Sacred places: war memorials in the Australian landscape 9780522847529, 9780522851908

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Foreword (page v)
Introduction: Holy Ground (page 1)
1 Colonial Monuments (page 12)
2 Soldiers of the Queen (page 39)
3 The Great War (page 75)
4 The War Memorial Movement (page 123)
5 Anzac Days (page 197)
6 In Foreign Fields (page 251)
7 Capital Monuments (page 280)
8 From World War II to Vietnam (page 348)
9 Australia Remembers (page 412)
Sources (page 484)
Acknowledgements (page 486)
Abbreviations (page 488)
Notes (page 489)
Index (page 516)

Citation preview

SACRE D PLACE S

WAR MEMORIALS IN THE AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE

K.S. INGLIS ASSISTED BY JAN BRAZIER

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Melbourne University Press An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd (MUP Ltd) 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 1998 Reprinted (with corrections) 1999 Paperback edition 2001, 2005 Text © K.S. Inglis 2005 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 1998 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1966 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Cover designed by Actual Size Text designed by Lauren Statham, Alice Graphics Typeset by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia, in 11/15 pt Berthold Baskerville Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group, Burwood, Victoria National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Inglis, K. S. (Kenneth Stanley), 1929- . Sacred places: war memorials in the Australian landscape. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0 522 85190 8 (pbk.). 1, War memorials—Australia. 2. Monuments—Australia. [. Brazier, Jan. IT. Title. 725.940994

Foreword

Some places are made sacred—set apart—by a significant event. Other places, like the ground upon which war memorials stand, are consecrated by the feelings they evoke. Sensations

of sadness, sorrow and anguish together with thoughts of courage, bravery and duty undergird the thousands of memorials scattered across the continent to Australian men and women killed in war. They allow us to enter the world of comrades who survived the horrors of war and the grief of families who mourned their deaths. We might even be touched by the same emotions that drove them to erect monuments and to deem certain places sacred to their memory. Why are these memorials so numerous? Of the one million men and women who left these shores in military uniform over the past 140 years, more than 100 000 have not returned. For a country with such a small population, this is a substantial death toll. Not surprisingly, those who felt deeply the loss of a loved one and were unable to see their final resting place, if indeed they had one, needed a place of their own nearer to home where they could recall their life, honour their service and leave a tribute. The consecration ofa memorial on Australian soil completed the burial rites, if indeed they were ever performed.

These memorials became surrogate graves and the ground on which they stood was sanctified. Those erecting the monuments however grand or modest had done ‘the right thing’ by those who died. They remain a focus for honouring ‘the fallen’ whose final resting place was far away in a remote land or an inaccessible place to which former comrades could not return or the bereaved could never hope to visit.

These private and personal expressions of grief were accompanied by public mourning on a national scale. To symbolize the thousands upon thousands of Australians lying in unmarked graves across Asia, the Pacific, Africa and Europe, the remains of one man who served in the Great War of 1914-18 were exhumed from a French cemetery and reburied in Canberra. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial has become a national focus for the commemoration of the nation’s war dead. One death has come to signify all the rest and to remind us that anyone who dies is somebody—not merely a loss to family and friends but to the entire nation and to all of humanity. There is a very hopeful line in Psalm 112 that reads: “The righteous shall be held in everlasting remembrance’. In establishing so many memorials, Australians want to believe that the righteous ought, at least, ‘to be held in everlasting remembrance’. They want to know that the honest, the true, and the virtuous will never be forgotten. We feel that goodness deserves recognition and should receive it. In cataloguing the devastating human cost of

armed conflict, memorials are a potent reminder that war is destructive, combat is devastating and human beings are affected physically, emotionally and spiritually. People are killed and incapacitated in the belief and with the hope that they offer themselves in the service of something greater than themselves. They deserve to be honoured.

vi Foreword As part of an effort to transform ‘ought’ into ‘will’, Iam sure that Australians will continue to erect and preserve memorials to the righteous, even the unknown righteous, and to honour their spirit on occasions like Remembrance Day and Anzac Day as they

reflect on war and its enduring consequences. They will also face the challenge of commemorating Australian contributions to more recent military campaigns in Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq, and international peacekeeping operations in Rwanda, Cambodia, Somalia, Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. These, too, have come with a human cost. Over the years I have participated in commemorations at the cenotaph in Wollongong where I grew up and at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne when I was serving with the Royal Australian Navy. I have officiated at ceremonies near tiny monuments like that at the former gold-mining village of Tuena in rural New South Wales, and at the Dawn Service held at the majestic Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Each occasion was made solemn by the symbols around which we gathered and the ground on which we stood. Something of enduring significance has been invested in each place. They embody something that cannot be reduced to mere words or exhausted by familiar rituals. They hint at the spiritual, the numinous and the divine and, as a people, we believe that these things abide. And yet, like many, I have been oblivious to much of the more subtle messages these memorials convey. It is for this reason that I am particularly grateful to Professor Ken Inglis, the author of Sacred Places. He is one of Australia’s finest historians and an astute observer of our culture and its evolution. In this book, he has examined a previously unexplored aspect of Australian national life. His account is sensitive and perceptive, empathetic but critical nonetheless. Since its publication in 1998, Sacred Places has attracted the interest of a wide audience from veterans to students. Importantly, it has encouraged a new generation of scholars in a number of academic disciplines to consider the meaning of war memorials ana the part they play in defining identity and imparting purpose, as well as encouraging local communities across the country to preserve these important symbols of our common life. Sacred Places has rightly received much critical acclaim, in addition to a number of significant literary awards. It is fitting that this new edition of Sacred Places appears on the ninetieth anniversary of the Anzac landings at Anzac Cove, or Ari Burnu, as it is known to the Turks. Gallipoli has inspired many memorials over the years and new stories of valour and tragedy emerge even now. It is a special place for all Australians and no visitor to the Peninsula can remain unmoved by the experience. I was part of the seventy-fifth anniversary pilgrimage to lurkey

in 1990. The dawn service at Anzac Cove was as unforgettable as the veterans I was privileged to meet. They have all since died. When we utter those words ‘We will remember them’, Ken Inglis helps us to understand not just why, but what we ought to bring to mind. This book transcends history and we are all the richer for it.

Dr Tom Frame Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force Member, Council of the Australian War Memorial Australia Day 2005

Contents

Foreword v Introduction: Holy Ground 7 1 Colonial Monuments 12 Memorials ancient and modern 12

A privilege for posterity 14

Statues 26 No shrine 37 Civil conflicts 18

2 Soldiers of the Queen 39

Distant graves 39 For the Empire 44 The makers 50

Statues 52 Ceremonies 60

Remembering and forgetting 62

Missing monuments 66

The Commonwealth landscape 69

3 The Great War 75

ANZAC 75 The dead 85

The bereaved 97 The monument as recruiter 106

Division 712

4 The War Memorial Movement 123

The right way 123 Raising the money 129 Choosing the site 135

viil Contents The sacred and the useful 138

Forms 154

Experts and artisans 144 ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE’ = 779

‘LEST WE FORGET 190

5Red Anzac Days 197 letter day 197 Ceremonies 207

Messages 216 Dissenters 224 The post-war landscape 2353 Uses and abuses 239

Graves 251 Memorials 258

6 In Foreign Fields 251

Pilgrims 269 7 Capital Monuments 280

Slow movements 280 Tasmania 284 Western Australia 286

Queensland 290 South Australia 293 New South Wales 298

Victoria 315 Dawn 329 Canberra 333

8 From World War II to Vietnam 348 ‘Never such innocence again’ 348

The triumph of utility 352 The persistence of monuments 358

Women 365 Prisoners of war 367 Names and inscriptions 363

Aborigines 374

Contents 1x

Overseas 375 Korea and Vietnam 377 State updates 388 A sacred way 402

The Australian War Memorial 392

9 Australia Remembers 412 Operation Restoration 412 Ceremonies old and new 422

Sacred sites 44] Aboriginal presences and absences 444 The Unknown Australian Soldier 45]

Civil religion 458 Meanings 471

Multiculture 474 ‘All graves are one’ 479

Sources 484 Acknowledgements 486

Notes 489 Index 516 Abbreviations 488

Illustrations

page

The Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne / War Memorial, Thirroul, New South Wales 5 Monument at Anglesea Barracks, Hobart 12 The Little Boy at Manly 17 Monument in Ballarat Cemetery, 1856 19 Monument to Wombeetch Puyuun, Camperdown, Victoria, 1884 25

Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Bourke, Sydney, 1842 27

Burke and Wills, Melbourne, 1865 28 General Charles Gordon, Melbourne, 1889 37

Mounted trooper by English sculptor Adrian Jones 39

Memorial obelisk at Sherwood, Queensland 4]

Memorial at Watson’s Bay, Sydney 43

Obelisk at Gumeracha, South Australia 44

Tablet at Oatlands, Tasmania 44

Obelisk at Geelong, 1902 48 Monument in St Kilda Road, Melbourne 50

A New South Wales Lancer at Lismore 54 A ‘sorrowful figure at Allora, Queensland 54

James White’s sculptures in Ballarat and Perth 55 Australian centaurs by James White, Western Australia 57 A South African War Memorial at Launceston, Tasmania 59 District Soldiers Memorial, Parramatta, New South Wales 59

Kiosk at Charters Towers, Queensland 60

Tasmanian Soldiers National Memorial, Hobart 67 The first soldier statue of the Great War, Newcastle, New South Wales 75

Order of service for funeral of Major-General Sir W. T. Bridges 77

The man of Anzac as symbol for the nation 87 George Lambert’s portrait of C. k. W. Bean 83 Unburied Australian dead at Anzac, August 1915 85

Cemetery at Anzac, 1915 89

Xil Illustrations Australians killed at Pozieres awaiting burial, 1916 97

Burial service on the Somme, August 1916 92

Will Dyson, ‘One of the Old Platoon’ 95

Will Dyson, “The Mate’ 95 Temporary graves and memorials at Péronne, 1918 96 Urgent telegram from the Defence Department 98

Text of the King’s scroll, and accompanying letter 107 Family monument at Ma Ma Creek, Queensland 105

Family monument at Cornelian Bay, Tasmania 105 Roll of Honour, Murringo, New South Wales 107

Monument at Balmain, Sydney 109

Unveiling at Newcastle, 16 September 1916 177

Memorial at Manly, Sydney, by Burcham Clamp 1712 Memorial obelisk at Toogoolawah, Queensland 1719

Bundaberg, 192] 123

Memorial at Lithgow, New South Wales 12] Monument by Alfred Perrott, near Armidale, New South Wales 125

Mrs Margaret (‘Granny’) Riach 126

Mothers’ Memorial, ‘Toowoomba, Queensland 132 Drinking fountain at Woolloomooloo, Sydney 13.2 Arch outside town hall, Wallaroo, South Australia 133

Column, Albury, New South Wales 137 Soldiers Memorial Hall, Gerringong, New South Wales 14]

Memorial Hall, Martin’s Creek, New South Wales 142

Tablet on hall, Martin’s Creek 142

Memorial Municipal Chambers, Kerang, Victoria 142

‘Rest shed’, Stanthorpe, Queensland 142 Carillon, Bathurst, New South Wales 143

Competition for a memorial, 1919 145

“True in every detail’ 147 Statue outside public school at Miranda, Sydney 152

Miranda memorial on a new site, without statue 152

Doric pavilion, Narrogin, Western Australia 154

Tower at Rocky Hill, Goulburn, New South Wales 154 Cenotaph by Sir Edward Lutyens, Whitehall, London 155

Cenotaph, St Leonard’s Park, North Sydney 155

Cenotaph, reeling, South Australia 156

Arch of Victory and Avenue of Honour, Ballarat, Victoria 157

Illustrations xili Church of St George the Martyr, Goodwood, Adelaide 159

Sketch for obelisk, Mortdale, Sydney 160

Victoria’s tallest obelisk at Terang 167

Small obelisk at Tambellup, Western Australia 167

Imported firgure from Italy destined for Kaimkillenbun, Queensland 162

Figure carved by East Brisbane stonemason Alfred Batstone 163 Batstone’s figure on its pedestal at Amosville, New South Wales 163

Figure by Alessandro Casagrande at Nanango, Queensland 165

Figure by Francis Rusconi 165

Figure at Atherton, Queensland 166 Bronze figure by William Macintosh at Double Bay, Sydney 166

Figure by Margaret Baskerville at Alexandra, Victoria 167

New South Wales 167

‘The bomber’, bronze figure by C. Web Gilbert at Broken Hill,

Figure by Margaret Baskerville at Maryborough, Victoria 168

‘Wipers’, a replica of a bronze by C. Sargeant Jagger 168 ‘Dead Soldier’, George Lambert’s figure in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney 169

The Archangel Michael at Angaston, South Australia 171 Soldier in front of obelisk at Beaudesert, Queensland 171

Obelisk at Maryborough, Queensland 172

Female Victory on the obelisk at Maryborough 172 Allegorical female figures by Gilbert Doble at Wellington, New South Wales 173

Bronze medallion by Dora Ohlfsen on memorial at Mornington, Victoria 175

‘Weeping Mother’ at Gatton, Queensland 175 Bas-relief bronze by C. Douglas Richardson at Strathalbyn, South Australia 177 Additional names, Launceston, Tasmania 183

Names, Montville, Queensland 185

William Perrott ‘Aboriginal’ at Herberton, Queensland 189

The clock tower at Boorowa, New South Wales 195

Inscription, Ross, Tasmania 195

Inscription, Ipswich, Queensland 196 Anzac Day procession in Thirroul, New South Wales, 1920 197

Launceston, Tasmania 199

Programme for unveiling at Marrickville, Sydney, 24 May 1919 199

Memorial arch at Bega, New South Wales 200 Unveiling at Subiaco, Perth, 25 November 1923 203 ‘The Last Post’, Dudley, New South Wales 208 Badge for unveiling at Stanley Flat, Victoria 208

X1V Illustrations Richard Ramo’s Temple of Peace at ‘Ioowong, Brisbane 232 War memorial statue and drinking fountain at Thirroul, New South Wales 234

Anzac Day at Albert public school, Maryborough, Queensland 239

Pillar at Bairnsdale, Victoria 240

Obelisk in Anzac Parade, Sydney 240

The memorial as symbol of betrayed promise 247 A memorial wrecked at Tingalpa, Queensland 249 Memorial to the Anzac Mounted Division, Port Said 251

Exhumed Australian bodies near Villers-Bretonneux, 1919 253 Temporary crosses in the Adelaide War Cemetery, 1920 253

Beach cemetery, Anzac 254 Lone Pine cemetery and memorial, Gallipoli 254 Memorial to the Fifth Australian Division at Polygon Wood, Belgium 259

30 August 1925 261

Unveiling of memorial to the Second Division, Mont St Quentin,

Winning design by William Lucas for the Australian National Memorial,

Villers-Bretonneux, 1927 267

July 1938 269

Dedication of the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux,

Australian pilgrims at Anzac on Anzac Day 1931 271

Menin Gate at Midnight by Will Longstaff 274

‘A Voice from Anzac’ by Will Dyson 277 ‘Calling Them Home’ by Will Dyson 278

Dedication of the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, 11 November 1934 280 Dedication of the Tasmanian War Memorial, Hobart, 13 December 1925 285

