In the years after the Great War, Australian memorials were often engraved with a simple request, ‘Let silent contemplation be your offering’. Today, remembrance is fuelled by a booming Anzac industry. Luxury cruises to far-flung battlegrounds, commemorative sporting contests, blockbuster books, newspaper liftouts, souvenirs, mass-produced Anzac biscuits, and VC winners spruiking beer brands.
Australians have been consuming Anzac for a century. While commemoration and commerce have never been entirely separate they have become increasingly intertwined. How does the Anzac Industry shape the way we remember war? And why do marketers seek to align their brands with a failed military campaign?
Consuming Anzac reveals how consumer culture has proved central to the contemporary resurgence and proliferation of the Anzac tradition. In probing the ways in which war memory has been produced, marketed and sold since 1915, it offers new insights into the dynamic commercial world and mutually beneficial relationships that underpin the commemoration of war in the twenty-first century.
