Imagining an emotional nation: the print media and Anzac Day commemorations in Aotearoa New Zealand

Introduction

Held on 25 April each year, Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Day initially commemorated the Gallipoli landings of the First World War. It has since been extended to remember all those who served and died in subsequent military operations and is seen as signifying New Zealand’s emergence as a distinct nation. The year 2015 marked 100 years since New Zealand soldiers landed at Anzac cove and as such offers a timely opportunity to explore – via a corpus of newsprint articles – ways in which the affective-discursive offerings available support a hegemonic account of military and national history as print media construct the nation in the present. Such an account, we suggest, involves media practices that imagine the affect and emotion of Anzac Day in ways that are congruent with and reinforcing of settler (here, used interchangeably with Pākehā – both of which refer to New Zealanders of European descent) supremacy and the fantasy of a homogeneous national identity via a narrowly defined community of practice.

This article examines a range of interpretive repertoires and affective-discursive positions around Anzac Day and discusses these within the frame of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and recent work on discourse and affective practice in social psychology (Wetherell, 2012, 2013). Affective-discursive positions refer to distinct pieces of emotional text constructing potential identity slots primarily derived from a cultural canon of feelings and emotions (Wetherell et al., 2015). Ideologically charged, these positions assist in recreating a ‘background of felt dispositions’ (Blackman, 2011) which construct identities within constricted forms of culturally competent citizenship in New Zealand.

The current analysis suggests that Anzac Day is predominantly framed as a ‘successful’ (Hawkes Bay Today, 2015a) day, one in which the promise of something powerful, stirring and memorable is affirmed by the widely reported numbers of people taking part in services across the country alongside a range of deeply emotive accounts repeatedly laid down in print. Throughout the country, affective-discursive practices are put to work – the 25th of April becomes ‘a legend of sacrifice’ (Martin, 2015), in which ‘the spirit of the Anzacs’ (Hawkes Bay Today, 2015b) is powerfully interpellated through news narrative. Here, Gallipoli quite literally becomes ‘a name that has been seared into New Zealand and Australian consciences’ (Moore, 2015), ritualistically marking the (re)‘birth of our [particular kinds of] nations’ (Moore, 2015).

These positions and repertoires hail citizens into particular kinds of affective practices and identity formations: the True Kiwi, observing Anzac Day in the way it ought to be observed; the galvanised community citizen at the dawn service; the pilgrim on a spiritual journey travelling to Gallipoli; the disrespectful menace, ignoring expected rites and rituals; and the despicable deviant protesting against war despite public opprobrium. Uniform across all positions and practices is the way in which they overwhelmingly speak to and uphold the power of settler cultural identity. We explore these affective-discursive framings within the context of the Treaty of Waitangi – the agreement signed in 1840 by Māori and the Crown. Despite the guarantee of Māori sovereignty, the subsequent process of colonisation saw settlers quickly become the beneficiaries of the agreement, laying down new sets of laws, beliefs and practices which led to a national culture that has come to be dominated by the normative power of settler culture. Here, settlers typically enjoy a range of ongoing benefits that include, for instance, economic advantages and better health prospects (Bell, 2006), societal norms that reflect settler preferences and systemic processes that privilege settler identities (McConville et al., 2014).

Anzac Day and the print media

Described by a government website as ‘a signature date in New Zealand history’ (Gow, 2014), Anzac Day traditionally marks the anniversary of the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey by Australian and New Zealand soldiers during the First World War, the purpose being to eliminate Turkey’s military power and enable France and Britain to more effectively descend upon Constantinople. The campaign, however, was poorly executed and ultimately saw nearly 3000 New Zealanders killed and over 5000 wounded, nearly 9000 Australians killed and over 18,000 wounded, alongside an estimated 87,000 Turkish deaths (Slade, 2003). In New Zealand, 25 April has gone on to be held as a major national day commemorating these landings and has, over time, been extended to remember all New Zealand fatalities of war.

