Invert Syrup, Feminist Snap: Anzac Biscuits and Feminist Resistance to Imperial Logics

Baked for Anzac Day in April but eaten all year, Anzac biscuits memorialize the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) participation in the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. The chemical and culinary capacities of one of the biscuit's key ingredients, golden syrup, offer strategies for figuring snaps, breaks, and refusals. Golden syrup catalyzes a feminist digestion of a food often perceived as culturally conservative or nationalistic. Sara Ahmed describes “feminist snap” as a moment of fury that confronts and changes history. Snap can additionally refer to crispy batter-based desserts that often call for golden syrup. Classified as an “invert syrup,” golden syrup was formulated from sugar refining waste products that were fed to pigs before being adapted for human consumption. “Invert” refers to the assessment of syrups using a beam of light, which inverts its angle of rotation as fructose and glucose separate. Reading the chemistry of inverting sugar alongside the feminist-led “anti-Anzac” day movement of the 1980s, this paper proposes that edible everyday militarisms might be snapped, inverted, spun, and reshaped. Anzac biscuits bring domestic everyday militarisms into Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand kitchens.

Anzac biscuits are simple sweet biscuits made by dissolving bicarbonate of soda into melted butter and golden syrup, then adding the foamy results to a mixture of oats, flour, desiccated coconut, and sugar. Baked for Anzac Day in April but eaten all year, Anzac biscuits commemorate the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps' (ANZAC) participation in the Gallipoli Campaign during World War I. ANZAC soldiers were among the first Allied divisions to land on a beach near the Arıburnu headlands in present-day Turkey (now Anzac Cove) on April 25, 1915. After a series of increasingly hopeless battles, Allied forces withdrew in defeat in December 1915. Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand credit this campaign with forming a new national consciousness, despite its high casualty rate, withdrawal, and political fallout. Feminist theorists Sara Dowse and Patricia Giles note, “our contribution to the survival of the British Empire [is] seen, paradoxically, as our coming of age as a nation” (1996, 63). Despite never having been eaten at Gallipoli, Anzac biscuits are closely associated with Gallipoli and WWI.

The chemical and culinary capacities of one of the Anzac biscuit's key ingredients, golden syrup, offer strategies for figuring snaps, breaks, and refusals in a food often perceived as culturally conservative or nationalistic. Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed (2017) describes “feminist snap” as a moment of fury that confronts and changes history by breaking bonds. Snap can additionally refer to crispy batter-based desserts that often call for golden syrup. Classified as “invert syrup,” referring to the assessment of syrups using a beam of polarized light, golden syrup was formulated from sugar refining waste products. The light's angle of rotation changes (inverts) as fructose and glucose separate. Reading the chemistry of inverted sugar alongside feminist-led anti-Anzac Day protest movements of the 1980s, I ask what happens when edible everyday militarisms are bitten, snapped, inverted, spun, and reshaped. I locate feminist resistance to imperial violence and global war in biochemical processes of metabolism and digestion. The integrative and transformational imperatives of digestion and metabolism make disavowal, avoidance, utopian visions of a world without war unsustainable positions. When an unremarkable yet popular and significant food such as the Anzac biscuit snaps, the resulting fissures allow feminist resistance to empire-sustaining violence to infiltrate and invert kitchens, stomachs, and worlds.

This essay sits within a larger project about biscuits that centers baking and tasting biscuits linked to military histories in groups (Kelley 2022b). The project's “participatory taste workshops” utilize a taste-based methodology derived from practice-led participatory art research. Such research “adapts the tenets of the creative arts in order to address social research questions in holistic and engaged ways in which theory and practice are intertwined” (Leavy 2015, 4). Baking and eating inform and cannot be untangled from theoretical and historical inquiry. Natalie Loveless describes “research-creational practices that nurture our capacities not only to reflect and analyze but to act and intervene,” and produce works that are “not just on but as” (2019, 101). Participatory formats reinforce that research on taste must use taste as its basis. To do this, I combine tasting with conversation about food preparation, historical transformation, recipe variations, and personal reflections. This essay focuses on feminist anti-Anzac activisms with antiracist and anticolonial aspirations. The efficacies and failures of these organizing efforts sit in tension with differences between feminist praxis and mythologized Anzac identities. The practice-led context of the larger project matters to, first, my analysis of activist praxis, including baking anti-Anzac biscuits, and, second, my attention to the chemistry and taste profile of one of the biscuit's key ingredients, golden syrup. The practice of baking Anzac biscuits shapes connections between affective experiences of eating and the weighty political significance of these foods. When I conducted an Anzac biscuit morning tea at the New Zealand National Army Museum Te Mata Toa, participants told me that they regularly bake Anzac biscuits and send them overseas to deployed family members. As I write, the Australian Department of Defence (2021) lists twenty active operations in as many locations, from Afghanistan to South Korea to Israel. I am confident that Anzac biscuits circulate in every one of these places.

