On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service

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v i s u a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n

On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service

S H A N T I S U M A R T O J ORMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

A B S T R A C T

The Anzac Dawn Service is an established and increasingly well-commem-orated Australian national day. Its rhythms include music, readings of ritual texts and moments of scripted silence and stillness, all of which take place in familiar commemorative environments. This article takes up the role of dark-ness in shaping how and what participants perceive of the Dawn Service. It draws on renderings of darkness as generative of atmosphere, linking this to national identity and commemoration. It dwells on three analytical points: that darkness recasts the built environment as mysterious and shadowy, drawing together representational and non-representational aspects of the event; second, that darkness conjures the crowd of participants as unknow-able and therefore imagined to each other; and finally, that the dawning light introduces a sense of special temporality, as the inevitability of the changing light conditions moves participants through a range of affective states linked to a specifically national narrative.

K E Y W O R D S

I N T R O D U C T I O N

I felt my stride quicken as I approached the memorial. It was cold in Canberra at 4.30 am, but there were many other people walking towards the same destination: families, young people in twos and threes, some Australian Defence Force members in uniform. Despite the pre-dawn darkness, the streetlights and passing traffic cast ample light to see by as I walked along the road. As I got closer, I could see faces and place names of conflict zones projected onto the Australian War Memorial’s familiar façade. This steady illumination layered Australian military history onto the stone, personalizing the names of battle sites with images of combatants or battle scenes.

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A big screen flickered to the left of the growing crowd. Moving out of the glow of the streetlights, the landscape was darker, illuminated in pools and patches from various artificial sources. I felt a heightened awareness of my surroundings, and was eager to get a place to stand where I would be able to see the faces of the speakers at the podium. It was dim on the gentle rise as I walked up, the grass wet, the footing less predictable. I looked down to be sure of where I was stepping. I found a place and stood still, looking around.

I could see many other people to my right in the grandstands erected at the front of the Memorial for the event. They formed a sort of amphi-theatre oriented towards the broad central steps and flat courtyard of the main building. Pools of light from the streetlamps illuminated sec-tions of the crowd, but the light was gentle, diffuse, yellow and dusky. The overcast sky reflected a dim glow from ambient light in the dis-tance, and city streetlights beyond the stands were spots of glare. As I stood and looked, a voice on the loudspeakers announced the order of the ceremony to come, and the crowd, already quiet and subdued, settled into their places.

In this article I address a central aspect of the sensory experience of the Anzac Day Dawn Service that I have begun to describe above: darkness. I will argue that darkness acts in particular ways during this event to shape participants’ affective experience and to thicken and emphasize the nar-rative of loss, grief, reflection, commemoration and national identity that envelops attendees. The visual impact of darkness and illumination under-pins perception of the ceremony, and I will show how this is reflected in visitors’ reactions and my own experience of the event. I begin by framing my account with scholarship on darkness, linking this to material on atmo-spheres and national identity, before introducing the narrative and signifi-cance of Anzac Day. I then turn to an analysis of my attendance at the Dawn Service in Canberra in April 2014.

D A R K N E S S A N D A T M O S P H E R E

Darkness has a double face. It has long been associated with urban danger, a veil hiding a variety of threats and hazards, subject to ‘persistent nyctopho-bia that characterizes fear of the dark across the urban West’ (Edensor, 2013a). Prostitution, poverty and other grubby unpleasantness lurked in the shadows of Victorian London; the city of dreadful delight was one of the night dangers that accompanied its diversions (Walkowitz, 1992). In urban darkness, familiar envi-ronments could become disorienting and alarming. Darkness in the city remains associated with violent crime, transgression and danger (Brand et al., 2013).

However, darkness also brings benefits. Edensor (2013b) argues that positive constructions of dim urban landscapes have always existed in rec-ognition of the possibilities that darkness enables. In his study of blackouts,



269Sumartojo: On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service

Nye (2010) argues that by the First World War, darkness had become a form of camouflage and protection, rather than a menacing danger or a simple backdrop to the brilliance of electric light (Sumartojo, 2014a). City-wide blackouts provided a measure of protection from aerial bomb attacks, even as they introduced new dangers to people moving through the darkened city streets. This ambiguity is one of the signal properties of darkness: it both hides the body and shields it from harm, while also making it more vulnerable to accident or unforeseen attack. Whereas day is ‘transparent’ and therefore appears safe, ‘night can also be a magical landscape of wonder and festivity – sometimes dangerous, sometimes enchanting’ (Gallan and Gibson, 2011). Tanazaki (2001[1977]: 46) explored the aesthetic properties of darkness arguing that ‘we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pat-terns of the shadows, the light and darkness, that one thing against another creates.’ Light and dark here carve out spaces that rely on each other, and remind us of their relational nature. Present in each state is the possibility of slipping into the other, the ‘instability between the two’ (Morris, 2011: 316). The vulnerability of each state lies in how light and shadow create each other, with a creativity in the ‘ways in which they are both present in each other’ (Edensor, 2013a: 11).

