Affecting the body : cultures of militarism at the Australian War Memorial

The machine-gun turret of the Second World War bomber, "Tail End Charlie," sat in the middle of the exhibition hall, its tiny doors open as if inviting the museum goer to crawl inside. This invitation was of course virtual rather than actual-not least because very few of the museum-goers viewing it with us appeared small enough to fold their bodies inside the turret. Nevertheless, the virtual invitation drew on previous experiences of tight spaces-the backseat of a coupe, an economy-class airline seat, and so on-to inspire an imagined corporeal link between us and the airmen who flew so many missions in these exposed, dangerous, and unheated spaces. It was only as we drew closer that we noticed the bullet holes riddling one side of the turret, our embodied sense of its tight spaces nagging our conscious minds that the turret's occupant was unlikely to have survived. Those bullet holes, blasted through steel and unchanged in the years since, triggered an imagined moment of death-our own-overlaying that of the unknown occupant. The affective homology between our bodies and those of the men seventy years ago who manned these turrets, when brought into relation with the now-cold violence of the bullet holes and their twisted edges, produced an event through which a multiplicity of lines of flight unspooled in and through us. Our critical analysis of the exhibition came to a momentary halt as we imagined ourselves as soldiers and felt grateful that we had not experienced the trauma of war. This chapter builds on our memories of that encounter by considering the cultures of militarism displayed at the Australia War Memorial (henceforth "Memorial") in Canberra, Australia, as enmeshings of the social and somatic. Derived from embodied interactions between people and wider discourses and technologies, both serendipitous and planned, we move to understand the museum experience as provoked by far more complex and performative processes of engagement than traditional museology literature might have it. Indeed, our intention is to understand the Memorial as a place of affect and effect.