Commemorative insights: the best of life, in death

ABSTRACT

This study explores visitor experience at the National Anzac Centre in Western Australia using multiple qualitative methods. Initially, Nethnography is used to assemble a blend of lived experience and online non-dialogical commentary. Nethnography (an alternative to Netnography) is used here as a mechanism for data grooming. Three data sets inform this study: 500 Trip Advisor comments, 500 Visitors’ Book comments and four days of participant observation. The data are then analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Leximancer in the unsupervised mode. This methodological collage is designed to improve the veracity of interpretation through both lived experience and triangulation across data sources. Findings suggest a significant visitor-thirst for the positive aspects of commemoration. By the same token no respondent reported being motivated by schadenfreude, mortality salience or death. If a certain fascination with, and commodification of death defines popular dark tourism then commemorative tourism’s relegation of death indicates exception. It would seem commemorists relegate death and darkness to mere context, while gravitas, ritual and cultural validation transcend the superficial and the kitsch. Meanwhile, visitors to the National Anzac Centre concentrate on more endearing traits including sacrifice, love, loss and the nobility of caritas.

KEYWORDS:

• Anzac
• commemoration
• dark tourism
• Leximancer
• Nethnography
• Reflexive Thematic Analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the curators of the National Anzac Centre and the City of Albany their valuable insight and assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ANZAC [acronym] refers to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps: formed in Egypt 1915. Later, Anzac [proper noun]; refers to Antipodean involvement in all wars and conflict since 1914.

2 Note the difference in spelling. Netnography advocates dialogical interaction and immersion with online respondents. Nethnography advocates non-dialogical scraping of online [Big] data with a compulsory period of phenomena immersion, typical lived experience.

3 The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA), Dickin Medal is awarded to Commonwealth animals that have displayed ‘outstanding gallantry’ in wartime.

4 Legenda Aurea, the original [Latin] title for The Golden Legend; 100+ hagiographies compiled by Jacobus de Varagine (Ca. thirteenth century).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin MacCarthy

Dr Martin MacCarthy is an academic in the School of Business and Law at Edith Cowan University, Perth. His research interests include commemorative tourism, qualitative research methods and experiential consumption.

Ker Ni Heng Rigney

Dr Ker Ni (Vivienne) Heng Rigney is an academic at Edith Cowan University and Murdoch University. Her research collaborations include marketing and management, and more recently commemorative tourism.