but in our digital world they also act as signposts that guide how we understand our feelings and interactions before, during and after the commemorative event.

118 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 5.2  Esky ready for post-run Anzac Day BBQ. (Source: Connor)

The feeling of Anzac, then, imbues or sticks to many different things, in a process that is also enabled digitally. Anzac Day is still a part of everyday life in Australia, and for people who do not attend ceremonies or pause to remember family members, it is both special (as a regular holiday distinguished by familiar cultural markers) and banal (as a chance to catch up on chores, exercise or watch television). Anzac Day is therefore also about mundane activities because although these occur without particular reference to the well-known cultural narratives of remembrance, they are still shaped by the fact of a day off work, shop closures, special football matches on television, time with family members and other small reminders. Pam’s photo of digital road signs displaying the upcoming

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

119

Fig. 5.3  Connor’s narrative about melding the everyday with Anzac Day, digitally. (Source: Connor)

road closures around the Australian War Memorial are indicative of the way that Anzac Day intersects with the everyday: The sign is just a reminder that Anzac is soon because I don’t travel anywhere near the war memorial … it’s just, the kind of, the media environment that we live in, you know, prompts me with dates, for all sorts of things, that I usually don’t remember. (Pam, April 2018)

People do not become irresistibly enrolled in the affective intensities made in and through their engagement with digital media and commemorative events (Edensor & Sumartojo, 2018). Rather, these Anzac feelings ebb and flow, sometimes at the forefront of attention and sometimes not. Moreover, they might shift from one feeling to another— from sadness to unease, or pride to irritation—and they might also be all of these things at the same time. In this chapter we have sought to thinkwith-feeling to draw together the emotional, affective and sensory

120 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

experiences as expressed and often mixed together in the accounts of our research participants. For most, this melding meant that feelings related to Anzac were never only about Anzac. That is, in part because their online activities were always also taking place offline (via photographs that were traveling from one person’s home to another, or social media that was being checked in a car or on the couch in a living room), there was always the possibility for other sensations, perceptions and feelings to emerge in the same settings as those directly related to Anzac. In this sense, not only are such feelings contingent and dynamic, they are also always partial and in process, coming into or falling out of alignment with normative versions of Anzac. Indeed, when we look beyond the mainstream and normative ceremonial events, we can see how people engage with Anzac in a very wide range of ways. Non-conforming Feelings: Digital Protest and Counter-Normative Expressions In the context of the digital world, Döveling et al. (2018: 2) introduced the notion of digital ‘affect cultures’, which are ‘inherently normative and infused with relations of power where, depending on the context, some emotional scenarios are normalized at the expense of others’. We discussed this notion in some detail in the previous chapter, particularly in relation to multiculturalism and the diversity of views about Anzac. Pointing out that the ‘affective flows in the digital terrain … might have very different logics than the emotional flows outside the digital realm’, Döveling et al. (2018: 7) have built on earlier scholarship that has considered the movement of feelings across more or less digital realms. For example, Kuntsman (2012: 2) has used the term ‘reverberation’ to characterize the ‘movement of emotions and feelings in and out of cyberspace, through bodies, psyches, texts and machines … [and] the multiplicity of effects such movement might entail’. This term allowed her to attend to the ‘distortions and resonance, intensification and dissolution’ implicit in the movement of ideas in the digital world (Kuntsman, 2012: 2); such distortion could include disinterest, disregard or even voluble disagreement with Anzac. The narrative provided by Sally, who did not participate in Anzac Day and who had been vocal and active in opposing what she considered its co-opting of  ideas about national identity, aptly articulates this  idea of reverberation. Discussing the mainstream adherence to a normative Anzac narrative, Sally made the following critical point:

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

121

I don’t know, there’s not a lot of reflexivity encouraged or made space for? I think every time I hear a young vet[eran] talk, I think that’s where even I personally have opened up. There was a fantastic ABC interview1 last year after the Yassmin incident between when a young vet[eran], whose name I can’t unfortunately remember, I think, he is even based in Canberra, or had been, and had been, and Clementine Ford, who is a feminist activist, and I thought when I started listening to it, I got that same thing, that fear, the dread, the like really physical reaction to something that was about to go horribly wrong and that was going to be really upsetting and actually they had this incredible dialogue where the veteran said that I was quite unhappy with what Yassmin has written. But that they were even kind of more unhappy with the way that their day had been co-opted for a political circus. And, you know, expressing a really heartfelt desire to have some, some special space and thought given to that concern, yeah, and I kinda thought that I hadn’t even really considered that, how upsetting it must be for people who genuinely want people around them to stop and think about what happens when this country commits its military personnel to overseas service. What does that mean for people? How does it affect them how they come back? (Sally, April 2018)

In this passage, Sally clearly identifies her pensiveness and the surge in feelings prompted by the interview, itself refracted through the digital world. These felt experiences were germane to her position on Anzac, to her body, and to her body’s memory. Sally’s reactions echo Casey’s (2000: 147) argument that memories are ‘intrinsic to the body, to its own ways of remembering: how we remember in and by and through the body’. Yet, the reverberation of feelings in this narrative also exemplifies the complexity of a politics of memory, evident in how Sally’s sense of dread was tempered somewhat by empathy for the lack of recognition of another group’s feelings, which she felt were also silenced when misgivings about Anzac were publicly expressed. In the case of Anzac, the community of feeling purportedly coincides with national feeling, so that those who question its narrative are described as ‘unAustralian’, thereby placing them outside the Anzac community and transforming them into objects of suspicion or even hatred. In Sally’s quote above, she referred to the ‘Yassmin incident’. This 2017 ‘incident’ involved a Facebook message by a young Sudanese-born Australian and diversity activist, Yassmin Abdel-Magied. She had initially posted ‘Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine.)’ but later retracted the text in brackets, reverting to the standard ‘Lest We Forget’.

122 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Widespread vitriolic responses ensued, similar to those levelled at Scott MacIntyre when, in 2015, his Tweet that Anzac amounted to the ‘cultification of an imperialist invasion of a foreign nation that Australia had no quarrel with’, resulted in his sacking by then employer SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), Australia’s multicultural and multilingual broadcaster. Like Scott, Yassmin was sacked by her employer, the ABC, though arguably—and we support these arguments—she was subject to far greater criticism because of her cultural heritage, her religion and her gender. Notwithstanding the gravity of the intersectional racism indicative in this example, our key motivation here is to demonstrate how stepping outside of, and moreover daring to question, the normative Anzac narrative via social media is commensurate with the outpouring of heated emotions. This emotional discharge is emblematic of how tightly held the Anzac narrative is (Drozdzewski & Waterton, 2016), and also references what McConville et al. (2020: 133) label ‘affective-discursive privilege’, which is built upon ‘feelings of entitlement, comfort and belonging’. It also provides substance to Kuntsman’s (2012: 6) contention that ‘online performative acts of naming an emotion can create communities of feelings … as well as objects and subjects of feeling: love, hate, mourning or nostalgia’. These communities of feeling also reverberate and refract through our digital world, leaving imprints as expressed in the two quotes below: I was particularly emotionally affected by the response to Yassmin Abdel-­ Magied’s post last year, I felt like that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me in terms of being able to handle the discourse around Anzac Day, which leaves absolutely no space for critical engagement, for analysis, or for criticism, even for people who were into the Lest We Forget, commemorate war thing—which I am not at all, I’m like pretty far at the end of a particular spectrum—but not even people who want to engage, respectfully or softly, but still leave room for some critical dialogue. (Sally, April 2018) Last year’s treatment of Yassmin, she got shut down because she dared to Tweet ‘Lest We Forget’ with a picture of refugees stuck in camp, isn’t that what our Liberal democratic state is about, that you can afford everybody the opportunity to law and equal treatment before the law, and these guys are just stuck in the middle of a camp festering, and she pointed that out with the word Lest We Forget, that we use usually to celebrate our ­democracy … Yassmin got shot down, and she effectively left for Britain. (Pam, April 2018)