Anzac biscuits are prepared from what appears to be a simple recipe that uses ingredients many people have on hand. Bicarbonate of soda dissolves into melted butter and golden syrup, creating an eruption of frothy foam. Fold this foam into a mixture of oats, flour, desiccated coconut, and sugar, then bake. Golden syrup binds the biscuits without eggs to act as a preservative, making Anzac biscuits an ideal care package food. For sociologist Sian Supski, “the originality of Anzac biscuits is the use of golden syrup”; this ingredient more than any other distinguishes Anzac biscuits from possible antecedents (2006, 53). Although the recipe seems simple, even skilled bakers report unexpected differences from one batch to another, making Anzac biscuits an unpredictable and improvisational chemistry project. Bakers attempt to manipulate the recipe to produce chewier or crunchier textures by adjusting the ratio of wet and dry ingredients or smushing the biscuits down in the middle of baking.

As histories of the recipe make clear, Anzac biscuits can be linked to multiple other kinds of biscuits, from Scottish oatcakes (Supski 2006) to parkins and similar biscuits that follow the “melting method,” an approach that benefits from golden syrup's viscosity (Reynolds 2018). Anzac biscuits are the result of improvisation in the kitchen, emerging from trial and error and experimentation that would be out of place in public observances of Anzac Day, which are tightly scripted and easily destabilized. For anthropologists Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Hallam, improvisation's generative, relational, temporal, and practical outcomes “are intrinsic to the very processes of social and cultural life,” and everyday situations, from crossing the street to maintaining a building to writing by hand, offer opportunities for creative enmeshment of practice and theory (2007, 19). Even as Anzac biscuits carry the weight of nation-forming narratives, their emergence from improvisational domestic spaces allows them to carry the potential for surprise, creativity, and inventiveness.

The improvisational and capricious nature of the Anzac biscuit baking process sits in tension with strict cultural inscriptions of the biscuits as bearers of national identity and history. Legislation protects the word “Anzac” and even stipulates the characteristics of a lawful Anzac biscuit—never “cookie,” a word with “non-Australian overtones” (Australian Department of Veterans' Affairs 2020; Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage 2020). Historian Martin Crotty describes the “quasi-religious status” of the Anzac experience as “an almost biblical creation story for Australia, a national equivalent to the Book of Genesis” (2008, 102). Crotty recalls Australian novelist Peter Shrubb's characterization of Anzac Day as “the only day of the year that had any holiness in it...the War was...the nearest thing I had, I suppose, to a myth of Creation” (Inglis 1999, 168). White settlers draw on biblical stories, including the Exodus, “in order to reposition themselves as toilers and victims, rather than invaders or oppressors” (Curthoys 2001, 131). Historian Ann Curthoys argues that thousands of First Nations servicemen in both world wars function as a “shadow” or “dangerous supplement, which lies inside the story, threatening to undo” the myths white colonizers construct (2001, 133). The disputed origin story of Anzac biscuits joins this “quasi-religious” discourse, imagining (white) Australian and Aotearoa New Zealander homemakers hearing from (white) deployed family members about the culinary horrors of Gallipoli, and responding by inventing, baking, and shipping Anzac biscuits. Even though “Anzac” and “Gallipoli” were appended to diverse recipes during the war, recipes for Anzac biscuits as we know them today were not published until after WWI was over (Reynolds 2018). Despite this discrepancy, the mythical origin story of the Anzac biscuit remains firmly associated with WWI, so much so that Anzac biscuits carry an imagined sensory environment of the Gallipoli Campaign into the present day.

These imagined WWI home-front bakers defined and limited roles for women. Art historian Caroline Speck observes that cultural production after WWI “reinforced the nation as masculine, with armed struggle in the landscape defined as the making of nation” (1996, 129). Although Speck does not mention Anzac biscuits specifically, as Supski will do a decade later with her conceptualization of the Anzac biscuit as a “culinary memorial” (2006), Speck's argument that women's memorials “demonstrate a negotiated form of wartime citizenship” could equally apply to the activity of baking Anzac biscuits (1996, 129). Adrian Howe, a member of Melbourne's Anti-Anzac Day Collective, reminds readers that “while returned soldiers were given a heroic status, which was enshrined in a national day of remembrance, women were given nothing” (1995, 303). During WWI, single women went overseas to serve as nurses, and the home front saw women undertaking industrial labor and other jobs usually held by men, as well as supporting troops by sending care packages to the front, the activity that supposedly created the Anzac biscuit. Howe qualifies this participation with 1983 Anzac Day Sydney Women Against Rape rally organizer Rosemary Pringle's assertion that in Anzac mythology, “Australian women...are not part of the nation. Rather, we are 'part of the property they fought for'” (1995, 305). Women's contributions to the armed services were increasingly acknowledged in Anzac Day events following protests in the late 1970s and 1980s, but Anzac biscuits continue to sit comfortably within this patriarchal, colonial formation of property: the biscuits and the women who make them are natural resources to be consumed.