Thus, it is not useful to think of light and dark as oppositional or binary (Gallan and Gibson, 2011). Even the brightest light hints at the possibility of shadow, and perfect darkness, particularly in modern cities, is very rare. It is the blending of and contrast between light and dark that create both visual impact and affective charge: the surrounding darkness is inherent in the optic apprehension of artificial light, and the atmosphere that it helps to create. Light and dark can be understood as a range of different mixtures, combina-tions or transitional moments, such as the dawn.

An example is Bille’s (2014) description of the importance of dimness, shadow and flicker in the creation of hygge, the Danish domestic interior feel-ing of comfort purposefully crafted through regular, habitual practices; Linnet (2011: 23) translates the Danish term as ‘cozy, homey, informal, sincere, down-to-earth, warm, close, convivial, relaxed, comfortable, snug, friendly, welcom-ing, and tranquil’. The curation of light, and its material qualities of warmth and enclosure are an important part of the creation of hygge. Bille describes how his research subjects used fairy lights and candles to make their domestic spaces feel cosy, and how they shared this atmosphere through display of their homes to those outside, or with visitors to their carefully arranged illuminated interiors. Importantly, the mix of different intensities of light sources was curated and combined to atmospheric purposes. Informants also considered the light conditions outside their homes, used windows to contrast interior glow with the evening darkness and ascribed to these careful schemes emo-tional properties of interiority; cosiness was gently constructed through the visual perception of ranges of brightness and dimness as welcoming, inviting and enclosing.




This material shows the importance of the variation in darkness in working on human activity and spatial atmosphere. Like its obverse, light, it helps constitute the feel, tone or atmosphere of space. It can render familiar environments strange or make mysterious ‘how the human body is in relation to that which surrounds’ (Morris, 2011: 316). Ebbensgaarde’s (2014) account of a public lighting scheme in Copenhagen similarly explores how artificial illumination ‘distorts and alters the visual appearance of space by night’, lead-ing to transformations of how light makes a space feel. It can enclose a space, making it feel safe or homely, as with hygge, open it up for new night-time uses or isolate people in brightly illuminated pools that obscure the shadowy areas (and the people and things in them) beyond the light. These accounts also show how darkness and light are explicitly designed to engender particular atmospheres. This is domestic and vernacular in the case of hygge and part of purposeful urban redevelopment that is intended to improve public amenity in Ebbensgaarde’s description.

On the other hand, set against the short days and long nights of the Scandinavian winter, these examples also hint at the role of seasonal patterns of light and dark. Thus, hygge is engendered through and as a result of the lack of natural light that varies throughout the year. These natural patterns of light and darkness are important in understanding the affective charge of darkness. Whilst the artificial glow of urban illumination can be controlled by being turned on and off, natural light patterns are simultaneously uncontrollable and predictable. Although it varies in brightness, tint and suffusion, dawning light is a quotidian event that is both banal and extremely powerful. Common associations of dawn with hope, rebirth and possibility recognize this irresist-ible inevitability.

The transition between darkness and the light of day can be a threshold moment, a special period for thinking, reflecting and daydreaming. It can be a time of promise or optimism, a moment to consider and plan the day ahead. It can also be disorienting and confusing, when, still ‘drunk with sleep’ ordinary things ‘appear in a different and exotic light’ (Benjamin, 1992, in Löfgren and Ehn, 2007: 16), until the first cup of tea or a hot shower ease us into full aware-ness. Löfgren and Ehn (2007: 15) describe it as ‘the hour of the wolf ’, when anxieties, embarrassments and fears about the future can overwhelm. Griffero (2014[2010]: 59) similarly identifies the mixed shadows of twilight as a thresh-old moment, a time when ‘the contours of things have been progressively dis-solved’ and the ‘atmospheric irradiation’ grows from the ‘indeterminancy that can be found both in the object … and in the subject’. As at the other quotidian threshold moment, dawn, darkness at twilight encourages particular atmo-spheres because of the change in the way we can apprehend our surroundings, especially visually.

This aligns with accounts of atmosphere that foreground the role of experience through the sensing body. McCormack (2008: 413), for example, describes atmosphere as the intensities of feeling co-constituted by people




and their spatial surroundings, ‘environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies while remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’ (see also the introduction to this issue). The location of atmosphere in experience raises questions about the spatial conditions in which such affects emerge, and architects have a long history of considering how to encourage or manipulate the ‘feel’ of space (Böhme 1993, 2014; Borch, 2014; Griffero, 2014; Zumthor, 2006).

