Commemorative atmospheres: memorial sites,

collective events and the experience of national

identity
Shanti Sumartojo
In Australia as elsewhere, shared annual commemorative ceremonies such as those on Anzac Day, 25 April, help
to connect residents to particular versions of the nation, to the past and to each other. This article investigates
what can be gained by pairing the concept of commemoration – a set of practices and narratives that draw together
national identity, collective and individual memory, grief and mourning, regular ritual, collectivity and material,
aesthetic representations of war and death – with atmosphere and its dynamic combination of space, sensory
experience, affect, individual memory and experience and the material environment. It introduces the notion of
‘commemorative atmospheres’ to explore how such events ‘feel’, arguing that spatially-specific affective experience
can work to connect individuals to the nation. The article builds on scholarship that explores how memorial sites
symbolically express aspects of national history and memory, linking this to accounts of how atmospheres can be
constituted by architectural form and the material and aesthetic aspects of space. It uses recent research on
Australian Anzac Day ceremonies to identify the different spatial elements that contribute to the moods of these
events, and explores how these interweave with first-hand experience of the ceremonies and established national
narratives. It also considers the sensory perception of commemorative events, identifying how these aspects link to
discursive elements, helping to frame national identity for attendees at these ceremonies and potentially for a
wider national audience.

Key words atmosphere; commemoration; national identity; Australia; Anzac Day; auto-ethnography

School of Media and Communications, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia
Email: shanti.sumartojo@rmit.edu.au

Revised manuscript received 5 July 2016

atmospheres. In turn, these can help explain the

Introduction
The 2014–2018 centenary of the First World War has
seen a diverse international range of public commem-
orative projects, with hundreds of museum and heritage
exhibitions, public art installations, school projects and
excursions, re-enactments and a burgeoning library of
new scholarly and popular publications. In light of this,
this article investigates what can be gained conceptually
by pairing the concept of commemoration – a set of
practices and narratives that draw together national
identity, collective and individual memory, grief and
mourning, regular ritual and material, aesthetic repre-
sentations of war and death – with atmosphere, and its
dynamic combination of space, sensory experience,
affect, individual memory and experience and the
material environment. I propose the notion of ‘com-
memorative atmospheres’ as a means to understand the
impact that remembrance events have on attendees. I
will argue that individual and collective anticipation
and sensory perception mix with memorial landscapes
and built environments to co-constitute such
affective impact of commemoration and how it con-
nects individuals to historical narratives, collective
memory and national imagined communities (Ander-
son 1991).
This is not to suggest that atmosphere sweeps up
hapless observers at commemorative ceremonies, who
mutely respond to environments designed to shape
experience in particular ways (Sumartojo 2015). People
co-create atmosphere through their actions and
responses in commemorative moments, but also
because of their anticipation and expectations of the
events (Edensor 2012). This has significance beyond
the instance of commemorative ceremonies, because
the gathered actions, narratives, symbols and environ-
ments of commemoration are employed to help rein-
force versions of national identity that can have wide
social ramifications. Taking up Closs Stephens’ (2015,
2) approach of treating national identity as a ‘feeling’
and her invitation ‘to address how [national atmo-
spheres] matter politically’, this article will use ‘com-
memorative atmospheres’ to explore how memorial

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of
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542
events feel to participants and what some of the
implications of these feelings might be for wider
framings of national identity.
The arguments build on scholarship that explores
how memorial sites symbolically express aspects of
national history and memory (e.g. Doss 2012; Johnson
2007; Sumartojo 2015; Young 1993). This links accounts
of how affective atmospheres can be shaped by the
material and aesthetic aspects of space (Zumthor 2006)
with recent work on atmosphere, affect and the impact
of designed spaces and ‘staged materiality’ (Anderson
2009 2014; Bille et al. 2015; B€ ohme 2013). It uses
examples of the different spatial elements of memorials
that contribute to the moods of commemorative events,
and explores how these interweave with first-hand
experience of the ceremonies and established national
narratives, most of which are familiar to participants. I
draw on illustrative empirical material from commem-
oration in Australia, a country that has a particularly
close relationship with the First World War.
Australian identity and the ‘Anzac
tradition’
In Australia, the 1914–18 conflict has long been
associated with political self-definition, with 25 April,
the date of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli, now
considered a moment of national genesis; as Scates
notes, ‘Australians discovered their nationhood on the
killing fields of Gallipoli’ (2006, xxii). In the past
100 years, the name of the Australia and New Zealand
Army Corps (Anzac) has become shorthand for a
mainstream narrative of national identity, important in
official cultural self-definition, and emblematic of a set
of characteristics that supposedly define national
behaviour and outlook.
Perhaps the most commonly invoked of these is
‘mateship’, which was elevated to the highest political
level with former Prime Minister John Howard’s 1999
proposal that it be included in a proposed new
preamble to the Australian constitution. Dyrenfurth
explains that ‘it describes the bonds of loyalty and
equality, and feelings of solidarity and fraternity that
Australians, usually men, are typically alleged to
exhibit’ (2015, 4) often associated with ‘the Anzac
tradition’. This virtue has become closely associated
with the figure of the First World War soldier, the
‘Digger’, a word now generally applied to any Aus-
tralian with military service. Both the figure of the
Digger and his moral code of mateship reveal the
overwhelming orientation towards the masculine in
the Anzac. Indeed, women are largely excluded from
the story, except in the proscribed roles of comfort-
giving nurse or grieving relative, where they are
primarily identified by their subordinate or supportive
emotional role in relation to male soldiers. Critiques of
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Shanti Sumartojo
Anzac have also questioned its relevance in light of
contemporary Australian multiculturalism (Bongiorno
2014; Drozdzewski 2015; Sumartojo 2014) and the
much older and contentious questions of settler-
colonialism and Indigenous dispossession (McKenna
2014).
Furthermore, the Anzac narrative places war mem-
ory at the heart of a mainstream way of thinking about
Australian identity. As Drozdzewski points out, in
Anzac there is a mixture of
martial nationalism with nation building [in an] ongoing
performance where the commemoration of war and the
celebration of Australian values are inextricably woven
together to encapsulate a collective Australian identity.