In her argument for Anzac biscuits as a “culinary memorial,” Supski observes that “Anzac biscuits link Australians powerfully and instantly to a time and place that is regarded as the heart of Australian national identity” (2006, 54). The past intrudes on the present to reveal how Australians and Aotearoa New Zealanders invite the Gallipoli Campaign into their kitchens (Kelley 2022a). Bench tops, stoves, and ovens sustain and enforce the violence of colonial empire building. The biscuit's association with national belonging has led historian Joanna Cobley (2016) to call for adding “the idea of the Anzac biscuit recipe” to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) intangible cultural heritage list. Cobley's case rests not on the recipe itself but on the continuing transmission of the recipe from one generation to the next, evidenced by Anzac biscuits continuing to be included in care packages sent to deployed soldiers in today's war zones.

Anzac biscuits emerge from home kitchens. When large manufacturers, including supermarket chains Arnott's and Unibic, sell Anzac biscuits commercially, their mass-produced biscuits strive for a homemade appearance, eschewing the molds and complex assemblies that characterize other iconic commercial biscuits such as the Tim Tam or elaborately stamped and pressed shortbreads. Variations in texture and irregular shapes acquire narrative force, telling the story of sending homemade biscuits to deployed soldiers. The domestic kitchen travels with the biscuit, and, in turn, Anzac biscuits complicate domestic kitchens, first by troubling housework, and second by revealing how everyday militarisms are reproduced in the home and at table.

How to account for the public life of domestic tasks such as Anzac biscuit baking? “Preservation activity,” for Iris Marion Young, creates meaning and continuity at home by “preparing and staging commemorations and celebrations,...teaching the children the stories, practices, and celebrations that keep the particular meanings alive,...knitting together today and yesterday” (1997, 153). Preservation suggests the work of preserving food, or in the case of Anzac biscuits, developing a recipe that keeps well and can be stored in transit. Preservation can lead to transformation. Ahmed, recalling bell hooks and the “homeplace” as a site of resistance (hooks 2015), suggests that housework carries revolutionary potential: “Feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. Feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master's residence” (Ahmed 2017, 7). If housework can be revolutionary, it must equally be, for Jennifer Mae Hamilton, “necessarily, sweaty, embodied, difficult, durational and critical feminist labour” (2019, 19). These messy challenges of housework infuse public kitchen cultures, even and especially cultures of Anzac biscuits which can be mobilized by conservative forms of nationalism (but can be mobilized in other more subversive ways, too). Elsewhere I have written that through creative production, “the kitchen becomes a political space capable of effecting change and mobilizing resistance” (Kelley 2016, 53). One might snap in the kitchen.

Anzac biscuits engage the language of “home fronts,” which feminist cultural studies scholar Deborah Cohler reminds us “function not only to incite nationalism in noncombatants, but also to frame violence geospatially, temporally, and politically” (2017, viii). If Anzac biscuits make housework public and meaningful, they simultaneously complicate the “imperialist logic” of the home front to reveal homes and kitchens prepared for war (Cohler 2017, viii). Militarization might appear to be located outside the home on a public geopolitical stage, but military technologies and narratives intrude on everyday domestic actions and spaces. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo discovers that the foods she packs in her child's lunchbox have been “designed for soldiers. Almost all the foodstuffs, or the key technologies used in producing them, originated with the U.S. military in the creation of combat rations” (2015, 8). Military research and development quietly support everything from food chemistry, with everyday staples containing preservatives designed for military MREs (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) to food packaging, with plastic shells and containers designed for heating joining the classic examples of tin cans and tea bags. In the case of Anzac biscuits, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand kitchens are implicated in war efforts, past and present. Supski's framing of the Anzac biscuit as a “culinary memorial” reinforces how biscuits are “a potent reminder of the first world war, Gallipoli and the Anzac spirit” (2006, 52). Anzac biscuits align with Marx de Salcedo's technoscientific creep; their ubiquitous presence in lunchboxes and morning tea tables extends the battlefields of WWI into the present day. Housework contributes to war readiness both knowingly, as with nation-forming stories attached to Anzac biscuits in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and unknowingly, as with a child's lunchbox full of undeclared combat rations. After emerging from the kitchen, everyday militarisms are eaten, digested, and metabolized. Metabolism formed as a concept alongside the Industrial Revolution and factory manufacturing. Bodies that metabolize are therefore, for sociologist Hannah Landecker, “industrial bodies,” because metabolism has been understood as a factory (2013, 497). Even as understandings of and metaphors for metabolism change, “postindustrial metabolism...both comes after and is very materially and literally produced by industrial metabolism” (Landecker 2013, 516). Generational inheritance of militarized and mobilized foods such as the Anzac biscuit works in a similar way. Even as politics and capacities for resistance change, bodies that eat in combat-ready kitchens are and remain combat-ready bodies.

