Tweeting from the past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary @ABCNews1915

Introduction

In the weeks preceding the centenary of Anzac Day, 25 April 2015, I discovered a Twitter feed that intrigued and puzzled me. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had established @ABCNews1915, an account that it explained was ‘Live tweeting (+100yrs) accounts of #Gallipoli landing from soldiers, nurses, officers, media, politicians’. The feed used archival material from the National Library of Australia (NLA), the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) to build up what it called an ‘uncensored’ collective account of the Anzac assault at Gallipoli. As the ABC’s (2015) website asked,

How would Australian soldiers, political leaders and the media have tweeted the Anzac experience if they had social media? Imagine the landing at Gallipoli reported by uncensored social media, where soldiers, officers, nurses and the media report what they see, think and feel.

I started following the feed and began to receive snippets of text, sometimes accompanied by a photograph of a person, scene or handwritten text. The tweets provided first-hand accounts of the experience of preparing for, travelling to and fighting on the Gallipoli peninsula, starting weeks before with the journey from Australia and forward postings to Cairo. As 25 April approached, the tweets became more frequent and the number of linked accounts increased to include MPs, officers and enlisted men fighting at Gallipoli, and even Mustafa Ataturk, then a commander of the Turkish forces. By 28 April, King George V (via @TheKing_1915) had offered his congratulations to the Australians in under 140 characters: ‘The Australian troops have indeed proved themselves worthy sons of the Empire #Anzac100 @FergusonGG_1915 via @MoAD_Canberra’.

The Gallipoli campaign is highly symbolic in Australia, commonly understood as a moment of national genesis for the then British colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and 25 April 2015 was a highly significant moment of commemorative activity for the ‘centenary of Anzac’ that had been years on the planning. So it was not surprising that this highly significant date was the focus of innovative and online forms of commemoration. This practice of presenting history ‘as it happened’ on Twitter was also not unfamiliar, with other sites, such as the well-established @RealTime WWII, enjoying thousands of followers. The Anzac centenary social media effort, however (which included many sources besides the ABC and on other social media platforms), had particular currency. This was because they were part of a much bigger, multi-modal national engagement with the centenary of Gallipoli, a well-established part of the contemporary national narrative in Australia. The online presentation of the Anzac myth was part of innumerable national and transnational commemorative events and projects around the world connected to the First World War that have been well documented and subjected to intense scholarly inquiry elsewhere (see Daley, n.d.; Frame, 2016; Holbrook, 2014; Scates et al., 2015; Sumartojo and Wellings, 2014).

However, the ‘live tweeting’ of the landings at Gallipoli confounded and complicated the familiar and ritualised commemorative forms by treating events and figures a century old as contemporary rather than timeless, or even as having happened in the past. The tweets were personalised as individual memory and were only made possible by the availability of digitised archival material and the ubiquity of the technologies that brought them, quite literally, into the hands of a potentially very wide audience through smartphones, tablets and computers. Thus, ways of understanding memory, history and its role in narrating national identity to large audiences were complicated by the time-spaces and accessibility of digital social media. Importantly, the feed was presented as ‘uncensored’, a common way to understand the use of Twitter during unfolding contemporary events such as protests or conflict. Although this was key to the feed’s claim to an authentic ‘as-it-happened’ account, as I will argue, its careful curation by official national institutions meant this was not the case. In what follows, I attempt to make sense of these online deployments of national history via Twitter by the national broadcaster in conjunction with official archives and museums and seek to open ways of thinking about commemoration as it draws the now ubiquitous online world into its assemblage, arguing that this has political implications that we must now consider in investigating new forms of digital state commemoration.

One such implication concerns how the archival trace of the past is presented as lively and emergent, and the temporalities of national history and memory that this complicates. Indeed, as Nora (1989) remarks, national memory is contingent on the functions of the archive and its ongoing relevance for the concerns of the present: ‘Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording …’ (p. 13).