State War Memorial, King’s Park, Perth 288

Dedication of Queensland National Anzac Memorial, 11 November 1930 292

Daphne Mayo and her Queensland Women’s War Memorial, 1930 293 South Australian National War Memorial, The Altar of Sacrifice 296

South Australian National War Memorial, Womanhood 296

Cenotaph, Martin Place, Sydney, dedicated in 1927 302

Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, 1934 306 ‘The Crucifixion of Civilization’ by Rayner Hoff for the Anzac Memorial 309

‘Infantryman’ by Rayner Hoff on the Anzac Memorial 310

‘The Sacrifice’, Anzac Memorial 317

Model by Theo Cowan for Cenotaph 314

Dissent at the inauguration of the Shrine 316 ‘Patriotism’, Paul Montford’s sculpture for western wall of the Shrine 324

‘The Man with the Donkey’, Melbourne, 1936 326

Illustrations XV Cartoon in the Australian Worker, Sydney, 28 March 1928 B39

and Emil Sodersteen 342 Australian War Memorial, Anzac Day, 1929 I4G Design for Australian War Memorial, Canberra, by John Crust

Commemorative area of the Australian War Memorial as it stood in 1945 347 Stone sculpture by George Allen , Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne 348

Diggers’ Memorial Club at Harbord, Sydney 5S

War Memorial Civic Hall at Dubbo, New South Wales 356 War Memorial Olympic Swimming Pool at Casino, New South Wales 358

Obelisk at Dubbo, New South Wales 360

Bronze figure by Otto Steen at Nowra, New South Wales 361 Granite wall panel added to World War I memorial at Warrnambool, Victoria 362

Additions to World War I rotunda at Erina, New South Wales 363 Monument encompassing World War I statue at Ulverstone, Tasmania 363

War Nurses Memorial Pavilion at Bundaberg, Queensland 366 Early prisoner-of-war memorial near Lithgow, New South Wales 369 Plaque on ex-prisoners-of-war commemorative tree at Numurkah, Victoria 370 Bronze statue of Sir Edward (‘Weary’) Dunlop in St Kilda Road, Melbourne 373

The cenotaph as clothes line 378 ‘Save Our Sons’, Anzac Day 1966 379 Commemorative tablet at Newcastle, New South Wales 3B3

‘Memorial motifs’ at Fairfield, Sydney 385 Additions to World War I memorial at Austinmer, New South Wales 385

Tablet below statue at Nannup, Western Australia 387

‘The Four Freedoms’ 395 Figure in Hall of Memory, Australian War Memorial 398 Roll of Honour for 1939-1945, Australian War Memorial 399

Canberra 407 Anzac Day 1985 442

Geoff Pryor’s vision of a new diorama in the Australian War Memorial 401 The Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial in Anzac Parade, Field of Remembrance outside St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney,

Missing hand and rifle at Waverley, Sydney 414 Missing head, South African War Memorial, Launceston, Tasmania 414

Head from statue at Cordalba, Queensland 474

The soldier at Thirroul from about 1985 417

Judith McKay’s advice to carers 418 Vigilantes defend the memorial at Wodonga, Victoria, Anzac Day 1988 419

The figure at Thirroul in January 1996 42]

XVv1 Illustrations Dawn service at the memorial clock tower in Barraba, New South Wales, 1985 422

After the dawn service in Sydney, 1985 424 Laying a wreath in Emerald, Queensland, Anzac Day 1985 426 Morning service at crucifix in Berridale, New South Wales, Anzac Day 1985 = 428

Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, 1977 43] The Wall of Remembrance at Sawtell, New South Wales 433 “The Peace Memorial that children built’ 437

Complementary patriotisms 445

Entombment of the Unknown Australian Soldier in the Hall of Memory,

Australian War Memorial, 11 November 1993 454

President Clinton at the Australian War Memorial, 20 November 1996 456

‘The Broken Years’ 460 Irreverence 464 Aboriginal ‘Unknown Soldier’, Condobolin, New South Wales, 24 April 1994 458

Women Against Rape, Anzac Day, Sydney, 1984 467

Memorial overwhelmed 469

Abandoned memorial at Bodangora, near Wellington, New South Wales 469

Memorial as quiet place for study, Launceston, Tasmania 470

Memorial as playground, Alice Springs 470

Greeks in Anzac Day march in Adelaide 1985 475 The War Memorial at Thirroul, Anzac Day 1996 478

Anzac Day 1995 480

Turkish-Australian at Ataturk Memorial, Anzac Parade, Canberra,

Japanese war memorial shrine at Cowra, New South Wales 482

Introduction

Bg ee eee ae aa (A oa OE bo "hl Tl Bi bs Ri:

—¢ el eee a I esis : Pa a RUPERT BPG tere g: Hoa be Bm ery BOR Yd Ra B ON eu aM:

The Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne (Shrine of Remembrance)

The Shrine of Remembrance was a new and mysterious presence in the Melbourne of my childhood. Rising from a mound in the Domain, just

south of the city, the building proclaimed itself the most important object in the landscape. The king’s son, the Duke of Gloucester, dedicated the Shrine on 11 November, Armistice Day, 1934, when | was five, at a ceremony timed to coincide with the city’s centenary celebrations. What was a Shrine? In remembrance of what? The makers, sensing that elucidation was necessary, had answers carved into the grey granite wall. Every visitor, everybody who passed along the grand boulevard of St Kilda Road, was addressed by a solemn command.

1

2 Sacred Places ‘LET ALL MEN KNOW THAT THIS IS HOLY GROUND

THIS SHRINE ESTABLISHED IN THE HEARTS OF MEN AS ON THE SOLID EARTH COMMEMORATES A PEOPLE’S FORTITUDE AND SACRIFICE YE THAT COME AFTER GIVE REMEMBRANCPE’.

The archaic language signalled tradition. What tradition? To the most educated of readers the message sounded Greek, and therefore in har-

mony with the architecture. Other monumental buildings on holy ground in Melbourne, the two Christian cathedrals named for St Paul and St Patrick, the Scots and Methodist churches, were Gothic. This one was Athenian. To receive any Christian message you had to go inside. In the centre of the pavement was set a Stone of Remembrance inscribed

‘GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN’. Readers were expected to recognize these words as Jesus’ and to supply for themselves the rest of the verse: ‘than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. Written

on that stone, the text was clearly intended to speak of the war dead. Their names were written on parchment in books housed in glass cases.

But not only the names of the dead: every man who had gone to the Great War from the state of Victoria was honoured in those books. We who came after were to give remembrance to all who had exhibited that

fortitude and sacrifice, the men who returned as well as those whose bodies were buried on the other side of the earth. My own earliest memory of the Shrine connects it with the occult. I learned with wonder that on Armistice Day every year, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh

day of the eleventh month, a ray of light would fall on the Stone of Remembrance. Had some capricious supernatural power chosen to stop the war at exactly that moment? Greek building, Christian inscription, ancient pagan theatre of the sun: ‘Shrine’ was a name chosen to embody complex understandings of war, death, sacrifice, the nation, the universe. My first experiences of the Shrine inspired awe and confusion and fear: awe in the presence of the holy, confusion about what to think and feel and do in response, fear of I don’t know what. I met in the grounds

Introduction: Holy Ground 3 the wholly intelligible, attractive and unfrightening little statue of two men and a donkey. Private Simpson, the Man with the Donkey, saviour

of comrades at Gallipoli, I had learned about already, probably at church (where preachers of children’s sermons would connect two kinds

of sacred story by comparing Simpson with the Good Samaritan), certainly at school in the Fourth Grade Reader, where the Victorian Education Department placed him to initiate us into the Anzac tradition.

Here was the one story from the war which all our mentors, the most bellicose and the most peace-loving, could agree was entirely edifying. (The Reader did not tell us about the most famous Australian fighter of the war, Albert Jacka, from Melbourne, awarded the Victoria Cross for killing seven Turks the day Simpson died.) Find Gallipoli on the map, said the Notes and Exercises. Was Simpson brave? What does his story teach us? Write a composition entitled ‘Their Mission is to Save’.

The time for that assignment was around Anzac Day, which to school children as to everybody else meant more than Armistice Day. 25 April was a state school and public holiday; 11 November was not. On the last working day before 25 April some children were delivered to the Shrine for a special service, and the rest of us were gathered

in quadrangles to be addressed by teachers and returned soldiers (and some men who were both) on the meanings of Anzac. Birth and/or

baptism of the nation; sacrifice; rallying to the empire; holding on against impossible odds; fighting to defend the right, and being prepared to do it again. In my class at North Preston, most of us, born in 1928 or

1929, had fathers who had been just too young for the war; an envied minority wore their dads’ medals, and the most admired of all, my friend Wally, wore medals of a dad who was dead. Anzac Eve speakers drew our attention to the honour board bearing the names of old boys. Above the blackboard in one classroom hung a print of Will Longstaff’s painting Menin Gate at Midnight, showing the great British monument to dead men ‘Missing’ in Belgium, among them thousands of Australians, and in the foreground, ghostly soldiers rising among the poppies. Simpson, Menin Gate, the old soldiers’ sermons, the honour board: we were being thoroughly schooled in the values the Shrine was created to signify. My age-mate Peter Shrubb, born in New South Wales, recalls

4 Sacred Places that like perhaps most children of our time he grew up in the culture of the Great War. ‘Anzac Day’, he writes, ‘was the only day of the year that had any kind of holiness in it’. And not only for boys. Joan Colebrook, growing up in Herberton, north Queensland, remembers ‘the sacred letters’ which ‘had about them the unforgettable aura of the 1914 that we had not experienced’, and the days when she marched to the monument

with fellow-pupils for wreath-laying, singing and ‘tears of pain and patriotism’.

On the actual day some of us took tram or train with parents into town and watched the march to the Shrine; some attended ceremonies at the nearest local war memorial (an arch outside the Preston Town Hall); some listened to wireless descriptions of the march, some just had a holiday—a dour one, like a Sunday, for no public pleasures were yet permitted on the sacred day. If you visited the Shrine after the march and the service, you could inspect a pile of wreaths laid around the Stone of Remembrance. On Armistice Day classes were suspended between morning playtime and lunch while we stood in line, heard addresses like those of Anzac eve but dwelling more on death than birth and on the world rather than the nation; and we bowed our heads in silence at the moment the ray of sunlight was lighting up the Stone of Remembrance. On the steps of the Shrine, day in and day out, stood a man dressed in the Great War uniform of the Australian Light Horse—leggings, emu-

plumed Digger hat, rifle to shoulder—guarding the Shrine and when necessary reminding visitors, especially young ones, to keep their voices down, stop running about and generally show proper respect. Wally and

I once got a stern reproach from him on a holiday visit, for fooling about. He was actually a policeman dressed up: a living statue, an incarnation of all the Shrine enjoined us to remember. One Anzac eve more

than thirty years later the Light Horseman told my daughter Louise, sitting innocently on the steps, to stand up.

There is a vivid description of a war memorial in Kangaroo, the novel D. H. Lawrence dashed off while he and his wife Frieda were living at Thirroul (in the novel ‘Mullumbimby’) on the south coast of New South Wales in 1922.

Introduction: Holy Ground 3

die A. ie

at im -

aN gees ewan om i—@=| | FF | m.. ee,Dita, Roe | onFt ea haw “ee ge REOO gy,

War memorial, Thirroul, freshly cemented into place for unveiling on Anzac Day 1920. The drinking fountain is not mentioned in D. H. Lawrence’s description. War memorials were a popular subject for postcards. This image is one of hundreds from Australia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere collected by W. G. Fortman in Melbourne and now lodged in the Australian War Memorial.

It was really a quite attractive little monument: a statue in pale, fawnish stone, of a Tommy standing at ease, with his gun down at his side, wearing his puttees and his turned-up felt hat. The statue itself was about life size, but standing just overhead on a tall pedestal it looked small and stiff and rather touching. The pedestal was in very nice proportion, and had at eye

6 Sacred Places level white inlet slabs between little columns of grey granite, bearing the names of the fallen on one slab, in small black letters, and on the other slabs the names of all the men who served: ‘God Bless Them’. The fallen

had ‘Lest we forget’, for a motto. Carved on the bottom step it said, ‘Unveiled by Grannie Rhys’. A real township monument, bearing the names of everybody possible: the fallen, all those who donned khaki, the people who presented it, and Grannie Rhys. Wonderfully in keeping with the place and its people, naive but quite attractive, with the stiff, pallid, delicate fawn-coloured soldier standing forever stiff and pathetic.

A sensitive observer—novelist, poet, painter—is here responding to the

local variant of a monumental form new to the world. What does he see? First, pathos, not triumph. That may be why Lawrence prefers the homely English word “Tommy’ to the hard ‘Digger’, which he knows well but saves for darker purposes. Or he may simply have wanted to keep it simple for English readers: Frieda calls it in letters an ‘Anzac’. Second, Lawrence notices the monument’s communal character, naming townspeople and bearing on separate white slabs the names of the

fallen and of men who served: at Thirroul as in the Shrine of Remembrance, the survivors as well as the dead are honoured. Finally, he likes it. Lawrence had discovered an Australian icon. For once the word can be used with no stretch of meaning: a bodily image, created to be revered. D. H. Lawrence’s appreciation was for a long time unusual among the sorts of Australian who read his books. For anybody whose mind had

been turned by the catastrophe of 1914-18 towards some variety of socialism or pacifism, the very enterprise of making and using war memorials could appear unhealthy. Lovers of peace tended to turn away from them with a sigh or a shudder. So did like-minded people in other countries, including liberal scholars. Even now I find some friends and acquaintances uncomfortable to know that I am writing about war memorials, as if the very act of studying them gives blessing to militarism. For one reason or another, war memorials were rarely included in otherwise ample descriptions of the cultural landscape, in Australia as

elsewhere. Yet they were visible everywhere, across those countries

Introduction: Holy Ground 7 whose armies had suffered the heaviest losses. How numerous they were

depends on one’s definition of a war memorial, but a cautious guess would put Australia’s war memorials at more than four thousand. How is it possible, asks a French historian, to ignore the thirty thousand monuments aux morts erected after 1918, constituting as they do the greatest efflorescence of public art in the nation’s history? The question reveals a shift in perception. As recently as 1980, war memorials had almost no scholarly literature. Now the interested reader

can gather a small shelf of books and a thick file of articles, and historians from three continents converged on Paris in 1991 for a colloquium on the subject. Why the change? The simple passing of time has helped. The urge to study every aspect of World War I has strengthened as 1914-18 makes the passage from memory through a sort of limbo into history; the students are now grandchildren, not children, of that war, looking back across still worse horrors with a disinterested curiosity, or

irony, or in some other mode not easily open to their parents. Moreover, as fashions in aesthetic appreciation come and go, the blindness of earlier observers itself becomes a fact to be interpreted. In the new field of popular culture, historians meet cultivators from other disciplines, and what was once disdained for vulgarity and banality becomes useful evidence about common perceptions of nation and community, life and

death. Death, its representations and contexts, has become a more common subject of study, and so has the human body, alive and dead, actual and represented in art and craft. Practitioners of a new approach to comparative history hope to win rewards from inspecting the monuments of various societies for similarities and differences. There have been more particular sources of heightened interest. In France from the late 1970s Maurice Agulhon’s studies of national image, symbol and ceremony, and Antoine Prost’s analyses of monuments aux

morts, became founding works of an enterprise which might be called iconographic history, and which helped to provoke a broader French project, Les Lieux de Mémoire, with Agulhon and Prost among contributors and Pierre Nora as director, committed to the interpretation of monuments and other texts as bearers of collective memory. Benedict Anderson, having proposed in a study of modern Indonesia that ‘monuments are a type of speech’, issued in 1983 a challenge to students of

8 Sacred Places nationalism, especially Marxists, to try imagining without a sense of absurdity the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. The creation of the stark and startling Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington (1982) stimulated scholarly interest in the whole genre in and beyond the USA. More recently, monuments to Hitler’s ‘holocaust’ have been raised in and out of Europe, accompanied by much discussion about what such commemorative projects can and

cannot do. One way and another, the interrogation of war memorials has become a vigorous branch of cultural history. My own interest goes back some forty years. Studying the place of

religion in modern society, I began to wonder what had become of traditional impulses towards faith and worship when ecclesiastical Christianity was losing its authority as custodian of essential truths about

life and death. Had religious belief atrophied in the face of science, industry and other agents of modernity? Was it being diverted into new vessels? I found my attention turning towards the commemoration of

war. It struck me that the spirit of the Shrine and of Anzac Day, so powerful in my memories of childhood and still well and truly alive, had

somehow escaped the eye of people who wrote about Australia. Although C. E. W. Bean, the official war historian, was more prolific and possibly more popular than any other writer of Australian history, all the others virtually ignored him and the question central to his work: ‘How

did the Australian people—and the Australian character, if there is one—come through the universally recognized test of this, their first great war?’ The solemn observances of Anzac Day were given at best perfunctory attention by scholars. J. M. Freeland’s capacious Architecture in Australia. A History, published in 1968, mentioned no war memorial, large or small. It was a playwright, Alan Seymour, who put into general

usage a deeply Australian phrase, ‘the one day of the year’; and the potency of the occasion was made spectacularly evident when the governors of the Adelaide Festival rejected Seymour’s play with that title in 1959 because they thought that it was an offence to the sacred, a kind of blasphemy.