Two meanings of snap follow: one from Ahmed, the other from biscuit recipes (for example, ginger snaps). The chemical properties of golden syrup offer paths into mainstream Anzac Day events and the feminist-led anti-Anzac Day movement of the 1980s alike. I read the chemistry of invert syrups alongside Anzac biscuits and Ahmed's “feminist snap” to show how eating and digestion both reveal and integrate the troubling work of empire building that cannot be expunged from the home and must be lived with on an intimate everyday scale.

Eighteen definitions for snap as a noun, and an additional seventeen for snap as a verb appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. These definitions range from metal fastener to rare usages such as disregard or indifference (“I don't care a snap”) (OED 2021). The two definitions that matter to this essay sit adjacent to one another: “The act of snapping or breaking suddenly; a break or fracture” and “A small, usually round, cake or biscuit of crisp gingerbread; a ginger-snap” (OED 2021). There are honey snaps, vanilla snaps, brandy snaps, butternut snaps, and chocolate snaps (and other snaps, too). These definitions are related: ginger snaps “break or fracture” and this quality of breaking when bitten makes them snappy. Ahmed defines “feminist snap” as “a breaking point”: “By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne” (2017, 187, 199). Breaking off a piece from a crispy biscuit could illustrate aspects of feminist snap. The bitten off pieces cannot be smushed back together; the snap is irrevocable. Yet the snap does not disavow the world. Breaking from “a world I cannot bear” creates distance without denial. When a biscuit snaps while biting it, part of it ends up incorporated and eaten.

Many (but not all) snap biscuit recipes call for golden syrup or molasses (also an invert syrup). Anzac biscuits are not precisely “snaps”: in their chewy manifestations, they do not snap at all. A crispy Anzac biscuit does snap, and some bakers prioritize this quality, as with Wendy Hunter's variation on the Anzac biscuit recipe, a recipe for “Anzac wafers” promising “biscuits that are like a brandy snap” (n.d.). Snapping does not define an Anzac biscuit as it does a ginger snap, and not all recipes using golden syrup are snappy (for example, fudge, jellies, and cakes). Even so, as the Anzac biscuit's essential ingredient, the chemistry of golden syrup helps think feminist snap together with Anzac biscuits and everyday militarisms in the kitchen.

Golden syrup, a light treacle, was created from refiner's return syrup, a dark and bitter molasses separated from sugar crystals during the process of washing raw sugar cane to create white sugar. This “mother liquor” was initially viewed as a waste product and sold as pig food. Abram Lyle—the Lyle named on “Lyle's Golden Syrup” tins—adapted the syrup for human consumption in the 1880s (Mason 2015). During WWI, sugar rationing created a market for such substitutes. Golden syrup can be made at home, although starting with white sugar, the product that generates refiner's return syrup, might seem counterintuitive. Whether starting with white sugar, sugar cane, or sugar beet juice, water and heat hydrolyze the sugar's sucrose. A catalyst, such as lemon juice or cream of tartar, will speed this process along. This separation of molecules can be thought of as a snap or breaking point. As hydrolysis splits sucrose's chemical bonds into fructose and glucose, the optical rotation of the syrup changes. Optical rotation refers to the angle of rotation of a beam of polarized light as it passes through a solution. A beam of light passing through a pure sucrose solution will angle to the right, clockwise. With invert syrup, the beam of light inverts and angles to the left, counterclockwise. The hydrolysis or snap creates difference and refuses purity. Like the snapped biscuit, the fructose and glucose cannot be smushed back together into sucrose again. In the kitchen, sugar inversion impacts both texture and taste. Golden syrup starts and stays viscous and sticky—even after years of storage, golden syrup will not crystallize. This viscousness gives baked goods longer-lasting moisture. Fructose tastes sweeter than sucrose, so using golden syrup will produce a sweeter-tasting product than sugar alone. In Figure 1, sucrose appears on the left. Water is added. The arrow, read as “yields,” could alternatively be read as “snaps.” Glucose and fructose appear on the right, their oxygen bond broken.