(2015, 5)
However, despite its martial, colonial and masculine
roots, Beaumont argues that ‘the very flexibility of the
Anzac legend – its capacity to be constantly re-
invented, to be both static and dynamic . . . explains
its endurance as a foundational narrative’ (2015, 2).
This is because the meaning of Anzac Day has changed
in the past century, particularly in the falling away of
imperial loyalties that led Australia into conflict in
1914. Although the popularity of Anzac Day has waxed
and waned since it was first observed in 1916, since the
1990s, attendance at these commemorative events has
continued to grow (Holbrook 2014). A century on from
the Battle of Gallipoli, it enjoys robust official financial
support, bipartisan political approval and record-
breaking attendance at annual ceremonies. However,
despite the importance of this date in the national
calendar, and the intense public discussion of national
identity that accompanies it, attention is rarely focused
on how the meaning of Anzac is understood through its
memorial spaces and their atmospheric qualities. As
the locations for commemorative events, memorials
provide tangible, spatial links between individuals,
experiences and the nation. At these moments, national
narratives that are familiar to most people raised in
Australia, including those gathered under metonymic
terms like ‘mateship’, are solemnly commemorated.
This does not mean that official deployment of this
narrative is universally accepted. Critics have question
the estimated $500 million that will be spent on First
World War remembrance in Australia (Brown 2014), or
accuse officials of engaging in a new ‘Anzackery’, the
‘nationalistic hyperbole . . . attached, limpet-like, to
Anzac’ (Daley 2014, np). Lake and Reynolds (2010)
assert that an overwhelming focus on Anzac is mili-
tarising Australian history to the detriment of other
potentially cohering national narratives, while others
warn that the apparent inclusivity of Anzac nationalism
makes public criticism difficult (Bongiorno 2014).
During the feverish commemorative period around
Anzac Day 2015, the ubiquity of a heroic narrative has

Commemorative atmospheres
been strongly criticised. ‘We will be told the old lies
again’, accused one prominent Australian historian,
during ‘what has become a parody of remembrance,
Anzac as carnival, commodity and re-enactment’
(Scates 2015, np). Even so, commemoration of Anzac
has been on the rise for 20 years, record numbers of
Australians attend Anzac Day Dawn Services around
the world every year, and the popular ‘Anzac myth’
shows no sign of diminishing.
This article is based on my attendance of Anzac Day
Dawn Service ceremonies in 2014 and 2015 in Can-
berra and Melbourne as a ‘participant-sensor’ (Wood
2012). I focused on how spaces were organised, what
happened in them, how others appeared to respond to
the ceremonies, and also how I reacted myself, using
my own body as an ‘instrument of research’ (Longhurst
et al. 2008). I used sensory autoethnography (Pink
2015) as a means to grapple with atmosphere as the
focus of analysis, given its ‘ontological and epistemo-
logical vagueness’ (Bille et al. 2015, 32) and the
difficulties of pinning it down as a distinct and definite
thing in time and space (Anderson and Ash 2015). In
doing so, I attended to the sensoriality of my own
experience, using it ‘as a route through which to
produce academic knowledge’ (Pink 2015, 94), one that
acknowledged that ‘being and knowing cannot be easily
separated’ (Longhurst et al. 2008, 208). This was
intended to suit atmosphere’s ephemeral, subjective
and affective qualities. Furthermore, Anzac commem-
orative events are often reported in emotional terms, so
rather than potentially trespass on the feelings of
others, I base this account on my own experiences. My
fieldnotes and audio recordings were augmented by
photographs detailing the memorial sites’ built envi-
ronments, as well as newspaper and broadcast media
accounts of the ceremonies.
Atmosphere and commemoration
Scates’ scathing assessment of Anzac Day as ‘carnival,
commodity and re-enactment’ hints at the charged
significance that such commemoration holds. During
such events, a past beyond living memory becomes
‘historical remembrance’, a ‘discursive field, extending
from ritual to cultural work of many different kinds . . .
[with a] capacity to unite people who have no other
bonds drawing them together’ (Winter 2006, 11).
Similarly, the ‘modern culture of nationalism’ rests on
‘arresting emblems of . . . cenotaphs and the tombs of
Unknown Soldiers’ to cohere national imagined com-
munities (Anderson 1991, 6–9). The military content
that animates Anzac remembrance is not unique to
Australia, but rather is a common medium for the
expression of national identity.
Such communities, however, are neither uniform nor
permanent, according to Nora’s (1989) characterisation
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543
of the relationship between history and memory: the
power of institutions to shape national narratives on
the one hand, and the resistance, adherence or even
indifference to these narratives by the public on the
other. Winter has identified a ‘memory boom’,
embraced by states and citizens alike, that has gradually
superseded history in the past three decades, and that
subordinates rigorous inquiry into the events and
conditions of the past to personification and empa-
thetic connection to individuals, often family members
(Winter 2006). In this way, historical narratives have
been
reconfigured into emotionally charged versions of ‘our
history’ . . . official ‘history’ and vernacular ‘memory’ have
been selectively mixed in the arena of identity politics by a
range of actors who choose aspects of the historical past to
buttress their own political goals. (Sumartojo 2014, 6–7)
Here, commemoration is activated in deeply political
national events that work in particular ways to connect
people to each other, and to past generations of co-
nationals. I argue that distinctive commemorative
atmospheres imbue these events and help to create
and frame their meanings for attendees that are
expressed as germane to national identity.