Anzac Day, in both New Zealand and Australia, has in recent decades experienced resurgence in public support. In contemporary cultural discourse, the meaning of Anzac Day is typically unified and uncontested and is habitually referred to as a ‘sacred’ day across media, political and commemorative services (Henry, 2006; Seal, 2007). However, this has not always been the case, and at one period the print media suggested it was condemned to be a day that would eventually dissolve due to lack of public support (Twomey, 2013). In exploring print media portrayals of Anzac Day in Australia in 1965, ambivalence, meaninglessness and malaise were common emotional repertoires which emerged around the period of the Vietnam war. Pilgrimages to Gallipoli were few and unorganised, and media coverage in general was sparse. However, 1990 saw ‘carefully choreographed’ ceremonies ‘attended by high ranking dignitaries (Macleod, 2002: 154)’ alongside a tour to Gallipoli comprising politicians, veterans, media and others. Similarly, criticism and critics of the day were beginning to be affectively marked in exclusionary ways.

Macleod (2002) accounts for the change in a number of ways. First, the day’s association with the Returned Services League (RSL) had, by 1990, evolved through a range of actors that became involved in different ways – government and feminists, for instance. The latter of which, Twomey (2013) attributes as playing a major role in the rise of the day’s prominence – an unintentional outcome of using the day for protest action around war’s traumatising effects and the subsequent media coverage it received. Second, newspaper coverage had significantly differed. The 1965 coverage expected a degree of familiarity with the story of Gallipoli and as such lacked much explanation around the day in favour of a broader rhetoric ‘emptied of meaning’ (Macleod, 2002) – ‘lest we forget’ became ‘what are we remembering?’ (p. 157). In comparison, 1990 coverage included a wide range of interviews with living veterans, diary and letter extracts, and a broader burgeoning ‘Anzac education industry’, which included efforts to teach children about Gallipoli, greater museum participation and reinvigorated interest likely developed over a number of years based on influential books written on Gallipoli such as Bill Gammage’s (1974) The Broken Years, and the popularly of the film Gallipoli (1981).

Twomey (2013) argues that, from the early 1980s, media repositioned Anzac Day reporting in line with neoliberal ideology. Emotion and affect, expressed through personalised, individualised stories, were placed at the centre of reporting in tandem with recasting war as ‘traumatic and horrible’. Here, ‘the “damaged and dependent veteran,” symbolically and rhetorically, was one of the forces that helped to revivify interest in an institution that had been in the doldrums since the late 1960s’ (p. 89). Similarly, older repertoires that linked war to glory and manhood were recast, linking it to horror and the shattering personal effects suffered. Alongside this, Anzac Day has come to be explained as ‘a story of mateship among individuals who exemplify what it is like to be Australian’ (Macleod, 2002: 168). These ideas also resonate in New Zealand; for example, the New Zealand Symphony orchestra recently put together an event ‘influenced by the acts of human violence throughout history’ entitled ‘music, mateship and memories’ (WW100, 2014).

Anzac Day and national life in Aotearoa

Our analysis examines the print media’s approach to Anzac Day within the context of the Treaty of Waitangi and subsequent and ongoing colonisation of Aotearoa. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840–1841 by Māori and representatives of the British Crown allowing for the former to become British citizens and granting British subjects the right to settle in Aotearoa (Orange, 1987). Complications arose over the interpretation and implementation of the Treaty due to Crown determination to use the English form which read as a cession of sovereignty, rather than the Māori language form, which the majority of Māori signed, that stated they would retain sovereignty and self-determination (Tino Rangatiratanga) with the Crown overseeing governance (Humpage, 2008).

The Crown stance was used to legitimise subsequent colonisation that saw an exponential rise in the arrival of British nationals and other Europeans. Land was typically alienated from Māori using quasi-legal processes of Crown pre-emptive purchase and sold to immigrants at higher but still cheap rates. This allowed the Crown to both fund the process of colonisation and entice settlers to leave their homeland and relocate to New Zealand (Novitz et al., 1989). Within a decade, both settler population and culture had come to dominate. Colonial laws, values and social practices quickly became entrenched, with the power and privileges that come with such hegemony benefiting settler society while simultaneously marginalising Māori power, commerce, organisation and social practice. Settler domination persists in the contemporary cultural climate affording a greater sense of inclusion, well-being and higher social status than Māori, so that they experience greater financial wealth, higher levels of education and employment, better housing, health and life expectancy, alongside a host of other advantages (Borell et al., 2009).