To illustrate feminist snap, Ahmed details the fractures that broke her relationship with her father. She grapples with the word “disowned,” explaining that “When my father 'disowned' me (I shouldn't use this word, because it implies previous ownership, but it does help to convey something of the significance of snapping a bond), it was partly because my queer life choices represented for him a cut-off point” (Ahmed 2017, 193). Ahmed challenges the essence of patriarchal relations, the father owning the daughter, the woman as property, her queer life the catalyst that ejects her from this system. Even though her father had the “cut-off point,” it was Ahmed who snapped: “I stopped doing the work of reconciliation because I wanted the bond to snap; I was exhausted by that bond; a bond can be a bind” (193). Ahmed imagines a twig snapping. The snap may not be as sudden as it seems: “a snap would only be the beginning insofar as we did not notice the pressure on the twig” (189). Ahmed links this pressure to the roots of “oppression” in “press.” Resilience becomes less an admirable strength than the ability to “take it” and bear up: “If a snap seems sharp or sudden, it might be because we do not experience the slower time of bearing or of holding up; the time in which we can bear the pressure, the time it has taken for things not to break” (189). Ahmed chooses the story about her father for reasons; the pressure of patriarchy has a similar cumulative effect.

Howe and Pringle's declaration that “Australian women...are not part of the nation. Rather, we are 'part of the property they fought for'” resonates with Ahmed's framing of owning and disowning (Howe 1995, 305). Ahmed's snap differs from Howe and Pringle's: at a familial scale, Ahmed can snap and retain her antiracist and feminist politics. The positioned specificity of this snap allows her to keep feminist genealogies intact. Ahmed learned about feminism from her “auntie in Lahore, Pakistan, a Muslim woman, a Muslim feminist, a brown feminist” (2017, 4). Howe and Pringle's statement operates within settler logics of patriarchy and white supremacy. A nation made by white settler men snaps differently than Ahmed and her father: the logics that prop up the nation form bonds with settler women that recall Ahmed's relationship with her father: bonds that bind. But what about First Nations women who were never included in Australia, immigrants who were not or were grudgingly acceptable under the White Australia policy, and a host of other women, including activist women and queer women? How might their snaps compound? Recalling sucrose, a homogenous substance splits into parts, and once split cannot be repaired. When faced with something bonded en masse and strongly, as nations are, snaps must build into a catalyst big enough to split something so seemingly intractable. Examining Indigenous, queer, and feminist challenges to Anzac Day, Catriona Elder finds the pressure that produces resilience: “if the dominant story chosen as the national story is a sanitised one, then it needs to be acknowledged that someone is bearing the pain of exclusion” (2007, 251). Ahmed argues for this acknowledgment, too. Her snap from her father succeeds in a way anti-Anzac activisms may not succeed, but these activisms nonetheless contribute one snap among many that together build a larger movement. The chemistry of invert syrup supports this building: the “yield” arrow moves only in one direction. Anti-Anzac Day feminist protest actions attempt to hydrolyze, cause irrevocable rupture, split the nation into more than one.

In the following section, I read anti-Anzac events of the 1980s as an inversion of Anzac Day catalyzed by feminist snap. The women organizing these events snapped under many pressures, including Elder's pain of exclusion, the increasing urgency of links between war and violence against women, and the conservative conventions of Anzac Day itself. Ahmed cuts ties with her father, and Australian feminists use nonviolent protest and symbolic actions to cut ties with Anzac Day's sanitized celebration of nation-forming myths that regard women as property and erase both Indigenous struggles against invasion and First Nations participation in both world wars.

Anzac Day and its everyday militarisms pressed against feminists in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand until they could no longer bear it and experienced Ahmed's “feminist snap.” Activist groups including Women Against Rape (WAR) and the Melbourne Anti-Anzac Day Collective organized multiple Anzac Day protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra.¹ Recalling Dowse and Giles linking Australia's coming of age with British imperial logics, the protestors' focus on sexual violence must be read within a broader context of empire building and colonial violence. Historian Nicoletta Gullace reminds us that “the British government attempted to market

Figure 2. “Women Against Rape in War lay wreaths at the Stone of Remembrance during the Anzac Day service at the Australian War Memorial,” Peter Wells (1983), photo courtesy of Canberra Times Collection.

