Full disclosure: The ultimate class of my undergraduate program is based on the concepts of memory and trauma in history. The goal of the course is to write a 20-25 page paper centering on these themes.
In light of the centenary this year, I have elected to write on the evolution of Anzac Day in the public memories of New Zealand and Australia from the inception of the holiday through the present. Specifically, I want to argue that Australia "commemorates" the holiday, while New Zealand typically "memorializes" it. I base this distinction of terms on the acknowledgement of the trauma of the original event, i.e. Australia's more boisterous, triumphalist activities surrounding the holiday ignore (to some extent) the sacrifices of the diggers, allowing a greater degree of celebration to infiltrate the national consciousness than is allowed in New Zealand.
While this is all well and good (or so it seems to me), I was hoping that I could read some theory pieces that address the distinction between these two processes that would help me contextualize the argument I'm making within the present historiography.
Additionally, if any specialists could point me towards sources dealing specifically with Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand's public memory, I'd appreciate it. Currently, I'm looking into the works of Ken Inglis, Bill Gammage, and John Moses. Unfortunately, these are clearly focused on Australian perceptions of Anzac Day.
Thanks for any help given!
Full disclosure: I'm just an undergrad who's also researching World War One commemoration, for what will hopefully become a thesis on war memory in Britain. I can't speak to the differences between Australia and New Zealand, but I've encountered the same difference you speak of between commemorating and memorialization. There's a definite tension between mourning the dead as dead and celebrating them as rejuvenating the nation through their sacrifice. I can recall running into it in a text only fairly tangentially, in the article "War Commemoration and the Republic in Crisis: Weimar Germany and the Neue Wache" by Sean Forner. You might be able to find something in the notes of that piece if you look. You also might be able to get some useful insights about World War One commemoration in general from the more traditional European-centered sources like George Mosse's Fallen Soldiers and Jay Winter's Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. They don't treat Australia or New Zealand specifically, but if you want general theory I think a great deal more work has been done in the European context.
The New Inquiry had a recent kind of related piece on this.
I don't remember any theorists making this distinction in those terms, but off the top of my head some analogous ones might be
Sorry this is all kind of tangential. I don't know what you covered in class, but the major thinkers on collective memory might have some related scholarship?