The manifest and un-reconstituted colonisation of the country underlies a form of identity that is unexpectedly fragile and precarious, one which Bell (2006) argues reflects a profound ‘ontological unease’. While Pākehā are the majority national group, they are not native to the land they inhabit yet claim a kind of national identity that would assume this to be so. Throughout the initial phases of the settler cultural project, this fact went relatively unchallenged, but latterly historical accounting (Belich, 1986, 1996; Salmond, 1992) has given rise to critiques ‘questioning of the morality of [Pākehā] claims to place and peoplehood’ (Bell, 2006: 256). Indeed, a once secure claim to national identity has increasingly come under question and is arguably reflected in the distinct ways Pākehā observe both Anzac Day, as outlined in this article, and Waitangi Day (McConville et al., 2014) – the other major national day in Aotearoa, the character of which we will briefly outline below in order to contextualise the current argument.

Waitangi Day commemorates the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi which is often regarded as the founding document of the nation. Compared to Anzac Day, however, Waitangi Day is routinely presented in common talk, political speech and media coverage as a conflict ridden and hostile day. It is an occasion where activism and protest around issues that highlight Treaty injustices are regularly recast as Māori being irrationally angry and repeatedly ‘hijacking’ celebrations and ‘disrupting’ the day (Abel, 1997; McConville et al., 2014; Wetherell et al., 2015). While the day ‘could’ be a day for ‘celebration’ and ‘cordial conversation’, it instead becomes a day that ‘we’ would rather forget. In short, mainstream media in particular use the day as a reminder as to why Māori activism is little more than an unfounded commotion. This further entrenches the idea that Māori regularly threaten ‘New Zealanders’ enjoyment of social spaces (see also, Nairn et al., 2009), in brazen attempts to draw upon what is widely represented as their ‘privileged’ status – a common trope in social discourse (McCreanor, 2008; Nairn and McCreanor, 1991) despite the glaring evidence of marginalisation, exclusion and disparities.

Both Anzac and Waitangi Days are used as sites in which the maintenance and reinforcement of settler hegemony is performed, reproduced and maintained through varying means to the same end. Anzac Day is viewed as ‘our’ day, and thus celebrated as ‘we’ (Pākehā) see fit, while Waitangi Day is seen as ‘their’ day – and accordingly devalued and disregarded. This observation is supported by the discrepancy in funding each day receives. Tens of millions of dollars have been set aside for projects related to the First World War centenary programme since 2012. Lottery Grants Board Funding has allocated over 25 million in funding to support community involvement; Creative New Zealand has provided 1.5 million dollars for organisations both national and international to support ‘large-scale, collaborative work with New Zealand artists as part of the wider government programme to mark the First World War centenary’ (WW100, n.d.-b). Alongside this, a range of funders have provided monetary assistance around the day, from further lottery grants, Veterans’ Affairs New Zealand assisting old soldiers to attend overseas commemorations, and a range of arts and culture organisations to broadcasting assistance from New Zealand On Air (WW100, n.d.-a).

These figures are particularly illuminating when considered alongside Waitangi Day funding. The ‘Commemorating Waitangi Day Fund’ administered by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (MCH), for instance, offers local government and community organisations the opportunity to apply for grants which range from NZ$200 to NZ$10,000 and on average are delivered at NZ$3000 (MCH, 2015) to a total of around half a million dollars. Recently, MCH declared that ‘more than $17 million (NZD) has been allocated to help communities commemorate the centenary (of World War One)’ (MCH, 2016). This comparative lack can be again explored in terms of the way in which Anzac Day is marked as a day primarily to reproduce a particular settler-centric perspective and in turn reinforce an associated hegemonic identity, with a greater focus on internal wars between Māori and Pākehā in the years after the Treaty was signed, potentially raising complications for the fantasy of an untroubled and uniform sense of national identity.

Imaging an emotional nation

This article draws upon three positions around the print media that taken together, imagine an emotional nation. First, following Anderson (1983), we assume nations to be partly imagined in nature. Anderson notes the degree to which the large groups of people that form a nation will never meet all of those marked as belonging, but nonetheless manage to maintain a coherent imaginative sense of connectedness and ongoing felt sense of national identity. A key way through which an imagined community constructs a sense of continuity and connection is through print capitalism’s capacity to circulate ideas to a large number of people and, as a result, reproduce particular cultural formations.