The Melbourne Anti-Anzac Day Collective sought to end Anzac Day as a public holiday, and links this project to sexual violence, much like the WAR protests in Sydney and Canberra. A Melbourne Anti-Anzac Day Collective banner read, ”Abolish Anzac Day. No more silence about sexual violence“ (Twomey 2013, 99). Sexual violence and ending Anzac Day were not connected for everyone involved, and, indeed, a range of issues suggest themselves when contemplating problems with Anzac Day, including the day's failure to commemorate First Nations resistance to colonial invasion. I cannot ascertain the race or class or gender of people whose names and sometimes faces are all that is available to me via archival source material. However, the majority of feminist protestors and feminist theorists reflecting on the events have access to university education or university spaces, and do not identify themselves as First Nations people. These nested positions likely contributed to the choice to ”be informed not by a reading of Australian history but rather by the analyses of the American radical feminists Susan Brownmiller and Mary Daly,“ who are themselves non-Indigenous (Howe 1995, 305). Sydney protestor Meredith Burgmann remembers being against Anzac Day before the question of sexual violence was raised: ”Our opposition to Anzac Day was not specifically about rape in war. Speaking for myself, I hadn't really thought about the issue previously“ (2014, 117). This disconnect may be why Burgmann recalls that ”we didn't properly set out our issues about Anzac Day“; but nevertheless, ”in retrospect, we were amazingly intrepid and actually quite brave“ (2014, 121). Howe hints at some of what ”properly setting out our issues about Anzac Day“ might look like when she explains that ”there is a still greater risk facing those feminists who want to reclaim Anzac Day as a day of mourning but who are oblivious of the historical significance of Anzac Day for women: it is the risk of being incorporated into a ritual celebrating a tradition that women had no part in making“ (1995, 307-8). By choosing protest actions that reiterate established practices of mourning, the women risked absorption into existing patriotic norms, and, paradoxically, may have contributed to a subsequent resurgence of Anzac Day.

The earliest anti-Anzac Day protests attracted little attention in the wake of the governor general's dismissal of Gough Whitlam's Labour government in 1975, but soon grew to a gathering of 500 women with 61 arrested in Canberra in 1981, then 750 women and no arrests in 1982, the women having moved to a visible but less obtrusive position overlooking the official events (Dowse and Giles 1996, 66). Anzac Day protests took similar form across Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney, with women demonstrating in proximity to parades and finding creative ways to confront and engage police or elude arrest.

Anzac biscuits were part of anti-Anzac protest culture in the 1980s. Although documentation of the Melbourne Anti-Anzac Day Collective and WAR events does not mention or show biscuits, biscuits appeared in feminist spaces that supported the Melbourne protest actions. Academic, agitator, and film critic Deb Verhoeven baked and sold anti-Anzac biscuits as concessions at the Film Fatale film festival in Melbourne, which included screenings that overlapped with Anzac Day. The Film Fatale Collective was founded in February 1987 ”with the objective of forming a structural network for women participating in film and video“ (Verhoeven and Sdrauling 1987). In the midst of fundraising, founders Verhoeven and Sandra Sdrauling wrote a letter to their supporters proposing that ”if all this fails...we intend to step up the production of anti-Anzac biscuits and market them to pick up the crumbs!“ (1987). I asked Verhoeven if she modified the biscuits in any way and she replied, ”No, they were pretty much just Anzac biscuits, but we co-opted them to be anti-Anzac biscuits because we couldn't sell Anzac biscuits in good conscience“ (2021). ”Anti“ splits the biscuits, a broken bond that recalls the WAR wreath: same ingredients, snapped context. Verhoeven speculates that ”the semiotics of the Anzac biscuit, the durability, the minimal elements, could apply to activists or agitators from a feminist perspective“ (2021). The biscuits lend themselves to organizing as much as to war. They suit atmospheres of struggle and survival. The toughness of Anzac biscuits reflects the mobility of the militarisms they evoke; the anti- can be militant, too.

Film Fatale's anti-Anzac biscuits show how ”anti-Anzac,“ by 1987, had become associated with feminist activism. Members of the Film Fatale Collective, including Verhoeven, were active in the anti-Anzac Day marches—Verhoeven testified in court after witnessing a woman in a wheelchair being arrested for abusive language after yelling ”Don't call me a cunt!“ (The man who called her a cunt in the first place was not arrested). Verhoeven explains that ”anti-Anzac biscuits were a fundraiser for us at the same time as promoting these marches that we would engage in on Anzac Day and contributing to that sense that our resistance or opposition was a core part of feminist practice“ (2021). The resistance and opposition signaled by ”anti,“ ”no,“ and ”Don't call me a cunt!“ recall Ahmed's feminist snap and Ahmed's antiracist feminisms. Saying no, splitting, being against something, breaking bonds that bind, suggests no longer being able to tolerate a situation or homogenous solution, implying an ”at the end of my rope“ calamity that demands the inversion of assumptions and rationales. The Film Fatale anti-Anzac biscuits show how protest actions were active in and supported by the broader cultural life of the city. The community formed by the anti-Anzac Day protests persists beyond Anzac Day and permeates daily life, similar to how Anzac biscuits are digested and metabolized all year round but wreaths and poppy pins are displayed only on April 25. Although experienced with the senses, wreaths and pins are not materially transformed, processed, or reshaped by bodies.

