Evidence suggests that Australians aren’t strongly wedded to celebrating a national day on 26 January.

A series of papers given by the various speakers at the Australian Human Rights Commission’s War and Peace: The Anzac spirit and human rights 2014 seminar.

This paper analyses the decisions made during the development of public memorial proposals in Canberra and Melbourne. It develops a general model of the memorial development process and characterises four distinct procurement approaches used: open competitions, invited competitions, direct commissioning, and ‘grassroots’ initiatives that bypass formal planning procedures.

After outlining the issues to be explored and the types of data that can shed light on them, this paper provides a brief history of the major memorials erected in Canberra up until 2002, and the rationales that shaped them. The main focus of the paper is then new commemorative projects that have developed in...

For three decades the Australian War Memorial has been the focus of a struggle between two ways of knowing the past, writes Dean Ashenden on our partner site, INSIDE STORY