The emotional possibilities the print media offer on Anzac Day are often quite similar to those of other mainstream media outlets; for example, Radio New Zealand, which has a reputation for fair and accurate journalism, tends to frame Anzac agendas through conventional discursive practices. As one long time journalist employed by the station attests,

Every year, Anzac Day, like the budget, has a formula to its reporting. Firstly, there are the dawn services that occur across the nation and reporters are assigned to those where the Governor-General, Prime Minister and other high profile people attend. (Pamatatau, 2012)

Within this formulaic and predictable approach to national identity building, there is little willingness to engage in coverage that includes perspectives outside settler colonial narratives (Pamatatau, 2012). Visual media such as television has played a significant role in the revival of interest in and around Anzac Day, with the advent of coverage transmitted from Gallipoli in the 1980s now commonplace alongside regular documentaries and televised pilgrimages by ‘elderly men and their supporters, accompanied by a raft of state officials’ (Davis, 2009: 80).

Beyond the mainstream, since 2004 Māori television has presented indigenous histories and stories in ways that complement, support, maintain and challenge conventional constructions of New Zealand national identity, and from 2006 its day long Anzac Day coverage includes indigenous histories that can assist in rethinking the greater national imaginary (Abel, 2013; Smith, 2011). New and social media offer possibilities for citizens to directly engage with the day in a range of ways; for example, Social Networking Service Twitter saw a range of expressions of dissent around Anzac Day in 2015 (Edwards, 2015). The blogosphere in general offers similar opportunities for a wider range of voices to engage around the day, some exemplifying dissent and reflexivity and others reproducing normative and expected affective practices (e.g. Upton, 2015).

Our second assumption follows Wetherell (2012, 2013) in assuming affect and emotion to be entangled with discourse, meaning making, and practice. In contrast to highly influential theories of affect that posit it as non-verbal, pre-personal and post-human in nature – as an ‘excess’ or ‘operating outside discourse’ (e.g. Clough, 2010; Thrift, 2004), ‘affect-discursive patterns evident in social life that operate rather like other social practices (such as cooking, sport, personal care, mothering and so on)’ (Wetherell, 2013: 351). The study of affective-discursive practice observes culturally available forms of emoting and making meaning and, in this case, the canonical means through which some forms of being affected and some emoting actors are privileged and included (while others are simultaneously excluded) through familiar and recognisable tropes and rhetoric. The patterning produced coalesces with wider social and national histories and ties into ways through which space and place are both organised and managed. Affect and emotion are often understood as private, hidden and located in an inaccessible psychological domain. In contrast, the study of affective-discursive practice turns attention to the public, performative, patterned and social nature of affect. In this sense, affect can be revealed, interrogated and observed through an exploration of how social power and force accrues from successfully constructing a particular kind of affected community and making it stick (Ahmed, 2004) as canonical and consensual.

Third, while a lay conceptualisation of print media coverage around Anzac Day might be that the media attempt to anticipate and describe actual social practices performed by members of the nation, we assume that media representations around the day more specifically act as a tool to both map and leverage normative reproduction of a particular kind of community of practice. Lave and Wenger (1991) define a community of practice as a group involved in related learning and activity and who, over time, reproduce the community through gradated induction and socialisation. The media, in this sense, operate as a platform through which the coordination and facilitation of particular social processes are articulated working to (re)induct members of this community into particular kinds of identities and affective practices.

Taken together, we suggest that the print media, through its imaginings of the affected nation, play a key role in the reproduction of a particular community of affective practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. More specifically, we argue news choreography is organised in such a way so as to facilitate the fantasy of a homogeneous community through which congenial similars sharing an untroubled colonial identity are free to reproduce hegemonic rituals, routines and affective practices. Of course, these canonical, espoused practices will differ somewhat to actual lived practices, and the ideological map of how social actors ought to feel and be in relation to aspects of the day will not always successfully show up in embodied states.