But feminist snap can be more than a reactive calamity: snap can be aspirational, a desirable goal. Ahmed writes, ”I want to think about breaking points, as the very points we might aim to reach“ (2017, 187). The authors of the Feminist Data Manifest-No, citing Ahmed, argue that “what allows [many, plural feminisms] to ‘hang together’ as different but still feminist is the negative construction—a refusal of an inheritance” (Cifor et al. 2019). Inheritance can be refused, even as we inherit refusal. Howe centers the “anti” in a 1995 postscript to her 1983 essay written while in the midst of organizing the protest actions. Anzac Day cannot be rehabilitated: “It seems that Anzac Day's defenders believe that the digger's day...can transform itself so as to incorporate the very same social groups that it has always excluded—Aboriginal people, ethnic minorities and Anglo women. But why would these groups want to be incorporated by such a masculinist and British imperialist military tradition?” (Howe 1995, 309). “Incorporate” and “transform” link social formations to eating, digesting, and metabolizing. Howe suggests that not everyone wishes to be gobbled up by British imperialism. Many WAR actions align with this impulse to incorporate—wreath laying, marching, mourning—and feminist analyses highlight how such actions risk subsuming women into patriotic frameworks that continue to exclude them. Such risky incorporations are not easily metabolized. How does the wreath laid by a WAR protestor differ from the wreaths laid during official events? The WAR wreath has snapped: its bonds with sanctioned Anzac Day events have broken. The bitten biscuit cannot be smushed back together, the invert syrup's glucose and fructose will never be sucrose again, yet all those inversions and bites end up in the same stomach. This interpretation of Howe's caution regarding incorporation recalls Linda Tuhiwai Smith's call to better understand “the reach of imperialism 'into our heads'” (2012, 24), and, I would add, into our stomachs.

If feminist snap refuses an unjust world, the state's refusals perpetuate the status quo. Verhoeven's example of the woman arrested for refusing ”cunt“ exposes structures designed to support the man who shouted ”cunt“ in the first place. Elder describes how arresting the WAR protestors reveals state power: ”Though the threat to the parade and the day made by the women's protest was never significant, the violence and outrage the presence of the women elicited signifies the effort required in silencing alternative configurations to the national story of innocent military endeavour“ (2007, 250). The national story won out. Today, Anzac Day is more popular than ever. Twomey links the protest actions of the 1980s to this resurgence, arguing that by focusing on rape and war, ”feminists gave new space and voice to understandings of war as a cause of suffering and trauma. The reinvigoration of Anzac...began with the raped woman but it was soon the traumatised male war veteran who stood at its centre, and Australians opened their hearts to him“ (2013, 92). These shifts show how cultural forms can be inverted and reconfigured after bonds break: trauma becomes detached from sexual violence and lands on the implicitly male soldier, leaving women out of the equation despite their service as nurses and in combat. Arguably, ”support for Anzac Day was renewed, in part, by releasing a wave of misogyny directed at the women who participated in the feminist protests“ (Twomey 2013, 101). Reactions to the protests from parade organizers and police helped bolster patriotic Anzac discourse and expose misogyny and sexual violence surfacing not only in war but also in policy and public opinion.

Twomey's, Howe's, and Elder's analyses reveal how Anzac Day and ”the Anzac spirit“ are almost impossible to criticize, entangled as they are with white Australian national culture and settler myths and values: ”before Anzac, we bow down, we close ranks and we remain silent“ (Lake et al. 2010, 133). Feminist activists and bakers invert and question the politics of commemoration and memorial only to find their ”anti-" silenced or even appropriated by the imperialist state they protest. Just as golden syrup's fructose content defines it as invert syrup but also heightens its sweetness, attempts to enact cultural shifts may amplify the very qualities protestors seek to snap.