I began to work backwards through Australian history, exploring the events and movements of which the landing at Gallipoli was said by

Introduction: Holy Ground 9 Bean and Anzac Day orators to have been a culmination, examining the

gaps and silences which, they declared, the men of the Australian Imperial Force had filled. Zhe Australian Colonists. An Exploration of Social History 1788-1870 (1974) reported the first stage of the journey. In The Rehearsal. Australians at war in the Sudan 1885 (1985) J told the story of the

first military force ever despatched from a self-governing colony to an imperial war. I hope to complete expeditions long under way into the Australias of 1870-1900 and 1901-1915. Most of the present book is about the years since 1915; its themes are those I had in mind when I set out, though at first | had not intended to put war memorials at the centre of the story.

They, and what happened around them, began to occupy me. I liked to go and look at the soldier on his pedestal at Thirroul. Devoted research by Ted Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the Thirroul sub-branch of the Returned Services League, uncovered the story of the making of his town’s monument, and helped me realize that every memorial had its own history, sometimes harmonious as at Thirroul, sometimes

not, as I found the making of the Shrine of Remembrance to have been. Harmonies, conflicts and accommodations could all, I hoped, once made legible, yield understandings of what people cared about and stood for.

In 1983 I embarked on a survey of war memorials throughout Australia, to produce an inventory for posterity and the data for this book. I did not then imagine that the last of its chronologically arranged chapters would be so long. By 1960 or so, like almost everybody else who thought about the matter, I thought that the ceremonies of Anzac would wither away and its monuments become ever more archaic. Even when I began this study more than twenty years later I did not foresee

the imminent resurgence of commemoration, which continues as | write. I would have thought it unlikely at that time that the remains of a man of the first AIF would be repatriated on the seventy-fifth anniver-

sary of Armistice Day 1918 and entombed in Canberra at the centre

of the Australian War Memorial to become an object of reverent pilgrimage. If this book helps readers to understand the significance of that event in Australian history, it will have achieved its unexpectedly extended purpose.

10 Sacred Places The Heritage Commission and the Australian War Memorial have given valuable support to my project. The Australian National University has provided still more. Jan Brazier worked with me as a research assistant, her salary paid for one year by the Heritage Commission and for two more by the ANU. Her patient travelling and meticulous docu-

mentation have created a rich record in words and photographs of memorials in New South Wales. In Queensland Judith McKay, who was

conducting a survey conservationist in purpose for the state branch of the Returned Services League, has offered comradely collaboration. Elsewhere in Australia we relied on volunteers. Many people, whom |

thank on pp. 486-7, have shared the discovery that once you start noticing memorials, you can’t stop. Jan Brazier dug in libraries and archives for material on all states and compiled a finding aid invaluable once I began to write. With advice from Ken McSwain she constructed a computer database and analysed such characteristics of the memorials as could usefully be counted.

I had wanted all along to place the subject in an international context. In New Zealand Jock Phillips, with the photographer Chris Maclean, had begun a survey which was still at a stage early enough for them to collect data in a form comparable with ours, enabling a precise study of war memorials in two societies so close to each other and so similar in character that any differences are instructive. George Mosse, pioneer interpreter of monument and ceremony in modern Europe, has long been an inspiration, and especially since 1979, when he came to Australia and inspected the Australian War Memorial and the Shrine of Remembrance with eloquent wonder. The convenors of a conference at

Bellagio in 1985 on gender, politics and power, helped me to think about the representation of men and women on monuments. The hospitality of St John’s College Cambridge in 1990-91 made it possible for

me to examine war memorials in the United Kingdom and to benefit from research under way at the Imperial War Museum by Catherine Moriarty, national co-ordinator of an inventory of war memorials. On Annette Becker’s visit to Canberra in 1990 I saw Australian war memorials through the eyes of a scholar who had written an instructive book about their French equivalent—or rather, near-equivalent, for she and I came to realize that war memorial and monument aux morts are not identical constructions: the difference in language expresses a difference

Introduction: Holy Ground 11 in culture. I thank Avner Offer for putting me in touch with Annette Becker and with Jay Winter in Cambridge. To these two historians I am grateful for much counsel and for access to the overlapping groups of scholars who met in Paris in 1991 for the conference on Les Monuments aux Morts and at Péronne in 1992 on the comparative cultural history of World War I. A conference held in 1991 by the Institute of General History of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Social History and Problems of Synthesis gave me the opportunity to speculate about war memorials at large and to reduce, thanks especially te Sergei Malyshkin, my ignorance of Russian commemoration. To Avner Ben-Amos I owe my partici-

pation in a conference sponsored by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut at Essen in its Leipzig annexe in 1993 on The Transformation of the Sacred in Modern Nationalism at which I gave a paper on tombs of

unknown soldiers. I have learned much about the USA from C. Kurt Piehler’s book Remembering War the American Way (1995), and from con-

versations with its author and other scholars in 1995 at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. My sister Shirley Lindenbaum in New York has been an alert supplier of evidence about contemporary perceptions of American memorials. For Italy I have benefited from the kindness of my daughter Kate Inglis and her husband Maurizio Nazari and the patience of my grandsons, Nicholas and Duccio Nazari, who have accompanied me to many monuments commemorating the agonies and ambiguities of their country’s participation in two world wars. Duccio, aged three, after hearing the echoes of his voice and his shoes ring through the galleries of the vast ossuary at Asiago, where Italians and Austro-Hungarians killed each other, asked: ‘Mama, are the soldiers frightened of war memorials?’ Evidently Duccio was, somehow; as I had been when first confronted by the Shrine of Remembrance; and as the seven-year-old Joanne Cunningham had been in the Thirroul of 1920, seeing the lid taken off the wooden box in which the statue had been transported to the site and believing, for a moment of terror she remembered all her life, that the body inside was a dead soldier. Though everybody knew that the figure was a piece of stone, the statue on its pedestal did stand for each dead man whose body, identified or Missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned to Thirroul. That made its site holy ground.

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Soldiers of the Queen 49 was that the British were supposed not to forget was itself quickly forgotten, as the solemn, biblically archaic message was declaimed around the imperial world. It had been created just in time for use in commemoration of South African war dead inside and outside the mother country,

a mint-fresh invocation of ... of what, exactly? Their sacrifice? The cause? God? By assembling that conjunction, that pronoun, and that verb, unbounded by any noun, Kipling had sent on its way a message ideally suited to the contemplation of dead soldiers with unfocused gravity.

In capital city, country town or suburb, the memorials themselves were given a variety of names. Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial was possibly the most common, incorporating the euphemism that had become an established usage during the nineteenth century in history, fiction and art, according to which soldiers of the queen did not stagger or sink or topple or have bits blown off, but fell, to become not simply the dead but the fallen, who cleanly, heroically, sacrificially, gave their lives in war. People raised on such high diction were not well prepared for squalid actualities. James Green, chaplain with a unit from New South Wales, recorded the sickening moment when he first observed a man killed. One has to be in an engagement to see what ‘the glorious death of the soldier’ really is in these times of modern artillery. One man was lying with an arm blown away, and a great hole in his side such as is made in the earth with a shovel. As I lay by his side, the shells flying over us, he rocked from side to side in his agony.

Such images were to be forgotten, if possible, by participants and kept from mourners; for the comfort of the living the dead were metaphorically made whole, embalmed, shrouded, turned back into the Fallen. That word, and fell for died, were also commonly used in the detail of inscriptions.

Sometimes the monument was simply the Soldiers’ Memorial, a title that could accommodate the living as well as the dead. The makers did not, in my reading, employ the short term ‘war memorial’. In the dominions as in the United Kingdom, ‘war memorial’ appears not to have been used until monuments had to be made for a larger, more nearly total war.

50 Sacred Places The makers Nobody expected federal, state or municipal governments to pay for the memorials. The grieving and the celebration were understood to be a Communal rather than official responsibility.

Melbourne had one highly visible example of a familiar British enterprise, the memorial regimental in both auspices and character. Throughout the nineteenth century officers and men of British regiments

had raised monuments not only in the field but at home—in public places and churches—to comrades who had died on service overseas. In this tradition was an elaborate structure honouring men of the Victorian

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face of a central pedestal: ‘ERECTED BY MEMBERS OF THE 5TH VICTORIAN CONTINGENT VM.R. IN MEMORY OF THEIR FALLEN COMRADES IN SOUTH AFRICA’. Three other faces name fifty-four men in order of rank. Six surrounding pillars are inscribed with the names of places where the unit had been in action, including Wilmansrust.

Soldiers of the Queen 51 Mounted Rifles, unveiled in 1903, mixing pillars, arches and obelisk, and standing just south of the city of Melbourne, beside the boulevard of St Kilda Road and close to Victoria Barracks. Site and scale declare that the VMR is entitled to high civic regard; on the monument itself, citizen soldiers honour their own.

Several other memorials were military in inspiration but civic in character, as men back from the war provoked fellow-citizens into making a tribute. The public meeting at Gatton, Queensland, which

originated a campaign for a memorial was held on the initiative of officers and men in a locally-based squadron of the 13th Australian Light Horse Regiment, Queensland Mounted Infantry; and at Tenterfield, New South Wales, townspeople were stirred to the commemoration of three dead men by their comrades in the Tenterfield Mounted Rifles, and in particular J. F. Thomas, solicitor and citizen soldier, who when a major in South Africa had taken on the grim task of defending Harry Morant

and his companions at their court martial. More often, however, and especially for tributes to more than one man, the monuments were initiated by civilians, and inscriptions said so: “THE RESIDENTS OF THE DISTRICT, ‘THE PEOPLE OF THE RICHMOND RIVER, ‘ERECTED BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION’. The local paper announces a public meeting as soldiers go off, or when news arrives that one is dead, or that Mafeking has been relieved,

or that the empire has a new monarch, or that the war is over. The meeting elects a committee—possibly chaired by the mayor, to give the project a character both communal and municipal. An appeal is launched for an amount that seems both adequate and feasible: a hundred pounds in small towns, two hundred to a thousand in larger ones, and more still for state-wide projects. (One hundred pounds then is roughly equivalent to $A16 000 in 1998.) People volunteer to collect, and to run fétes and entertainments. The Tasmanian committee sends out 35000 circular let-

ters, and South Australia’s tries just about every fund-raising device known to philanthropic man and woman: art union (raffle), ladies’ fund, choral concert, military tattoo and ball, direct appeals to school children,

men of the citizen forces and footballers, lantern slide lecture tour by soldier with horse and dog. Campaigners may find the going hard. Narrandera would be struggling without the individual donation of

52 Sacred Places the local magnate Sir Samuel McCaughey. At Allora Colonel Harry Chauvel complains that there is ‘very little genuine civilian money in the account’: the monument has had to become a regimental responsibility. The committee invites somebody to design and erect the memorial. Some hold competitions. South Australia commissions a design without

competition, and so do most committees in provincial towns. A few engage architects, a few more sculptors, but most go for monumental masons, craftsmen whose main business is supplying memorial structures for graves in the cemeteries their premises often adjoin. The most popular memorial form, chosen by one committee in four, was the mason’s obelisk. They would readily recommend it to clients who wanted advice, for it was well within their technical and artistic scope, and convention permitted it to be almost any size. A small one could be cheap. It could

be read as signalling both mourning and triumph. There was another advantage, in a country with a tradition of ecclesiastical sectarianism and

no established church. When people in the United Kingdom put up South African war memorials, they commonly chose a cross. For the rarity of that symbol in Australian commemoration, and the greater popularity of the obelisk, the most likely explanation is that committees,

composed as they were of people from all denominations and none, tacitly agreed to go for a form that was common secular property. So in Victoria, subscribers in Geelong and Castlemaine put up imposing obelisks four times as high as a tall man, while the hamlet of Byaduk installed a tiny one in honour of its two dead sons.