The current focus recognises that repetition and foregrounding of various interpretive repertoires and affective-discursive positions available on the day will impress upon the public sphere in ways that allow for certain emotional positions to become obvious and expected, while other possibilities recede into the background. Interpretive repertoires (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell and Potter, 1988) refer to socially available patterns and familiar formulations of events and phenomena which emerge through culturally recognisable discourse configurations, metaphors, rhetoric and tropes. Inter-pretive repertoires offer both a perspective from which to understand the world and usually occur alongside possibilities for particular characters of speech and forms of feeling to emerge. Here, subject positions (Davies and Harré, 1990) refer to the range of identity possibilities, voices and speaking positions a text constructs. In this study, we are interested in the emotional identities and forms of affect on offer.

The corpus developed for our analysis focuses on 1 year – 2015 – and includes 77 articles from a survey of national and regional newspapers. All articles were included that discussed issues around Anzac Day, published over the 4 days in the lead up to 25 April 2015, along with those published on and after the day itself. An analysis of the main topics covered in these articles found that 6 focussed on the poppy, 7 focussed on preparations at Gallipoli, 6 focussed on managing dissent, 7 focussed on sports matches, 11 focussed on community preparation for the day, 12 discussed Anzac Day in general, 14 focussed on patriotism around the day, 12 discussed successful Anzac services and 2 were critical of the day.

Anzac Day is a ‘Sacred Day of Respectful Remembrance’

The print media’s approach to Anzac Day is overwhelmingly unified around the interpretive repertoire of Anzac day being a sacred day of respectful remembrance. This repertoire is typically uncontested, facing no ideological dilemmas or serious challenges to its legitimacy. We begin by exploring ways in which such an imagined community of practice might be reproduced via the print media:

Gallipoli is a name that has been seared into New Zealand and Australian consciences and holds a sacred spot in both countries as this is regarded as being the birth of our nations.

Perhaps it’s fitting then that it was so bloody and so painful for those who fought and died there, as well as their mourning loved ones left behind.

To mark their sacrifice – and of all the other Anzac servicemen and women – we wear red poppies in the lead up to April 25 (Anzac Day) and November 11 (Remembrance Day).

The small flower is appropriate as it grew in both Flanders fields and the hills of Gallipoli.

Last Friday, I went into town to finalise details of an imminent trip that will pass close to Flanders fields.

I was pleased – and not a little surprised – at the huge number of people wearing poppies. There were so many that those without could be counted on one hand (Moore, 2015).

Published on 21 of April in the days leading up to Anzac Day, this extract exemplifies ways in which a social field is organised so that opportunities for collective learning are presented around how the occasion ought to be normatively engaged with and adhered to. The opening sentences present Gallipoli as a site through which national identities were birthed via collective turmoil and affective practices of pain. As a ‘sacred spot’ in ‘our’ country’s history, the day is presented as one that connects people through a shared domain of interest – nationhood. Assuming this interest, the article extract seeks to build a relationship to and understanding around the day via preparing symbolic (‘The small flower’) and affective (‘I was pleased …’) resources members of this community will require in order to acquire a degree of practical expertise around the day.

Poppy wearing is modelled as an essential requirement for membership in this community of practice and offers a material and performative connection to both past and present. In short, this extract assists in forming the conditions necessary to ensure that the repertoire is operationalised on the day in a way that cultivates adherence to normative affective practices. It is in effect an affective-discursive strategy of assimilation to a community of practice concerned with the reproduction of a particular identity. The following excerpt speaks more directly to those this community of practice might more specifically include:

I think that we are only really now beginning to realise how important Gallipoli was. It was a time that we actually began to think that we weren’t British, that we weren’t Australian – that we were actually New Zealanders.

We were a nation in our own right. It was a real turning point for us – we really saw that we were different.

Gallipoli is a key part in our history and our sense of ourselves as being Kiwis. Those servicemen and women at Gallipoli really embodied the best of us. They were courageous, selfless and incredibly human.