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

123

Circling back to McConville et  al.’s concept of affective-discursive privilege, the above quotes highlight the limited parameters for both discursive and emotional engagements within the context of Anzac commemorations, leaving ‘no space’, to borrow from Sally, for subversion, which is inevitably ‘shut down’. This sense of affective-discursive privilege, as McConville et al. (2020: 133) argue and as we discussed in Chap. 4, affords space only for a certain ‘“we” to feel most comfortable … [to] celebrate if we wish, commemorate if we so desire, or for those in full-­time employment—simply “enjoy a day off”’.

Conclusions This chapter has explored how geographies of commemoration, and of Anzac, have sentient capacities that readily move across the material and digital spaces of their associated commemorative discourse. Feelings of and about Anzac can be emotive, palpable, intense and passionate, as much as they can be messy, tempestuous, inconvenient and disruptive. Often, feelings about Anzac will not align with official emotional regimes, either because we actively resist them, simply ignore them, or we hybridize them to suit our own positions and places. Travelling across the personal and collective scales, a focus on feelings deepens our understandings of how and why people engage with Anzac, for example through private reflection, but also by gathering at mass events, as well as how and why they connect with others’ experiences via digital platforms. An example of these travelling sensory responses is revealed in how the intimate micro-­ geographies of interactions with our smartphones connected participants to friends, larger groups of people, and to narratives that are themselves collective. An attentiveness to these micro-geographies reinforces the  argument commenced in Chap. 2, about the epistemological entanglement of affect, embodiment and discursive meaning that characterizes the complex geographies of commemoration. That Anzac Day incites such strong emotive responses, and that these responses are also intertwined with notions of the nation and of belonging to its collective, means that outright resistance or opposition to Anzac at dawn service ceremonies themselves is rare (although indifference, distraction or boredom are another matter). Instead, digital places and spaces have emerged as potential outlets of dissidence and resistance to the feelings normatively associated with Anzac.

124 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Indeed, online anonymity and distance from the spatial event affords more diversity in views and discussion about Anzac, which might include more resistant or dissenting emotions that do not conform to longstanding commemorative practices and narratives.

Note 1. A link to this interview is here: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/ hack/hack/8464744

References Ahmed, S. (2014). Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Berry, D., & Dieter, M. (2015). Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation And Design. Palgrave. Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. Sage. Blackburn, K. (2016). War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan UK. Casey, E. (2000). Remembering. Indiana University Press. Clark, A. (2017). The Place of Anzac in Australian Historical Consciousness. Australian Historical Studies, 48(1), 19–34. Döveling, K., Harju, A., & Somme, D. (2018). From Mediatized Emotion to Digital Affect Cultures: New Technologies and Global Flows of Emotion, Social Media + Society, Jan–Mar: 1–11. Drozdzewski, D., & Waterton, E. (2016, April 20). In Remembering Anzac Day, What Do We Forget?, The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ in-­remembering-­anzac-­day-­what-­do-­we-­forget-­57629 Edensor, T., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Geographies of Everyday Nationhood: Experiencing Multiculturalism in Melbourne. Nations and Nationalism, 24(3), 553–578. Frame, T. R. (2016). Remembering the Fallen or Reflecting on Fallen-Ness? In T. R. Frame (Ed.), Anzac Day Then and Now (pp. 232–256). NewSouth. Frith, J., & Kalin, J. (2016). Here, I Used to Be: Mobile Media and Practices of Place-Based Digital Memory. Space and Culture, 19(1), 43–55. Gordillo, G. (2014). Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press. Hoskins, A. (2011). Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn. Parallax, 17(4), 19–31. Hoskins, A. (2018). Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. Routledge. Hoskins, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2010). War and Media. Polity Press. Jones, O. (2011). Geography, Memory and Non-representational Geographies. Geography Compass, 5(12), 875–885.

5  DIGITAL FEELINGS 

125

Kuntsman, A. (2012). Introduction: Affective Fabrics of Digital Cultures. In A.  Karatzogianni & A.  Kuntsman (Eds.), Digital Cultures and the Politics of Emotion: Feelings, Affect and Technological Change (pp.  1–19). Palgrave Macmillan Limited. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell. Marshall, D. (2004). Making Sense of Remembrance. Social & Cultural Geography, 5(1), 37–54. McConville, A., Wetherell, M., McCreanor, T., Borell, B., & Moewaka Barnes, H. (2020). ‘Pissed Off and Confused’/’Grateful and (Re)moved’: Affect, Privilege and National Commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Political Psychology, 41(1), 129–144. Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and Mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324. Sear, T. (2016). Dawn servers: Anzac Day 2015 and Hyperconnective Commemoration. In B.  West (Ed.), War Memory and Commemoration (pp. 69–88). Routledge. Sumartojo, S. (2015). On Atmosphere and Darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service. Visual Communication, 14(2), 267–288. Sumartojo, S. (2016). Commemorative Atmospheres: Memorial Sites, Collective Events and the Experience of National Identity. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(4), 541–553. van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14. Walsh, M. (2008). ‘Lest We Forget’: The Tradition of Anzac Day Football. Sporting Traditions, 25(1), 1–15.

CHAPTER 6

Using Geography to Think-Through and Towards New Commemorative Frontiers

Abstract  The final chapter of this book provides a reflection on the multiple, fluid and emergent encounters and engagements with geographies of commemoration of Anzac, emphasizing their malleability to new contexts and contingency on personal histories and experiences. To reinforce this position, we locate our own relationships with Anzac in a set of personal vignettes that reveal not only how our approach pulls together concepts, empirics and methodologies, but also how we, as researchers, are surrounded by the same cultural tropes as our participants. The chapter concludes with a new agenda for geographies of commemoration in a digital world, one that reiterates our recognition of the importance of thinking-with the digital, and which can also be applied beyond the specific case of Anzac or Australia. Keywords  Commemoration • Anzac • Thinking-with • Positionality • Digital • Identity politics • Social media