Statues The statue was second only to the obelisk in popularity, erected in about half as many places but more visible in the landscape than that figure suggests: for this was the form chosen in many large centres of population, including all those capital cities where state-wide memorials were raised by 1914. The effigy was not of an officer, or of any individual, but of a type: history at last had delivered to monument-makers in Australia a local hero, the citizen as soldier. Within a few years the civic landscape displayed more statues of him than of explorers or governors or other worthies. When committees had the ambition and the money to engage sculptors rather than masons, artists rather than journeymen, they were

Soldiers of the Queen 53 given figures in marble, bronze, or occasionally a copper-coated plaster which looked like bronze but cost less. Stonemasons worked in marble or a softer stone. Some of the figures they supplied were carved by Italian craftsmen at quarries in Carrara which had served Michelangelo. In Goulburn, New South Wales, Gatton, Queensland, and the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick stood emblems of independent Australian British nationality that were actually made in Italy, though to Australian design and installed on locally made pedestals. The soldier figure is larger than life on the most expensive monuments, life-size on others. Typically he is tallish and lithe, and a physical

study of the first contingent suggests that this was realistic. He has a moustache, an ornament fashionable in the European world of 1900 for signalling manliness. He wears the uniform of the citizen military forces, nearly always with the felt hat, broad-brimmed and looped up on one side, which identifies him as Australian. None of these figures is triumphal. They may be keen and vigilant. Soldiers in Bendigo and Bathurst are ready for action, stepping forward and raising their rifles. Other figures are less militant. Lismore’s Lancer

struck a reporter as ‘simple and severe’ in treatment, yet complex in meaning: a ‘noble figure’ standing at ease ‘perhaps on sentry duty, perhaps

merely in deep reflection on the earnest purpose for which he has left his native surroundings, or, may be, mourning over some fallen companion and the sad havoc created in so many homes’. The figure in bas relief on the memorial at St Kilda, Melbourne, made by the sculptor C. Douglas Richardson, cradles his rifle and looks out to sea. In sandstone at Watson’s Bay and Allora, in marble at Gatton, he stands with bowed head and reversed arms in the conventional military posture of paying respect to the dead. In town after town the effigies installed to fix

the soldiers in public memory represented them in postures of grief, meditation, tranquillity. In Ballarat and also in Perth, a soldier protects a

wounded companion. Such a tableau had also some popularity in the United Kingdom, as the sculptor, James White, may well have known, among makers who wanted to represent soldiers in action but either had taken to heart Kipling’s warning against frantic boast or simply preferred to avoid recording a win for Goliath over David. In real life the theme was thoroughly approved by the imperial military authorities as

54 Sacred Places

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The statue of a New South Wales Lancer at At Allora, Queensland, a reporter sees the Lismore struck one observer as ‘simpleand _ figure, by William Macintosh, as typifying severe’ in treatment, yet complex in meaning: — sorrow. For a Great War memorial by the

a‘noble figure’ standing at ease ‘perhaps on same sculptor, see page 166. sentry duty, perhaps merely in deep reflection Photograph Richard Stringer) on the earnest purpose for which he has left his native surroundings, or, may be, mourning over some fallen companion and the sad havoc created in so many homes’. Building,

Engineering and Mining Journal, 5 /uly 1902. The figure is made of hammered copper by the Sydney firm of Wunderlich Ltd. (Photograph Jan Brazier)

grounds for decoration. All six Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians were for valour in rescuing comrades, not in killing enemies. The pair in Ballarat were conceived as a British soldier being succoured by an Australian mounted rifleman. The dominant figure is both Australia to the rescue of Empire and the bushman as master of horse and saviour of man.

Soldiers of the Queen 55

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. ae ne = ware he In Ballarat (left) and Perth (right) James White’s sculptures depict vigorous action, but in defence and comradeship. Ballarat Fine Art Gallery; Fortman postcards, Australian War Memorial)

The soldier figure is often a bushman, whether on horseback or by accoutrements and bearing; and that, like his stature, was true to life. The cities in which most Australians lived were under-represented, and rural areas over-represented, in the early contingents, mainly of citizen soldiers, and still more so after the British authorities decided that proficiency in open country mattered more than military training. Citizens’ Bushmen, Australian Bushmen, Imperial Bushmen: a word rich with Australian history was built into the names of their formations, and they were quickly celebrated as a new Australian type, the bushman soldier.

The bronze mounted trooper in Adelaide, outside Government House and opposite Parliament House, is his apotheosis. The committee

for South Australia’s memorial searched for the best sculptor, within their means, to commemorate the state’s fallen soldiers, and were led to Adrian Jones in London. Jones could have given Adelaide a foot-soldier guarding a stricken comrade, as he was doing for the Royal Marines in the Mall; but the South Australians preferred a horse and rider, and so did he. A very spirited composition, one Adelaide man in London judged

it, naming a quality admired in both men and horses; and when the sculptor took a photograph of the model to Buckingham Palace, King Edward VII used that very word. The bronze horse and rider, twelve feet high on a pedestal almost

as high, were shipped out in 1904 and delighted their patrons. Many Australians told the sculptor it was their country’s best statue. It happened

56 Sacred Places also to be the first equestrian statue in the continent, apart from St George

and the Dragon by Sir Joseph Boehm outside the National Gallery of Victoria which belonged to the history of art rather than to the culture of commemoration. In life as well as legend, Australia was a country of horses. In 1900

there were actually more of them here than in the United Kingdom, though the mother country had ten times as many people. Forty thousand

horses were shipped from Australia to the war, and all that survived it were slaughtered in South Africa as their riders sailed for home. For any-

body who wanted to see it that way, the South Australian memorial commemorated dead horses as well as dead men. Certainly it celebrated a profoundly Australian type. The Bushmen’s corps, said the Adelaide Advertiser, represented ‘the only romantic figure left in colonial life’. The

note of nostalgia is significant. The bushman on horseback had been an archetypal figure for popular Australian poets, from Adam Lindsay Gordon’s Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (1870) to Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895). The poem of Paterson’s title had

first appeared in 1890 in the Bulletin, and that paper, calling itself the Bushman’s Bible, published much verse in similar mode, including work by Harry Morant, steeplechaser, polo player, known as ‘the Breaker’ for his mastery of wild horses. For Bulletin writers and readers in the urbanized Australia of 1890 the type was becoming history, his feats the stuff of saga: The man from Snowy River is a household word today, And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.

The war gave him a new lease of life. The Bulletin welcomed writers who celebrated the superiority of the bushman to the Englishman as a fighter against Boers. J. H. M. Abbott, a Bulletin contributor who served in South Africa, published in 1902 a book-length eulogy of the bushman soldier as a living, fighting refutation of imperial fears and a fulfilment of colonial hopes about the destiny of Anglo-Australian man. Jommy Corn-

stalk, Abbott called him, the Australian version of Rudyard Kipling’s Tommy Atkins. As a third-generation colonist, Abbott was familiar with imperial prophecies that the old stock would degenerate out here. Put to the great test of war, however, Tommy Cornstalk was revealed as bigger

Soldiers of the Queen 57 and tougher than Tommy Atkins, alert where the original was bovine, accustomed in a democratic country to defer to nobody, schooled by the

bush to be at home on a horse, and all in all to be ‘the renewed, reinvigorated reproduction of the old race’, the very best of Britons. Alfred Deakin, federal statesman disguised as Australian correspondent of a conservative London newspaper, offered a tribute which differed from Abbott’s

only by avoiding swagger: “They are not braver than Tommy Atkins, but they can live well where he would starve ... They are not better horsemen than the British Cavalry, but they can get more out of their horses

... Richard Jebb, globe-trotting connoisseur of colonial nationalism, endorsed such judgements. Experience in South Africa, he wrote, had allowed people in the colonies to come to the following conclusions: ‘Officers and men alike proved superior in this war to their British brethren:

more adaptable to the business in hand; more used to life in the open;

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58 Sacred Places handier to make shift under difficulties. They were horsemen, not men on horses’.

The bronze group Adrian Jones executed for Adelaide represents the Australian centaur, bushman and horse at war. The rider could have been Paterson’s Clancy—‘No better horseman ever held the reins’— astride an animal that ‘snuffs the battle with delight’. It took an imperial war, and an imperial sculptor, to get the two of them on a statue. Some soldiers shared monuments with other forms. The figure at St Kilda was set on a tall tower which had, unusually, a cross high on each of four sides. At Launceston four doll-like stone soldiers guarded a

singular marble figure high above them, a female—imported from Italy—looking tenderly down, wreath in right hand, and representing Australia. Or so the official description said. The uninstructed might wonder. Victory? More likely, given her bearing, Peace? Unlabelled, and

drawing on no local tradition, she could not answer. New Zealand, by contrast, had three female figures on South African war memorials. Like Launceston’s, they would not have looked out of place in a cemetery, as grieving angels; but they were clearly identified on plinths as ‘Zealandia’. Why did the war yield three daughters of Britannia in the one dominion

and at most one in the other? Was it that while New Zealand had long

been a single colony, with one name, not until the war did the six components of Australia come together as a Commonwealth, still too infantile to be readily visualized, if at all, as other than a Little Boy? Some cartoonists evidently thought so. For whatever reason, except in Launceston the manly soldier had no competition on war memorial pedestals from any figure representing a woman. No monument portrayed any of the sixty or so Australian nurses who went to the war, though the one whose body lay in a distant grave, Fanny Hines, dead of pneumonia at Bulawayo, was named on the memorial at Ballarat. The broken column, the urn, and other forms familiar in cemeteries were erected in public places not only, as we have seen, to commemorate

one dead man but sometimes to honour more than one. The District Soldiers Memorial at Parramatta, west of Sydney, dedicated to fifteen dead men in 1904, incorporated but transcended a broken column. This was the most elaborate of all South African war monuments. The column was surrounded by a classical shrine or temple—four Doric columns,

Soldiers of the Queen 59

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At Launceston, soldiers around a pedestal District Soldiers Memorial, Parramatta: surmounted by the only female figure (and she column inside classical temple surmounted

imported from Italy) to appear on a South and flanked by guns African war memorial, officially deemed to represent Australia

entablature and cornice—on top of which sat a starkly unclassical fortress gun; two more guns flanked the structure. The classical forms had been

left over from an old court house, and the guns from the Crimean war, imported in the 1850s for defence against possible Russian attack. To a well-informed observer, the monument not only mourned men from the district—a stronghold of the New South Wales Lancers—who had given their lives in South Africa but also connected their sacrifice with the civil and military history of New South Wales; but even in 1904, many people who frequented the park would need help to see all that. The drinking fountain, like the broken column, was erected for multiple as well as single commemoration, chosen to serve the community

as well as to honour the soldiers. So, in the parks of Armidale and Mudgee, New South Wales, was the rotunda, and in Charters Towers,

60 Sacred Places

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Kiosk at Charters Towers, Queensland, a bandstand and an amenity for users of the park ‘erected to the memory of the volunteers who left Charters Towers to take part in the South African war’, all of whom are named on tablets. (Photograph Edgar Waters)

Queensland, the long vaulted kiosk, providing shade for all and a venue for the band, and in Glen Innes and Forbes, New South Wales, memorial street lamps. Men from Toowoomba, Queensland, were honoured by a memorial concert hall. At Bathurst, New South Wales, commemoration was delayed for years by argument about whether it should take the form of a clock tower. The town needed a reliable public time-piece;

but was it proper to mourn and honour the soldiers by putting up an object that civic resources should have provided anyway? Were monuments cold and useless stone, or should a true memorial have no purpose other than commemoration? Bathurst chose a soldier, and most other committees likewise opted for pure monumentality.

Ceremonies Foundation stones were laid, and memorials unveiled, in ceremonies blending the familiar with the new. The Duke of Cornwall and York, son of the King, out to open the Commonwealth Parliament, tapped stones with a trowel as his uncle the Duke of Edinburgh had done three decades

Soldiers of the Queen 61 earlier, happy to bend his itinerary for so imperial a cause as the laying

of foundations for memorials in Perth, Ballarat and Hobart. Royalty having sailed away by the time memorials were accomplished, viceroys were the first choice as unveilers. Senior army officers with South African experience were often invited to do the job. In some places the mayor officiated, and at Narrandera, New South Wales, the mayoress.

Crowds turned out. Regimental and municipal bands marched through the streets advertising the occasion and setting the pace for soldiers, sailors, members of rifle clubs, cadets, school children, the Boys’ Brigade.

Guards of honour formed around a temporary platform seating local and visiting dignitaries and members of the memorial committee. Places of honour were reserved for soldiers and bereaved relatives. The monument remained veiled, in Union Jack, Australian ensign

or plain wraps; if the governor was there, in Union Jack and Royal Standard. Wreaths were laid at its base on behalf of families, schools, military units. The speechmakers rarely included clergymen, though in Geelong and Launceston chaplains read prayers: they were involved as mentors to Christian soldiers, not pastors of denominational flocks. The makers nearly everywhere deemed this occasion military and civic, not ecclesiastical.

God was addressed in the national and imperial anthem beseech-

ing the deity to save the king, and sometimes in a popular hymn. Unveilers assured the bereaved that their men had died in a good cause: ‘in a just and righteous war’, said the governor at Hobart, for ‘equality of rights for members of the Anglo-Saxon race’, and for an empire which had proved invincible. As at nineteenth century statues, speakers invoked the memorial’s power to address children and posterity, hoping that it would inspire young people now and unborn generations for ever. One

man who sat on many platforms was eloquent about the memorial’s inspirational purpose. Major-General Sir Edward Hutton, a British regular officer, formerly in charge of the New South Wales military forces,

commander of Australians among other troops in South Africa, and lately appointed by the federal government to turn six colonial forces into a single army, used the ceremonies to promulgate a saga of sacrificial participation in the South African war which could serve the cause of creating a nation in arms.

62 Sacred Places Would it? Most of the men here honoured had served in contingents representing separate colonies. To be sure, those colonies became

states of the federation during the war; but the only federal force for South Africa arrived just in time to see the war end. Unveilers for the most part spoke of this town, this district, this state; the Commonwealth was not yet a sentimental entity. Alfred Deakin, its second prime minister, indulged the tortuous hope that this war would become somehow Australia’s spiritual equivalent of the Americans’ war of independence (and so in Canada did Sir Wilfrid Laurier). But in my reading Hutton was the only unveiler who said anything like that.

Whatever the local variations, speakers and editorial writers on unveiling day everywhere dwelt on the men who had made the sacrifice. In Adelaide the Register heard the dead themselves sending a message about the consolidation of empire: “They whose bones are on the veldt speak to us in the “immortal silence” of the work accomplished’. Speaking or silent, the dead lying on that far veldt could be imagined as in some sense brought home by the monument raised to their memory. At Allora an unveiling speaker ‘looked on the statue as not only a memorial, but as a tombstone’, and thought it possible that ‘their departed spirits were

hovering round them that day’. Allora’s statue, sculpted in pale sandstone, could easily be seen as ghostly; but that may not account entirely for the speculation, made at a time when many people, including Alfred Deakin, believed that spirits of the dead could speak to loved ones still on earth. A chronicler at St Kilda, not far from Deakin’s Melbourne home, was moved to imagine the suburb’s dead sons present at the unveiling: If, as is asserted by some, the spirits of the departed hold communication

with the relatives here upon earth, may we not hope that the spirits of the brave lads whose bodies are under the veldt were awakened by the mighty bugle sound of the ‘Last Post’, wafted over the ocean to the S.A. veldt, and brought them to witness the great ceremony enacted to their memory, and in their honour?

Remembering and forgetting What they had actually done on the veld was a theme speakers seldom addressed. They shared with popular writers a difficulty identified by the historian A. P. Thornton: ‘There may have been heroes in South Africa,

Soldiers of the Queen 63 but South Africa was never itself a heroic scene. The plot of the imperial

story had become too thick, and a writer who sought simplicities was hard put to find them’. War correspondents and cable sub-editors turned particular events into intelligible and comforting myths: Mafeking, Ladysmith, Kimberley. The makers of monuments at Casino and Nowra, New South Wales, inscribed the names of those places on pedestals, though no man from either town, and few from Australia, had fought in any of

them. The name of Mafeking, reached by some Queenslanders just as the siege was lifted, appeared on a number of memorials, and in Murray Bridge, South Australia, a monument was raised to Colonel Robert Baden Powell, English commander of the besieged town. This was a tribute both to the news men’s skill at creating heroic simplicities out of a bafflingly complicated war and to the efficacy of a telegraph network which could transmit their words almost instantaneously around the empire.