The starting point for this argument is commemo-
ration and its relationship with memory, history and
national identity. Ashplant et al. (2000, 13) contend
that three distinct approaches to commemoration have
shaped scholarly understanding of it. One foregrounds
the activities of the state, which enjoys the primary role
in shaping the form and content of commemoration. A
second identifies ‘civil society’ as employing commem-
oration to advocate for improved recognition of the
impact of war, including the grief and mourning that
accompany it. The third, based in part on the collection
of oral histories, turns to ‘private memories’, empha-
sising ‘their capacity to connect with and articulate
particular popular conceptions’. This approach ‘pro-
vides a means of showing the ways in which individual
experience is always structured and understood through
cultural narratives, including those of the nation-state’
(Ashplant et al. 2000, 14). Here, commemoration is
informed by a complex and multi-scalar rendering of
memory that ranges from the individual to the collec-
tive to the national, but that, according to Mitchell,
blends these into generalised narratives:
The repetition engaged in various commemorative events
and rituals . . . is crucial in blurring the differences between
individual interpretations of events, and creating a single,
highly idealized, composite image. This image then forms
the generalized social framework for future recollections,
and through time, individual memories tend to conform and
correspond with this composite. (2003, 443)
These authors remark on the role of commemoration
in linking the individual to the nation, and identify how
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544
repetitive ritual makes these connections stick. They
also acknowledge that bereavement or mourning
inevitably shadows the history and memory of war,
and that for many individuals the emotional impact of
such events can be based on intimate connections to
the past through familial grief, even if generations old.
Indeed, the emotional aspects of commemoration have
been explored at length. Winter’s work on the Great
War, for example, emphasised how the representational
‘motifs’ that emerged after the war were the result of
‘the search for an appropriate language of loss’ in the
face of ‘the universality of bereavement in the Europe
of the Great War and its aftermath’ (1995, 5). Together,
the confluence of memory, identity, emotion and
commemorative ritual opens up questions of how we
might understand commemorative events as sensed or
felt, as well as cognitively understood.
Accordingly, the form of Anzac commemoration I
consider in this article is framed as a manifestation of
collective memory bound up with national identity and
war history, experienced by the sensing individual. It is
one means by which specific historical narratives are
made into observable expressions of contemporary
national identity. However, it moves beyond this by
suggesting that commemoration can be understood as
staged, enacted and experienced through and by means
of atmosphere. This helps to explain the potency of
commemorative events, moments that exceed the ritual
reinforcement of identity narratives to conjure atmo-
spheres that mix narrative, sensory and affective
elements into powerful combinations with political
implications.
The growing interest in the utility of considering
‘atmosphere’ as a way of understanding spatial expe-
rience and meaning is now familiar in the social
sciences and humanities (Bille et al. 2015; Edensor
and Sumartojo 2015). Studies have reached into the
intimate spaces of the home (Bille 2015; Daniels 2014;
Pink 2015), public places such as museums (Waterton
and Dittmer 2014) and heritage sites (Crang and Tolia-
Kelly 2010; Modlin et al. 2011; Turner and Peters
2015), as well as spaces we share with other people such
as trains (Bissell 2010), shopping malls (Rose et al.
2010), local festivals (Edensor 2012) and football
matches (Edensor 2015). Across these accounts, atmo-
spheres are accounted for as aspects of space that are
more-than-representational, part of the ‘feel’ and
experience of events, encounters and places. They are
a ‘condition constantly being taken up in experience’
that ‘exceed the ensembles from which they emanate’
(Anderson 2014, 148, 160), but that also rely on
material and signifying representations, as well as the
remembered, anticipated and experiential.
National identity can also emerge atmospherically.
Wood (2012, 17), for example, remarks that the
‘Scottishness’ of particular forms of music are anchored
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Shanti Sumartojo
in specific cultural ‘performance practices’. Particular
ways of engaging in music-making, and audience
reactions of appreciation or participation, are as
powerful as the melodies themselves in signalling
national identity; here, bodily practices and sensory
perception combine to generate a particularly national
experience. Closs Stephens extends this with her
argument that an analytical orientation towards atmo-
sphere
offers ways of loosening the grip of the language of identity,
essence and belonging in the study of nationalism and
attends instead to the currents and transmissions that pass
between bodies and which congeal around particular
objects, materials and bodies in specific times and spaces.
(2015, 12)
Reaching beyond the specific narratives of particular
nations, she investigates how national identity is
made through the activities and experiences of people,
rather than the deployment of particular symbolic
resources.
Such concatenations of objects, people and activities
are also spatial. Accordingly, architectural perspectives,
such as B€ohme’s (2013) notion of ‘staged materialities’
or Zumthor’s (2006) descriptions of the moods or
impressions that designers intend to create – and the
material best used to reach these, such as stone, wood
or running water – recognise the importance of the
surrounding landscape context, architectural form and
materials in promoting sensory aspects of place.
Indeed, Pallasmaa recognises the crucial experiential
aspects of atmosphere, describing it as
an exchange between material or existent properties of the
place and the immaterial realm of human perception and
imagination. Yet, they are not physical ‘things’ or facts, they
are human experiential ‘creations’. (2014, 232)
Thus, atmosphere has been described as the ‘feel’ that
emanates from a dynamic combination of built envi-
ronment, place and people, with atmospheres ‘dis-
tributed yet palpable, a quality of environmental
immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies
whilst also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’
(McCormack 2008, 413). As participants in atmo-
spheres, it is unclear ‘whether we should attribute them
to the objects or environments from which they
proceed or to the subjects who experience them’ (Bille
et al. 2015, 2). Griffero embraces the term’s vagueness,
describing it as ‘something-more, a je-ne-sais-quoi
perceived by the felt-body in a given space, but never
fully attributable to the objectual set of that space’
(2010, 6). Indeed, individual subjectivities – memory,
experience and sensory perception – make a vital
contribution to how atmospheres coalesce, are sus-
tained and dissipate. Atmosphere helps comprise how
meaning emerges through individual interpretation of

Commemorative atmospheres
spatial events and practices, with sensory experiences
playing a necessary role. It is
a vague yet anything but weak phenomenon that is staged,
culturally informed, and manipulated to achieve social,
political, and economic goals by tapping into people’s
emotions and affects. (Bille et al. 2015, 37; emphasis in
original)
In this way, atmosphere includes and derives from
affect’s implicit relationality and its focus on bodily
capacities. Belonging to neither the subject nor the
object, atmospheres instead ‘reveal specific types of
relational configurations’ (Anderson 2014, 12) between
the subject, her memories and experiences and the
representational and more-than-representational ele-
ments that constitute her spatial environments. Feel-
ings such as pride, humility, grief, sadness, boredom or
uneasiness may accompany the experience of a collec-
tive memorial event, but the atmospheres that emerge
are spatialised in particular aesthetic and representa-
tional settings. They are not reducible to these
components, as they are ‘affective qualities that . . .
exceed the ensembles from which they emanate’
(Anderson 2014, 160). However, as I will argue below,
they can be shaped and characterised by a range of
spatial conditions.