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3_6

127

128 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Anzac Futures The final chapter of this book is not a conclusion. Given that Anzac Day is a calendar ritual, its commemorative geographies defy summation. Indeed, and as is evident throughout this book’s empirical discussion, encounters and engagements with geographies of commemoration of Anzac are multiple, material and digital, traditional, innovative, unorthodox, fluid, contingent and if nothing else, malleable to new contexts—political, social, and, as we have seen in 2020, to medical and biophysical contexts, too. Yet, the capacity of the Anzac narrative to adapt, and to occupy the spaces of these lively geographies, is far from an unfettered and independent process. As our participants’ stories showed, running alongside their personal encounters with Anzac geographies is a longstanding and deeply rooted politics of memory and identity. This politics maintains control and influence over how norms of Anzac are established and felt, how/when they are rejected or subverted, how such rejection/subversion is tolerated (if at all), and who has the privilege of being included (and by corollary excluded) from these norms. On Anzac Day, those normative articulations of belonging mandate the observation of gratitude and reverence to Anzac’s fallen soldiers; the Diggers, who at dawn on 25 April 1915 fought on the beach at Gallipoli, as a delegation of an Imperial power, in a battle plan with very limited possibility of success. Collectively on Anzac Day, Australians are called to remember the nation as having its genesis moment at this time, though many have convincingly argued against this invented tradition (see for example: Reynolds & Lake, 2010; McKenna, 2010). Yet, the changing character of Anzac’s commemorative geographies has meant that the incorporation of tropes—of the Digger, of mateship, courage and sacrifice—codify and encapsulate the linkages between Anzac’s past and the present-day interpretations of Anzac, in and to an imagined Australian identity. Drawing past and present together, so the narrative goes, at official services and more broadly in everyday spaces, our political leaders ask us to be thankful for freedoms enabled by the courage and sacrifice of those Anzac Diggers, and, that we should aspire to emulate their now archetypal Australian characteristics. Before we continue, however, we acknowledge and are cognisant that in writing a book-length case study of Anzac Day’s commemorative geographies, we have (re)produce(d) some of the conventional politics of memory and identity. While we have specified our situated knowledges,

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

129

including previous scholarship, we are mindful of how this politics of memory of Anzac accrues around its social and cultural frames and draws in positioned readings of the Anzac narrative in Australia. However, our concurrent work to unsettle the normativity and conventionality of how Anzac presents as a part of people’s lives has demonstrated differential modes of engagement and attunement to Anzac, including its possible exclusion and/or disregard, too. In Chaps. 3, 4 and 5, we have pursued a focus on how Anzac is present for people (or not) in many different ways, as well as asking how it has come to mean different things amongst our research participants’ encounters with it, materially, digitally and both. Thus, while certain politics of memory and identity indubitably underscore (some of) the motivation for these encounters, we have hoped that the nucleus of these ‘how’ discussions have remained clear and apparent to our readers. In Chap. 1, we flagged that it was not our intention to provide a history or politics of Anzac, though certainly this politics is interwoven in our participant’s wider narratives, with this entanglement often expressed as felt and as embodied. Our choice of methodology also meant that we could read, sense and interpret such feelings across a variety of material and digital media, thus enabling visual, sensory, haptic and aural expressions to combine in more-than-verbal capacities. This overlaying and intertwining of the material and the digital, and, the oral with the aural and haptic, were critical and crucial epistemological research approaches. It enabled an attentiveness to how ‘things’ encountered in and with the commemoration of Anzac, refracted through established frames of reference, but also through our participants’ bodies, and our own as researchers. In this regard, McDuie-Ra et  al. (2020: 1), drawing on Wetherell (2012), have argued that, as soon as affect is captured and articulated, it is shaped by personal experience; as soon as we draw upon cultural-linguistic repertoires to identify a feeling as emotion, emotions then become embedded within power relations. We can read the discursive and symbolic elements of ‘affect and ‘emotions’, but our interpretations will always be shaped by our own affective biographies and cultural linguistic memberships.

In terms of Anzac, those cultural linguistic memberships relate to the Australian nation, to a sense of belonging to it, or not, and to the power relations that render some (more) capable of asserting what that

130 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

belonging looks like and how it should feel. It is at this intersection—of emotion, power, identity, memory and its embodiment—that we locate the greatest importance in advancing new geographies of commemoration. Echoing our contention in Chap. 2, intersecting connectivities located in bodies, memorial spaces, commemorative events and across digital fora empower vibrant, nuanced accounts of memory encounter. Moreover, and as we have argued throughout, the affordances of a range of digital technologies and platforms—from smartphones to video cameras to social media—frame and circulate those memory encounters in ways that both strengthen them and add to their complexity. Throughout Chaps. 3, 4 and 5, these memory encounters intersected materially and digitally, embodied in different combinations related to varied interactions with Anzac tropes, and to their absences and presences among Australia’s diverse citizenry and its steadfast and evolving Anzac narratives. In our empirical examples, connective expressions of this memory-­work refracted in different sentient capacities through our digital world. What we have highlighted through this focus on the associative faculties of this type of memory-work is the saliency of an approach that ‘thinks-with’ memory in the digital world. This approach has allowed us to explore how our participants come to ‘know’ about the extensive commemorative geographies of Anzac, and, moreover, how we have come to know and embody these geographies across their wider spatialities, sensorial capacities and discursive scripts. In laying the groundwork for our epistemology of memory in Chap. 2, we specified that ‘attention to the role of bodies in memory research spotlights the inter-connectivity of memory-work as well as the inextricability of us, as authors, from the (re)telling of this memory-work’. We regard affective and sensory feelings as not only valuable, but as constitutive of meaning and understanding, which concomitantly means taking our own feelings and encounters seriously as a way into understanding others’ experiences through reciprocal processes of empathy. The epistemology of memory we advocate in this book has brought together a process that ‘thinks-with’ a range of feelings, subjectivities and concepts. We contend that this ‘thinking-with’ approach advances memory-work scholarship precisely because it facilitates recognition of the contingent, multifaceted and unfinished locations and processes of commemoration and collective memory. There is no single experience of Anzac Day; as such, we have not attempted to reach or define one. Rather, there are multiple, fluid and

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

131

emergent encounters—which also, by coincidence, locate our ongoing intrigue in the vibrancy of geography’s intersections with memory-work. Research, including writing, editing and reflecting with co-authors, does not occur in a vacuum. There are no automatic or assured entry points in/ to knowledge about memory, identity and its relationships across different places. Rather, the ‘affectual intensities constituting research encounters shape scholars’ emotional experiences of being in their respective field as well as conducting and/or reading research’ (Militz et al., 2020: 431). In reflecting on this process of conducting and re-telling we pursue a somewhat unorthodox trajectory for a final chapter, at least in its opening section. It follows that as researchers, our own experiential worlds have been, and will continue to be constitutive of, the connective capacities of our epistemology. To develop this contention, and contribute our own experiences to the many accounts in the previous chapters, in this section we present three vignettes, one from each author. Including our own perspectives in this final chapter shows not only how our approach pulls together concepts, empirics and methodologies, but that the inquiry itself is founded on ourselves as researchers and as people who are surrounded by many of the same cultural tropes as our research participants. Foregrounding this positionality is a crucial part of the epistemology we advance. The writing and inclusion of the vignettes, then, encompassed a critical reflexive exercise, an articulation of both our commitment to an embodied and affective research practice and a recognition of our own understandings of Anzac and how these are a part of how we have engaged with the material in this book, with each other, and with our research participants. Our own experiences of Anzac take in spectacular events and everyday activities, all of which now constantly incorporate digital technologies, and attending to this diversity in our own lives helps us ask our research participants about theirs. That is, together and individually, we can use our own versions of Anzac as a springboard to reach others’. In close cognisance with the operation of a politics of memory in commemorative practice, we recognize that we have actively chosen how this story is told, what participant accounts, photos and material to incorporate and the disciplinary position of this work. The vignettes are also an acknowledgement of the power we embody as women academics in privileged positions in the global North to choose how and what we research and write, as ‘[w]riting with and about feeling/s and evoking resonance result in a deeper analysis of power’ (Militz et al., 2020: 433). Our own cultural-linguistic repertoires filter this work, its feminist underpinnings

132 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

determine that ‘we cannot claim an “authentic experience” of a scene that is shared with others’ (McDuie-Ra et al., 2020: 1). Thus, instead of disavowing that the process of this research has had little effect on its outcome, in these vignettes we return to our situated knowledges of Anzac, exercise retrospective reflexivity (Drozdzewski, 2015) and use the ‘vignettes to write affectually and in a way that evokes and then destabilises resonance’ (Militz et al., 2020: 430).