Gallipoli is such an emotional place. You can’t help but be emotional when you look at those graves there – and that is just a fraction of those who died there. (Bailey, 2015)

Taken from a piece entitled ‘Gallipoli such an emotional place’, celebrated local media personality Judy Bailey recounts her trip to Gallipoli for Anzac Day commemorations. In the above vignette, Bailey employs the personal pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ alongside adverbal qualifications such as ‘New Zealanders’ and ‘nation’ intending to speak for ‘Kiwis’ as such. This presupposes a singular, unified collective of people, of which the ‘best’, akin to the Anzacs, come replete with emotional and psychological characteristics of courageousness, selflessness and incredible humanness. This could be described as the True Kiwi affective-discursive position – a broad brush appeal to the supposed emotive nature of the figure of the ‘Kiwi New Zealander’. The collective singular ‘New Zealanders’ is contrasted to British and Australian national identities of which separation, distinction and difference from what was inferred as a more unified tripartite supposedly emerged through the country’s role in Gallipoli. In this light, a very specific kind of national identity is being constructed; one that finds its roots as a settler colonial society augmented by the British Crown. From this perspective, the ‘we’ Bailey speaks of and to is the Pākehā ‘we’ – those of us who identify with Britain through ancestry or descent and align with those Australians who share a common heritage.

Another affective-discursive position this formulation gives rise to is that of the pilgrim on a spiritual journey – a position that affectively marks those travelling to Gallipoli as dedicated, diligent subjects who will, by default, also occupy the True Kiwi position. The spiritual pilgrim position was liberally spread through the corpus and likely reflects broader social practices of national commemoration around Anzac Day. Indeed, secular pilgrimages have become popular ways to express and enact nationalistic, travel, spiritual and semiotic motives within a broader frame work of self discovery (Hyde and Harman, 2011). In terms of a cultural identity for Pākehā, then, Anzac Day offers not only imagined possibilities but also concrete places and spaces where one can venture and practise forms of national pride and honour as modelled through Bailey’s account of her trip.

Bailey asserts an inherent emotionality to Gallipoli; one ‘can’t help but be emotional when you look at those graves there’. This is assumed to be what many from New Zealand experience as they find themselves immersed in the experience of being at the battlefields of the Gallipoli peninsula observing the gravestones: ‘They believe that their emotional response is immediate, elicited by the sight of … gravestones … as if all prior knowledge of Gallipoli counted for nothing when weighed against the experience of “being there”’ (McKenna and Ward, 2007: 141). It is precisely this kind of affective and emotional work that charges communities of practice, and the places and spaces within which they function, with particular forms of meaning, affect and intention (McKenna and Ward, 2007). For those unable to make the trip to Gallipoli, the many commemorations held throughout the country provide ample opportunity to participate and media offer much coverage and commentary. The following excerpt exemplifies the form local news and community commentary take:

Every nook and cranny was packed at today’s Gallipoli centenary Anzac Day dawn service at Tauranga RSA’s cenotaph.

At least 3000 people crammed the carpark and surrounding areas, grabbing whatever space they could find to get a view across a sea of heads.

It was clear from the volume of traffic streaming down Cameron Rd that the service was going to be unlike anything the RSA had seen before.

And that’s how it turned out, with the poignant atmosphere given a special resonance by the sheer numbers who flooded into the grounds.

The emotionally laden atmosphere of the minute’s silence after the bugler played the Last Post was so quiet that the air could have been cut with a knife. (Cousins, 2015)

Print media coverage was significant in this domain, and overwhelmingly framed the day as a ‘successful’ day, one in which the promise of something powerful, stirring and memorable was affirmed by the widely reported numbers of people taking part in services across the country, alongside a range of deeply emotive accounts repeatedly laid down in print. Taken from an article titled ‘Record numbers commemorate at Tauranga dawn service’, the central affective push of the piece focuses on documenting the grandiose and eminent nature of the occasion. Drawing on water metaphors (‘sea of heads’, ‘traffic streaming’, ‘flooded into the grounds’), the article emphasises crowd sizes of a nature, which in any other situation might perhaps be reported as reaching dangerous, potentially unmanageable levels (e.g. ‘3000 people crammed the carpark and surrounding areas, grabbing whatever space they could find’). This nature of excess in terms of crammed bodies and limited space within which to contain them is juxtaposed against their ability to stand together in silence despite the emotional intensity they carry. The affective-discursive position which this, and other pieces like it, evokes a strong sense of the figure of the galvanised community citizen; one who shows up and eagerly participates in dawn services in ways that strictly adhere to silence at the correct times, poised restraint and polite spectatorship.