These recording and remembering functions, however, take on new meaning and have new impacts and affects though their materialisation as a digital echo of an event a century ago, as they are collected, catalogued, accessed and circulated faster and to a wider audience. This article is focused on one such form of online circulation via a single Twitter feed, examining the implications of its foundation in official sources, and the treatment of chronology and spatiality that is made possible by its digital dissemination. In short, rather than addressing responses to or interactions with the feed, I seek to explore this case as it was officially presented: as a new way to ‘make our history live’ (ABC, 2015).

I begin by considering how collective remembering and forgetting in national ‘mythscapes’ (Bell, 2003) occurs, particularly in regard to the treatment of temporality and locality, how the traces of the past contribute to such ‘mythscapes’ and the collective and individual scales at which this occurs. I extend this to digitised archival photographs, letters and diaries, exploring how such material might invite us into a relationship with the past that relies on the images’ more-than-representational qualities to create connections across time, connections that are now rapidly accessible thanks to new digital technologies. I draw this together with recent scholarship on digital materialities that conceptualises the digital as thoroughly enmeshed with people’s everyday activities and experiences. This research considers how data might be expressed as relationalities that entangle the digital, material, affective, sensory and representational (Pink et al., 2016).

I then turn to the empirical basis of this paper, an analysis of the content of one online source, the Twitter handle ‘@ABCNews1915’, part of the commemorative programming from the nationally funded radio, television and online broadcaster. The ABC project used this handle to tweet in the lead up to the centenary of the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 2015, with 424 posts presented as live reportage from 1 to 30 April 2015. To come to grips with this material, I both followed the Twitter feed in the weeks leading up to Anzac Day 2015 and also saved and analysed all the tweets from the project. The archival materials, discussed in more detail below, that make up the content of the ‘live’ narration of the lives and events of 1915 are drawn from textual accounts – contemporaneous diaries, letters, newspaper reports and Hansard excerpts – with a handful of photographs of individuals, landscapes or in situ documentary images of military activity. I will use this material to explore the implications of using traces of the past in this way and to speculate on what ways of thinking about temporality and national identity such digital forms might reinforce or make possible. In doing so, I attend to how such forms might shape how people make sense of and come to grips with the ‘experience’ of the past, arguing that the obfuscation of the boundaries between the past and present has implications for the vitality and relevance of national historical narratives.

Sites, scales and temporalities of memory

‘Modernity has a particular problem with forgetting’, remarks Connerton (2009: 1), in an extension of his earlier work on ‘how societies remember’ (Connerton, 1989). For Connerton, forgetting is spatial, a result of how the specificity of locality has lost meaning in the twentieth century. He argues that a major source of forgetting is ‘associated with processes that separate social life from locality and human dimensions’, changes that include the ‘superhuman’ speed of movement between distance places; megacities that confound walkability, sociability and architectural longevity; and consumption that is alienated from the processes of production (Connerton, 2009: 5). This characterisation of modernity as narrowly focused on a fluid, ever-changing present with little interest in the past is a common way to conceptualise it, but Connerton’s concern is about changes to spatial experience that are at the root of human experience: ‘There is some kind of deep transformation in what might be described as the meaning of life based on shared memories, and that meaning is eroded by a structural transformation in the life-spaces of modernity’ (Connerton, 2009: 5).

Connerton’s treatment of memory as anchored in locality puts the focus on lived experience, and by extension, its messy, contingent and uncertain qualities, even if he appears to rely on a relatively proscribed notion of ‘locality’. Having said this, my intention here is not so much to critique Connerton as to use his interest in locality as a springboard to ways of thinking about the ‘location’ of the national, broadly defined, and how this relates to what and how we remember and forget stories about the nation. His locative approach also invites us to think about the past by means of the sites in which things happened, rather than as a series of chronological events that unfolded neatly, one after another. Indeed, such an orientation towards locality can de-centre a linear temporality and provide insights into the past that insist on its openness and mutability, shedding light on how it remains vital in the present. Thinking about the past through sites can enable us to draw on ways of thinking about place as relational, open and processual (Massey, 2005) and as made through experience, with the past is a vital part of how we make sense of our locality in the ‘here-and-now’.