That atmosphere could be, if not completely controlled, then at least encouraged, engendered or shaped, frames it as political (Thrift, 2004). The spaces in which atmospheres arise, for example, might be subject to official control, and used to suggest particular collective responses. Their intensities can differentially privilege the range of participants, or be understood vari-ously by different members of the collective. Borch (2014: 82) extends this point to contend that ‘particular architectures produce atmospheres that make certain feelings and modes of behaviour more likely than others’. Power is manifest in the control of the various elements that make up access to and experience of space.

Thus, an analysis of events designed with the goal of particular atmo-spheric outcomes frames space as political, inflected with the flow and con-trol of power. Massey’s (1992: 81) well-known treatment of place as a ‘web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation’, draws out the complexity of official design, control and enforcement of space on the one hand, and vernacular responses on the other. In terms of com-memorative space, empirical accounts range from individual memorial sites (Johnson, 2003; Michalski, 1998, Savage, 2011) to urban commemorative pre-cincts (Dovey, 1999; Sumartojo, 2013) to entire city landscapes (Kincaid, 2006; Vale, 2008[1992]).

Attending to spatial power can also help make sense of light and dark. For example, Schivelbusch (1988: 82) relates how authorities used ‘centrally organized public lighting’ to enhance their control of the Parisian streets, where moving around the city after dark without a light was criminalized. Here, the power of artificial light is framed in terms of regulating individual access and movement in a dense urban setting. However, light also has the capacity to work more gently, to persuade, encourage or attract. McQuire (2005: 129) describes the use of light ‘to alter the appearance and ambiance of urban space … to produce coherent visions of a fully electrified society for public display’ around the turn of the 20th century. This use of light was intended to promote the consumption of consumer goods and create an image of a safe and attractive ‘modern’ city. Here, power is both demonstrated and consolidated through the purposeful employment of illumination to contain or diminish nocturnal darkness, and thus shape the use and perception of the city. However, as discussed above, the co-mingling of light and dark in the gradual change that accompanies the dawn resists the techniques that Schivelbusch and McQuire relate. As I suggest in the analysis that follows,




dawn’s changing light conditions are powerful in part because they render our material surroundings ambiguous or mysterious.

The shadowy light of dawn also works on national narrative, as I will discuss. During Anzac Day events, participants are reminded of their con-nection with an abstract version of the nation through symbolic narratives (Anderson, 1991), present in both memorials’ built environments and the texts of remembrance services. At the Dawn Service, attendees are complicit in activating and reinforcing the familiar Anzac story with the repetition of rituals of annual remembrance (Connerton, 1989). Commemoration activates memorial environments through practice, but such settings also enable and encourage forms and articulations of commemoration; in other words, they are co-constitutive of remembrance, and through this, national narratives (Sumartojo, 2014b).

In the case of Australia, the symbolism of local and national war memorials can support contemporary political aims through association with the ‘Anzac legend’, working to privilege some histories over others, thus shaping which national stories are forgotten as much as those that are remembered. Sites such as the Australian War Memorial demonstrate this through their role as ‘historically inflected urban landscapes … [that] bolster a particular political order’ (Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004: 350). A consid-eration of atmosphere at such sites, then, must attend to how power accom-panies its creation and experience, and this is particularly critical in the case of commemorative events. This power resides in the design of memorial sites; in the memories, histories and related rituals that form the discourse that accompany their use; in the activities of authorities who control the activity at such sites; and in the bodies, actions and attitudes of people who attend commemorative rituals.

What role, then, does darkness play in the atmospheres that emanate from this mix of collective ritual, national identity and symbolic spatial set-ting? How is the impact and ‘feel’ of the Dawn Service ceremony constituted by the combination of changing light conditions, large numbers of purpose-fully gathered people and a familiar narrative of remembrance that empha-sizes solemnity and contemplation linked to national history? In the remain-der of this article, I use accounts of the 2014 Anzac Day event to interrogate this set of conditions.

A N Z A C D A Y : M E M O R Y A N D N A T I O N A L I D E N T I T Y I N M E M O R I A L S P A C E S

The Dawn Service is a long-established part of Anzac Day ceremonies, Australia’s 25 April National Day that recognizes military service and the war dead. After a lull in popular participation in ceremonies in the 1980s (Holbrook, 2014), attendance at these events has grown steadily.

Although it is not my intention to focus in detail on the larger politics of Australian war commemoration, the role of Anzac in Australian society and




national identity is far from settled, and a brief account will help contextual-ize what follows. Although commemorative activities enjoy robust bi-partisan political support, recent critics question the estimated $325 million that will be spent on First World War remembrance in Australia (Brown, 2014), or accuse officials of engaging in ‘Anzackery’, the ‘nationalistic hyperbole … attached, limpet-like, to Anzac’ (Daley, 2014). Lake and Reynolds (2010) assert that an overwhelming focus on Anzac is militarizing Australian history to the det-riment of other potentially cohering national narratives, while Bongiorno (2014) warns that the apparent inclusivity of Anzac nationalism makes public criticism difficult. This tension is part of the broader national context in which the Dawn Service occurs. Nevertheless, with 25 April a national holiday, even those many Australians who do not commemorate Anzac Day find it difficult to ignore completely.