Three Vignettes Danielle The process of ‘doing’ this memory research prompted considerable reflection, for me, on Anzac Days past and present. That I filter, unabatedly and without reticence, my analyses of the research materials for this project through my own situated experiences of, and knowledge about, Anzac has ensconced the efficacy of a ‘thinking-with’ approach to memory research. It thus also necessitates acknowledgment of those filters here, in vignette form; not just to retread the past or to perhaps justify certain analytical approaches, but rather to provide more nuanced foundations for how we have come to understand the contribution of our scholarship as well as identify pathways forward. My earliest memories of Anzac Day associate with services at school, not least because the boys’ school next door to my (girls’) school often held a combined service, and, my trumpet-playing father who was (and remains) that boys’ school’s music teacher, would play the Last Post. As the final reveille of the Last Post built, I would encounter a visceral sensation. A pit would form in the back of my throat as I thought of those same notes relaying across landscapes of desperation, trauma and carnage. That those last notes seemingly just hang, that they float across the spaces that they now render silent, has to my body, always been a haunting experience. Through those high school years, Anzac Day was a day where I would grow accustomed to seeing my father’s round face balloon red and rounder while playing the Last Post; yet, despite this seeming familial ‘integration’ to one of Anzac Day’s staple tropes, our long Polish family last name (unpronounceable to the majority in both our schools and when my father was introduced ahead of the rendition), and our lack of tangible and familial ties to Australia pre the arrival of my grandparents in the 1950s, always signalled a point of disconnection. As irony had it, however, my family

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

133

along with many Australian’s whose forebears arrived as part of the post-­ WWII ‘populate or perish’ migration drive, also had lived experience and memories of war. But not the same war, not that war. The war commemorated on Anzac Day represented something very different from the diversity aligned with that post-WWII cohort, Anzac’s war proxied for Australianness. Perhaps it was the budding geographer in me that tapped into identifying this Anzac as Australian proxy; perhaps it was a recognition from a very young age that difference (colour, ethnic origin, language, surname) marked some Australians as ‘Other’, in different ways. But certainly, those early rumblings of difference manifest in the paucity of connections I felt to this important national day—at least as we were instructed to consider it at school. As I became more interested in identity and memory politics at university, I felt better placed to ‘place’ my sense of discomposure about Anzac. While as we pointed out in Chap. 4, the narrative of ‘who’ is included in the Anzac Day has widened in the last decades to encompass a broader range of Australian, but also foreign-born, veterans, and those once considered enemies, my contention is that this inclusivity has never really been about accepting difference into the Anzac narrative. Rather, it has been about tolerating the difference only to broaden the mandate of the normative message—that the Australian nation’s spirit, its courage and it long-held trope of mateship were born at Gallipoli. Connection with that normative narrative connects you as an Australian. So many Australian-born Australians share and inherit the wartime lived experiences of their foreign-born ancestors. Even more so considering that the direction of Australia’s immigration policy through the last quarter of the twentieth century focused on humanitarian responses to conflicts, for example to Lebanon, Cyprus, Vietnam, and so on. What astounds me most about this disconnect is not that this cohort’s experiences are not given equal credence as those of Australian-born Australians who had family active and/or who perished on the Western Front during WWI, but that in blind sighting this diversity of lived experience of war and its memories, we overlook how this considerably large cohort of Australians1 adapts to, resists, encompasses or struggles with accepting a shared history that they do not actually share genealogically. Collectively, we fail to ‘locate’ their family histories and memories—as loudly or at all— among the important voices that are chosen to characterize the nation. Rather, in watching that characterization play out on Anzac Day, I imagine that their awareness of difference becomes palpable, as does mine.

134 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Notwithstanding this admission of my struggle to ‘place’ myself within the collective Anzac narrative, Anzac Day still moves me. It still generates haptic responses; it still heightens my awareness of how these staged spectacles draw me, and others in. On Anzac Day, 2016, standing in the cold grey drizzle at Plac Marszałka Józefa Piłsudskiego, in Warsaw, I recognized that pit in my throat again as the last piercing notes of the Last Post rang out. Yet, I thought not of Australians at Gallipoli then, but of all the fallen who never returned home and rest now in the battle scared urban landscape of Warsaw. That is, I connected to the collective narrative, but differently: ‘The physiological connects with the affective … [and] engender[ed] sensations registered by the body’ (McDuie-Ra et al., 2020: 8). That melodic connection has encouraged me to think more broadly about how we can connect differently. Difference here signals both connections forged through culturally diverse heritages, but also through non-visual and non-somatosensory cues. Unquestionably, it has firmed my stance that geographies of commemoration need to encompass and respond to the changing demographics of their audiences in inclusive and meaningful ways. One step in enabling this response is to recognize that: [t]he discourse of memory is, of course, more easily grasped by outsiders than is bodily memory, and this discourse has hitherto been the focus of scholarly attention to community memory and traditionalising practices. (Noyes & Abrahams, 1999: 84)

If we endeavour to push past the normative discourse of Anzac’s ‘traditionalising practices’, then we need to tolerate but also  elasticize to embrace diversity including a diverse repertoire of encounters. We need to recognize that the body holds memory, and that the bodies at Anzac Day services cannot inherit another’s memory, but they can, and do still feel that commemoration evocatively and deeply. While for some, me included, opening myself to these feelings means at least partially obfuscating the concomitant awareness of how a politics of memory is deeply embedded in generating these collective national atmospheres. But in returning to my fieldnotes from Anzac Day 2018, I glimpsed at how that was at least somewhat possible. I finish with snippets of those fieldnotes and the resonate squawk of a sulphur-crested cockatoo in the dawn sky.

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

135

Trees and leaf litter of the gum trees [scatter the ground] among [and between] the different war memorials  [up Anzac Parade]. A pair of kangaroos hop across the road, probably wondering what all these people are here for. Possibly the most Australian sight possible. Photo the gums flanking the main war memorial. The blue lighting illuminated them against a still starry sky. I can spy the faintly white figures of crested cockatoos in the gums, they are squawking softly but distinctively. The cockatoos fly and squawk as the drums roll … There is silence as we wait in the dark. The kids behind talk to their parents—they try and shush them … the service has started. As dawn beckons the cockatoos grow louder. They aren’t staged but perhaps the most affective background noise.