Nora (1989) adopts just such a language of place by situating memory in lieux de mémoire, broadly defined as deliberately constructed repositories of memory that are necessary because official ‘history’ now demands the past be organised in particular ways. However, whereas memory is held by individuals or communities and has always been malleable to suit different needs, the official historical reanimation of past lives has only relatively recently become readily available to the public through the digitisation of archives and the online availability of this material. In digital form, this has become delocalised, as Connerton laments, pulled out of its material contexts – books, papers, photo albums – into global online networks manifest on our smartphones, tablets and laptops, even as the digital offers new ways to compose, enrol and address the publics for whom the memories might matter. Available virtually everywhere, this material is no longer pinned only to specific locations, but floats freely and in doing so accumulates new meanings and affects as it circulates.

At the same time as he considers ‘forgetting’, Connerton identifies a paradoxical but parallel ‘memory boom’ (Winter, 2006) that also has flowered since the 1980s, broadly in time with the delocalised modernity he identifies. Embraced by states and citizens alike, popular ways to access and make sense of the past through empathetic connection to individuals, often by way of family relationships, have gradually subordinated critical and rigorous inquiry into the events and conditions of the past (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. (Mycock et al., 2014: 6–7)

Furthermore, collective memory can elide the scales of the individual and the national, and this is part of its appeal for officials who use it to specific political ends. Taking issue with the term ‘collective memory’, Bell (2003) posits that the shared symbolic resources that consolidate and express common experience on a national scale, such as war, instead constitute a national ‘mythscape’, ‘the perpetually mutating repository for the representation of the past for the purposes of the present’ (p. 66). Because it is vernacular and based on individual experience, he argues that the mythscape is more open, processual and diverse and thus contains the potential for resistance to hegemonic versions of the past. Thus, the notion of the mythscape suggests the potential for an inclusive and expanded politics of how the past is remembered and deployed.

If the individual and collective are blended (and possibly confused) in this process, then temporality is similarly folded, condensed and blurred in national mythscapes; indeed, Closs Stephens (2013) argues that ‘nations appear to have solidity because they give the impression of having a deep history’, despite their roots in the modern era (p. 17). As I have argued elsewhere (Sumartojo, 2015a), this is linked to commemorative ritual that derives its impact from a sense of being ‘timeless’:

‘national ritual time’ also links us to generations of co-nationals who we imagine have participated in the same ceremony. The participation of children and young people, and a recurring narrative of ‘passing down’ such ceremonies to younger generations, also imply a national future in which the same rituals will be performed … [and] help create a sense of ‘national time’ that transcends quotidian life, using remembrance to link us to the past and implying futurity through their apparent permanence. (pp. 13–14)

A similar way to frame the relationship between the past and the present is Jankélévitch’s (2005) notion of the ‘irrevocable’ past that ‘having-been-done … is stubborn and tough’ and by extension cannot be undone or forgotten (cited in Bevernage, 2013: 4). This is the past experienced as ‘a persistent and massive depository that sticks to the present’, and this ‘persisting past … blurs the strict delineation between past and present and thereby even questions the existence of these temporal dimensions as separate entities’ (Bevernage, 2013: 4–5). While the intractability of the ‘irrevocable past’ is often used in the context of historical mass violence or trauma, and indeed, the First World War was traumatic on a global scale, it is also useful for thinking about how commemoration does more than merely ‘keep the past alive’. Indeed, not only is the past kept relevant through commemoration, but as I will argue, the immediacy and reach of the live tweets that are the subject of this paper go further by complicating the boundaries between the past and the present. Furthermore, they do so by organising the past in a particularly linear way that simplifies and tidies it while simultaneously attempting to present it as complex, emergent and ‘uncensored’. Twitter is therefore the ideal platform through which to explore this paradox precisely because of its recognised contemporary function as reporting on emerging events while they are still messy and unfolding and before they become fixed into coherent narratives, only discernible in retrospect.

In this section I have roughly sketched some of the links between the sites and scales of memory narratives, by means of the notion of a dynamic ‘mythscape’, and the national temporalities that can make commemorative activity appear timeless. As I will discuss next, the use of digital technologies to engage with these narratives has further complicated the encounter with ‘national time’.