But who could locate on an actual or mental map, and remember, or even pronounce, most of the names they read on memorials of places where their men had fallen? Molopo, Ottoshoop, Koster River, Potchefstroom, Wakkerstroom, Slingersfontein ... Who could make sense of despatches by over-optimistic and censored correspondents whose reports had been reduced to telegraphese? And who could be sure what their own men were doing when British military authorities, wanting to discourage comparisons of performance among troops from various parts of the empire, made reporters write of ‘colonial’ forces which might or might not be Australian?

A few names did speak to Australians. At Diamond Hill, in ‘Transvaal, men from New South Wales and Western Australia fought in

June 1900 with a courage which earned them cheers from imperial troops and a much reported tribute from Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton for ‘the gallant way the regiment pushed forward beyond the

crest under murderous fire’. At the end of the war the Sydney Daily Telegraph could describe Diamond Hill as a place ‘famous in the annals of Australian military history’. At Eland’s River in western Transvaal, 500 men from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and Rhodesia held a besieged stores depot against attack during August 1900 by a force of 2500 to 3000 Boers. Not only did Kitchener, riding in

64 Sacred Places after the Boers had withdrawn, praise the colonials for ‘a wonderful defence’; Jan Smuts, distinguished enemy, admired their ‘magnificent courage’. Nearly a third of these men were from Queensland, where in Ipswich news of their heroism stirred a sense of patriotism in the heart of the fifteen-year-old Vance Palmer, and in Toowoomba the patriotic poet George Essex Evans spoke boldly for the colonial troops: On Australia’s page for ever We had written Eland’s River— We had written it for ever and a day.

If not for ever, the place was still in Henry Lawson’s mind when he wrote in 1908 a jocular essay on the men of Shakespeare’s Rome, observing that they were ‘in spite of the seemingly effeminate Italian temperament, as brave as our men were at Eland’s River’. In Victoria the name of Wilmansrust had meaning to people who

read it on monuments, but not for bravery. Here eighteen men of the Victorian Mounted Rifles had been killed on the night of 12 June 1901.

In post-war memory Wilmansrust evoked the judgement of a British general that the colonials had lacked it: ‘white-livered curs’, he had called them. Inscribed on memorials, Wilmansrust was a name to provoke complex feelings. There was a graver impediment to heartfelt celebration of Australian deeds that had helped to save the empire in South Africa, which set limits

even to the praise that could be heaped at unveilings. From the beginning public opinion about the war had been divided. In New South Wales the Labor politicians W. M. Hughes, W. A. Holman and Arthur Griffith and the historian Professor G. Arnold Wood, in Victoria the Labor members Dr William Maloney and John Murray, the Liberal H. B. Higgins and the Presbyterian minister the Rev. Dr J. L. Rentoul,

had expressed public misgivings about the British cause. Cardinal Moran, believing that the Boers were in the right, had advised Catholic soldiers: ‘stop home and defend your own country’. The men of the Bulletin, though proud of the bushmen’s performance at the war, wished they were not there. Though the ‘pro-Boers’ always sensed that they were in a minority—a plight for which they blamed in part a press utterly de-

pendent on jingo cables from London—they knew that experience

Soldiers of the Queen 65 in South Africa was disenchanting some Australian participants. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, was shaken by a conversation early in 1900 with Olive Schreiner, whose book The Story of an African Farm was well known in Australia. ‘You Australians

and New Zealanders and Canadians’, she told him, as he in turn told readers at home, ‘I cannot understand it at all, why you come here lightheartedly to shoot down other colonists of whom you know nothing —it is terrible’. Paterson became disgusted at the policy of setting fire to Boer farms. It was an assignment of which Australians might not easily feel proud. ‘We cleared the country by burning all farm-houses’, a man from ‘Tasmania wrote sardonically, ‘and the poultry fell to the victors’. All over the continent, moreover, were communities which had no South African war memorial. The people of most small towns and suburbs did not erect one. A total engagement of between ten and sixteen

thousand men in a population of four million left a large majority of households untouched by the war. Grief, pride and general awareness of the war concentrated in those suburbs and rural areas most strongly represented in South Africa because they happened to be catchment areas for units of the citizen military forces; in the rest of the country a sense of personal connexion was rare. One student of public attitudes proposes that the most illuminating distinction is not between pro-war and anti-war but between the committed and the apathetic. On that reading, the construction of memorials was an activity undertaken by two overlapping categories of people, those who had been enthusiastic for the war and those who had personal cause to remember it, and not by either the anti-war minority or the larger proportion of the population

who had no close interest in the war while it was on and then easily forgot it. Recollection may have been mildly prolonged by municipal naming of places and streets. In New South Wales Elands, Ladysmith and Spion Kop (a British disaster, if only the namers had known) were added to the landscape, and Bega acquired streets named Modder, Pardeburg, Ladysmith and Mafeking; but the map gained fewer new names from this war than from the one in the Crimea.

In one other respect with profound implications for its place in public and private memory, the war was significantly limited. In Australia as elsewhere in the empire, no man of military age had to fear

66 Sacred Places that people would think any the worse of him if he did not offer to serve. Volunteers were invited, but not exhorted. In Melbourne John Monash, aged thirty-five and a senior militia officer, thought that the war offered an opportunity to ‘anyone who aspires to military experience’ but was ‘not an occasion where patriotism demands the making of any personal

sacrifices’. Hubert Murray, the future lieutenant-governor of Papua, went solely to gain military experience, though ‘bitterly opposed to the war. Back from South Africa and working as a crown prosecutor, he noted with amusement the complex resonance of the new term ‘returned soldier’. In one court a man charged with assault pleaded successfully in

mitigation ‘that he was a returned soldier and that the man he kicked was a pro-Boer’, but in another a policeman had described a man as ‘a very bad character, a companion of thieves, vagabonds, and returned soldiers’.

Missing monuments Nobody proposed a national memorial, a tribute from the people of the

whole Commonwealth to the men who had served and died. Here Australia resembled the United Kingdom, where no architect or sculptor was set the challenge of representing a two-and-a-half-year encounter between an imperial army and bands of farmers. In New Zealand, by contrast, the Ranfurly Veterans’ Home was built in Auckland, named for

the governor who had initiated and led the campaign to create an institution for survivors of imperial wars in honour of the 218 New Zealanders, named on a tablet in the entrance hall, who had died in this one. Unlike Australia, New Zealand had experienced imperial warfare on its own soil, and that gave practical cause for looking after aged survivors. Possibly, too, as Keith Sinclair suggests, the war in South Africa

was more of a nation-making experience in New Zealand than for Australians, occupied as they were in constructing a new federal polity. In Adelaide, Hobart and Perth, memorials were raised in the name

of a state. Monuments in Adelaide and Hobart were actually called National: the South Australian National Memorial, the Tasmanian Soldiers National Memorial. Evidently the makers heard in the word a generality fitting for so momentous a collective enterprise, connecting antipodean

colonies with British realms everywhere. In Launceston the Examiner declared that the Tasmanian memorial would commemorate ‘the genesis

Soldiers of the Queen 67 , TASMANIA : faerie a. 28

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poo ee”. ae _— a a on rey ve The Tasmanian Soldiers National Memorial, Hobart Benjamin Sheppard’s statue was sent to London for casting in bronze, and exhibited there. The Times critic wrote: ‘He stands on the alert, his freld glass in one hand, and his rifle in the other; a fine type of the young manhood of the colony who came forward so readily to help the mother country and the Empire’. As the helmeted figure was not identifiably Australian, the sculptor was able to supply a replica for Halifax, Yorkshire. (Fortman Postcards, Australian War Memorial)

of a national sentiment that is Empire-wide’. Perhaps the word signalled

also the absence, so far, of any federal capital for the new Commonwealth of Australia, and therefore the virtual certainty that no truly national monument would be raised. Why should the people of any state capital not deem their city, and so their memorial, to be as national as any other?

68 Sacred Places Yet by 1914 none of the capital cities along Australia’s east coast

had a state memorial to participation in the South African war. In Queensland a public subscription launched in 1901 attracted only £850 over the next three years, and most of that, the returned Colonel Chauvel complained, had been given or raised by soldiers themselves. The appeal limped on, and a design chosen in 1912—local sculptor J. L. Watts’ bronze statue of a Queensland mounted infantryman on horseback—was unveiled at last in 1919. The rhythm of events was similar in Melbourne, where an obelisk honouring Victoria’s dead was unveiled on St Kilda

Road in 1924—a quarter of a century after the war, as one speaker remarked. Four guardian lions were added after another quarter century. A New South Wales memorial was not accomplished until 1940, and even then it was more regimental than civic in character, ‘ERECTED

BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN SOLDIERS’ ASSOCIATION’ and identifying the soldiers not as citizens but as “THE UNITS OF VOLUNTEERS’. Brisbane's pedestal recorded by name the eighty-nine ‘(QUEENSLAND HEROES WHO FELL; Sydney’s listed only the titles of military units; Melbourne’s named nobody but the dignitaries of the memorial committee, who perhaps thought they deserved honour for getting the monument up at all. This pattern of commemoration is puzzling. Did public and popular misgivings about the British cause run deeper in Melbourne, Sydney

and Brisbane than in other capitals? Did Adelaide, Hobart and Perth have more compact élites, clubs of gentlemen who could mobilize public

sentiment behind a cause more readily than anybody could do in the more pluralistic civic cultures of the east? Whatever the explanation, the absence of those three state monuments is consistent with the judgement that for Australians the war in South Africa was too complicated, obscure, equivocal, and ambiguous, and its impact too patchy, for the episode to

be interpreted as the nation-making experience of General Hutton’s rhetoric. J. H. M. Abbott’s Tommy Cornstalk did not go into general currency. In 1918 the Melbourne Age, looking back across the national experience since 1914, reflected of Australians in arms: “Irue, a few of them had come through the Boer War valorously. That, however, was scarcely regarded as a test’.

Soldiers of the Queen 69 The Commonwealth landscape The memorials to fallen soldiers added substantially to the stock of public monuments in streets and parks. As they were going up, other new monuments, traditional and novel, appeared in the landscape. The number of statues (apart from soldiers) in public places almost doubled between 1900 and 1914, and monuments in a variety of forms commemorated achievements and disasters old and new. Effigies of the dead Queen were created for Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne and Bendigo. In Perth the statue was placed not far from the Fallen Soldiers Memorial in the King’s Park, on high land just above the city, named for her son and successor Edward VII by her grandson the Duke of Cornwall and York. An effigy of the first governor-general, Lord Hopetoun, who became in 1902 the Marquess of Linlithgow, sat on a horse in Melbourne. Public subscriptions in Adelaide paid for retrospective tribute to local worthies, William Light the town planner, Charles Sturt and John McDouall Stuart the explorers, and honoured the more recent benefactors Sir Thomas Elder and Sir Walter Hughes. Robert Burns was represented in Melbourne and Sydney. In Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, premiers—Sir Thomas Bent, Sir John Robertson and T. J. Byrnes—were honoured posthumously. Byrnes, a legend for showing that in the working man’s paradise the son

of poor Irish Catholics could succeed as a conservative politician, was given a second statue in his electorate at Warwick. In Western Australia two men were commemorated for achievements both in and out of parliament. Alexander Forrest, politician, entrepreneur, explorer and brother of the more famous (and still living) Sir John, was commemorated in Perth, and Frederick Piesse in the town of Katanning of which he was uncrowned king. Two public servants were honoured, each distinguished for delivering water in a dry land: in Melbourne Edmund FitzGibbon and in Fremantle the engineer Charles O’Connor. In Bendigo a statue of the mining entrepreneur Sir George Lansell celebrated him as saviour of the town’s fortunes and benefactor of people with a small share of them. More of the subjects than before 1900 had led Australian lives, and the native born, though fewer than the immigrants, were numerous.

British sculptors continued to be engaged, though less often. The expatriate Australian Bertram Mackennal, working in London, created

70 Sacred Places Byrnes for Brisbane and Linlithgow for Melbourne. Mackennal was one

of only three native-born sculptors of statues. The others were Gilbert Doble, designer of the soldier at Lismore, and Margaret Baskerville, whose towering image of Sir Thomas Bent was the one statue in Australia executed by a woman.

Apart from the Queen, only one monument represented a woman:

not an actual woman but the colony and state of Victoria, standing above a kneeling male figure in the centre of Bendigo, symbolizing with him “The Discovery of Gold’, and commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of that event. The sculptor, C. Douglas Richardson, who had made

St Kilda’s South African war memorial, and who became Margaret Baskerville’s husband in 1914, described the female figure as ‘purely ideal’. This may be the first female embodiment of the nation apart from Australia on the South African war memorial in Launceston. Her bearded and bare-armed companion, the sculptor said, ‘is reminiscent of all the diggers | have seen’.

Among monuments other than statues created between 1901 and 1914 only one was dedicated to the new Commonwealth of Australia. Eventually the capital city at Canberra, like Washington DC, would be one large monument to the union of former colonies; but for the time being the federal parliament met in the grand neo-classical quarters of its

Victorian counterpart (whose members moved out to deliberate under the great dome of the Exhibition Building). Canberra’s first monument, unveiled at a ceremony conferring that name on the federal landscape,

was a modest declaration of intent to create a national capital. On 12 March 1913 political leaders who had spent the night in tents were driven to the spot Walter Burley Griffin had named Capitol Hill. The

governor-general and two of his ministers grasped trowels made of Australian gold, and tapped foundation stones on the base of a partly constructed monument. The ministers were members of a Labor government led by Andrew Fisher, Scottish immigrant coal miner, which had been conducting the affairs of the Commonwealth since 1910 in a manner identifying their party with the making of a federated nation. They had chosen the site of Canberra, after years of bickering and indecision. They had proclaimed the Act which compelled all young males to undergo military training.

Soldiers of the Queen 71 The Act had actually been there waiting when Labor won the election of 1910, and Labor’s Attorney-General William Morris Hughes had done

more than any other politician to win a majority for the scheme. Hughes’ zeal for compulsory military training of all male citizens was not, he persuaded his comrades, militarism. Nor was it inconsistent with his hostility to the despatch of Australian soldiers to fight in South Africa.

That was an imperial expedition; this was a scheme to make the youth of Australian towns as fit as Boer farmers to defend their homeland. Compulsory military training, like other national policies initiated or embraced by Labor, was designed to build a prosperous, well-protected and proud white Australia. One way and another the Scottish immigrant prime minister who had once made his living with the miner’s pick was the right man to tap with a golden trowel the monument on Capitol Hill. It was intended to be a ‘Commencement Column’, proclaiming the capital as federal, national and imperial. A hexagonal base represented the states, a shaft planned to rise from the base would stand for the Commonwealth of Australia, and higher yet was supposed to be set an ob-

elisk of British granite signifying the Empire. Once the base of the column had served the day’s ceremonial purpose, however, nobody bothered to complete it. This unfinished piece of masonry overgrown by grass in the unbuilt national capital demonstrated, to the very few observers who came across it, how far the making of the Commonwealth had yet to go.

Trade unionists in Melbourne erected a monument to pioneers of the Eight Hour Day which was far more austere than they had planned in boom time: instead of the goddess liberty and a working man, only a column topped by a small globe bearing the figures 888 (for the proper hours of work, recreation and rest). Men at work were depicted on the Coal Monument in Newcastle, New South Wales, a block actually made

of coal which offered a comforting view of progress, on bronze basreliefs depicting improvement between 1859 and 1909 in methods of hewing and shipping. A monument at Port Kembla, New South Wales— urn on column on pedestal—signalled that the job still exposed miners

to fatal danger, recording the names of ninety-six men killed by an underground explosion on 31 July 1902, the worst industrial disaster so far in Australian history.