Emma I first learnt about Anzac Day when I migrated to Australia in the 1990s. Born in Yorkshire, I arrived in Brisbane shortly after my twelfth birthday, inbound from Hong Kong where I had been living since I was three. I had never heard of Gallipoli at the time. In truth, I put little effort into trying to understand ‘the Anzacs’ in those first few years. Who has time for such things when they are concentrating on learning new rules and new roles, all the while pushing up against that unbearable threat of not quite ‘fitting in’? But I immediately recognized the sheer weight of remembrance; it was already etched into my skin. Remembrance of war is an intrinsic part of Yorkshire and British culture, and narratives of both had secreted themselves into Hong Kong while it was still a dependent territory of the United Kingdom. Most prominent for me were the practices of remembrance that have grown up around the rather innocently named Wars of the Roses, a series of English civil wars that tore the country apart between 1455 and 1487. Understood to be one of England’s bloodier convulsions, the Roses in question, the white and the red, remain potent symbols of the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire. I have remained aware of that ‘Roses rivalry’, watching it play out, year after year, on football and cricket fields. Of course, the Wars of the Roses are just one example amongst many in Britain’s history of warfare, where lived experiences and memories of war frequently hook into longer-serving representations of conflict. There are, somewhat unsurprisingly, physical intrusions of war everywhere there. The British landscape is punctured with such legacies, with the fractured remains of castle keeps, cannons, artillery defences, sea forts, bombing

136 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

decoys and anti-invasion defences scattered across the country. Memories of war have also been sutured into villages, towns and cities in the form of war memorials that sidle across that assumed divide between ‘then’ and ‘now’ and merge into the lives of those who still live there. To borrow from Ross Wilson (2012: 1), such wars, particularly the First and Second World Wars, are still lived with, ‘materially and psychologically’, carving out a kind of fidelity that is understood with absolute precision. My mother’s mother embodied this disposition, selling poppies to her neighbours in a small Yorkshire village until she became too frail to manage. Like Danielle and Shanti, I have learnt to feel commemoration acutely, but never really in connection to Anzac. That is because I share the same reservations about the conservative pulse that continues to modulate its meaning. As a consequence, I often struggle to disentangle my encounters with more localized acts of memory from the performances of militarism and ‘state-ness’ that unfold in so many ways in the Australian context, materially and virtually. Given the overriding preoccupation with an Anglo-Celtic, Australian-born and masculine notion of Anzac, it is perhaps unremarkable that I have felt excluded from much that is on offer, despite having once served in the military as part of the Australian Army Reserve. But what troubles me most about Anzac, along with broader official war commemorations in Australia, is that not all deaths are counted. There is a selectivity about whose lives, and indeed whose experiences, are remembered. For me, there can be no clearer illustration of the ways in which commemorations of war are tied to structures of power than the continued refusal to include the Frontier Wars within the remit of the Australian War Memorial. Yet despite these misgivings I still feel something of an affinity for this sort of memory work, and therefore acknowledge that official iterations do not fill all of the space that is available for knowing, feeling and connecting with the act of commemoration. My own attempts to reflect on the research underpinning this book have prompted me to turn to three spheres of influence, all of which are significant in my everyday life. For starters, my sister has always been glued more tightly to the world of wars than me. One of her favourite films growing up, released a decade before we arrived in Australia but discovered only after, is the Peter Weir directed Gallipoli (1981), which she watched alongside Memphis Bell (1990) and For the Boys (1991). Earlier this year, almost precisely to the day that we started drafting Chap. 4, she emailed me a scanned copy of a letter my Gran (my father’s mother) wrote to her brother, Len, while he was serving

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

137

in the Second World War. He was part of the Cheshire Regiment (D Company) and found himself in Germany at that time, en route to assist the 11th Armoured Division with the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp—it was just months before the war ended. Len never received Gran’s letter. He died shortly after it was posted, killed at the age of 18 and on the same day a local truce was agreed with the German forces. Gran’s letter was returned to her a few weeks later with a big purple message stamped on the front: ‘It is regretted that this item could not be delivered because the addressee is reported deceased’. In writing these reflections, I wanted to be sure I had Len’s details exactly right (who could correct them if I got them wrong?), so I searched for him in the Commonwealth War Graves records, which are available online. To help, my sister emailed through some official photographs—a product of her meticulous family history research—one of which is still held in the Imperial War Museum’s War Office Second World War Official Collection (see Fig. 6.1). Our new epistemology of memory was clearly at work, tugging into view the strong family influences that are central to so many experiences of commemoration and remembrance, and which figure here alongside the possibilities for connection opened up by the digital world. I have yet to close the browser tab on Private Leonard Cyril Rookes. Perhaps I’d have felt differently if I hadn’t read Gran’s letter and seen the weight of the world stamped on that envelope. My second sphere of influence is ‘being in place’. In 2009 I visited Gallipoli. As soon as I arrived my attention was grabbed by the beauty of a beach waiting to be breached. The faint tugging of my own family history and the whisper of suffering hovered above, as if the world had literally gone grey at its edges. Gallipoli’s landscapes are haunted by absence and by the dead who gather there, waiting to be encountered. And as they wait, they build into something, becoming ‘nodes’, to borrow from Gastón R. Gordillo; that haunting, as we argued earlier in the volume, has the capacity to turn an absence into ‘a pressure on the body … a physical presence that is felt and thereby affects’ (Gordillo, 2014: 31), compelling us to ‘imagine the situation of others’ (Byrne, 2013: 606). On my visit, the turquoise waters of the Aegean coast lapped uselessly onto the sandy shore of what is now known as Anzac Cove, a sliver of beach that glistens in its stillness, unmoved, as if that failed amphibious landing never happened. The feelings I had were undoubtedly influenced by a range of social, cultural and institutional processes of meaning-making, but they were, at the same time, also influenced by momentary ‘interruptions’ or

138 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 6.1  Men of the 1st Cheshire Regiment crossing the Rhine in Buffaloes at Wesel, 24 March 1945 (Source: Imperial War Museum (BU 2336))

transformations that brought a particular history into relation with my own affective and subjective feelings (Wetherell et  al., 2020). Such encounters with heritage are infinitely varied, but this particular visit prompted me to think carefully about the idea of ‘affect’ and its interweaving with memory. My most memorable Anzac Day has nothing to do with war or Gallipoli, however. 25 April 2015 stands out for all the wrong reasons. Earlier that day my partner and I left the village of Langtang, a small hamlet located in a narrow Himalayan valley in Nepal. We were heading back to Kathmandu

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

139

on foot when a major earthquake struck, registering a moment magnitude of 7.8. The initial tremors lasted a full 40 seconds. That’s a long time, and plenty enough to trigger five major landslides and avalanches across the valley, each composed of ice, rock and mud. A hanging glacier, dislodged by the tremors, fell directly onto the village of Langtang, smothering everything with a greyish state of indistinction: fields, bridges, homes, people and livelihoods. Home to approximately 600 people before the earthquake, the landslides and avalanches killed more than half that number, including residents, tourists and those from other parts of Nepal working in the area as porters and guides. Some remain missing today. In the space of 40 seconds, an extraordinary mountain range that had started to form some 50 million years ago folded inwards and smashed an entire village off the map. We barely escaped with our lives; boulders rained down on us as we ran through the valley, gasping, stunned and bloody, the sudden density of that moment shutting down our efforts to fully understand what had happened. Days later, as we waited in the British Embassy in Kathmandu for flights to resume, I realized the date and twigged that it had all happened on Anzac Day. I had forgotten, in that moment, that the date existed, and it has never been the same again. Shanti Unlike Danielle and Emma, 25 April 2018 does not stand out in my memory. I probably casually turned on the television and watched part of a ceremony. This likely included the Dawn Service at Villers-Bretonneux in France, a site I had visited a few years before, that was broadcast in Melbourne in the afternoon. I certainly did not get up at dawn or attend a formal Anzac Day event. I may have reflected briefly on the meaning of this day for Australian national identity, but I more likely slept in and then enjoyed a day off with my family. Despite the national event at the heart of this book, like many of our research participants, Anzac Day is not a special occasion for me personally. Although I was born in Australia, I did not grow up here, leaving for the United States when I was only four years old. Neither of my parents are Australian, so I do not share the family relationships that so often motivate Anzac remembrance. In terms of my understandings of my own ‘Australianness’, Anzac is less important than the tropes of the beach on a sunny day, or the contemporary multiculturalism that runs through my own ‘everyday nationhood’ (see Edensor & Sumartojo, 2018)—and this