Digital materialities and temporalities

New digital forms of memory-making, as people archive emails, reproduce, save and share photographs and record their movements on GPS-based self-tracking or mobile social media apps, have also complicated and expanded the sites of memory and the irrevocability of the past. This is not so much to disagree with Connerton’s argument that modernity has both a dearth and surplus of memory, but to point out that the sites and relationships in which memory is made now include a dynamic online world. Accordingly, open, connected and processual digital ‘life-spaces’ (Connerton, 2009) or lieux de mémoire (Nora, 1989) are entangled in processes of memory at the widespread and collective scale, and we must attend to these to understand how national commemoration reaches, draws in and affects people.

Recent research on digital memory has considered the effect of digital archiving of personal memory (Schwarz, 2014); a range of forms of digital commemoration, usually by means of online memorials to particular events or individuals (Hajek et al., 2016); and ongoing projects on how future memories will be made through digital means (see http://futuremaking.space/project/creating-future-memory/). There is also a substantial literature emerging on online memorialisation (i.e. Danilova, 2015; Graham et al., 2015; New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2015; Papailias, 2016), much of which identifies the vernacular, interactive and public aspects of these expressions regard and grief. This includes Knudsen and Stage’s (2012) useful notion of the ‘commemorative emergence’ that is ‘continuously reinvested with new meanings’ (p. 419) as online responses accumulate to social media memorials, in many cases (but not all) to the recently deceased.

However, my concern in this article is focused on state-sponsored commemoration of war as it was disseminated, and as a form of official remembrance that is promulgated in new ways. Indeed, as Keightley and Schlesinger (2014) remark, ‘Rapid changes in digital technologies, the greater availability of historical materials online, and increasing digital connectivity across the world, have kept the processes that constitute mediated social memory in flux’ (p. 745). These materials include a wide range of images and texts, with the photograph one of the most common and powerful:

the now venerable photographic image – so central to news and documentary – remains a central vehicle for encapsulating and constituting the past for present-day social remembering practices. The politics of such practices’ content and curation are just as important in, and indeed indivisible from, the exploration of their digital remediation. (Keightley and Schelsinger, 2014: 746)

The affordances of digital archival photographs also extend in some ways to text extracts from personal accounts, as can be seen in the @ABCNews1915 Twitter feed, and include two important aspects that charge them in terms of commemorative use: the intimacy of the images and words of individuals, which are inevitably wrapped in followers’ present-day knowledge of the casualties of the Gallipoli campaign, and our emergent digital encounters with them ‘as it happened’ as tweets, on computers, tablets or smartphones. Indeed, Edwards’ (2014) comments about photographs can also apply to text in this context, when she argues that people want to use photographs for cultural, social and political reasons: ‘people want a sense of presence, of connectedness, which enables photographs to function as the connective tissue of nation – a connectedness to people and a connectedness to place’ (p. 324). In this sense, excerpts from diaries, letters and other first-hand accounts construct a similar sense of immediacy and connectedness because of the intimate terms in which they are rendered. Photographs and other tweeted material are part of the ‘temporally extended narrative’ (Bell, 2003: 69) that makes up the national mythscape and are part of how the nation narrates itself at scales from the vernacular to the official. Their materiality – here extended to the small screens of hand-held digital devices – was part of how they were used, experienced and made sense of through the @ABCNews1915 Twitter feed. But equally important was their temporality – in other words, that they were presented as an unfolding and as-yet-unknown linear stream of events.

The example of the photograph helps explain the transformed encounter with the past through new digital materialities and temporalities. José van Dijck (2008) remarks that while photographs used to be a way of recording family members and events, the ubiquity of smartphones has contributed to their ability to reinforce social bonds between peers and share everyday experience, although this is not a result of digitisation alone: ‘the tendency to fuse photography with daily experience and communication is part of a broader cultural transformation that involves individualization and intensification of experience’ (p. 62). Thus, the status of the individual in the photographic record has a different meaning than a century ago when the materiality of photographs – a combination of paper, ink and chemicals – was more fragile. Accordingly, Edwards and Hart (2004) insist that ‘a photograph is a three-dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image … [they] are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience’ (p. 1). Contemporary photographs now also encompass the materiality of the devices we now commonly use to look at them and by extension the data infrastructures and digitisation programmes that bring them to our fingertips. When a century-old diary entry or photograph is digitised and shared, this new iteration is accreted onto its own existing and unfolding material, affective and intimate history. The digital therefore becomes part of thinking about photographs and archival texts as ‘things’ with biographies and meanings that change over time and with use (Pink et al., 2016: 12–13).