This engages with Thrift’s (2004) remark that affect
can be ‘engineered’ and the implication that atmo-
spheres can take on discursive and political aspects
through spatial interventions such as lighting, the built
environment, sound and other aspects of design.
Implied in this is a powerful dramaturge that aims
for particular impact by designing both space and the
experience of space; an example is Albert Speer’s
‘cathedral of light’ at Nuremberg’s tightly chore-
ographed Nazi rallies, designed to invoke a frenzied
patriotism centred on the figure of Hitler (McQuire
2005, 127). Accordingly, commemorative events can
be understood as an attempt by officials to marshal
atmosphere towards particular political outcomes, and
to enrol the bodies and emotions of participants in
common experiences linked to national narratives.
However, atmosphere’s emergent qualities, and the
eruption and dissipation of intensities, suggests it
cannot be perfectly controlled; it is co-constituted by
participants and ‘imbricated with other dimensions of
life without being reducible to other elements’
(Anderson 2014, 14). Thus, its ephemerality can
make it an unpredictable tool, as I will discuss in
the last section on the political implications of
approaching commemoration from an atmospheric
starting point.
Anderson identifies affect, a crucial element of
atmosphere, as ‘bodily capacities to affect and be
affected that emerge and develop in concert’ (2014, 9);
these are subjective and intimate ways of accounting for
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545
how our lives feel that ‘dissolve . . . public/private
boundaries’ (Thien 2005, 452). In light of this subjec-
tivity, my approach to commemorative atmospheres
attempts to understand the experience of these events,
considering aspects such as the sound, sights and
weather that attendees are subject to. I build on Degen
and Rose’s (2012) conclusions regarding the impor-
tance of perceptual memory and individual mobility in
understanding the meaning and impact of space on its
users. I will show how an orientation towards atmo-
spheres helps resist accounts of place that are ‘bereft of
political, social, and cultural orientations, delimiting
peoples’ agency, expectations, habits, and objectives’
(Edensor 2012, 1105). Instead, I argue that commem-
orative atmospheres are influenced by a combination of
elements that include: foreknowledge and anticipation;
built environments with symbolic material representa-
tions and ritual uses that promulgate narratives sup-
ported by the state; and sensory experience of these
distinctive spaces as activated by regular commemora-
tive events. This is not to argue that the feel of these
events is reducible to a recipe of these factors, but
rather to show how these elements can contribute to
the emergence of ways of feeling and experiencing
commemorative events that can be understood atmo-
spherically.
Foreknowledge and anticipation
In his study of the convivial atmosphere associated with
the annual winter illuminations in Blackpool, Edensor
(2012) identifies the importance of anticipation or
foreknowledge of the event in visitors’ experiences of it.
Similarly, Rose et al. (2010) shows how shoppers rely
on personal history of experience to understand and
navigate a busy suburban mall environment, and Lin
argues that the experience of the ‘Oriental’ in travelling
with Singapore Airlines ‘may in fact bear the imprints
of actions preceding their situational coalescences’
(2015, 289). Similarly, commemorative events are
framed by pre-existing knowledge at different scales,
from the collective and national to the personal and
familial.
In Australia, the figure of the First World War
soldier is iconic. The history and mythology of Anzac is
very well-documented elsewhere (e.g. Holbrook 2014;
Lake and Reynolds 2010), but the basic contours of the
narrative are that the Australian nation was born at the
landings at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, that Australian
soldiers stood out among the combatant troops as
particularly able, and that their military effectiveness
was based on a set of characteristics that are somehow
uniquely Australian: resilience, perseverance, ‘mate-
ship’, suspicion of and resistance to authority and a
laconic ‘she’ll be right’ optimism. It is not my intention
to address the historical accuracy (or not) of these
claims, but rather to sketch out some of the content of
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546
‘Anzac’ in contemporary Australian commemoration.
For example, the metonymic Anzac figure has been
widely employed by political leaders in Australia to try
and define national identity. PM Paul Keating (1993)
defined the Anzac ‘legend’ in his 1993 eulogy at the
interment of the Unknown Soldier at the National War
Memorial in Canberra:
[Anzac] is a legend not of sweeping military victories so
much as triumphs against the odds, of courage and ingenuity
in adversity. It is a legend of free and independent spirits
whose discipline derived less from military formalities and
customs than from the bonds of mateship and the demands
of necessity.
Here, the Anzac soldier is a national, generalised
figure, but this symbolism is repeated in more personal
accounts. Indeed, in the state of Victoria, the govern-
ment’s centenary body states plainly that ‘Everyone has
a connection to Anzac – who will you remember?’
(Anzac Centenary 2015), and translates the associated
online material into 19 languages that reflect the state’s
diverse cultural population. Such emphasis of a per-
sonal connection to Anzac is a very common strategy to
encourage participation in commemorative activity.
This employment of ‘Anzac kinship’ terminology
(Sumartojo 2014) helps to ‘transfer the sentiments
and commitments of citizens from their personal
experiences to that abstract and imagined community
called the nation’ (Eriksen 2004, 58). Even without an
Anzac in the family, the narrative has widespread
familiarity, learnt through school (Lake and Reynolds
2010), blanket media coverage around Anzac Day, and
repeated bi-partisan invocation by political leaders.
Thus, it is not surprising that a 2011 survey found that
‘Anzacs are associated with national identity by 90% of
Australians’ (Donoghue and Tranter 2013, 453). Par-
ticipation in commemorative ceremonies takes place
within a broad cultural awareness of Anzac that it
would be difficult for most Australians to avoid.