This kind of national nostalgia is in effect a tool to protect a positive sense of national in-group identity (Smeekes, 2015) and maintain a perimeter around the community of imagined affective practices contained and insulated with very specific emotional, material and psychological characteristics. People who attend these events are by default positioned as True Kiwis, but they are also galvanised community citizens who might one day go on to also be pilgrims on a spiritual journey. Affective-discursive positions are multiple, overlapping and dialectically reinforcing one another and the hegemonic repertoire that Anzac Day is a sacred day of respectful remembrance. As such, it becomes difficult for discourses of dissent and non-normative affective-discursive practices to penetrate or seriously challenge its force. The following illustrates ways in which one example of non-normativity was dealt within the mediascape:

‘The din was horrendous’ – Motorcycle gang drowns out Last Post

The Rebels Motorcycle Club has apologised for disrupting today’s Dawn Service in Waiouru.

A written statement emailed late this afternoon said the club had the ‘utmost respect for our fallen heroes whom have given their lives for our freedom’.

‘We were passing through at the time of service; we stopped to pay our respects. Assuming the service was completed, we then continued on our journey. Unfortunately, we misunderstood, causing disruption, this was not our intention. There are no excuses for the events that occurred; we can ensure you this will not happen again in the future’.

‘We deeply apologise for this, all hope that this apology is accepted.’

A grandmother who was at the service said members of the gang turned up to the service in the central North Island and revved their motorbikes while a bugler played the Last Post.

Merna Brotherston, who was at the service with her daughter and two grandsons, said the disruption was ‘despicable’ and shocked hundreds of people paying their respects.

‘It was really disgusting because there were lots of families there, people turned out with babies in prams and everything. The din was horrendous, then they drove off and it was just despicable – what a lack of respect’. (Ryan, 2015)

Positioned as a ‘gang’, and thus immediately excluded, the headline sets up an affective-discursive position for The Rebels Motorcycle Club that, in ‘disrupting’ the playing of the Last Post, become disrespectful menaces. In the opening sentences, however, the power of the day of respectful remembrance repertoire is put to work in two significant ways. First, via an immediate apology from the club for the disruption, the sincerity of which is emphasised through ‘a written statement’ in which a quote taken from the letter draws upon familiar tropes of Anzac day being a day to respect those who ‘have given their lives for our freedom’. Second, the nature of the collective doing the apology, a gang that supposedly operates outside socially acceptable communities of practice, so clearly, humbly and ‘deeply’ apologise for the disruption. This is exemplary of the ways in which the respectful remembrance repertoire’s force seemingly extends to categorically distinct communities of affective practice outside of its normative scope and as such reinforces the ubiquity of its hegemony.

The affective-discursive reach of the non-normative disrespectful menace here extends into an interesting juxtaposition with ‘a grandmother’, one who – outside of Anzac Day – is often excluded through a narrative of dependency and burden (e.g., Walker and Maltby, 2012). However, here she is given a speaking position as a True Kiwi and used to reinforce the kinds of social practices one ought to engage in on such an occasion through affective-discursive practices of difference (‘what a lack of respect’) and taste (‘It was really disgusting’). Her account includes other kinds of actors (‘babies in prams and everything’), which exemplifies the possibility of inclusion across a diverse range of groups contingent upon adhering to certain discursive, affective and performative tropes.

These conditions for inclusion follow a similar pattern for Māori. Indeed, what little aspects of indigeneity are included in the corpus tend to be those that are seen as least problematic to settler hegemony. The sporadic mention of ‘Māori cultural groups’, for instance, is occasionally evoked in ways that enrich the emotion and affect of an occasion and assimilate within a hegemonic narrative: ‘Then, after a period of silence, the New Zealand Defence Force Māori culture group will perform a stirring karanga (call to gathering) and the Dawn Service will begin with an introduction by Master of Ceremonies Major General Mark Kelly’.

The following exemplifies how engaging in overt dissent, in this case in Australia, is dealt with through the affective-discursive practices of the New Zealand print media:

SBS says a sports presenter who made highly inappropriate comments about diggers was fired because audiences could no longer respect or trust him.

The multicultural broadcaster on Sunday sacked football journalist Scott McIntyre for a series of tweets on Anzac Day that Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull described as ‘despicable’.