Of the several photographs that appeared in @ABCNews1915, only a handful were of people or places, and the rest were of the diaries, letters or papers from which the excerpts were taken. But even in these cases, the intimate curve of handwriting, the yellowing lined paper and the antiquated fonts of old newspapers still imbued the digital photographs of these archival traces with a particular material poignancy. Indeed, Pink, Ardèvol and Lanzeni insist that ‘the digital and material should not be thought of as two separate things that already existed independently in the world and have now become entangled’ (Pink et al., 2016), instead pointing to forms and experiences that result from new digital materialities. Berry (2014) similarly argues that ‘the historical distinction between the digital and the non-digital [has become] increasingly blurred, to the extent that to talk about the digital presupposes an experiential disjuncture that makes less and less sense’ (p. 22). In doing so, he calls for attention to ‘modulations of the digital or different intensities of the computational’ (Berry, 2014: 26), rather than interrogation of the difference between the analog and the digital. For archives, this can encompass the materialities of how archival ‘things’ are digitised, the digital infrastructures in which they exist virtually and people’s engagement with them that occur by means of digital devices (Miller and Horst, 2012: 4, cited in Pink et al., 2016: 10). Furthermore, archival ‘things’ are transformed by their use in this way, with implications for how they are received and understood, as I discuss below, and which in turn map onto larger processes of national narration and identity reinforcement.

Digital archives also make possible new temporalities in which the ‘persisting past’ that used to stick because of the widespread trauma of the experience of war is now reinforced through purposeful state-sponsored commemorative activity that pushes into our everyday lives through social media. Digital materialities are thus inextricable from digital temporalities, which are an aspect of the ‘superhuman speed’ (Connerton, 2009) at which information can now move and which have changed the means by which we can feel the relevance of the past in our present-day lives. The enrolment of these temporalities into the national mythscape works to blur boundaries between the past and present, with particular implications for the affective intensity of state-sponsored history. In the next section, I turn to the Twitter feed from @ABCNews1915 to tease out some of these points and demonstrate how the temporality of national commemoration was complicated by the availability of digitised archival material, its deployment in social media and the sense of immediacy and emergence that this helped to create.

Live tweeting the Gallipoli landing: @ABCNews1915

The ABC’s 2015 Twitter project chose 61 individuals to tell their stories, including politicians, military leaders, officers, enlisted men, two Australian nurses and three accounts from the Turkish side, including a German commander and Mustafa Ataturk, who also commanded at Gallipoli. Official Australian historian Charles Bean, a handful of newspapers and King George V were also included. ¹ The voices of these ‘characters’ were drawn from the holdings of Australian archival institutions, with material for individual tweets selected by dedicated curators and presented chronologically.

The choice of these individuals made implicit judgments about who can recount and retell the past, privileging military, political and other official versions of this history. There were only two women included, both military nurses, and no female civilians from the home front who might have recounted waiting for news of their brothers, husbands, mates or sons. Although the Gallipoli Campaign was a military action, it is commonly held as a moment of national genesis for Australia, a narrative which is presented as meaningful for all Australians, regardless of their gender, race, migrant background or political orientation. This has been discussed and critiqued in depth elsewhere (Brown, 2014; Holbrook, 2014; Lake et al., 2010; McKenna, 2014), and I will not précis this substantial literature here. Instead, I suggest that @ABCNews1915 reinforced longstanding ways of thinking about Anzac and its relevance for Australians, despite its use of a very recent form of online communication. Indeed, the social and political contexts of platforms like Twitter are an ongoing concern in studies of new media:

while digital media allow new articulations of memory to emerge and provide new resources for developing consensus around a shared past, their potentialities exist in a terrain already marked and structured by powerful institutions, social systems and dominant ideologies. Their possibilities for facilitating ‘alternative’ social memories and remembering practices are inescapably connected to the economic, political and representational inequalities in which they are being, or may be, performed. Adequately accounting for the mnemonic potential of new media, therefore, requires us not only to hold in view the persistence of older media technologies but also the socio-political contexts in which they, and the newer, are embedded. (Keightley and Schlesinger, 2014: 747)