140 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

sense of identity has been shaped by raising my own family in Australia, rather than through the experiences of previous generations. Indeed, the conservative politics that often support increased funding for Anzac, and the focus on an overwhelmingly masculine and Anglo-Celtic version of national identity, is deeply jarring to my own politics, gender and racial identity. However, I have been researching memorials and commemoration in general and Anzac in particular for over a decade, in part because I am fascinated with how national narratives such as Anzac retain their cultural grip, and why people might continue to feel them so strongly. The attempt to understand this grip has seen me attend Dawn Services in other years, and visit Anzac sites in Australia and France. Accordingly, the rhythms and timing of the speeches, music and moments of silence are familiar, and even if I have not found them personally evocative, these experiences have helped me understand the role of sensory and affective feelings in making them meaningful. That is, they have helped me to understand the ‘intensities that emerge from a sensing, perceiving body in material and immaterial environments, [that] are therefore central to how our surroundings feel as we encounter and move through them’ (Sumartojo et al., 2016: 35). This is not to say that I have not been moved by aspects of Anzac events, such as diary accounts read out in the pre-dawn darkness, the haunting tones of the digeridoo, bagpipes or bugle, or the inexorable, optimistic colour changes as the sun rises. For the most part, however, my understanding of Anzac has been moulded by what happens outside the official events. Asking where and what else it is, has meant attending to what happens before, after and around the official events that are folded into how it is experienced and understood by people. My own attendance in previous years in Melbourne and Canberra has meant getting up very early, cycling or taking the tram to a major urban memorial, gathering with thousands of others, and participating bodily in standing, singing and pausing in the quiet stillnesses as part of a crowd. This has helped me understand how others account for their participation in the same events. However, my main interest has evolved into how it is part of people’s lives in other, less spectacular ways, and how the affective, material and spatial settings of these lifeworlds incorporate Anzac without it being the sole focus. This approach has sought to decentre Anzac even while researching it. In this sense, my own thoughts, feelings and experiences about Anzac use my own body and imagination as a way to approach an understanding of others’ accounts. Gathering at a Dawn Service, visiting national

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

141

memorials, and even getting up late and casually turning on the television are all experiences of Anzac, and have all helped me empathize with others’ experiences as a researcher. This is because empathy is not ‘a capacity of the researcher as beholder of the experience of others, but as a form of imagination only ever emergent from specific and intentional encounters’ (Pink et al., 2017: 374). That is, empathy emerges from encounters with people in a ‘mutual, interpersonal process’ whereas as researcher, I seek to understand the perspective of research participants, by attending to their goals and intentions as much as what they tell me they have done (Geiser, 2008). To understand others’ experiences of Anzac Day, I must try to understand their motivations for and feelings about participating (or not). Even if this differs from my own, having a corresponding experience of the same national event allows me to engage with theirs.

Anzac@100 Refracted through Anzac 2020 While drafting this book, Anzac Day 2020 shed new light on our analyses of the multifarity of geographies of commemoration. As we conclude this book in October 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic continues to cast long and lasting shadows across the world, influencing communities’ capacities for social interaction and indeed mandating nation-specific social isolation regulations. In Australia, the social distancing mandate during this period was very strict, with most gatherings banned and many people restricted to their homes. For the first time since 1919, no public Anzac Day services were held and only a handful of dignitaries attended the Dawn Services in Australia’s capital cities. An #AnzacAtHome2 social media campaign, led by the AWM, encouraged Australians to organize their own Dawn Services, in their driveways, as a way to come together in spirit rather than in person. Using candlelight and music to signal their presence to their neighbours, these experiences were an attempt to create a sense of reflecting and commemorating together. Many people took up this challenge, with #LestWeForget, #LightUpTheDawn, #Anzac2020, #AnzacAtHome and #StandAtDawn all being popular Twitter hashtags trending across the day on 25 April 2020 (see Fig. 6.2). Social media was thus at the heart of Anzac experiences in 2020. With large gatherings of people prohibited, individuals, families and neighbours organized, recorded and reflected on Anzac Day online. The ‘sharing’ and the ‘collective’ in this memory-work shifted space. While this digital space of commemoration was indeed not new—as we have discussed in Chap.

142 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

Fig. 6.2  Anonymized Tweet from Anzac Day 2020. (Source: Shanti Sumartojo)

3—its unavoidable delegation precipitated renewed focus on the elasticity of Anzac’s commemorative geographies (Caso, 2020). Social media posts included a host of familiar representations and tropes—candles for remembrance, local versions of the Last Post played at the end of driveways or on balconies, children wearing medals, uniforms and bowed heads during a commemorative silence. However, the distinctive points of divergence for Anzac 2020’s digital foray have been archived as ‘practices of place-based digital memory’, as Frith and Kalin (2016: 44) have argued. Not only did such practices ‘help form the ground on which users walk—figuratively and often literally—through their pasts to construct their ongoing present sense of identity’, but they also have now recorded those changes to the

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

143

normative place-based commemorative geographies of Anzac (Frith & Kalin, 2016: 44). The connective capacities of commemoration that emerged on Anzac Day 2020 yoked through individual practices at home, and were  forwarded outward towards the nation. This interweaving of private/public commemorative practices shared very distinctively in an imagined national community, which we envisage Anderson would have archetyped back in 1991, had such digital remembrance been possible then. It is important, however, to temper our enthusiasm for describing this shared collective as an innovative digital event. Indeed, integral to the commemorative practices we saw enacted and shared on social media in 2020 were classic material (re)productions of Anzac, which interlaced the haptics of candles flickering in the still dawn darkness, piercing notes of the bugle, and the glistening of war medals heavy with their affective traces to generational past and present. These material representations and their sensory affects travelled from the personal to the collective via the click of the ‘share’ button on the smartphone in the palm of our hands; and with that ‘click’ also travelled the promise of them being shared and strengthened by other ‘affective publics’ (Papacharissi, 2016). That Anzac 2020 brought this digital sharing to the forefront of our considerations of commemorative in the digital world exemplified Rasmussen’s (2002: 125) contention that, ‘to remember something is not just to repeat it, but to reconstruct, even sometimes to create, to express oneself, and other parties to life and history as well’.