For those who do attend memorial services, officials expect attendance to peak in 2015. This is the centenary of the Gallipoli landing, the 1915 bat-tle that Australians mark as a crucial generative moment of national iden-tity. The annual commemoration of Anzac Day includes Dawn Services in state capitals, as well as smaller cities, regional centres and many small towns across Australia. Overseas services are also conducted at Australian memo-rials, including sites in Thailand, Borneo, Turkey, France and London. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) covers the ceremonies live from Villers-Bretonneux, the official national memorial on the former Western Front, and Gallipoli, in western Turkey. Described as ‘the commemoration on which the sun never sets’ (Bongiorno, 2014), the Dawn Service ceremony links Australian memorial sites across the world.

The order of the Dawn Service is said to be dictated by ‘tradition’, although it began as a spontaneous and vernacular urge to remember and grieve for the dead in the years after the war. Seal (2011: 51) remarks that there are several accounts of its beginnings, some linked to military traditions of the dawn muster of troops, or the 4.40 am Anzac attack on Gallipoli. Another recalls the observed practice of a grieving woman placing a wreath at Sydney’s Cenotaph in the still and contemplative early morning. Rival stories of ‘first’ Dawn Service ceremonies include Toowoomba, Queensland in 1919, Sydney in 1927 and Albany, Western Australia in 1930. These origins help to explain the argument that Anzac Day

… conflates the sacred and the secular, the military and the civilian with the official and the folkloric in an especially charged moment of time that involves significant numbers of people throughout the coun-try and beyond. (Seal, 2011: 50)

Contemporary services are often now organized by volunteers from the local Returned Services League (RSL). In Melbourne, for example, a city of over four million people, the service is held at the Shrine of Remembrance, the main metropolitan war memorial. This event is organized by a volunteer




committee and overseen by RSL members rather than professional event orga-nizers. Along with the hymns, speeches and readings of traditional texts, the ceremony is also characterized by familiar rhythms of illumination, darkness, sound, stillness, proximity to other bodies and patterns of controlled physical movement. It is as much a particular haptic experience as it is one marked by specific narratives or national symbolism.

The symbolism of the environment in which these ceremonies occur, however, conditions the experience of them. The majority of small Australian towns have a First World War memorial, as do all the major cities and regional centres. These sometimes take the form of a simple obelisk or list of names of those killed from the local area. They often depict the figure of a ‘Digger’, an Australian First World War soldier, a symbol for the bodies of the dead, only two of whom were ever repatriated to Australia. One was General William Bridges, who was killed by a sniper at Gallipoli in 1915 and reburied the same year on Mt Pleasant above the Royal Military College in Canberra. The other was the body of an unknown soldier, taken from the Adelaide Cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux in France and interred in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra in 1993. That the bodies of the killed and missing remained overseas created a ‘distant grief ’ following the war that focused on graves and memori-als as collective sites for private mourning (Ziino, 2007).

Inglis (1998: 11) argues that these figurative representations of the absent dead make war memorial sites ‘holy ground’ for Australians. Certainly the major war memorials in capital cities enjoy an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity similar to a religious site. This is reflected in their architecture. Victoria’s state memorial in Melbourne, for example, is called the Shrine of Remembrance, and was modelled by the architects on the tomb of Mausolus in Harlicarnassus, which is now in Turkey (Shrine of Remembrance, 2014). The national site at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra (see Figure 1) is similarly ‘eastern’ in appearance. The original building was com-pleted in 1941, and later additions were constructed to house displays about the Second World War and subsequent conflicts. Anzac Day was first com-memorated at the AWM in 1942, although wartime restrictions on public gatherings meant it was a modest ceremony.

Anzac Day as a political exercise can be understood as adhering to Bille’s (2014) treatment of atmosphere as:

… a critical project that highlights ways of staging architecture, behav-iour and subjectivities. It goes beyond ideals of living in harmony or of individual experiences and instead tying in to the shared experience of co-presences, or even a lack of separation between mind, bodies, surfaces and material phenomena.

The ritual of the Dawn Service is inextricable from the visual, aural and spatial environment in which it occurs. The symbolic reminders of the Anzac narrative are strong visual elements at the AWM and other services across




Australia and the world. These include a familiar architectural vocabulary of plinths or columns, lists of names, figurative statues, and repeated phrases, such as ‘lest we forget’, etched into stone. The activation of these environments with lighting, music and gathered crowds creates particular atmospheres that are enhanced by their scheduling at dawn.