This suggests that despite the presentation of this feed as ‘uncensored’ or emerging ‘as it happened’, it was still hemmed in by the institutions and ideologies that tend to valourise Anzac as central to Australian identity narratives. As Brendan Nelson, Director of the AWM, said in the press release accompanying the launch of the project:

The Australian War Memorial’s mission is to find new ways to tell the remarkable stories of the 102,700 people who died in service of our nation. This is yet another way to engage a broad, contemporary audience and make our history live. This is our nation’s story and I urge all Twitter users to connect with it. (ABC, 2015)

Here, although the potential of Twitter to reframe the familiar Anzac narrative was hinted at by references to the feed being ‘uncensored’, it was actually used to reproduce ‘our nation’s story’, one that has long been guarded and promoted by the AWM.

Furthermore, the claim for uncensored views was partial at best, given the fact that the source material was drawn from state archives – with clear collection policies – and was curated by archivists at each of the participating institutions. As Hawkins (2015) points out,

most personal diaries published for popular consumption during or directly after the Great War were exceedingly patriotic. Letters from the front were often censored by the military, or by writers themselves in an effort to shield relatives at home from the horrors of war.

Thus, the suggestion that the very use of Twitter potentially offered a version of the landings at Gallipoli that was somehow more spontaneous or uncontrolled than previous state-sponsored versions should be critiqued.

This is at odds with understandings of Twitter as a social media platform with a reputation for ‘mundane expressiveness and interaction’, dominated by first-hand accounts about banal everyday activities (Weller et al., 2014). As such, it can also act as an alternative to more formal news services in covering unfolding events, especially in places with strong state control over the news media. As Rogers (2013) remarks, Twitter evolved ‘to an event-following and news machine … when the Twitter tagline changed from ‘what are you doing?’ to ‘what’s happening?’, arguing that Twitter has now become a site used to gather a wealth of information about events that are happening in real time (p. 7). Consequently, scholarship on the role of Twitter in journalism and news reporting is growing rapidly (see Hermida, 2013). In terms of the dissemination of political messages, however, the most common use of the platform has been to be as a way to ‘replicate traditional one-way, top-down communication flows’ (Graham et al., 2013: 693), an approach that has only in some cases been transformed during political campaigns into a two-way engagement with constituents.

In this sense, the example of @ABCNews1915 is useful for understanding the potential of Twitter to reframe and complicate how we commemorate and even make sense of state histories. If Twitter acted as a form of institutional national history in this instance, then it is also important to consider the remarkable national temporalities that it was entangled with, temporalities that the digital world has now made possible in new and dynamic ways. As I sketch out in the remainder of this section, the commemorative project @ABCNews1915 folded national time in at least two distinct ways that shaped followers’ encounters with the past as represented in the archival record.

Intimate histories

The official version of history, linearised and curated for the feed’s 2681 followers, did not just work to represent official history narratives. The novel use of Twitter to provide public access to first person accounts in ‘real time’ also worked to create a sense of intimacy with the individual account holders. By presenting Gallipoli ‘as it happened’, even though it happened a century ago, the feed created a sense of urgency and uncertainty about the fate of the different characters, even though the broad outlines of the battle are commonly known in Australia, or easy to learn about. With small profile photos and the ability to click through to further information on almost all of the characters, followers of the feed encountered the characters as if they were still alive and tweeting. It blurred together diaries, letters, newspapers and Tweets, a wide range of ways of communicating, each with different intended audiences, formats, registers and expected longevity.