Thus, visitors to events at Australian commemora-
tive sites commonly come with at least some knowledge
of the Anzac narrative. Caroline Winter’s research
supports this, finding that a majority of visitors to
Anzac sites have some foreknowledge, perhaps through
a family connection, or some familiarity with Australian
military history. Her surveys show that 62% of visitors
to Australia’s national memorial on the Western Front
at Villers-Bretonneux had a relative who had served in
the First World War (Winter 2012) and that 84% of
visitors to the Victorian state memorial in Melbourne
were aware of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli (Winter
2009). Such knowledge, including family history,
encourages the affective charge of a memorial visit,
even outside major commemorative events. Indeed,
McKenna and Ward’s account of Anzac ‘sentimental
nationalism’ argues that the meanings ‘inherent’ in the
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Shanti Sumartojo
Anzac site at Gallipoli are actually ‘inscribed in the
assumptions of those who visit the site’ (2007, 145).
Their critique asserts that the commemorative site
itself, although ascribed the power to move visitors,
actually derives its meaning from the pre-existing views
of visitors themselves.
This was exemplified in Kate Abusson’s (2015)
documentary exploration of the high emotional com-
mitment to the Anzac story by young attendees at a
Gallipoli commemorative service in 2014. She found a
strong belief among her visitors in the unique heroism
of Anzac soldiers in 1915, despite poor knowledge
about the specifics of the campaign, and showed how
this conditions a highly emotional response that
strengthens pride in Anzac nationalism. In her doc-
umentary film, attendees to this service cry and report
feelings of pride and respect accompanied by mixed
emotions of sadness and confusion over the purpose of
the military action and the deaths of Anzacs who fought
there. Even for that majority of Australians who do not
attend a ceremony on Anzac Day, it is difficult to avoid,
as widespread media coverage treats it as an annual
newsworthy event.
In this context of familiarity with the narrative,
anticipation for attendance at a Dawn Service is also
built over the hours before it occurs, as people prepare
for an early start and make their way to memorial sites.
The Shrine of Remembrance in 2015, for example, saw
around 80 000 people attend the Dawn Service (Mar-
shall 2015). With the service scheduled for a 6.00am
start, my own anticipation built from the evening before
because I went to bed early and set my alarm to rise
unusually early at 4.15 am. The Melbourne public
transport system had advertised the city-wide tram
service would be running at a five-minute frequency,
with more public transport available on some routes
than a normal weekday schedule. Leaving my house in
the inner suburbs, I saw other people had already
gathered at the tram stop, and as my companion and I
entered central Melbourne, packed trams were trund-
ling into the city. We walked down the major boulevard
leading towards the Shrine, which was full of people all
walking in the same direction. There was a hum of
subdued conversation along the main route, illumi-
nated by streetlights and the ambient glow of the city
reflected down from the clouds and through the steady
rain. The paved approach to the Shrine, flanked by tall
rows of conifers, funneled the crowd up a slight rise
towards the main building (Figure 1).
A distinctive sense of anticipation emerged from the
unusual activity of attending a major commemorative
event. The early hour, the packed trams, thousands of
people channelled in the same direction, the presence
of police and security, the blocking of the street to
vehicular traffic, all pointed towards a common pur-
pose and a significant moment to come, priming me to

Commemorative atmospheres
Figure 1 Crowds at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance, Anzac Day Dawn Service 2015
Source: Author
experience something out of the ordinary. Edensor
insists that ‘atmospheric attunement . . . is frequently
anticipated attunement’ (2012, 1114). In the case of the
Dawn Service, this anticipation is built publicly in the
days leading up to the public holiday with an increased
intensity of media coverage, and at the personal level
by the preparations and bodily experiences of collective
movement to memorial sites immediately before the
commemorative ritual. Thus, even before the event
begins, a feeling of public significance is built through
official and media efforts, and even for people who
have no affinity to Anzac, its status is recognised with a
public holiday. Although most Australians do not
attend these events, its unequivocal official support
makes it unavoidable.
Symbolic built environments
Attendees at Anzac Day ceremonies are thus likely to
possess a foreknowledge that prepares them for an
emotionally charged ritual, and an immediate experi-
ence of rising early, travelling to the commemorative
site and finding a space in the crowd that shapes an
anticipation of the event. The architectural symbolism
and building design, and landscape contexts of memo-
rial sites also contribute to the atmospheres that
participants co-constitute and experience during cere-
monies.
For example, in Canberra, the Australian War
Memorial’s (AWM) symbolic representations shape
which national stories are forgotten as much as those
that are remembered. For the visitor, this begins with
the building itself, a 1941 design recalling a Byzantine
temple, with massive wings extending from a central
dome. According to Stephens, when it was designed,
‘only classical and ancient design was thought to convey
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547
the nobility of the digger who could be aligned with
olden day warriors through ancient symbolism’ (2012,
146). The landscape setting of the Memorial augments
its solemnity. It is positioned at the head of Anzac
Parade, an axial boulevard that forms a direct visual
line from the memorial to Australia’s parliament
building, punctuated with regularly spaced war memo-
rials to conflicts in which Australia has fought. At the
front of the AWM is a red gravel forecourt and two
flights of shallow steps that lead visitors up between
extended block pillars. A Stone of Remembrance,
etched with Rudyard Kipling’s ritual text ‘their name
liveth for evermore’, is the main feature of this area.
Repeated in Commonwealth war grave sites around the
world, this altar-like stone acts as a focal point of the
national Dawn Service on Anzac Day, with wreathes
laid against it in remembrance. Indeed, during this
ceremony, this area of the AWM’s grounds acts as an
amphitheatre with the addition of banks of benches and
rows of chairs that enclose the gravel drive and
forecourt.
