Projecting Memory: Lantern Lectures and Performing New Zealand's First World War Battlefield Memorials. Issue 4 (1st October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Dunham, Laura
• Is Part Of: Journal of Australian studies. Volume 44:Issue 4(2020)
• Page Start: 492
• Page End: 514
• Publication Date: 2020-10-01
• Subjects: Memory -- lantern slides -- magic lantern -- war memorials -- commemoration; Australia -- Civilization -- Periodicals; Australia -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; 994.005
• DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2020.1839533
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1444-3058

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In mediating the vast distances between the theatres of the First World War and the home front, lantern slides and their projection apparatus, the magic lantern, have been substantially overlooked by scholars. Using a series of lantern lectures given across New Zealand in 1926 as a case study, in this article I explore the ways in which the medium functioned as both a carrier and shaper of memory and commemoration in a postwar environment. The lectures focused on New Zealand's battlefield memorials and were delivered by their architect, Samuel Hurst Seager, who photographed their construction between 1921 and 1924 and introduced a plethora of war memorial material to New Zealand. Examining the assemblage of materiality, narratives, performance, sensory experience and setting, this article contends that the lantern lectures played an important part in enabling New Zealanders' consumption of visual and material modes of war commemoration. Audiences nationwide became participants in the communal remembrance of the war as the functions of the battlefield memorials were planted in their consciousness. However, the limitations of lantern slide media suggest that counter to perceptions of permanence that typically surround war memorials, these monuments were also subject to cultural erasure in New Zealand's collective memory.