One result was a sense of investment in individual experiences, particularly through the use of colloquial language or descriptions of intimate or bodily experiences. For example, the handful of Tweets from @EllisSilas have an immediacy and an attention to the small details of his experience, as in Figure 1. ²

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Figure 1.

All the tweets from the @EllisSilas1915 account.

These posts implicitly invited followers to imagine what it would be like to see and hear big guns firing, to wonder whether one’s own death was inevitable, or to worry that, like Silas, one might not be physically strong enough to carry a heavy pack up the beach unaided. As I experienced the feed, it was easy to empathise with what appeared to be an unfolding experience with unknown outcomes, a process that made the events feel part of an ongoing and emergent present as I read the new posts on my smartphone. Furthermore, in addition to receiving the ongoing feed from all the linked accounts, under the main @ABCNews1915, a follower could choose to focus on a set of tweets from one account, allowing them to find out more about the particular individual and their experience of Gallipoli. An example was the nurse Alice Ross King, whose handle was @AliceRK_1915. By clicking through to her Twitter stream, I found out that she was a ‘23 year old nurse from Melbourne, Australian Army Nursing Service’ and could also click through to her service record, held at the AWM, one of the institutions participating in the project. If I had wanted to, I could also tweet back to her with a message, or re-tweet her entries (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

The Twitter profile of Alice Ross King, and two of her tweets, including an image of her diary on @ABCNews1915.

The use of King’s personal details, her clear empathy for the soldiers who were about to be deployed into battle and the capacity to tweet directly to her worked to engender a sense of connection with her and other individuals from the past, a strategy not uncommon in other sites of state-sponsored histories, such as museums. Indeed, writing of affect and museum pedagogy, Witcomb (2013) investigates how

sensorial, embodied forms of knowledge that express themselves through feelings in response to the material, aesthetic, and spatial qualities of the exhibition/interpretation play a role in the production of meaning rather than focusing on the more explicit rational, information based content of the display. (p. 256)

Similarly, the sense that one could communicate directly with the different account holders of @ABCNews1915 augmented the historical narrative of their experiences.

Joseph Beeston’s account provides another example. Commander of the 4th Field Ambulance at Gallipoli, Beeston was a 55-year-old doctor from Newcastle, NSW. His feed is drawn mainly from his diary, but also includes photographs and regular references to his dog, Paddy, who he ‘managed to sneak all the way to Egypt’. Paddy’s adventures make engaging reading: on 31 March he slipped overboard the troopship and was saved when ‘one of the crew fishes him out’. On 2 April, he went missing and was found three miles away. Beeston’s final tweet is an account of Paddy’s death, from 29 April:

Paddy was very nearly human. One day we were down as usual when Beachy Bill got busy, and I had to leave the pier with only boots and a smile on. I took refuge behind my old friends the biscuits, and Paddy ran out to each shell, barking until it exploded. Finally one burst over him and a bullet perforated his abdomen. His squeals were piteous. He lived until the next day, but he got a soldier’s burial. ³

Beeston’s feed, with its descriptions of Paddy and his antics, culminated with the beloved pet’s battlefield death and ‘soldier’s burial’. This wove together detailed and historically valuable first-hand description of the Gallipoli landing with a personal and emotionally significant event by way of an archived and digitised diary. The sense of intimacy was increased by the few reportage-style photographs in Beeston’s feed. Edwards identifies the work that photographs do in effecting a temporal slippage, as even ‘if they look back at the past, they are very much in the service of the present and are primers for an idealised future’, making them what she calls ‘strong history’:

Social desire for evidence, actuality, authenticity and authority clusters around photographs. This realism, the possibility of the past being propelled into the present in it apparent entirety, and cohering as simultaneously a trace and an undeniable presence … acts as both an affirmation and metaphor of nation. The relationship between reality effect, authentication and affect makes photographs ‘strong history’. (Edwards, 2014: 322–323)

The photograph that accompanies one of Beeston’s tweets exemplifies this (see Figure 3). While it is not clear that Beeston actually took this photograph, it does appear to show wounded men gathered together on the beach, presumably waiting to be taken off onto a hospital ship. It serves to illustrate Beeston’s comment about the presence of incoming wounded men in a documentary-style shot which lends a strong sense of actuality and immediacy. Its inclusion with Beeston’s words suggests that this is the very scene that he was reporting in his diary. The unposed nature of the image, with a lying man’s elbow in the foreground and a white flag with a red cross fluttering outside a tent at the back, a line of kitted-up soldiers and a scrubby ridge rising up behind the whole scene, all combine to an effect of dynamic realism.

