The law in Anzac Day: an exploration of the commemorative narrative and its implication in the enactment of community

This research considers the contributory role played by the Anzac commemorative programme in Australia in determining a conception of Australian identity. It is suggested that the commemoration of Anzac Day propagates an exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from the Australian national community, however nebulous the definition of Australian-ness may be. Bound up in this exploration of the exclusivity of Anzac Day are interrogations of time, memory, historical authority, and expectation.

The interrogation of such themes is framed by an approach that draws on actor-network theory (ANT) and new materialism, both of which are identified as a useful means for articulating the way in which a commemorative programme is able to participate in effecting an exclusionary community identity. In particular, ANT and new materialism are invoked in order to articulate the complexity and situatedness of time. Approaching time in the manner facilitated by materiality-inflected methodologies enables an accentuation of the situatedness of memory and expectation. For instance, it is argued that rationalized temporalities, synchronicity, and calibration are folded into memorializations and commemorative expectations in order to effect an exclusion.

Moreover, the methodological approach used in this thesis allows questions of truth, knowledge, and relativism to be engaged with. This enables a critique of simple and exclusionary historical authority around which commemorations are built to be developed. The challenge to the facticity of 'a historical truth' builds on the approach taken when identifying the contingent enactment of memory, exemplifying that historical authority is also a political actor implicated in an exclusionary commemorative narrative and not an unequivocal fact.

By demonstrating the role played by the complexity, situatedness, and multiplicity of the aforementioned themes in the development of an Anzac Day commemorative programme, it is possible to understand how a mnemonic narrative is a contested site of legal and political significance.