The death of a child spectator at the implosion of the Royal Canberra Hospital on 13 July 1997 was an accident that had a profound impact on the local community, prompting a significant cursive response. Promoted as a public spectacle, the implosion was planned as an orchestrated collision between past and future that would enable an instantaneous obliteration of past in order to create a site of future opportunities. When it resulted instead in a failed demolition and the death of a child, the reversal of popular expectation precipitated not only shock, grief and guilt, but also a widespread state of ontological instability. If a certain fascination with death and disaster had contributed to the event’s popular appeal before the implosion, it was compounded by feelings of guilt and shame in the event’s tragic aftermath. Those feelings, shared by public and journalists alike, were given expression in the mediated discursive space of the Canberra Times and other media outlets, resulting in an extensive rhetorical performance of witness, therapy and argument. In this thesis, I use the diversity of voices that are held together in the discursive web that forms the textual fabric of this study’s empirical data, not to create a historical, single perspective narrative, but to go some way in re-creating the event, and the immediate response to it, by allowing that discourse to be re-voiced. As the product of extensive cultural labour on the parts of those who produced it, the implosion discourse, of which this thesis is now a part, stands as a significant corpus of commemorative work. This discourse is evidence of an engaged polity – one that transcended the passive role prescribed for it of an audience as consumers of entertainment to become, through its own labour, agents, creators and performers of meaning. My central thesis is that it is in this cultural performance that the true practice of ‘community’ can be discerned. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)