The main building of the Memorial is surrounded by
trees and lawns dotted with smaller individual memo-
rial plaques, a few decommissioned artillery pieces, and
figurative statues dedicated to Australian soldiers or
units. This setting extends at the back of the building up
to Mt Ainslie, providing a bush backdrop to the
rectilinear form of the building itself. This aspect is
part of how the Memorial presents itself to visitors,
with official promotion of its ‘distinctively Australian
setting among lawns and eucalypts . . . Kangaroos,
occasionally straying from nearby bushy hills, add to the
physical effect’ (Australian War Memorial 2015, np).
The parkland setting isolates the building in the
landscape, and the different approaches, in particular
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548
the main ceremonial one up Anzac Parade, reinforce its
status as a site with special national symbolism. The site
contributes to the atmosphere of commemorative
events there by providing a visual context for partici-
pants, and beyond this, it reproduces state symbols that
encourage purposeful remembering along particular
selective lines that emphasise some aspects of national
history and disregard others.
Thus, such war memorial sites are not neutral in
terms of their political purpose. They are designed and
activated in ways that promulgate a version of national
identity that parses martial achievement as national
virtue, a part of the national mythscape,
the page upon which the multiple . . . nationalist narratives
are (re)written . . . the perpetually mutating repository for
the representation of the past for the purposes of the
present. (Bell 2003, 66)
Accordingly, these and other memorials can be under-
stood as stages (Bille et al. 2015), with bodies shaping
discursive meaning by repeating specific, rehearsed
postures in ‘performances like rituals, festivals,
pageants, public dramas and civic ceremonies [that]
serve as a chief way in which societies remember’
(Hoelscher and Alderman 2004, 350). They can also be
sites of grieving or reconciliation, depending on the
personal relationship between the visitor and the events
commemorated, the location of the site and the time
elapsed between event and remembrance. For example,
early First World War memorials in Australia drew
together personal and national memory as sites of
intimate and collective mourning for the dead, serving
the needs of ‘a distant grief’ for the bereaved relatives
without the resources to visit faraway graves (Ziino
2007).
These memorials’ material environments include
nationally symbolic elements and landscapes – the
Figure 2 The front facßade of the Australian War Memorial with projected images, Anzac Day Dawn Service 2013
Source: Kerry Alchin, PAIU2013/058.02
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Shanti Sumartojo
altar-like Stone of Remembrance, the Australian bush
setting. But they also spatially arrange commemorants
as an audience focused on and in many cases physically
lower than the main memorial stage. They have been
purposefully designed to recall classical historical
references, but also to guide visitors to relate to them
physically as collective and subordinate. The crowd of
participants is part of the visual spectacle of commem-
orative ritual, and in the next section I adopt the
perspective of a member of this crowd, discussing how I
sensed and experienced an Anzac Day Dawn Service
(Figure 2).
Sensory experience
Wasserman remarks that
really good memorials allow the visitor . . . the gaining of
experiential insight . . . Through experiencing spaces, view-
ing and touching artifacts, moving in ritual patterns, and
engaging in community activity, the viewer becomes an
active participant in the experience of memory. (1998, 43)
If memorial design attempts to persuade visitors to
adopt particular attitudes towards commemorative
sites, then it also helps to structure visitors’ perceptions
and actions to enhance their engagement with the
commemorated subject matter. Attendance at com-
memorative events unveils how important the senses
are in making them meaningful and affecting. Primed
with anticipation and gathering in symbolically laden
environments, attendees at commemorative events are
subject to a range of sensory elements that coalesce
atmosphere and help to shape their experience,
revealing the close links among memory, affect and
place. Atmosphere helps to generate a ‘thick place’ that
‘ought to be regarded as an expression of the diverse
affective atmospheres generated in the collocations of
practice and place’ (Duff 2010, 893).

Commemorative atmospheres
Waterton and Dittmer’s (2014) study of their own
sensory encounters among the museum displays of the
Australian War Memorial adopts such an approach.
Their careful descriptions of the sounds, lighting and
the activities of other visitors focus on their own
experiences, show how these sensory elements rein-
force visitor engagement, and take a stance that does
not ‘divorce the mind from the body when talking about
knowledge/s, understanding/s and perceptions of the
world’ (Carolan 2008, 408). They draw on more-than-
representational sensory experience, linking place,
memory and identity to address ‘what momentary
experiences look like, and of how meaning (or inco-
herence) open out into narrative’ (Lorimer 2005, 89).
A crucial sensory aspect of the Anzac Day Dawn
Service, for example, is its ‘weather-world’ (Ingold
2010) outside in the Antipodean autumn. In the south
of the country it is chilly and often rainy, and these are
distinct aspects of attending the service, reinforcing
Ingold’s point that
the experience of weather lies at the root of our moods and
motivations; indeed it is the very temperament of our being.
It is therefore critical to the relation between bodily
movement and the formation of knowledge. (2010, S122)
Recognition of the weather is a subtle but routine part
of how the event is reported, as in newspaper accounts
that hail record attendance despite pouring rain
(Marshall 2014 2015) or cold temperatures. As a
participant, the weather dominated my experience of
the Dawn Service in Melbourne in 2015. It was chilly
with intermittent rain, and umbrellas were raised or
lowered with the showers, blocking and revealing the
view of the big screen I stood near. Rain ponchos
rustled, and people shifted and hunched when the rain
fell more strongly, making it difficult to hear the
speakers. I was cold and damp throughout the half-
hour service, which diminished my attention to the
speakers and made me eager for the ceremony to end.
Light and darkness also played an important role in
constituting atmosphere; Gallan and Gibson highlight
the ‘material qualities of light and darkness’ (2011,
2512) and the agency they exercise over human activity.
As Edensor remarks,
light alters the perception of the colour and shape of space,
and is both a discrete material object comprising an
assemblage of elements, but also a property that extends
across space. (2012, 1106)
If light has the capacity to frame and shape experience
(e.g. Bille 2015; McQuire 2005; Schivelbusch 1988), so
darkness has similarly powerful aesthetic qualities.
Darkness plays a particular role in Anzac ceremonies,
the dawn timing worked into a narrative that links
participants to the early morning Anzac assault at
Gallipoli. The gradual change in natural light
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549
throughout the ceremony ‘shapes a poignant and
fleeting atmosphere by rendering the spatial environ-
ment shadowy and mysterious’ (Sumartojo 2015, 283).
