Remembering the Battle for Australia

Main Article Content

Elizabeth Rechniewski

Abstract

For the last two years, Australia has commemorated, on the first Wednesday in September, the ‘Battle for Australia Day’, to mark the role of Australian forces fighting the Japanese in the Pacific in WWII. The aim of this article is to identify the agents involved in the campaign for the gazetting of this day and the justifications advanced; to trace the conflicting narratives and political and historical controversies surrounding the notion of a ‘Battle for Australia’; and to outline the shifts in domestic and international politics and generational change that provide the context for the inauguration of this day.

Article Details

Section
Fields of Remembrance Special Issue January 2010 (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Elizabeth Rechniewski, University of Sydney

Elizabeth Rechniewski is Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney. She has researched and published widely on French intellectuals and engagement, including Suarès, Malraux, Sartre: antécédents littéraires de l’existentialisme (Minard) and Sartre’s Nausea: Text, Context and Intertext, (with Alistair Rolls, Rodopi). She has a long-standing research interest in nationalism and nation-building in France including as Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery project: ‘National Identity and Communications in Early Modern France’. She has recently collaborated on a project coordinated by Professor Olivier Wieviorka, a comparative study of the significance of commemoration in contemporary national life. («Gallipoli: invention et réinvention d’une tradition australienne» Vingtième siècle n.101, janvier-mars 2009). This research continues through collaboration with Dr Matthew Graves on a comparative study of the topography of memorialism in France and Australia.