The analysis below is based on research conducted at the Anzac Day Dawn Service in 2014 at the AWM. Given my concern with the experience of the event, and how this combined with built and designed elements to create particular atmospheres, I adopted an auto-ethnographic approach, using my own ‘body as an instrument of research’ (Longhust et al., 2008; Waterton and Dittmer, 2014). In attending closely to the sensory environment and its effect on me, I drew on Dewsbury and Naylor’s (2002: 257) remarks that ‘bodies are more than just a continuum of sensation, energy, force and memory; they are themselves the very means of negotiation in the way they enable us to array the field into a space of empirical action.’

Figure 1. An aerial view of the Australian War Memorial in 1945 soon after its completion and before subsequent additions. © Photograph: Richardson, AWM 100793. Reproduced with permission.




The solemnity and silence of the 30-minute service meant that it was inappropriate to make notes or take photographs for this period, so I audio recorded during the ceremony to assist my recall. In the period before and after the ceremony, I dictated my impressions verbally and I also used pho-tographs to help document the environment, focusing on the organization of the space around the Memorial. I was not unique in photographing a public site directly after a national ceremony; this activity was itself a common prac-tice in that context. These photographs served both as a form of notation and captured aspects of the built environment and how light and darkness were evident in the site. These supplemented my own field notes, written later in the day after the event.

However, because Anzac Day is a collective event, I have also used media accounts of the ceremony to help frame my experience. This material is representative of the common ways in which Anzac Day is reported and understood in terms of emotion and affective experience. The value of this combination of an individual account and representations of collective experi-ence is that it can demonstrate the relationship between the two. If ‘everyday actions make up the grander façades of institutional agendas’ (Dewsbury and Naylor, 2002: 254), then framing my own personal account with the public re-telling of the event demonstrates the potential of individual sensory experi-ence to help make sense of much larger narratives of collective memory and national identity. Thus, the account below describes how the Dawn Service folded together my own experience of an atmospheric commemorative event with a public national narrative.

T H E A N Z A C D A Y D A W N S E R V I C E , A U S T R A L I A N W A R M E M O R I A L , C A N B E R R A 2 0 1 4

In 2014, when I undertook the research for this article, about 37,000 people gathered for the Dawn Service in Canberra (Australian War Memorial, 2014). They did so on stadium-style seating arranged at the front of the Memorial (see Figure 2), standing on the red gravel surface of the building’s forecourt and on the low, mounded hills either side of this area. People crowded close to the Stone of Remembrance, the central altar-like low plinth on which wreaths are laid during the ceremony.

The crowd was lit intermittently by pools of light from the streetlamps. Projected onto the two pillar-like structures that frame the façade at the front of the Memorial were crisp images of Australian military personnel and the names of various conflicts. The environment of the Memorial for the occa-sion was designed as dramatic, in the contrast between the bright projections and a shadowy crowd; emotional, with projected images of previous genera-tions of service-people, the names of battles, and live readings of historical diaries and letters; and solemn, with speeches by a serving nursing officer and the anticipation of participants who had purposefully come to engage in remembrance.




Despite having lived in Canberra for many years, I had never been to a Dawn Service there, although I was familiar with the flow and narrative of the event. I had been to one other Dawn Service, and had read, watched or heard many news reports during the annual blanket coverage of Anzac Day, so had an idea of what to expect. I anticipated the affective experience of the national Dawn Service long before my attendance at the AWM, in part because of the sense of national significance that is created every year through a range of political and cultural activities: besides its prominence in news broadcasts and publications, there are major matches in several important local and national sporting events, accompanied by controversy about the use of camouflage-patterned jerseys by the players; well-publicized fundraising campaigns for veterans and their families; Anzac biscuit sales in the supermarket (in 2014 these came in a special First World War commemorative tin); and annual ‘Anzac assemblies’ that many schoolchildren participate in. It is also a public holiday.

My preparations for the Dawn Service demonstrated this anticipation on the level of personal micro-practices: I set my alarm with plenty of time to ride a borrowed bike to the site, expecting traffic problems. I laid out my four layers of clothing against the forecast chill, prepared my backpack, filled a water bottle, checked the batteries on my phone and camera and went to bed early. I slept fitfully, waiting for the alarm, and finally got up at 4.00 am with the aim of being there well before the official program began at 5.30 am. My preparations had made for a speedy departure and I arrived about 4.30 am, locked up the bike and walked towards the Memorial.

Shadowy spacesMy experience of the Canberra Dawn Service was conditioned by darkness in three distinct ways. The first was that the pre-dawn darkness recast the spatial

Figure 2. The view from the front of the Australian War Memorial across the 2013 Dawn Service crowd with the Stone of Remembrance in the foreground. © Photograph: Adam Kropinski-Myers, PAIU2013/057.03. Reproduced with permission.




environment as mysterious and shadowy, throwing the illuminated aspects into a chiaroscuro that heightened the drama of the surroundings. The indis-tinct dimness created a mood that knitted together the material and the affec-tive. The rarity of darkness, particularly at large outdoor events, signalled an unusual and significant moment. This was taken up in physical stillness and collective contemplation on the part of participants that rendered the experi-ence of darkness more affecting.