Feminist philosopher Chris Cuomo asserts that “war is not just an event,” but instead emits “a constant undertone, white noise in the background of social existence” (1996, 42). To set the conditions for effective feminist resistance, war cannot be conceptualized as a unified activity happening at an observable distance. Everyday militarisms invert contained combat events to find warfare seeping into unexpected places: kitchens, cafes, movie theaters. The WAR and Melbourne Anti-Anzac Day Collective actions operate both as events and as Cuomo's white noise. By focusing on Anzac Day, one elaborately choreographed and scripted commemorative holiday, the protests may contribute to maintaining war as an event, separate from everyday life, elsewhere, over there, just this one day of the year. At the same time, by snapping and breaking the materials and actions of Anzac Day rituals, such as memorial wreaths, the protests introduce an unsettling hum, reminding both protestors and parade goers that global war and military aggression scaffold sexual violence, imperial aggression, colonial invasion, and Anzac Day itself, even and perhaps especially during so-called peacetime.

Do anti-Anzac biscuits operate in the same risky terrain as the WAR memorial wreaths? Even as the wreaths snap and break away from expectations, the women laying the wreaths are folded into the very narratives they sought to resist: a WAR wreath could easily be subsumed by a familiar and powerful patriotic script, becoming just another Anzac Day prop. If anti-Anzac biscuits are different, they are different because they emerge from improvisational domestic spaces rather than tightly choreographed public rites. While wreaths are laid on Anzac Day as part of a ritual of remembrance, Anzac biscuits circulate all year round, and, critically, they are eaten. Although strongly associated with Anzac Day, the biscuits are not incorporated into scripted activities on the day itself—politicians do not ceremonially wolf down a platter of biscuits on war memorial steps. Instead, biscuits belong to the home and adjacent sites, including grocery stores, workplace morning teas, and schools. Mouthfeel refers to how texture matters to the experience of eating. Although often distinguished from taste and flavor, mouthfeel depends on and is in dialogue with taste and flavor, just as the five senses cannot be easily separated and must be understood as a cultural construct. Never disconnected, war becomes a texture that draws together many senses and channels at once and only becomes noticeable when pressure builds and resilience starts to crumble. Baked in Verhoeven's home kitchen and consumed by a close-knit community of organizers, these particular movie theater concessions collapse domestic and public spaces. As a ubiquitous culinary memorial, the Anzac biscuit supports Schott's reading of war as a “presence” (1996, 19). Exemplifying the mouthfeel of militarism in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Anzac biscuits bear up under countless pressures, are ready to snap, and, in the case of the Film Fatale anti-Anzac biscuits, do snap.

Following Anzac biscuits and golden syrup across history, cinemas, street actions, and domestic kitchens has led to an analysis of how snaps, breaks, and refusals subvert a culturally conservative and often dismissed popular food. Culturally conservative domestic forms could generously extend to family structures, fathers, and patriarchal cultures that draw the boundaries Ahmed sets with her father, the acknowledgment of when bonds become binds. At a molecular level, the same ingredients can invert if provided a snapped context. This formula, same ingredients, snapped context, travels to materials beyond the WAR memorial wreath and the Anzac biscuit. The practice-led foundation of this project allows for theoretical and cultural outcomes that are as syncretic and unpredictable as Anzac biscuits in the oven. Drawing on the many resonances of “invert”—sexual deviance, reversal, contrariness—snap and inversion offer transformations that complicate straightforward interpretations of nationalism, history, and war. These transformations are uncovered through practical experimentation in the kitchen, and through the potential for eating and digesting to organize political affinities. The mouthfeel of militarism suggests not the grand narratives of history and politics but the intimate everyday sensations of consistency, warmth, smoothness, and abrasiveness that may comfort or enrage eaters, depending on their capacity to bear up against pressure, to snap, to invert and invent.

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE190100080). Interviews were undertaken under UNSW human research ethics reference number HC190344. Workshops with anonymous participants at the New Zealand National Army Museum Te Mata Toa were undertaken under UNSW human research ethics reference number HC16036. Thank you to the two anonymous reviewers for comments that nourished this text and will continue to transform future texts within the larger project. Thank you to Deb Verhoeven for talking about anti-Anzac biscuits with me and to the Domesticities of War editorial collective and the other authors in this special section for valuable feedback, workshops, and dialogue.

¹ The New Zealand History webpage mentions a feminist Anzac Day protest in 1978: “New controversy erupted in 1978 when a women's group laid a wreath in memory of women killed and raped in war” (2021). This description indicates that Aotearoa New Zealand women undertook similar actions to Australian women, but I have not been able to track down additional sources about this action or activist collectives in Aotearoa New Zealand, so this section focuses on Australian protest actions.

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Lindsay Kelley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design, College of the Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University. The recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019-2022), she has exhibited and performed internationally, and her published work can be found in journals including parallax, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Angelaki, and Environmental Humanities.