Paper short abstract:

Camp Gallipoli aimed to help people "commemorate ANZAC Day as participants, rather than spectators". Immersed in a new ritual of swags, rations and trenches, participants imagined heroic Anzacs - yet the event's banal nationalism and militarism aligned Anzac with state (and commercial) interests.

Paper long abstract:

Reanimating a symbol's meaning requires energy, which often comes from invoking well-known conflicts (Turner 1967: 38). To mark 2015's Anzac centenary, I joined approximately 5,000 people at a staged military camp at Sydney's Moore's Park for the inaugural Camp Gallipoli - paying A$120 to grab a swag, eat eggplant moussaka and watch Russell Crowe on the big screen, "just like the diggers did". Through rhetoric, ritual, and symbolic objects, people immersed themselves in narratives of hardship, heroism, fear, and great suffering that Camp Gallipoli markets as the "spirit of Anzac … in the DNA of every Aussie". Participants embody this spirit by pursuing ancestor worship, moral crafting, communitas, virtuous nostalgia, reverence, fun - and purchasing branded merchandise. Here, Anzac serves as a master symbol for Australian nationalism, in which state symbols are brought within hegemonic ideologies like egalitarianism. By creating corporeal experiences of related, though not equivalent, sacrifice, Camp Gallipoli imprints collective memory on individual bodies and links this to the ineffable and transcendent, so that participating becomes "a small thing, after what the diggers did for us". Then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott urged Australians to attend Anzac commemorations in a spirit of "defiance" to support "our country, our values and our armed forces". Camp Gallipoli's interplay between emotions, the senses, agency and state ritual also demonstrates that, a century after the first Anzac services, these have been almost completely reworked symbolically - with a marked banal militarism which aligns them more closely with state interests then ever before.