The dim conditions can also make it difficult to read
the landscape, the size of the crowd or the most
suitable place to stand in the memorial grounds on
arriving. The decision about where to stand during the
two ceremonies I attended was not a calculated
decision, because I could not see very well; instead, I
stopped with the crowd when I judged the view was as
clear as possible.
As distinct from any other outdoor event, the
weather-world and natural light conditions in the Dawn
Service are woven into the narrative about the discom-
fort and sacrifice that the original Anzacs experienced
as they waited for the assault to begin. As the
Melbourne newspaper The Age reported:
The ceremony is held at this hour – in a chilling half light
that is not yet morning and no longer night – for a specific
and military reason. This was the time of day when battle
came, when the enemy was weary, and one had to be alert
and ready and attentive. (Marshall 2014, np)
This report demonstrates how the outdoor conditions
of the ceremony are explained to a mainstream public
audience. It also shows how they are conventionally
understood as reflecting something of the authenticity
of a national historical experience by working to
connect contemporary Australians with the original
Anzacs of 1915, inviting attendees at the Dawn Service
to use their sensory experiences to empathise with
individual soldiers (Sumartojo 2015).
Accordingly, artificial illumination also plays a key
role. On the memorial buildings, particular architec-
tural elements were up-lit, foregrounding them in the
pre-dawn dimness (Sumartojo and Stevens 2016). This
technique was also used to pick out the figures of lone
musicians, often standing high above the crowd and
playing ritual pieces of music to mark important
moments in the ceremony. The flicker of big screens
is now a common feature of the Dawn Service, and in
Canberra in 2014, the light from such a screen washed
across the gathered participants. The pool of light cast
over the crowd varied in brightness and colour as the
images on the screen changed. Although it allowed the
crowd to see the speakers at the podium, the words of
ritual texts and other symbolic elements such as the
eternal flame, the flicker was distracting. It introduced
movement that pulled against the still solemnity of the
event, breaking the slow rhythm of personal and
collective remembrance. It also mediated the visual
experience through a choreographed sequence of
familiar images, narrating the event with a standard
visual vocabulary.
Another recent change to illumination is the use of
bright projections onto building surfaces. This began in
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550
Canberra in 2013, with place names and photographs
layered onto the front facßade of the Memorial. This
visual effect was subsequently used as a form of ongoing
memorial, with the names of the Australian dead
projected on to the central wall of the internal courtyard
throughout the 2014–2018 commemorative period. By
2015, commemorative projections were being used
outside memorial precincts, with works by Ian de
Gruchy, an established Australian projection artist,
installed at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in
the week before Anzac Day. The NGV is close to the
Shrine of Remembrance, and de Gruchy’s projections
linked a major Australian arts institution to the larger
national moment of commemorative fervour. Both the
NGV and AWM projections employed historical mate-
rial, presenting ‘temporal experience as highly malleable
and unstable, mimicking the act of memory not only as
archival, but also in an experiential sense, in which past
moments often “flash up” without warning’ (Barns and
Sumartojo 2015, 189) in unanticipated ‘memory returns’
(Muzaini 2015). On my approach to the Shrine in 2015,
these changing projections built anticipation and rein-
forced the Anzac narrative with images of First World
War soldiers, poppy fields and battlefield paintings from
the NGV’s collection.
Finally, sound is a crucial part of how we sense and
understand places and events (Lacey 2015; Thibaud
2014). Marshall details the ritual use of sound in British
Remembrance Day ceremonies, ‘ranging from music to
its counterpoint silence’ (2004, 40). Anzac Day’s
rhythm of speech, instrumental music, collective sing-
ing and the repetition of ritual texts, such as The Ode
or the group recitation of ‘lest we forget’, is a powerful
part of the event. As with the contrast between
illumination and darkness, this sound is emphasised
by silence in the still quiet of the assembled crowd, the
usual rustle and murmur of thousands of people
unexpectedly absent, or the ritual one-minute silence
broken by a sole bugler.
In some instances, the musical sounds were physically
immersive. In 2014, for example, before the official
service at Canberra’s Memorial began, deep, rumbling
didgeridoo music was performed from high atop the
main building. Lights picked out a single musician,
Darren Davies, a serving naval seaman and Yidinji man
from northern Queensland (Wroe 2014), as the sound
of his instrument reverberated throughout the bodies of
attendees. The specific sounds of the Dawn Service,
including people moving and talking quietly, music,
spoken word, birdsong and distant traffic showed its
capacity to ‘produce particular spatialities . . . to lay
claim to territories, to demarcate realms of power’
(Gallagher 2011, 50). The solemn hush, interspersed
with ‘official’ sounds – music, spoken word and singing –
combined with and was complicated by uncontrolled or
unpredictable sounds, creating a unique sonic
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Shanti Sumartojo
experience based on but exceeding the Anzac narrative
central to the Dawn Service.
This orientation towards the senses highlights the
importance of the individual in co-constituting atmo-
spheres. Just as anticipation is subjective, the sensory
perception of commemorative events also resides with
us as embodied individuals. However, on a collective
level, these sensory aspects contribute to the constitu-
tion of atmospheric experience, encouraging solemnity,
reverence and, for some, sadness. In combination with
the other factors discussed – the weather-world, light
and darkness, and sound – the senses are bound up in
Anzac commemoration in ways that enhance the
significant ‘feel’ of ritual events. As I discuss in the
last section, this gestures to a ‘politics of atmosphere’
that can reinforce mainstream national identity and
make criticism of Anzac commemoration problematic.
Commemoration and a politics of
atmospheres
Despite the ephemerality and looseness implicit in
atmosphere, the experience of an Anzac Day com-
memorative event shows the affective pull that emerges
from the combination of history, memory, place, built
environment, landscape, objects, texts, people and
anticipation. This constellation of elements pulls
together the material, sensory and affective to encour-
age connections among people and across time, even if
this is unpredictable, uneven or transitory. Indeed, an
orientation towards the atmospheric potential of such
events opens up new ways of understanding how the
past surrounds us, as Muzaini argues:
considering the ways in which the past is imbricated in our
present-day knowledge and subjectivities also provides a
nuanced illustration of the affordances of our surroundings.