A New Agenda for Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World With this new iteration of Anzac commemoration in mind, we use the remainder of this chapter to strengthen our new agenda for geographies of commemoration in a digital world, reiterating a position that recognizes the importance of thinking-with the digital, and one that can be applied beyond the specific case of Anzac or Australia. Our efforts in this regard have been marshalled into three clear lines of thought. First, as we discussed in detail in Chap. 2, we advocate an approach akin to ‘thinking-with’. This approach is a dynamic and multi-scalar process that does not seek to privilege ways of knowing but rather treats the spectrum of generative knowledge possibilities as analytically revealing. In this

144 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

book, this approach has allowed us to account for bodily and sensory feelings, affect, memory and imagination contemporaneously with discursive knowledge of cultural tropes and/or symbolic vocabularies. ‘Thinking-­ with’ does not restrict memory work or commemoration to a single empirical location, but rather relays it to multiple temporalities and relationalities. In ‘thinking-with’ memory-work across its multiplicative connective capacities, we open (more) space to attune to the ‘minor’ and locate our research participants at the centre of their own accounts. Importantly, thinking-with accommodates emergent experiential encounters as embodied memory knowledges. Second, we have attended to connectivity and the braiding together of the complex relationships of memory, place and identity. In doing so we have revealed the how of this connectivity, both in terms of how it was present in our own lives, as well as those of our research participants. Spotlighting connectivity has operationalized our methodology as in dialogue with our epistemology, because it foregrounds the (re)production, maintenance and performance of multiple ways of knowing, discursively through the body, across the material and digital worlds. These points of connectivity have occurred as frequently in banal everyday activities such as washing up, barbequing, and watching television with the family, as they have in spectacular state-sponsored commemorative events or national ceremonies. In attending to the quotidian alongside the spectacular, our participant-led digital visual approach has unveiled new insights about how commemoration is woven into the everyday fabric of life. With this contribution, we move beyond many previous approaches that have focused solely on commemoration as somehow isolated or decontextualized and/or overly unique. We posit that geographies of commemoration in the digital world will always be a part of many other things that people might be doing, thinking, or feeling, in combination with their thinking and feeling towards that commemoration. Finally, in this book we have foregrounded digital technologies and platforms as things that we must now ‘think-with’ to apprehend the complexity of commemoration and its entanglement in, and connection to, other aspects of our lives. For example, we maintain that thinking-with the digital flattens previous hierarchies of state-sponsored commemoration; where commemorative sites and events used to be regarded as distinct and separate from other aspects of our lives, we have shown how they are now enfolded through everyday life, on our smartphones and therefore in our pockets alongside many other aspects of our lives, material or otherwise.

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

145

More than two decades ago, Habermas (1996: 1) reasoned that ‘collectivities may have a historical fate, but entangled with it are many different people and generations, various social groups and subcultures, with distinct life patterns, diverging traditions, and forms of life’. Indeed, we think that the potentialities that arise from the accessibility and shareability of contemporary technologies propel commemorative material forward and towards greater  connectivity more readily now than ever before (see Becky’s account in Chap. 4). Commemorative Continuities Commemoration has always had an intimate side, due in large part to familial connections and/or associated feelings of grief, loss or pride. With the affordances of the digital world, these encounters are now faster and more readily circulated, adding weight to the existing scholarship on commemoration via their ability to demonstrate the constitution and sharing of research materials across different fora. One of the striking aspects of Anzac commemoration—and a quality that extends to other national contexts—is the multiple scales through which it is articulated. As we have discussed, it occurs in the feelings and thoughts of individuals, it stretches between different family members, it is part of how friendships are constituted, and it plays a role in the continued reproduction of Australian national identity. Moreover, it now also has traceable and place-based digital archives. Yet, specific tropes of remembrance, we suggest, are perhaps less settled in this context of hyper digitality. Discourse on Anzac, and indeed on a vast spectrum of commemorative opportunities, now evolves faster and includes more and more voices. Whilst we acknowledge the painful propensity for such voices to also be bullied, silenced and/or sanctioned in new ways (as we discussed in Chap. 5), digital commemorative spaces nonetheless characterize alternate space for encountering commemoration. This book has continued a collaborative pathway of, and about, commemorative geographies commenced by its authors nearly a decade ago. We have been incredibly fortunate to learn from each other, develop our scholarship in the field, and listen to and feel the knowledge of our varied research participants. That we have tried to synthesize these knowledges into something that might be taken up by other scholars and practitioners interested in memory-work is how we have ‘thought-with’ commemorative continuity. We hope that our epistemology of memory and its

146 

D. DROZDZEWSKI ET AL.

working through this book proffers something useful, something different, and something to give back to a community of scholars, especially to those feminist scholars pushing the boundaries of the still deeply entrenched Cartesian binary of discursive narrative normativity. We remain cognisant that through learning our memory-work, our participants, in both this specific research and in far-reaching fields, have shared their deeply embodied, often personal, intimate and sometimes traumatic memories with us. We are indebted to have learnt from and listened to these embodied narratives. In closing Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World— Anzac@100, we have reinforced and extended scholarship on how digital technologies and platforms imbricate with how we relate to each other as individuals and co-nationals, as well as providing a situated empirical anchor for our understandings of national identity. We have shown how Anzac, like commemorative geographical narratives the world over, is unfinished and incompletable, despite attempts to treat it as inviolable and even sacred, fixed and unchanging. This paradoxical sense of perdurance and vulnerability might help to explain why so much effort around the world is poured into maintaining commemorative tropes, symbols and rituals and reinforcing absences and exclusions—but also why it continues to animate our relationships, and hold sway over our imaginations and feelings.

Notes 1. The 29 percent who were born overseas, or the 1 in 2 Australians whose parents or grandparents are overseas born. 2. See https://www.awm.gov.au/anzacathome

References Byrne, D. (2013). Love and Loss in the 1960s. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19(6), 596–609. Caso, F. (2020, April 24). 105 Years On, a Digital Commemoration Marks a Very Different Anzac Day, the Interpreter for the Lowy Institute. Retrieved July 31, from https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-­interpreter/105-­years-­digital-­ commemoration-­marks-­very-­different-­anzac-­day Drozdzewski, D. (2015). Retrospective Reflexivity: The Residual and Subliminal Repercussions of Researching War. Emotion, Space & Society, 17, 30–36.

6  USING GEOGRAPHY TO THINK-THROUGH AND TOWARDS NEW… 

147

Edensor, T., & Sumartojo, S. (2018). Geographies of Everyday Nationhood: Experiencing Multiculturalism in Melbourne. Nations and Nationalism, 24(3), 553–578. Frith, J., & Kalin, J. (2016). Here, I Used to Be: Mobile Media and Practices of Place-Based Digital Memory. Space and Culture, 19(1), 43–55. Geiser, T. (2008). Embodiment, Emotion and Empathy. A Phenomenological Approach to Apprenticeship Learning. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 299–318. Gordillo, G. (2014). Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press. Habermas, J. (1996). On How Postwar Germany Has Faced Its Recent Past. Common Knowledge, 5(2), 1–13. McDuie-Ra, D., Ho, E. L.-E., Jakimow, T., & Somaiah, B. C. (2020). Collaborative Ethnographies: Reading Space to Build an Affective Inventory. Emotion, Space and Society, 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100683 McKenna, M. (2010). Anzac Day: How Did It Become Australia’s National Day? In H. Reynolds, M. Lake, M. McKenna, & J. Damousi (Eds.), What’s Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (pp. 110–134). University of New South Wales Press. Militz, E., Faria, C., & Schurr, C. (2020). Affectual Intensities: Writing with Resonance as Feminist Methodology. Area, 52(2), 429–436. Noyes, D., & Abrahams, R.  D. (1999). From Calendar Custom to National Memory: European Commonplaces. In D. Ben-Amos & L. Weissberg (Eds.), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (pp.  77–98). Wayne University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and Mediality. Information, Communication & Society, 19(3), 307–324. Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D., & Heyes LaBond, C. (2017). Empathetic Technologies: Digital Materiality and Video Ethnography. Visual Studies, 32(4), 371–381. Rasmussen, S. (2002). The Uses of Memory. Culture and Psychology, 8(1), 113–129. Reynolds, H., & Lake, M. (2010). What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. University of New South Wales Press. Sumartojo, S., Pink, S., Lupton, D., & LaBond, C.  H. (2016). The Affective Intensities of Datafied Space. Emotion, Space and Society, 21, 33–40. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and Emotion. A New Social Science Understanding. SAGE Publications: London Wetherell, M., McConville, A., & McCreanor, T. (2020). Defrosting the Freezer and Other Acts of Quiet Resistance: Affective Practice Theory, Everyday Activism and Affective Dilemmas. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17(1), 13–35. Wilson, R. (2012). Landscapes of the Western Front: Materiality during the Great War. Routledge.

