ABSTRACT
Australians often disregard the Crown, calling it ‘merely symbolic’ and minimising its constitutional and cultural significance. Despite this, the Crown has remained a potent taken-for-granted symbol within Australian nationhood rituals, the most important of which commemorates the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landings at Gallipoli in 1915. For 100 years Anzac Day’s social meanings were jostled over, exalted, criticised and contested, and by the centenary its symbolism had been radically reordered. New ceremonies at Canberra’s Australian War Memorial and Camp Gallipoli (a private event) prompted citizens to perform the nation’s origin myths in fresh ways that asserted a unified Australian identity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and drawing on notions of banal nationalism and the ambiguity of political symbols, the author argues that these new Anzac ceremonies employ the Crown as a central symbol in unusual ways. By analysing the Crown’s ambiguous role in these reformulated rituals, she asks how the Crown retains its relevance, despite its widespread dismissal in a country where many remain committed to republican reform.