It widens understanding of issues pertaining to materiality
and affect. . . (2015, 110)
This demonstrates the value of using atmosphere as
a route to understand our experiences of commemo-
ration and the ways in which it connects us to the
national imaginary and to each other. Furthermore, it
shows how our own actions, thoughts, feelings and
memories contribute to atmospheres that might draw
others into shared experiences of collective events. At
such moments, the symbolic and narrative mix with and
are enhanced by the perceptual and personal, stirring
atmospheres that ‘bathe everything in a certain light,
unify a diversity of impressions’ (B€ ohme 2013, 2).
Indeed, rather than ‘loosening the grip of the language
of identity, essence and belonging’ (Closs Stephens
2015, 12), in commemorative settings, these aspects are
significantly bolstered by the weaving together of the
material and immaterial, the representational and
sensory.

Commemorative atmospheres
Accordingly, I argue that we need to think of
commemoration as an affective and atmospheric
event, rather than primarily a historical, textual or
symbolic one, in order to come to grips with its
possibilities for inflecting national identity. In the case
of Anzac Day, this includes paying particular attention
to how the event personalises narrative, linking
participants to the individual war dead and thereby
attempting to create direct affective bonds with the
past. It also means attending to the built environments
and official rituals that constitute these events, envi-
ronments and rituals designed to promulgate a speci-
fic version of the state, its history and ‘appropriate’
reactions to these. Indeed, Anzac Day can be under-
stood as a political exercise that aligns with Bille’s
(2015, 57) treatment of atmosphere as ‘a critical
project that highlights ways of staging architecture,
behaviour and subjectivities’.
It is therefore crucial that in investigating the
atmospheres that accompany commemoration, we
attend to the power
[that] resides in the design of memorial sites; in the
memories, histories and related rituals that form the
discourse that accompany their use; in the activities of
authorities who control the activity at such sites; and in the
bodies, actions and attitudes of people who attend com-
memorative rituals. (Sumartojo 2015, 272)
In the case of the Anzac Day Dawn Service, the
atmospheres that coalesce tend to reinforce main-
stream versions of Australian national identity. How-
ever, in other settings they might offer the potential for
counter-hegemonic expressions of national identity to
erupt and gain sensory and affective purchase.
What implications does this approach have for a
politics of commemoration, and how can atmosphere
assist in understanding its pull and influence, and
relationship to national identity? In other words, ‘what
might it mean to think seriously about nationality as a
set of feelings circling in the air?’ (Closs Stephens 2015,
2; my emphasis).
Attendance to the sensory aspects of atmosphere
links the meaning of commemoration to the experience
of the individual, recognising the importance of this
alongside the promotion of official narrative through
events and environments intended to work on our
senses and feelings. It shows how both the represen-
tational and the more-than-representational are impor-
tant elements in the creation and maintenance of
national identities, and recognises this as related to the
interaction between people and their built environ-
ments. Thus, an atmospheric orientation shows how
‘collectivities do not precede but are produced through
the circulation of emotions’ (Closs Stephens 2015, 4).
Even if this process is fleeting and subjective, under-
standing Anzac in atmospheric terms can help account
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551
for its increasing popularity and strong hold on
Australian national identity.
It also helps shed light on why Anzac Day is often
reported as meaningful by individual attendees, even
when the symbols and material representations can
seem clich ed or the memorialised events are over a
century old. If atmosphere at commemorative events
affects us emotionally and bodily, then
we grasp the atmosphere before we identify its details or
understand it intellectually. In fact, we may be completely
unable to say anything meaningful about the characteristics
of a situation, yet have a firm image, emotive attitude, and
recall of it. (Pallasmaa 2014, 232)
Here, knowledge of an event is made through atmo-
spheric experience that can be amorphous, non-specific
and indistinct, but still potentially very powerful for
attendees at Anzac ceremonies.
In Australia, critical resistance to Anzac Day takes
place outside the spatially specific commemorative
atmospheres of the event itself. For example, protest at
the Dawn Service in contemporary Australia is almost
unknown, although there are protests during the mid-
morning marches. This often relates to recognition of
Aboriginal fighters, including those who resisted Bri-
tish colonisation after 1788. Despite high turnouts for
the centenary of the 1915 Gallipoli landings, most
Australians do not attend a Dawn Service. Even so, the
Dawn Service is presented to Australians as a symbolic
event that engulfs the entire country, and Anzac Day
remains a regular stately occasion ‘when the nation
and its symbolic attributes are elevated in public
display’ (Edensor 2002, 72), even if it is not universally
revered.
Bell argues that ‘memory is employed in contempo-
rary social and political thought in an often-bewildering
variety of ways’ that obscures ‘vectors of power’ (2008,
149). Commemorative events contribute to this foggy
mixture of emotion, affect, history, national symbolism
and personal memory, but atmospheres also provide a
focus of analysis to try and understand how these
processes are working on us and what their limits are.
This can support a better understanding of particular
articulations of nationalism, its persistence and its
current popularity. While Anzac has been the empirical
focus of this article, it is only one setting in which the
notion of commemorative atmospheres helps explain
the relationship between the individual and the nation,
and how national identity is reinforced during signifi-
cant moments of remembrance. Attention to such
atmospheres offers a subtle account of how the nation
and its collective memories are ‘felt’, helping to explain
some of their powerful allure, and identifies how
memorial spaces and commemorative events contribute
to compelling national narratives. By showing how
narratives that enjoy strong state support are
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552
experienced in commemorative events, this article
seeks to account for the complex affective and more-
than-representational aspects of national identity and
memory that continues to make historical narratives
moving for so many people.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Angharad Closs
Stephens, Tim Edensor and the anonymous reviewers
for their assistance in developing this article.
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