Index1

A Absence/presence, 14, 18, 30, 36, 37, 39, 69, 82–99, 106, 111, 130, 138, 141, 146 Affect cultures, 108, 120 Affective-discursive privilege, 122, 123 Affective intensities, 30, 46, 91, 108, 119 AFL ANZAC Day match, 112, 113 ANZAC Day AFL match, 112, 113 continued popular support, 7 family connections, 18, 82, 85–92, 97, 98 importance of, 8, 18, 64, 71, 72, 76, 98, 109, 111, 113, 115, 130, 143 multiculturalism and, 65, 76, 82, 85, 91–99, 120, 139 national identity, and, 9, 15, 27, 66, 70, 85, 92, 93, 96, 120, 139, 140 presencing, and, 76, 87, 97 protests against, 18, 83, 84, 99, 107

reflective vignettes, 115 service, and, 7, 9, 17, 19n3, 39, 40, 61, 62, 67, 69, 87, 88, 91, 94, 96–98, 106, 115, 128, 132, 134, 141 services, staging of, 10, 56–76 social media, and, 12, 15, 98, 107, 108, 114–117, 120, 122, 141–143 spectacle and staged, 18, 67–75, 134 tropes (see ANZAC tropes) ANZAC tropes encounters, learned, conventional and accepted, 58 examples; medal storyboards, 58–61; Rosemary leaves, 61, 75; slouch hat, 65 politics of memory, and, 10, 65, 108, 121, 128, 129, 134 thinking-with, 3, 14, 42, 56, 64, 66, 71, 73, 75, 97, 106, 108, 114, 117, 132, 143

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 D. Drozdzewski et al., Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4019-3

149

150 

INDEX

Atmospheres, 11, 15, 26, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 59, 69, 107, 109, 134 B Banal nationalism, 112 Bodies in, and of memory, 34–37 C Canberra, 8, 11, 39–41, 62, 63, 69–71, 111, 121, 140 Collective/national identity, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38–40, 46, 47, 61, 62, 66–69, 71, 72, 76, 82, 85, 87, 92–94, 96, 107, 108, 114, 115, 120, 123, 130, 134, 139–141, 143, 145, 146 Commemorative atmospheres, 15, 33, 39, 107 Communitas, 107 COVID-19 pandemic, 2, 32, 72 D Digital feelings, 106–124 ceremonial encounters, 107–114 Digital worlds absence/presence, 18, 82–85, 94, 97, 98, 130 COVID-19 pandemic, and, 2, 15, 72 entanglement of media and practices, 12 memory-work, 3, 13, 14, 17, 30, 130 part of daily life, 12, 14 photos, sharing, 39, 90 Disremembering, 84 Distant grief, 86

E Embodied encounters, 45 Embodiment, 30, 34, 39, 58, 71, 99, 123, 130 Emotional collectivity, 107 Emotional connections, 93, 106, 107, 111, 117 Encounter, 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 31, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41–45, 47, 56–76, 83, 85, 91, 97, 98, 106–114, 128–132, 134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145 Epistemology of memory points of connectivity, 31, 144 reflexivity of practice and process, 31 Ethnography, 47 Experiential, 2, 6, 11, 27, 36, 38, 39, 57, 59, 71, 95, 96, 99, 108, 117, 131, 144 F Family connections, 18, 82, 85–92, 97, 98 Feminism, 29 Frontier Wars, 83, 84, 136 G Geographies of commemoration accounting for affect, atmosphere an experiential world, 27 bodies, and, 3–6, 17, 18, 34, 35, 130 connectivity, cause and effect, 32 digital feelings, (see Digital feelings) digital worlds; absence/presence, 82; COVID-19 pandemic, and, 2, 15; entanglement of media and practices, 12; memory-­work, 3, 13, 26, 33, 141; part of daily life, 12, 14; photos, sharing, 43 encounter, as, 2, 6, 12, 37, 47, 56, 71, 75, 128, 130

 INDEX 

encountered in multiple ways, 144 feminism, and, 29 importance of; reinforcing official narrative, 18; spatial and connective focus, 5; territorial subjugation and service, 4 new agenda, 18, 143–146 politics of memory and identity, 128 post-structural perspectives, 82 public visible, 43 semiotic, 27 spectacles, and, 10, 18, 68 strong connective and affective bonds, 33 Great Australian silence, 83 H Hyperconnectivity, 109 I Identity politics, 26, 87, 128, 129, 133 M Medal storyboards, 58–61 Melbourne, 40, 41, 65, 94, 107, 109, 110, 112, 139, 140 Memory biosocial and biosensory, 61–62 bodies in, and of, 34–37 collective, 2, 5, 6, 8, 30, 61, 67–69, 71, 82, 130, 141 epistemology of (see Epistemology of memory) in-the-head/in-the-world, 115 politics of (see Politics of memory and identity) Memory-work, 3, 13, 14, 17, 26, 29–31, 33–35, 37, 38, 130, 131, 136, 141, 144, 145

151

bodies, and, 34 Moments of encounter, 35, 36, 56, 58, 59, 64 Multiculturalism, 65, 76, 82, 85, 91–99, 120, 139 N Nation, 2, 5–9, 26, 30, 33, 40, 57, 65, 67–69, 82, 83, 92, 108, 122, 123, 128, 129, 133, 141, 143 National identity, 5, 9, 15, 27, 33, 66, 70, 85, 92, 93, 96, 120, 139, 140, 145, 146 Nationalism, 64, 112 P Politics of memory and identity ANZAC tropes, and, 10, 65, 87, 129 bodies, and, 36 interconnections, 37 operationalized, 26, 108 Positionality, 34, 47, 131 Poststructural perspectives, 82 Prized narratives, 87 R Remembering through the senses, 113 Representations-in-relation, 35 Research project data analysis, 45, 46 interviews, 46 photo elicitation; sensory and visual information, 40–44, 46; relationship to everyday life, 30, 43 recruitment of participants, 41 Reverberation, 120, 121 Rosemary, 57, 61–64, 68, 71, 75, 96

152 

INDEX

S Semiotic, 27, 45, 106–107 Senses, 4, 6, 9, 18, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38–40, 42, 46, 47, 56, 59, 67, 75, 82, 91, 94, 95, 97–99, 106–110, 113, 117, 120, 121, 123, 129, 133, 140–142, 146 Slouch hat, 65, 66 Social media, 12, 15, 98, 107–109, 114–117, 120, 122, 130, 141–143 Sydney, 41, 94–96

T Thinking-with methodologies ANZAC tropes, 3, 17, 39, 64, 66, 73, 97, 98, 108, 132 research project, 47 use of, 37, 38, 114, 117 V Vignettes, 39, 131–141