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Figure 3.

Joseph Beeston tweets a photograph from the beach at Gallipoli.

This is another way in which @ABCNews1915 mixed memory – living, emergent and contingent – with history – representational, authoritative but static. The affective intensities that emerged from the encounter with individuals and their fates, the ‘strong history’ of photographs and the immediacy and intimacy of diary accounts, thus stuck to the official narrative of Anzac heroism that motivated the creation of the project.

Conclusion

@ABCNews1915 complicated the boundaries between the past and the present, with the effect of supporting existing state-sponsored historical narratives that underpin particular versions of Australian national identity. The Twitter feed I have discussed here is only one digital articulation of state commemoration, and it suggests that further attention to the digital aspects of national memory and identity is necessary, including how people engage with these forms of commemoration and how such forms might shape how people make sense of and come to grips with the ‘experience’ of the past.

Elsewhere, I have argued that commemorative events work to draw together individuals and embed them in abstract national narratives through purposefully designed spatial atmospheres (Sumartojo, 2015b). In part, this occurs through individual identification with figures from the past, often an Anzac soldier:

At the Dawn Service, the interplay of light and dark that accompanies the dawn help to link participants to each other in an annual ritual, but also link them to generations of commemorants before them, including the Gallipoli soldiers that Anzac Day remembers … The early start and pre-dawn conditions are also central in a theme of personal sacrifice that finds a distant echo in the bodily discomfort of early risers at the service.

In these settings, participants are linked to the past by means of (mild) bodily discomfort and the sensory experience of dawn that is meant to have had a parallel in the experiences of the first Anzacs. A similar link to ‘first hand’ experience is at play in @ABCNews1915, where followers are implicitly invited to imagine how Gallipoli would have been tweeted. But the trick of reanimating figures from the past in this way – a trick easily possible via digital technology – is confused by the elision of the individual tweeting characters from the past, on one hand, and the official national story that they tell and their roots in official archives, on the other. Moreover, the sense of intimacy with the past was enhanced by the use of Twitter, a short-form, rapid-fire format of sharing information about ongoing events that is often encountered by way of everyday hand-held devices. The entanglement of the digital and material – including the archival documents and photographs presented digitally and the devices through which people encountered them – were intended to bring Anzac history to new audiences, or perhaps to existing audiences in new ways.

However, the blurring of past and present that this entailed imbued Australian state-sponsored history with intensities more akin to an unfolding contemporary news story than a century-old historical event. Followers were enrolled in an emerging narrative, told as if it had-never-before-happened, rather than as-it-happened. That the account was presented as ‘uncensored’ does not hide the fact that it was both censored (at the time and subsequently through archival policies designed to value some types of accounts over others) and curated by professional historians and archivists in the present. In tweeting of ‘first person’ accounts, official agents of the nation – in this case national broadcasters and public archival institutions – mixed different scales of memory, using the records of individuals’ feelings, thoughts and experiences to represent an narrative that invited Australians to engage with affectively, and somehow make it their own. Bell (2008) argues that ‘memory is employed in contemporary social and political thought in an often-bewildering variety of ways’ that obscures ‘vectors of power’ (p. 149). What I have argued here is that despite the potential for digital technology to transform how we engage with the past and commemorative projects in ways that are faster, more intimate and more ubiquitous than before, this did not occur in the case of @ABCNews1915. Instead, as a new digital form of state commemoration, it did not open up routes to ‘uncensored’ or more representative history. Instead, its use of official sources and its linearisation of the complex localities, relationships and contingencies of the past served to reinforce existing narratives of Australian national identity based on the Anzac myth.