In Canberra, the projections onto the front of the Memorial were arrest-ing and beautiful (Figure 3). The effect of light on the material environment was evident at other Anzac ceremonies: one newspaper report of the Gallipoli service, for example, identified the faint light of the moon ‘casting magic on the old hills and gullies hunkered in the dark’ (Wright, 2014). Here, the inter-play of light and darkness made the visual experience of the event more mys-terious and remarkable, recalling Edensor’s (2012: 1107) characterization of light as producing a ‘particular confounding of materiality and immateriality’. The glow and definition of the projections, framed by a striking architectural form, drew together representational and non-representational aspects of the event (Barns and Sumartojo, 2015 forthcoming).

The low ambient light that made the projections so vivid, however, also meant dim conditions for visitors finding a place to sit or stand. People moved quickly as they approached the site, their paths lit by streetlights and traffic, but at the Memorial itself, they began to move more cautiously and slowly. This transition into darker conditions slowed bodily movement, necessary as people were forced to move more carefully, and also helped people enter a state of reflection or contemplation. This reflective stillness typifies descrip-tions of the Dawn Service. The Canberra Times (Doherty, 2014), for example, summarized the ‘solemn’, ‘sombre, respectful’ mood, with the atmosphere of the event described in terms of participants’ behaviour, shaped in part by the dark conditions. Darkness not only signalled stillness in a symbolic sense, it also compelled it by obscuring surroundings, slowing bodies and encouraging quietness.

Figure 3. The front façade of the Australian War Memorial with projected images, 25 April 2013. © Photograph: Kerry Alchin, PAIU2013/058.02. Reproduced with permission.




The darkness of the event also resonated with its narrative elements. The Dawn Service’s explicit purpose as a time to contemplate death and the sacrifice of military service was linked to ascriptions of generalized and sym-bolic attributes of the Anzacs to contemporary Australians. For example, in his Dawn Service address, Victoria Cross recipient Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith reminded attendees that, not only did the Diggers die to protect the freedoms currently enjoyed in Australia, but that the ‘Anzac spirit’ is ‘a life force that resides in all Australians … it is our constant and our preserve’. He explicitly linked this narrative to the illuminated projections, spelling out what the orga-nizers intended through their use:

Looking out from our national memorial towering behind me are the faces of our most recent heroes. Men who like their forefathers believed that our safety, our freedom, and our way of life were worth all and more than their own suffering and loss. Proud, willing, capable Australians who did what needed to be done. (Roberts-Smith, 2014)

This suggests that light and shadow at the Dawn Service were intended by the designers to encourage reflection on loss and sacrifice. As I observed them, the brightly lit projected images were more imposing and affecting because of their relative brightness in the pre-dawn conditions, and the strik-ing images seemed to knit together spatial, narrative and aesthetic aspects of the Anzac story. Roberts-Smith’s speech instructed the crowd in the official interpretation of the illuminated projections. For me, the images of past sol-diers, the quiet, contemplative crowd and the historicism of the spatial sur-roundings all helped to underscore the national symbolism and to shorten the distance between contemporary commemorants and the Anzacs themselves. Darkness seemed to augment and thicken this atmosphere.

Conjuring the crowdAnother way that darkness appeared to shape the atmosphere of the event was by hiding the size and reach of the crowd. Dawn brought a startling realiza-tion of the publicness of the event. Standing in the dimness and concentrating on the ceremony, I was only aware of those closest to me, so the revelation of the numbers with whom I had shared the service was surprising. On a much larger scale, this is a further example of the capacity of light (and darkness) to shape social relationships (Edensor and Falconer, 2014).

The interplay of early morning light and darkness helped to set this event apart from the everyday. It also obscured the apparent size of the setting and the numbers of people in it, thus rendering the crowd of participants as unknowable to each other, although potentially part of the same imagined national community participating in the event (Anderson, 1991). It was only as dawn arrived that the full extent of the crowd became visible, and I could understand the collectivity of the experience. This experience of being in a large, mostly still and quiet crowd in very low light was strange and unsettling.




As dawn broke, it revealed the extent of attendees in a powerful and unexpected process of revelation. The quietness of the crowd also made the experience uncanny, as I could not hear how big it was from the usual sounds of people talking or moving until the service ended, and I was unprepared for the numbers of people there (see Figure 4). Although the setting itself had not changed, the growing light made me see it as more expansive and full of previ-ously unperceived bodies.