72 Sacred Places Possibly the only monument representing Aborigines in these years was also created to preserve the memory of a terrible event. During the forty years between Maitland Brown’s recovering the remains of three men killed by natives at Roebuck Bay, Western Australia, and his own

death in 1905, the three had become legendary martyrs. His remains were added to theirs in the East Perth cemetery, under the monument on their graves; and in 1913 the explorers and their saviour were honoured,

and their being ‘ATTACKED AT NIGHT BY TREACHEROUS NATIVES’, recorded for a new generation of white Western Australians, on a monument unveiled by Lady Forrest, wife of the eminent politician Sir John, on the esplanade at Fremantle. A bust of the heroic rescuer by the Italian-born sculptor Pietro Porcelli crowned a pedestal on which bas reliefs portrayed the explorers and the legendary version of their death.

The inscription ended with words already familiar on monuments to war but never before used as a pledge to keep in mind evil deeds supposedly done by Aborigines: ‘LEST WE FORGET’. To people familiar with the public places of Europe, monuments of all sorts appeared thin on the ground. The Queensland sculptor Harold Parker left for London in 1896 and returned to his native land in 1911. ‘What struck me most strongly about the cities of Australia’, he recalled later of that moment, ‘.. . was the absence of sculpture in the streets and

open spaces’. Their relative emptiness signified a new society whose makers discerned few attainments worthy of commemoration. ‘She is not yet’, wrote the Queensland schoolmaster James Brunton

Stephens in his poem “The Dominion of Australia: a Forecast’, 1877, which was memorized by children in all colonies. That was still true for the poet Bernard O’Dowd in 1912. ‘For Great Australia is not yet... She is a prophecy to be fulfilled.” Again and again the future was pressed to serve the tremulous nationalism of patriots apologetic for their country’s lack of an inspiring past.

What they nearly all meant (O’Dowd is an exception) was that Australians had escaped, or been denied, the experience of war. In 1910,

three years before occupying the chair of history at the University of Melbourne, Ernest Scott described Australia as ‘the only considerable portion of the world which has enjoyed the blessed record of unruffled peace’. He did not consider Eureka or South Africa or Black Wars as episodes substantial enough in the eye of history to modify that judge-

Soldiers of the Queen 73 ment. Nor did other interpreters in the years after 1900. The English visitor Alfred Buchanan, telling the public at home in 1907 about The Real Australia, declared that in this country ‘the shrine of the local patriot is difficult to tend. The altar has not been stained with crimson as every

rallying centre of a nation should be’. His idiom was close to Wentworth’s lament in 1853 that military action was a privilege reserved for

posterity. Another English observer, a special correspondent of The Times, put it more simplv in 1908: “The war with nature, terrible and protracted as it has often been, is the only war she knows’. In that war the exemplary heroes, for historians now as earlier, were the explorers. Pedagogues and popular authors did their best to animate the war with nature. In Victoria the Education Department produced in 1903 Stories of Australian Exploration, with an introduction blaming teachers for making

explorers less exciting than warriors; and in 1913 the nation’s most popular celebrant of imperial warfare, Rev. Dr W. H. Fitchett, turned to

Australian history. While presiding over the pupils of the Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne Fitchett had written since 1897 a series of books which became best-sellers in the imperial metropolis as well as in colonies, telling in plain proud words how the manliest of British men had performed, in the words of his first title, Deeds that Won the Empire. In the foreword to his first Australian venture, The New World of the South, he admitted that the subject matter was both tame and juvenile; ‘Australian

history ... is, from the military point of view, drab-coloured and unpicturesque’.

Australian soldiers’ deeds in South Africa did not create brighter colours for Fitchett’s palette. Nor did any event in the war provide an occasion for annual civic commemoration at memorials. Such ceremonies as did occur were arranged by veterans themselves. In some places they used the old Queen’s birthday, 24 May, celebrated from 1905 as Empire Day. History had not yet given Australians a day of their own, unless it

was 26 January, anniversary of an event so difficult to dramatize for memory or ceremony that there was annual uncertainty about whose landing was being commemorated, Governor Phillip’s in 1788 or Captain Cook’s in 1770.

Outside Sydney, where the festival had begun, and Melbourne, where it had been nurtured by the Australian Natives Association in the cause of federal fraternity, 26 January was embraced at best tepidly, as

74 Sacred Places citizens of other states preferred foundation myths which did not incorporate the taint of Botany Bay. In Adelaide Will Sowden, ANA stalwart, editor of the daily Register, lifelong promoter of the independent Australian

British sense of nationality, proposed moving the anniversary from 26 January to 23 August, the day Cook took possession of eastern Australia,

thus connecting the celebration to the purity of imperial exploration rather than to the pollution of foundation by felons, and incidentally placing the holiday in early spring instead of hot midsummer. Sowden was also president of the Wattle Day League, which urged Australians to make the golden wattle bloom an emblem of their nationality —representing, the League suggested, the golden fleece of wool, the golden grain of wheat, and the golden sunshine in the hearts of the people. The Australian patriotism of the ANA sat quite comfortably with solid attachment to empire—the figure of Britannia was represented in their anniversary pageants—but propagation of the wattle would tilt the balance of sentiment among independent Australian Britons a little away from Britain and towards Australia. A close observer could spot wattle leaves and gum leaves carved on the pedestals of some soldiers’ memorials. The League proclaimed Wattle Day for the first time in 1910, and

Sowden proposed that it be merged with the re-sited koundation or Anniversary Day so that people could celebrate at the same time both Australian nature and the reputable beginnings of Australian history. By 1914 the observation of Wattle Day revealed a modest constituency

for its moderate and botanical nationalism, but no progress towards detaching 26 January from perfunctory commemoration and summer pleasures. The one thoroughly popular festival Australian in origin and character, as visitors and newcomers discovered with wonder, was Melbourne Cup Day, a holiday in Victoria and a diversion to people throughout the continent for a race between horses. When ‘Banjo’ Paterson, back from the war in South Africa, visited Rudyard Kipling in Sussex, the prophet of empire said gravely: “You people in Australia haven’t grown up yet. You think the Melbourne Cup is the most important thing in the world’.

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Ae Pere . oa The first soldier statue of the Great War, Newcastle, New South Wales, 19176. Names of the dead are inscribed on three faces of the pedestal (fifteen so far, seventy-three by the end of the war). The base is by a local architect named in an inscription. The marble statue, honouring the dead with bowed head and reversed rifle, has been made by an unnamed artisan in Ltaly to local order. Wreaths cover the bowls of a drinking fountain: thirsty people entering or leaving the Post Office, or passing along Hunter Street, bow their heads to the mourning figure. The photographer has added his own inscription. (Photograph courtesy Helen Sutton)

Only one Australian body was carried home from the battlefields of the Great War. On 3 September 1915 the corpse of Major-General Sir William Throsby Bridges, commander of the first division of the Australian 75

76 Sacred Places Imperial Force, was buried near the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in the Federal Capital Territory, where he had been the first commandant. As a young man in New South Wales Bridges had volunteered for the Sudan contingent, and he had gone to the war in South Africa. In August 1914 he was given the task of raising an army of Australian volunteers for a greater war. Naming it the Australian Imperial Force was

his own idea: a title pithier and more encompassing than that of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force which had been despatched to seize German New Guinea, registering the dual character of

his country’s nationality and a determination that this time Australians would fight as an entity instead of being dispersed among British units.

They did just that when men from Australia and New Zealand landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula from dawn on 25 April 1915. Their destination was Constantinople. They were part of a Mediterranean Expeditionary Force which planners in London and Paris had assembled to land on both sides of the Dardanelles for the purpose of knocking Germany’s Ottoman ally out of the war. The units from the two dominions together formed an Australian and New Zealand Army

Corps, abbreviated during training in Egypt to ANZAC, and within days the beach of their landing was named by the invaders Anzac Cove (to the defenders, Ariburnu); the area where they had dug in was called simply Anzac. They mapped the terrain with words from all over the place—the Turks’ own Gaba Tepe, Achi Baba, Chunuk Bair; the Sphinx remembered from Egypt and the Nek by old hands from South Africa; Plugge’s Plateau, Quinn’s Post, after officers of their own; and it was in Monash Valley at Anzac on 15 May that Bridges was shot in the head. He died on a hospital ship three days later. He was made a knight, without knowing it, on his last day alive. A Scottish staff officer recorded with pleasure an Australian expression of attitudes to death and rank. ‘Have you chaps heard’, asks a patrician English officer, ‘that they’ve given General Bridges a posthumous KCMG?’ ‘Have they?’ says a large Australian. ‘Well, that won’t do him much good where he is now, will it, mate?’

They gave him also a grave in the British section of a military cemetery in Alexandria. Two months later the body was dug up, put in a lead-lined coffin, shipped home, and carried through the streets of Melbourne, the temporary federal capital, on a gun carriage for a

The Great War 77 memorial service in St Paul’s Church of England cathedral. Behind the coffin walked Bridges’ horse Sandy, which had accompanied its master’s body home. From Melbourne the coffin travelled by train to Canberra. These occasions were more than official tributes to an eminent servant of the state. The dead general was surrogate for all his officers and men, thousands already, who had died at Gallipoli. After another service at

St John’s Church of England, mourners made their way up the hill above the Royal Military College which was the only national institution so far inaugurated in the incipient capital. Guns from Duntroon fired a salute, and the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney declared that the grave would be a national monument. After the war a granite tomb would be installed. Bridges’ grave on a slope of Mount Pleasant joined the Commencement Column of 1913, across the Molonglo River on Capitol Hill,

as the second national monument in the capital city. It is the only

Burial of the late

| Major-General Sir William Throshy Bridges,

RCB., CMG., at the

Ropal Military College,

| Buntroon.

Ceremonp at Canberra.

std September, 1915,

Order of service for the only funeral to be held in Australia of a member of the AIF

78 Sacred Places structure designed by Walter Burley Griffin still to be seen in Canberra’s landscape. From the beginning of the project no other place was imagined for

the reburial. The State House of Sir Henry Parkes’ centennial vision would have received such bones, but after federation only a site in the national capital would do. Griffin’s Capitol might or not have become a pantheon for illustrious Australians, but that was never built. In London eminent warriors were entombed in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. In a multi-denominational society and a secular Commonwealth, though Anglican buildings were deemed suitable staging places for the last journey of a man who had been a worshipper in that church, his final destination was common national ground. At the time of Bridges’ death the British government had already stopped the private repatriation of bodies from sites of war to the United Kingdom. What most families could not afford, none would be allowed:

modern democracy demanded that all dead soldiers lying in foreign ground should be brought home at public cost or not at all. The return of the dead was too expensive for any nation other than the USA, whose government promised in 1917 that no American boy would lie in alien soil unless his family agreed. The cost, as it turned out, was less than

may have been expected: of the 60 000 Americans killed and 55 000 who died of illness at the war, the bodies of some 80 000 had to be shipped across the Atlantic for reburial at home. The British imperial dead numbered over a million. Sending them home was logistically impossible—and spiritually unnecessary if you invoked, as apologists for

the policy did, the famous lines of Rupert Brooke, buried not far from Gallipoli after dying of illness just before the landing. If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.

Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, governor-general since 1914, chief

mourner at the obsequies in both Melbourne and Canberra, was in Adelaide on 7 September, four days after Bridges’ interment, for another ceremony provoked by events at Gallipoli: the unveiling, as the mayor

told an applauding crowd in the city’s southern parkland, of ‘the first

The Great War 79 monument to the fallen heroes’ in Australia. Like the state governor, Munro Ferguson was on the platform both as representative of the King and as patron of the body which had created the monument, the Wattle Day League of Australia.

7 September was Wattle Day, the festival invented in 1910 under the auspices of the Australian Natives Association in the quest for a national day more uplifting than 26 January. W. H. Sowden, president of the League, doyen of the ANA in South Australia, was chairman of the ceremony. He had lately presided over Adelaide’s first welcome home to men wounded while serving in the AIF, conducted by the Cheer Up Our Boys Society which he had himself founded. Now, for the first time, the sentiment of Wattle Day could be connected with Australian achievement at war. People in city streets wore sprays, and statues were decorated with wattle as they awaited a monument different in character. The governor-general removed the Union Jack and the Australian flag to reveal an obelisk inscribed simply ‘AUSTRALASIAN SOLDIERS DARDANELLES APRIL 25 1915’. ‘Australasian’ recorded fraternally

that soldiers from the other dominion were there at the landing. A few months later the inscription might have said ‘Anzac’, but that word had not yet moved in homeland usage from the Corps and the site in Turkey to the soldiers themselves. The obelisk was of rough granite, and as its

maker told the congregation, he had added one more to the many meanings of that form: he wanted it to take their minds back to the day

of the landing and see the rugged hills up which the soldiers had climbed. Speaker after speaker celebrated that moment. Their theme had become familiar over the past four months, and would be proclaimed from platforms all over Australia for the rest of the war and beyond. The days of ‘She is not yet’ were over. At last public oratory could

describe Australian achievement in the present and past tense. The anniversary of the landing on 25 April 1915 would supersede Wattle Day and 26 January and give the nation a festival no less popular than Cup

Day but with all the gravity missing from that occasion. New monuments would become sites for new ceremonies. The obelisk in Adelaide honoured no individual men, originating as it had in a movement to celebrate the nation at large; but the governor-general foresaw other monuments on which the soldiers would have their own names ‘engraved in

80 Sacred Places every city and township in this continent’, and the mayor was already imagining one in Adelaide, ‘a stately and splendid memorial worthy of both the men and the city’, bearing the heroes’ names on its pedestal. Empire Day, 24 May, had offered an early opportunity for celebration, led by public men armed with precious texts. News cabled from

Anzac Cove by two official correspondents, the Englishman Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and the Australian C. E. W. Bean, had been printed and pored over by editorial writers, analysed by politicians and preachers,

and reprinted already for young and old. Ashmead-Bartlett’s account was read as a glowing report by an imperial examiner on men who had triumphantly passed the hardest of tests. These ‘raw colonial troops’, he judged, *... proved worthy to fight side by side with the best of British heroes’.

Had they done even better than their progenitors? The Rev. W. H. Fitchett, famous chronicler of British battles, dared to say so at a rally on this historic Empire Day. No longer did Australian history fail to supply his pen with truly stirring events. Fitchett recounted the story of the landing as he had described those earlier imperial episodes, and concluded that deeds at Gallipoli not only equalled those at Waterloo but in one respect surpassed them: ‘Wellington’s lads would not have had the initiative and daring to climb that cliff. That was the “Australian touch”’. The audience applauded loudly, as well they might, hearing so unprecedented a judgement from so respected a source.

