The burgeoning activity of Australian backpacker tourists visiting the WWI Gallipoli battlefields is analyzed to explore the rite of international civil religious pilgrimage. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs, it is argued that this ritual form plays an important role in reimagining and enchanting established national mythologies. At Gallipoli, this occurred through the development of a dialogical historical narrative combining Australian and Turkish understandings of the past. The broader influence of this narrative on Australian historical understanding illustrates how global forces can be integrated within the study of national collective memory.

As part of a larger ethnographic research project, this article analyses the history of memorialization on the First World War Gallipoli battlefields and its relationship with international travel and tourism. It contrasts the original Australian and New Zealand memorialization on the site with Turkish memorials constructed there in the late 20th century, a significant proportion of which are characterized by direct symbolic recognition of the ‘other’. Drawing on Bakhtin’s writings on referential discourses I refer to these as being dialogical. At Gallipoli this dialogical memorialization facilitated the rise of Australian tourism to the battlefields by allowing for a cosmopolitan reimagining of the military campaign, which included emphasizing extraordinary cases of humanity and framing soldiers as tourists. A cultural sociology of the public sphere is proposed as a way of comprehending such tourism, one that avoids assumptions about the severing of meaningful cultural ties with the events and institutions of modernity.

In this paper we report the results of an extensive qualitative analysis of Australian discourses on drought. Themes in Australian discourses on drought are broadly Durkheimian in nature, referring to the need to reaffirm social morality and solidarity in the face of an unexpected and unprecedented challenge from nature. A brief analysis of statistical data suggests that drought discourses have a relative autonomy from both meteorological and social structural determinants. The paper concludes by theorising why 'drought' is so often invoked as a symbolic threat to the Australian national community.

This research note builds upon our recent publication in this journal entitled 'Drought, Discourse and Durkheim' (West and Smith 1996). Drawing upon Robert Merton's methodological recommendation that functionalist research should explore possible functional alternatives, we examine discourses surrounding Australian natural disasters other than drought: floods, earthquakes, cyclones and bushfires. The paper identifies three variables that constrain the risk and ritual orientations of natural disaster discourses—time, space and mythology. These variables explain why drought has a unique place among Australian natural disasters as the generator of a national solidaristic narrative.

This article examines Australian working holidaymaker patronage of ‘Aussie’ theme pubs in London to explore meanings of the national themed environment. From semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork at three venues, it is argued that themed space can be interacted with in highly reflective ways while working to facilitate the reimagining of national identity. This finding challenges post-modern, critical and Weberian perspectives that argue the ersatz nature of themed space overwhelms actors’ ability to think critically while severing traditional connections with historical time. Attention is drawn to the polysemic dimensions of themed representations and the new ways that actors can engage with the nation in a globalizing world.