Paper short abstract:

How is a rocky Turkish shore seemingly more sacred to Australians than the nation’s own red centre or the monolith of Uluru? This ethnographic account of an immersive domestic pilgrimage illustrates state-sponsored efforts to forge a renewed national identity by retelling a heroic tragedy a century old – and very far away.

Paper long abstract:

White Australian autochthonic claims remain entangled with the outback and Uluru, yet the increasing inaccessibility and climatic hostility of these places has coincided with the resurgence of a Turkish peninsular as the focus of Australian nation-building. Gallipoli holds a singular place in Australians’ imaginations.

To mark the centenary of this catastrophic military defeat, some 40,000 Australians joined their local staged military camp for the inaugural Camp Gallipoli. Through rhetoric, ritual, and symbolic objects, people imagined themselves at Gallipoli a hundred years ago, immersed in narratives of suffering, heroism and fear that Camp Gallipoli marketed as the ‘spirit of Anzac … in the DNA of every Aussie’. Participants embodied this spirit through ancestor worship, moral crafting, virtuous nostalgia, reverence, fun, and purchasing branded merchandise.

Here, Anzac serves as a key symbol (Ortner 1973) for Australian citizenship, in which state symbols are brought within hegemonic ideologies like egalitarianism. By creating corporeal experiences of related, though not equivalent, sacrifice, Camp Gallipoli imprinted collective memory on individual bodies and linked this to the transcendent, so that participating became ‘a small thing, after what the diggers did for us’. Turner noted that reanimating a symbol’s meaning requires energy, which often comes from dramatising well-known conflicts (1967: 38). Camp Gallipoli’s interplay between affect, the senses, agency and state-sponsored ritual demonstrated that, a century after the first Anzac services, these have been almost completely reworked symbolically with a marked banal militarism far more aligned with state interests than ever before – and reasserted that Australia’s most sacred soil lies in Turkey.