The official AWM figures reckoned the crowd at 37,000 (Australian War Memorial, 2014). The size of the crowd is often mentioned in descriptions of Anzac Day, and the numbers of attendees are often reported as increased. This is one of the main ways that organizers measure the ‘success’ of the event. The crowd is thus both part of the story of the event and part of the physical experience of it. This merging of the narrative and the embodied resonates with Anderson’s remark that atmospheres ‘mix together narrative and sig-nifying elements and non-narrative and asignifying elements. And they are impersonal in that they belong to collective situations and yet can be felt as intensely personal’ (Anderson, 2009: 80). As a participant, the crowd and the darkness were intertwined in experience, and being with lots of other people in the dark was a strange feeling, especially because the crowd was so quiet. My experiences of comparable numbers of people, such as at a football match or concert, had been noisy and active.

Furthermore, what the people around me were doing also generated particular atmospheres. As people found their places to stand or sit, they stilled their bodies, waiting for the service to begin. When it started, postures of reflection were adopted, bodily positions that formed part of the ritual of the event. Even though it was cold and the slope of the ground made it dif-ficult to stand comfortably, the people around me were very still, attentive and focused on the service. The bodies of attendees thus formed a micro-landscape

Figure 4. The size of one section of the crowd at the close of the Dawn Service revealed in the dim dawn light. © Photo: Shanti Sumartojo.




of remembrance. The grouping of the crowd also worked to symbolize national collectivity in the common media use of images such as Figure 5. Such photo-graphs acted as metaphors for the solemn national atmosphere of the service, cloaked in pre-dawn shadows.

National timeThe third way in which darkness conditioned the Dawn Service ceremony was through its use as a link to symbolic and temporal ‘first Anzacs’. Throughout the ceremony, darkness was used as a rhetorical device to link participants in the Dawn Service to other Australians and to the Anzac Day soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915. The early hour formed a strong element of the narrative of sacrifice and commitment that many participants referred to, and the dawn darkness reinforced the reflective attitudes and postures that virtually all attendees adopted. The rhetorical power of darkness was enhanced by how it weighted the event as significant, as well as the shared experience of attending it as part of a large crowd. The Melbourne newspaper The Age (Marshall, 2014) outlined the narrative significance:

The ceremony is held at this hour – in a chilling half light that is not yet morning and no longer night – for a specific and military reason. This was the time of day when battle came, when the enemy was weary, and one had to be alert and ready and attentive. We stand to, as they stood to [one family said] ‘It’s a small thing, getting up early in the cold, but it’s a mark of sacrifice … we owe that much.

Here, the participants in these services are represented as connected to the Gallipoli Anzacs in part through the time of day that the ceremonies occur.

Figure 5. Attendees at the 2013 service stand in respectful postures and use candlelight to illuminate their programs. © Photograph: Kerry Alchin, PAIU2013/058.31. Reproduced with permission.




Dawn is a moment of ‘national time’ when the repetition of the ceremonial service creates a connection to the past. Rituals such as those on Anzac Day ‘do not simply imply continuity with the past but explicitly claim such continuity … by ritually re-enacting a narrative of events held to have taken place at some past time’ (Connerton, 1989: 45). The darkness augmented this by encourag-ing an empathetic link with the bodies and experiences of the Diggers.

Bille and Sørensen (2007: 274) argue that

… light has the ability to alter human experiences of space, and to define sensations of intimacy and exclusion. This network between the light, the person or thing shapes the atmosphere, whereby material and social relationships are created or manifested.

At the Dawn Service, the interplay of light and dark that accompany 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 dawn conditions specifically featured in the Anzac Day speech of the Minister for Veterans’ affairs Michael Ronaldson at the Gallipoli Dawn Service:

In the silence of this morning, in the eerie half light of this new day, we should all pause and reflect upon those who were here 99 years ago and what their thoughts were as they landed on the shores below.

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. Attending the Dawn Service is strongly associated with the sacrifice of sleep, comfort and warmth (especially in the colder southern areas of Australia) on a public holiday with an opportunity for a lie-in. Here the dawn darkness signals haptic associations that have become a metaphor for military sacrifice, and also the shared experience with those other Australians who have risen early for the same purpose. The small sacrifice of attendance at the Dawn Service identifies participants as particularly committed to a version of Australian-ness that values the ‘Anzac spirit’: ‘reckless valour in a good cause … enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat’ (Bean, 1946: 181). This forms the core of official historian CEW Bean’s account of the Gallipoli campaign, and is commonly referred to in political rhetoric that attempts to identify Australian national identity.