Empire Day had been devised above all for children, and on 24 May 1915 they were taught new lessons. “They were told about Gallipoli’, reported the Melbourne Age, ‘—that new word of liquid syllables, which twelve months ago meant nothing, but now has a meaning that will not pass away’. For adults the new dimension of Empire Day was proclaimed not only in daily newspapers but even in the traditionally anti-imperial Bulletin, which abandoned the name ‘Vampire Day’ and reported without derision the speech made at a rally by the governor of New South Wales. From the first news of the landing the Bulletin’s makers had decided to embrace it as part of the national experience. For the Bulletin in the centenary year of 1888, 26 January 1788 had been ‘the day we were lagged’, and a truly Australian history began at Eureka on 3 December 1854. Now the paper deemed the landing in Turkey of a

The Great War 81 force both Australian and imperial to be an event fit to stand beside Eureka. In the demotic verse of the Bulletin poet C.J. Dennis, Ginger Mick, a larrikin inspired to join the AIF by no loftier ideal than the call of stoush, is overcome on Gallipoli by pride in being an Australian (‘A noo, glad pride that ain’t the pride o’ class ...’). For Bulletin writers as for the author of Deeds that Won the Empire, the men at Gallipoli had given their country an element lacking until 25 April 19165. C. E. W. Bean proudly and meticulously recorded the Australian soldiers’ experience from the beginning of their war to the end. He was in the most precise sense an Anglo-Australian, born in Australia in 1879 to an Australian mother and an English schoolmaster father, educated at

an English public school and at Oxford, back to Australia in 1904, a

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The man of Anzac as symbol for the nation.

“WELL, DAD?” is the caption for Alf Vincent’s cartoon in the Bulletin of 13 May 1915. fohn Bull glows. The Little Boy from Manly (p. 17) has grown up.

82 Sacred Places journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald when chosen in a ballot of his peers to go to the war with the first contingent of the AIF. Like Kipling, with whom he felt the special affinity of someone who had Anglo-Indian forebears, Bean had come to think that the outriders of empire were the best of Britons. The performance of the AIF was for him a vindication of faith in Australian manhood. The big thing in the war for Australia, he

judged, ‘was the discovery of the character of Australian men. It was character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held there during the long afternoon and night’.

Bean wrote those words at the end of the war, when he had committed the rest of his life to creating two monuments. The first was an Australian Iliad, 7he Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1978,

which would eventually run to twelve volumes, six by Bean himself and the other six written under his editorship. At the centre of this vast work was the preoccupation of his and his father’s generations with war as the great test. ‘Its theme’, as he wrote after more than twenty years labour, may be stated as the answer to a question: How did this nation, bred in complete peace, largely undisciplined except for a strong British tradition and the self-discipline necessary for men who grapple with nature—how did this nation react to what still has to be recognised as the supreme test for fitness to exist?

The question is Tennysonian and Darwinian. Bean’s mode of answering made the work unlike any other military history in texture and tone. He

had an unparalleled intimacy over four years with the experience of men at war, and he wrote of his subjects with reverence, convinced ‘that

the only memorial which could be worthy of them was the bare and uncoloured story of their part in the war’. The second monument Bean pledged himself to create was a great national war memorial in the federal capital, in his early vision a ‘perfect, simple, solemn exquisite building’

holding ‘for all time ... the sacred memories of the AIF’. Late in his long life Bean would see the accomplishment of the Australian War Memorial, not perfect or simple or exquisite but certainly a solemn repository of sacred memories, a temple consecrated to the spirit of Anzac. The Anglo-French invasion of Gallipoli was abandoned at the end

of 1915. It would enter history as a disaster, either bungled or doomed.

The Great War 83 we 4 4 < 44 Ce"

Ls |

ae oe aN |? C. E. W. Bean: Portrait of the war correspondent by George Lambert (Australian War Memorial)

But when Australians celebrated the first anniversary of the landing on 25 April 1916, the pride expressed around that obelisk in Adelaide’s parkland was utterly intact, untinged by any recognition of failure. ‘’m damned if they can say the Australians failed to do what was asked of them’, wrote one soldier on the last night at Anzac; and that remained

the dominant Australian interpretation, both official and popular. William Morris Hughes, who became prime minister two months before the evacuation, would say: ‘One thing is certain, that the responsibility

for failure does not lie with us’. As material for a legend in which Australians were still loyal to the Empire but mature enough to be full partners in it, Gallipoli suited very well, failures and all. English politicians had thought up the Gallipoli campaign, English officers led it. The Anzacs simply fought. 25 April might never have gained its unique character as a national day, and the word ‘Anzac’ its aura, if the motherland had come out of Turkey with more glory.

84 Sacred Places The word appears to have been the first formed anywhere from initials to go into general English usage. By the first anniversary it glowed

with holiness. When men invalided out of the war heard a sermon in their honour at Melbourne’s Wesley Church on Anzac Day 1916 by a preacher with three sons in the AIF, they could see the word ANZAC in gold letters on a crown over the pulpit. ‘Anzac’ was written into songs and a film, books of prose and verse; a music hall group called itself the Anzac Coves. When some uses were deemed to approach desecration, a

regulation under the War Precautions Act prohibited unauthorised employment, and after the war a new regulation kept watch, entitled ‘Protection of the word “Anzac”’. ‘The greatest new word of the war is Anzac’, said the Sydney Morning Herald on the third anniversary of the landing. Sometimes Australians remembered where the second and third

letter came from, more often they forgot. In France another new collective name came into use among the men from Australia and New Zealand: they were Diggers. ‘Anzac’ was high, formal, solemn; ‘Digger’ was colloquial, convivial, a form of address among equals expressing the special fellowship of trench and tent and distinguishing the Australian or New Zealand soldier from Tommy Atkins. ‘Digger’ took on among

Australians as ‘Tommy Cornstalk’ had not done in the South African war. As the AIF journal Aussie defined the type in January 1918: ‘A friend, pal, or comrade, synonymous with cobber; a white man who runs straight. By what routes the word may have travelled from Australian goldfields or New Zealand gum-diggings could be debated endlessly by old hands. Then, towards the end of the war, each army generated a new word for its own men, who would put it into general circulation at home. ‘Aussie’ was a fresh usage when it appeared on that AIF journal’s masthead; and by that time the New Zealanders had begun to call themselves

Kiwis. Anzacs together, Diggers at least in parallel, Aussies and Kiwis apart: the war had given citizens of the southern dominions two words which distinguished them from metropolitan Britons, and another pair which signalled their different nationalities. ‘Anzac’ was the word that would appear on their monuments to the war, and many of them would bear effigies of the Digger.

The Great War 85 The dead Two thousand Australians were killed or died of wounds in the first ten days at Anzac Cove. That was already four times as many as had died over more than three years in South Africa. For millions of men in the Great War, hundreds of thousands of Australians among them, the sight

and the stench and even the feel of dead bodies became a normal experience. Retrieving and burying them was a hard labour of sanitation and humanity. At Anzac a man might meet the dead even before landing. On his way ashore at first light on the 25th, one Australian could see ‘a carpet of

dead men who had been shot getting out of the boats’. The bodies of men who had died on a ship after evacuation with wounds distressed Private Ernest Atkins. “Not having seen a corpse before’, he wrote awkwardly in his diary, a feeling of repulsion came over me, so | went outside into the passage way. Recognising that I shall see death in many forms, sorrow overcame the

former thoughts & then when several morbidly curious men came along

to have a look at the dead, annoyance made me refuse them—I was in charge of the cabin and felt that the looks of the curious were a desecration.

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Cemetery at Anzac, 1915 (Photograph C. E. W. Bean, reproduced in Zhe Anzac Book, 1916, which he edited.)

softly covered with a glittering shroud The unburied dead.

They were still lying there when the order came to evacuate Gallipoli. The Rev. Walter Dexter, an Anglican chaplain, drew a map of the Anzac graves as a guide to future custodians if and when the British returned. The defeated invaders at Anzac and elsewhere on the peninsula crept away with a stealth which deceived the Turks, and which enabled the withdrawal to be portrayed as a kind of victory rather than the last act of a débacle. But seldom by Anzacs. No theme recurs so powerfully in their published and private memories as the anguish of leaving dead comrades. At the end Bean observed in all the cemeteries ‘men by themselves, or in twos and threes, erecting new crosses or tenderly tidyingup the grave of a friend’. As Sowden told the crowd in Adelaide on 7 September, a man in that city had sent to his son at Anzac some wattle

90 Sacred Places seeds to plant around the graves of Australian dead as emblems of their nation. Padre Dexter now walked around the cemeteries scattering more

wattle seeds, and on his prompting General Birdwood, commanding officer at Anzac, left a note asking his Turkish counterpart to make sure that the graves were honoured. Leaving them behind, Bean wrote later, was by far the soldiers’ deepest regret. ‘“I hope”, said one of them to

Birdwood on the final day, pointing to a little cemetery, “I hope they won't hear us marching down the deres.”’ How many they were, nobody then knew; but in due course official counting put the Australians who lost their lives on Gallipoli at around 7600, the New Zealanders 2500,

the total of all British and French invaders at 46 0OO and the Turks 87 OOO.

Survivors of Gallipoli and men newly recruited in Australia were transported to France in time for the huge offensive that began along the Somme on | July 1916, to kill and be killed by Germans until the very end. Others were sent to Egypt to serve in mounted units against Turks and Germans across the Sinai Peninsula and into Palestine. In South Africa and for the first stage of this war, the value of participation by soldiers from the empire had been more symbolic than military. As the killing went endlessly on, the imperial troops became more and more necessary. Eventually contingents from the dominions and India enlarged the forces available to British generals by some 40 per cent. Their losses were heavy.

On Somme battlefields in the summer of 1916, Australians were slaughtered when attacking German positions near the town of Fromelles,

endured possibly the heaviest artillery bombardment in history on the site of what once had been the village of Poziéres, struggled for possession of a farm named Mouquet. In 1917 they were ordered into two disastrous attacks on the Hindenburg line near the village of Bullecourt. Later that year they fought on Belgian ground, around Messines and in the Ypres sector Broodseinde, Passchendaele and a clump of broken saplings named Polygon Wood. In 1918, back on the Somme, a Corps composed of five Australian divisions was in the thick of fighting during German and Allied offensives. On Anzac Day Australians captured the town of Villers-Bretonneux, and early in September Mont St Quentin, a

The Great War 91

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(Australian War Memorial, AWM negative no. AQ0016)

hill outside Péronne. Their compatriots on horseback in the Middle East repelled in 1916 a Turkish attack on Romani, on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and captured El Arish from retreating enemy forces. In 1917, across the border in Palestine, they were among troops occupying Gaza and Beersheba; and in the last year of the war Australians rode into Jericho, Jordan and Damascus. In Anzac litany the names of places from the Bible would mingle with places less familiar and places until now unknown. At the peace conference in 1919 William Morris Hughes would tell the great powers that he spoke for 60 000 Australian dead. 1915, the year of blooding at Gallipoli, had turned out to be the least costly. As nearly as the official medical historian could tell, 8474 Australians died on active service in 1915, 13 696 in 1916, 21 736 in 1917 and 14 240 in 1918. The western front was the site of most deaths: three in every four Australians who did not return from the war had died in France or Belgium.

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The dead were about one in five of the 330 770 who embarked for service abroad. The AIF and the Royal Australian Navy had voluntarily recruited 416 809 men, about half of the eligible population. The figure invoked most proudly after the war was the proportion of casualties to embarkations: 68.5 per cent. Two of every three Australians in uniform were killed or wounded. The United Kingdom had a higher proportion

of men in arms: conscripts and volunteers, from the trenches back to base offices, amounted to 24 per cent of the male population, compared with 13 per cent of Australian men (and 13 per cent of Canadians and 19 per cent of New Zealanders). But because they were almost all sent to battlefields, using British troops for services in the rear, the Australians suffered proportionately more casualties. The comparable figure for the United Kingdom was 52.5 per cent. That was the statistical base from which Hughes at Versailles could invoke the cost of the war in Australian blood. From the beginning of this war, as in South Africa, men sent into

battle discovered how badly the language of romantic chivalry had prepared them for grisly reality. Alexander Aitken, a New Zealander, was greeted at Anzac by bodies ‘lying there in every attitude of death, some face downwards, some face upwards, a few kneeling with their

The Great War 93 heads in their hands, and one, startlingly conspicuous among them all, sitting lifelike in an aiming position’. ‘It is conventional’, Aitken reflected,

to gloss over such scenes with abstractions, lest they should grate too harshly on the soft susceptibilities of civilian life. We take refuge in vagueness, or in noble phrases like the ‘sombre aftermath of victory’, or in tradi-

tional emollients, dulce et decorum est, or sed miles, sed pro patria, or something found in such a non-combatant poet as Tennyson.

The most ennobling of traditional euphemisms, the Fallen, was given new currency as soon as the dying began, when Laurence Binyon, an elderly English scholar, poet and librarian, published in September 1914 his verses ‘For the Fallen’: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn, At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

These lines, venerating eternally youthful dead soldiers, stand with Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem “The Dead’, in which the blood of dying soldiers becomes ‘the red sweet wine of youth’ as classic examples of what Paul Fussell has called high diction about the war, a rhetoric of chivalry learned by two generations who had read English male romances

in verse and prose by authors from Tennyson to Rider Haggard, employed now to make horror and anguish endurable, to give comfort by softening what was otherwise too awful for words. In 1916 appear English combatant poets who write against the grain of high diction: Robert Graves in the poem ‘Big Words’, Siegfried Sassoon in “The Hero’;

later, in 1917, Wilfred Owen uses ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ as sardonic

title for a poem in which blood ‘Comel|s] gargling from the frothcorrupted lungs’, and in 1918 plans a book of poems which are to be not

about ‘deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War’. Ernest Hemingway’s Frederick Henry, fighting alongside Italians, is ‘always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression “in vain”’. Hemingway was contributing to a contest between Big Words and harsh words which

continued long after the war. Rupert Brooke’s verse would be more

94 Sacred Places widely read than Robert Graves’ or Siegfried Sassoon’s or Wilfred Owen’s, and Binyon’s would enter the liturgy of public mourning throughout the empire. When men condemned to create and endure the carnage took pen or pencil and tried to convey its horrors, they said again and again that they were describing the indescribable. If Bean or any other war correspondent had dared to do that, the censor would have blue-pencilled him and might have sent him home. Photographers were forbidden to take pictures of dead bodies. Nor did official war artists put on canvas the worst of what they saw, either now or later. Robert Hughes observes

that in George Lambert’s war paintings, ‘his young Australians died dramatically and hygienically as the bullets of the Turks tumbled them into suitable postures, with lots of smoke and a minimum of gore’.

In letters home some men acted as their own censors, sticking to comforting euphemisms, others mixed reticence and candour. Among themselves, in and out of the trenches, Australians resorted like men of all armies to a diction thick with profanity and evasion. The artist Will Dyson in France listened with insight to the Australian version: those proper expedients of the Digger for the disguising of deep feeling—

of the exhibition of which the boys are so timid that they evolved a language compound of blasphemy and catch phrases in which they can unpack their hearts without seeming to be guilty of the weakness of emotion.

Dyson depicts Diggers grieving in reverent gestures rather than words. The artist had no shortage of models. One man walks 28 miles to tend his dead mate’s grave; another makes a cross and sticks it in ground on which he has seen a comrade blown to bits. Where the slaughter had been most devastating, as at Mouquet Farm, big crosses were put up to the dead of whole battalions. Their burial had often to wait. Captain Mervyn Higgins, only son of Mr Justice H. B. Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, had survived Gallipoli to be killed by a sniper in Egypt at the end of 1916. ‘As all ambulances were needed for wounded’, a comrade wrote, ‘we had to unload the body and leave him to be buried later by the troopers’. At the end men had also to endure the killing of their horses. As General

The Great War 95

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Will Dyson: ‘One of the Old Platoon’ Will Dyson, ‘The Mate’, from Australia at

‘Australian War Memorial) War, London 1978, p. 26. As an Australian soldier describes such a moment in January 1917, a man ‘searched for some timber and made a rude cross, on which he scribbled his dead mate’s name and number and stuck it

up at the end of the mound’. A. A. Brunton in Bill Gammage, The Broken Years, Ringwood 1990, p. 253.