McIntyre began his tweets on the centenary of the Gallipoli landings by criticising what he said was the ‘cultification [sic] of an imperialist invasion’.

‘Remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these brave Anzacs in Egypt, Palestine and Japan’, he said.

SBS managing director Michael Ebeid on Sunday labelled the remarks inappropriate and disrespectful, saying they breached the broadcaster’s code of conduct and social media policy.

‘It’s not tenable to remain on air if your audience doesn’t respect or trust you’, he said.

Besides causing outrage on social media, the tweets also caught the eye of the minister, who said it was difficult to think of anything more offensive or inappropriate.

‘Despicable remarks which deserve to be condemned’, Mr Turnbull tweeted. (AAP, 2015)

Against a particular affective climate established through the day of respectful remembrance repertoire and associated affective-discursive positions of inclusion and exclusion, the above article exemplifies how overt dissent is managed. The article opens by positioning a resistor as a despicable deviant. Through engaging with affective-discursive practices that oppose hegemonic repertoires around the day where, for instance, ‘heroes fought and died for our freedom’, a sports presenter is positioned as engaging in ‘highly inappropriate’ and ‘despicable’ behaviour. Consequences of these actions are exemplified through the reporter being ‘fired’ from his position in the organisation.

Throughout the article, the resistor is continually excluded through affective-discursive practices which condemn dissent, deny debate and avoid critical reflection and broader discussions of meaning making around the day. While some of the resistor’s positions are quoted, none of them are brought into dialogue or conversation, effectively working to discount any validity his claims may hold. Multiple actors in positions of power are drawn on to police dissident condemnation through emotive expressions of disapproval.

These kinds of media practices echo Murray et al.’s (2008) observation ‘of what Daniel Hallin has termed the “sphere of legitimate controversy” with the anti-war movement relegated to a “sphere of deviance”’ (p. 7). While Murray et al. observe this repositioning from favourable to unfavourable coverage of activism occurring as a result of media coverage during wartime, it appears to have some crossover as a similar media practice during contemporary war commemoration, at least in New Zealand. Taking into consideration Billig’s (1995) argument that national identity is reproduced in banal and mundane ways alongside more overt nationalist acts such as going to war, it follows that a militarised day such as Anzac would be of benefit to the maintenance of a nation state, and more specifically the survival of a national identity currently traversing a period of ontological unease.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to demonstrate ways in which the print media both appeal to and model a dominant cultural identity in order to imagine a particular kind of emotional nation. Drawing upon familiar tropes and rhetoric, a range of geographically specific affective-discursive practices are recurrently put to work.

In compiling a distinct set of interconnected affective-discursive positions together under a singular, uncontested interpretive repertoire that Anzac Day is a sacred day of respectful remembrance, hegemony is assumed, national unity is performed and settler identity is effectively reproduced. Boundaries demarcating acceptable and transgressive affective practices are clearly set in place, with opportunity for inclusion open if social actors adhere to a specific set of rites and rituals around the day and accept the dominant historical narrative.

The observed print media affective-discursive practices critiqued in the analysis reinforce and build on prior literature in a number of ways. Anzac Day is again presented as a sacred occasion with public support at an all-time high. The day is portrayed as being infused with emotion, meaning and purpose, through a range of sites and practices set up, both at Gallipoli and across the country, embodying and exemplifying the power that this kind of affective meaning making has for national identity. However, particularly in light of the near invisibility of Māori in media representations of these commemorations over the survey period, this article questions, whose national identity is being performed. Although on initial inspection it appears as if the day is presented as one that speaks to New Zealanders as such, closer examination reveals a clear appeal to Pākehā identities and cultural history.

When providing coverage around Anzac Day, our sample of print media often fail to take into account the contributions of Māori to the armed services, the position of the Treaty of Waitangi in nation building and the subsequent role that Pākehā and Māori ought to have in the way identities and emotional positions are represented. From this perspective, the way in which dissent is managed also needs to be reassessed, with a broader, deeper pool of affective-discursive resources deployed to deal with a range of possibilities for how we might collectively come to terms with our conflicting histories, emotions, discourses and identities. Indeed, national life is impoverished when media lack the cultural competence necessary to effectively engage in broader debates and political discourse.