One further temporal aspect of the dawn light that helped shape the affective atmosphere of the Dawn Service ceremony: its ephemerality. More so than at other times of day, the dawn (and dusk) reminds us of the passage of time. Löfgren and Ehn (2007: 11) describe a fading Nordic habit of ‘keep-ing dusk’, a moment of quiet family time at the threshold between night and day before the first candle of the night was lit. This contemplative period, I suggest, is marked out as precious in part because of its unstoppability. As the




light conditions inevitably brighten, the colour and lucidity of the sky change with every moment. At the Dawn Service, the brightening of the sky is linked to the certainty of the coming battle and the sadness of the unavoidable death of many hundreds of young men. Unlike the first Anzacs, attendees know that the battle was long, bloody and ended in defeat. The dawning day that com-memorants experience together is woven into the narrative of death, sacrifice and national identity that Anzac Day commemorates.

C O N C L U S I O N S

The analysis above, organized into three thematic sections, could appear to disregard the diversity of experience of darkness at the Dawn Service or down-play the ambiguity of participants’ perspectives. As with any national event, public discourse about Anzac Day includes expressions of pride and respect, but also of dismay, grief, anger and rejection. It is not my intention to dimin-ish this ambiguity, but instead to draw on my own experience of the event and frame it within public accounts of the Dawn Service and well-established official national narratives.

The Anzac Day narrative certainly employs aspects of dawn: its inevi-tability, and the activity and movement that this implies; and the freighting of pre-dawn darkness with both the onward passage of time and the future certainty of illumination. As I have discussed above, in the setting of the Dawn Service, dawn’s temporality is poignant because it suggests the inevitability of changed circumstances: the Anzac mythology associates dawn with action, movement, noise and the likelihood of violent death. But it also brings a type of relief and end to the awful waiting before battle when anxiety and fear can overwhelm, the pre-light ‘hour of the wolf ’ when we are helpless to act, and imagine the worst (Löfgren and Ehn, 2007). At the Dawn Service, darkness retells and reinforces the narrative of the Anzac attack at Gallipoli, working this into the bodies of commemorants through their sympathetic experience of dimness, stillness and anticipation.

In his book-length exploration of the history and meaning of atmo-spheres, Griffero (2014[2010]: 6) embraces the term’s vagueness, describing it as ‘something-more, a je-ne-sais-quoi perceived by the felt-body in a given space, but never fully attributable to the objectual set of that space’. The tenu-ous but tenacious early morning conditions of light provide an example of this state of powerful uncertainty. The changing balance of darkness and light at this hour shape a poignant and fleeting atmosphere by rendering the spa-tial environment shadowy and mysterious, thus weaving together the material and immaterial, and heightening the drama of the event.

These atmospheres are shaped by expressions of cultural power in the Anzac symbolism of the memorial, and the control of the event through vari-ous mechanisms. These include stewards and marshals, printed programmes that spell out the order of service, rows of seats and low fencing that determine




where people can sit or stand, and the pre-existing exposure of many attendees to the rhythms and symbolism of the ceremony, even if they have not attended one before. Purposeful use of illumination is also used to cut through darkness and emphasize narrative elements, as in the projections on the façade of the memorial, or the big screens that display the words to hymns at the appropri-ate moments.

Thus, the atmosphere conditioned by darkness in the commemora-tive setting of the Dawn Service helps to reproduce the Australian national identity that is the main narrative thrust of the event. The collective activ-ity of attending a Dawn Service, not only with local attendees, but also with those around the world at other Anzac sites, creates a community of remem-brance that endures a common sacrifice in the early hour and the occasion-ally uncomfortable conditions. The dawn timing also carries a sympathetic link to the 1915 Gallipoli Anzacs who attacked in the very early morning, and attendees are encouraged to remember the actions of these men (and a few women) from one hundred years ago. The sense of respectful contempla-tion is enhanced by the still conditions in which the ceremony occurs, and the darkness allows a measure of privacy for solemnity or reflection. Many accounts, as above, report the Dawn Service as personally moving and as engendering a sense of pride animated by national identity and conditioned by the darkness of the event.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

This research was supported by a research grant from the RMIT School of Architecture and Design. I received this with Associate Professor Quentin Stevens, who I also thank for his contribution to the project. Much appre-ciation also to Felicity Cull for her considerable skill and enthusiastic help, despite the pre-dawn start, and to the two anonymous reviewers whose gener-ous engagement with a draft version was very helpful.

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B I O G R A P H I C A L N O T E

SHANTI SUMARTOJO is a Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. She is the author of Trafalgar Square and the


http://www.shrine.org.au/The-Shrine-Story

http://minister.dva.gov.au/media_releases/2014/apr/minva025.htm



Narration of Britishness, 1900–2012: Imagining the Nation (Peter Lang, 2013) and co-editor of Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand (Peter Lang, 2014). Her research interests are in three main areas: the constitution and experience of atmo-sphere, particularly at commemorative sites; the effect of public art on urban space; and the role of memorials in national capital cities.Address: School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia. [email: [email protected]]



On atmosphere and darkness at Australia’s Anzac Day Dawn Service

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