Bridges’ was the only body returned to Australia, so his charger Sandy was the only horse. All the rest had to be put to death or sold in Egypt and Palestine. Some men of the Light Horse, believing the second fate

even worse than the first, shot their own mounts rather than deliver them for sale into Arab captivity.

In the Middle East, unlike Gallipoli, graves could be made and tended at sites occupied by steady advances, and on the western front, too, most bodies were buried in friendly ground. The administration of the dead became more orderly when the British established a Graves Registration Commission, which evolved by 1917 into the Imperial War Graves Commission, responsible for the making of cemeteries and the planning of such others as the war might require. The decision to send

96 Sacred Places ” eee :

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Temporary graves and memorials to Australians killed when AIF units recaptured Peronne, 1918 ‘Australian War Memorial, AWM negative no, £3765)

no bodies home gave the Commissioners the huge and delicate assignment of creating British cemeteries in foreign countries. It would also have to devise means of commemorating those dead

men whose bodies were not recovered, at least in any recognizable form. ‘Hanging on the old barbed wire’, as surviving comrades imagined them at informal roll-calls after fighting too awful for words. Missing, as

the administrators put it. In the first hours of peace on 11 November 1918, C. E. W. Bean walked reverently through the 1916 battlefield at Fromelles. ‘We found the old Nomansland’, he wrote in his diary that night. ‘Simply full of our dead... the skulls & bones & torn uniforms of them were lying about everywhere’. Soon an Australian Graves Service would be searching such fields: four officers, 64 other ranks, twelve cars and three motor cycles, helped by volunteers, examining the debris like archaeologists. Whose initials might be these etched on a spoon? Whose

The Great War 97 had been this rusty compass? Which unit, when, had worn that shade of khaki? Every act of identification might help some distant mourner to grieve more tranquilly.

The bereaved Leon Gellert, soldier and poet, imagined as he left Gallipoli ‘a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.’ Breaking the news of a man’s untimely

death was already an Australian legend, connected not with war but with the dangerous peacetime job of mining. More of the country’s men had been killed in that occupation by 1914 than in war. The painter John Longstaff, seeking fit national subjects for commemoration, had portrayed the archetypal scene in a canvas of 1887, Breaking the News, widely believed to be based on an actual disaster of 1882 in which twenty-two

miners had died. A young woman carrying a baby is about to be plunged into grief; but unlike the bereaved of the Great War, she has her man’s strong-bearded comrade to break the news and other workmates to bring home his body. She will be offered the consolation of a funeral service in the local church, a procession to the cemetery, a burial there. The families of men killed in the Great War, by contrast, were deprived of the traditional mourning rituals of their culture. Their dead lay far away. If we count as family a person’s parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family was bereaved by the war. The most unusual aspect of this bereavement, in Australia as in all those belligerent countries where increased expectation of life had made death an event of old age, was that so many of the mourners were a generation older than their dead. The news was broken most often to mothers and fathers who had lost sons, less often—for more than 80 per cent of the AIF were unmarried—to women who had been made widows. An official military telegram was the normal medium, and a clergyman the preferred bearer, in hope of having the news broken as gently as possible. ‘To the nearest priest or minister of the denomination a man

had named when he enlisted, the postmaster-general’s department delivered an urgent telegram. The recipient had to decide whether to

quote such information or attempt a softening paraphrase. When C. J. Dennis kills off Ginger Mick at Anzac he has ‘a parson cove’ tell Rose that she is a widow. He does his best. ‘But ’ow kin blows be sof’n’d

98 Sacred Places COMMONWEALTH OP AVOTRALIA. To. a POSTHASTER-GEYERAL'S DEPARTMENT, NEW SOU"! WALES, “ee

URGENT TELEG RAM. a | This Message has been received subject 10 on oes a os postmaster General.

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Urgent telegram from Defence department asking a clergyman to tell a man that his son has died of wounds ‘Bill Gammage, The Broken Years, Ringwood, 19.90, p. 229

sich as that?’ asks Mick’s mate, the Sentimental Bloke. H. B. Higgins and

Mary Alice Higgins were in their holiday house at Dromana, on Port Phillip Bay, when a minister arrived on New Year’s Eve 1916 saying that it was his ‘grievous lot’ to report the death of their son Mervyn in Egypt seven days earlier. In the United Kingdom the telegram came unaccom-

panied by clergy. In France the news was brought by the mayor. Possibly neither the federal officials who initiated the procedure nor the church leaders who agreed to take it on foresaw the scale of the task— imagining, at first, casualties not much worse than those in South Africa.

‘The time was to come’, wrote an official historian, ‘... when women were to hide themselves and sometimes faint at the approach of the clergyman of their faith...’

Close friends might pass the news around the family. Robert Gordon Menzies, university student, took the tram to his old school, Wesley College, to tell a younger friend that his brother had been killed

in France. Military officers in capital cities signed letters conveying sympathy from the King and Queen, the Commonwealth Government

The Great War 99 and the dead man’s commanding officer. Mayors sent out municipal condolences. Friends, employers and workmates learning of a death from a list of casualties in a newspaper, as columns with such headings as ‘Australia’s Roll of Honour’ lengthened, wrote letters of sympathy. Frank Tate, director of education in Victoria, was a tireless writer of compassionate letters to the families of dead teachers. One recipient replied: ‘We see them go forth from home in the prime of their man-

hood, and then the dreaded news arrives that never more will they return to those waiting and watching for their return’. Tate knew the dread, having himself two sons in the AIF.

Later came letters by sea, from chaplains and other officers and from comrades. ‘My dear Mrs Thomson’, wrote the Rev. W. Ashley Brown from Belgium to Tumbarumba, New South Wales, on 2 October 1917.

I regret very much to have to write you of the death of your son, Driver H. H. Thomson. He died from wounds received while doing his duty on 30th September during the heavy fighting in the Ypres salient. He was buried with the full rites of his Church, in a peaceful cemetery well behind the firing line.

She herself, the padre goes on, has been noble in giving her three splendid boys to serve their country. ‘He who has been taken has died the noblest death possible.’ His wounded brother in the same unit will be home soon (one leg amputated below the knee, the mother learns from another correspondent). The third son is quite well, and he hopes will be spared. (He was.) The commanding officer and all members of the unit join the chaplain in offering sincerest sympathy: ‘May God comfort you in your loss’. Noble, splendid, duty: weary writers sending messages of sympathy across the world to unknown mourners reached for Big Words, transforming every dead man into a fallen hero; if they knew that he had been blown to bits or disfigured or drowned in mud, the comforters would keep that knowledge to themselves. The postman might bring letters from the dead man himself for weeks after the family knew he was gone. Relics were wrapped and sent home by mates or by soldiers assigned to the job: a diary, a watch, coins, a pocket prayer book

100 Sacred Places damaged by shrapnel; in one family’s legend a woman slept every night for the rest of her life with a dead son’s revolver under the pillow. Photographs made shrines of sideboards. After the war had ended, through 1919 and 1920, postmen delivered

to every bereaved household two elaborate imperial tributes: a brass plaque with the dead man’s name inscribed between Britannia and a lion, with the legend ‘He died for freedom and honour’; and ‘the king’s scroll’. The plaque and the scroll, devised in 1918, were posted to more than a million next of kin throughout the empire. The composition had been assigned in 1916 to an elderly Cambridge don, Montague Rhodes James, who had displayed a gift for composing moist and hazy rhetoric

about dead undergraduates. His draft had not actually mentioned the King: country became King and country at the express wish of George V

himself. This heraldic tanguage was a world away from C. J. Dennis’ epitaph for Ginger Mick: "E played a game ’e knoo, and played it well. What more is there to tell?

What more the plaque and the scroll told was that the king himself, incarnation of the imagined community known as the British Empire, was assuring every grieving subject that this son, that husband, must be remembered for dying in a noble cause. If the cause be not good, says Shakespeare’s soldier Michael Williams in the army of Henry V, thinking of men who die in battle, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make. In the Great War as at Agincourt, one solemn purpose of monarchy

was to endow with meaning each death in the service of the state. If keeping the plaque and the King’s scroll counts as evidence, they were

cherished by many bereaved Australian families. So were the more homely illuminated addresses crafted by local committees to honour men who had died for the imagined community of Australia.

Bereaved people performed their own acts of mourning. They

could place death notices in the papers under the heading ‘ON ACTIVE SERVICE’; they might insert tributes either familiar in prewar mourning or created for the war: gone but not forgotten, until the day breaks, or died for his country gloriously, bravely fighting for home and empire.

The Great War 101

es prey

UCKINCHAM PALACE. pT) Wy GES

(A Gg aS oss NY) I join with my grateful people A ye Naame see in sending you this memorial

of a brave lile given for others HE whom this scroll commemorates | in the Great War. was numbered among those who, atthe call of King and Country eftall that was dear to them, endured hardness,

faced danger,and finally passed out of

Gongs eA the sight of men by the path of duty | and self-sacrifice, owing up ther own

| Let those who comeafter seetott

lives that others might live in freedom. that his name be not forgotten.

Text of the King’s Scroll, and accompanying letter: the dead man’s name, rank and any decorations were inscribed on each scroll.

Some families inserted first a death notice and then, as in peacetime, one

under ‘IN MEMORIAM? on the anniversary of a death. Others, less traditionally, used ‘IN MEMORIAM?’ columns for a first notice, presumably because in normal circumstances the announcement of death preceded the funeral which these mourners were denied. Many mourners chose or composed statements dwelling on that absence which added a layer to their grief. Zoo far away your grave to see; In Gallipolt’s lonely graveyard; Far from the land of the wattle. We shall not stand beside his grave, And none shall point to where he lies.

If not at funerals, bereaved people could mourn at memorial ceremonies, large and small. In the vestibule of the Sydney Town Hall on Anzac Day 1917 a Joan of Arc Committee—dedicated to alleviate the lot of ‘women who have suffered the loss of relations’—entertained several hundred ‘wives and mothers of fallen soldiers, for the most part dressed

102 Sacred Places in mourning’. A year later the Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers attracted to a memorial service in Sydney’s Domain a huge gathering of women—nearly ten thousand, all dressed in black, who then walked to the wharf at Woolloomooloo where they hung white wreaths, inscribed with names, ‘on the gate through which their men had gone over three years ago’. Intimate services in country churches honoured local men. Private George Priestley had been the first man to enlist from Martin’s Creek, near Newcastle, New South Wales. Two months after his death in France in February 1917 at the age of twenty-two, a service was conducted for him at St James’ Church of England, where he had run the Sunday school. The church was funereally ‘draped for the occasion’, and the ceremony was ‘largely attended’, reported the Raymond Terrace Examiner, ‘by numerous relatives and friends of the deceased soldier’.

The rector took for his text, as many preachers did at such services, John 15:13, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. He praised George Priestley as a Christian gentleman and hoped God would comfort and sustain those near and dear to

him. The paper listed parents, brother, grandparents, uncles and aunts

present at the service; and under ‘RETURN THANKS’ the family published their gratitude to people who had sent letters and cards of condolence and regret. Bereaved relatives might put on mourning dress, or wear a black armband with ordinary clothes, or use no bodily emblem of their loss. In Australia as in other English-speaking countries, habits of mourning in both dress and ceremony—widows in black crepe for a year or more, purple drapes on windows, hearse drawn by black-plumed black horses

—had been in decline by 1914; modern culture had begun to define solemnity as gloom and pomp as ostentation. Paradoxically, the war which created such unprecedented levels of bereavement may actually have tended to reduce its public expression. The British government discouraged deep mourning as bad for the nation’s morale. Brian Lewis, a

schoolboy in Melbourne during the war, believed that the death of so many men overseas actually diminished the significance and solemnity of ordinary funerals. Much grief was publicly invisible and inaudible, its severe and pos-

sibly fatal burden known only to the sufferers and their nearest and

The Great War 103 dearest. A. E. Leane, a South Australian Staff Sergeant at Anzac, feared that the news of one friend’s death—an only son, whose parents ‘went on their knees to him not to go—would kill his mother. Biographies give us glimpses of anguish. When two sons of the Labor Senator Arthur Rae died at the war, his wife Annie ‘never recovered from the blow’. From the day the minister brought H. B. Higgins news that his beloved only son Mervyn was dead, Higgins felt stricken: ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the rest of my life’. The idiom of punishment hints at guilt, for this opponent of war in South Africa had encouraged his son

to believe that this time the cause was just. Jeanie Evatt was already enduring the death of her son Ray, killed near Ypres in September 1917,

when she had to be told a year later that his brother Frank had died of wounds in France. She fell unconscious to the floor, was ill for weeks, and never fully recovered. The news had been broken by Mrs Evatt’s remaining son Bert, who became obsessed by a conviction that if only he had got to the war he could somehow have saved his brothers’ lives, and who put his own anguish into a sonnet entitled ‘November 12, 1918’:

Oh! dear God, I yearn For those dear boys who never shall return.

For H. V. Evatt ‘dear God’ was a figure of speech. What comfort did other bereaved people take from the orthodox Christian message of resurrection delivered to them at memorial services? Were George Priestley’s family sustained by God, as the rector at Martin’s Creek wanted them to be? Did they share what Padre Merrington at Anzac called the great hope of everlasting life? The modern world harboured anti-faiths—atheism, agnosticism—

which could offer only a lean secular comfort, as in those words of Rupert Brooke’s declaring that the soldier’s body annexed its little territory. But a variety of heterodox assurances and hopes were also within reach of mourners. The dead were asleep, whether or not they were to

rise from their graves on the last day. Or they had ascended in some other living form: Lester Lawrence, writing about the snow-covered bodies at Gallipoli, imagined

104 Sacred Places ... the beating of the wings of migrant birds Wafting the souls of these unburied heroes Into the skies.

Or they were still alive, on one possible reading of that message in the king’s scroll that they had passed from the sight of men. If that were so, they might yet return to the sight of men—and women. In the Mallee town of Hopetoun, Victoria, the mother of Private William White, killed in France, was moved to write Where is my boy—killed, they tell me, No more his home again he’ll see; But when the war is over, Still I dream he'll come to me.

From their other world the dead might speak to loved ones. The spiritualism which had attracted some people bereaved by the South African war had its constituency enlarged by this one, as people tried to communicate with the dead through a medium, or by table-rapping, or by messages on a Ouija board. Norman Lindsay, creator of ferociously patriotic cartoons, believed that a Ouija board brought messages from his brother Reg, killed on the Somme in 1917, Archie Sharpe, a relative of the Lewis family in Melbourne whose son Owen was dead in France, wrote from London after attending a seance. ‘Owen had spoken through the medium and it was very convincing. He gave a description of a girl, clearly identifiable as Phyllis ... Archie asked if mother wanted him to go on with the matter. She did not; neither did Phyllis’. In a long elegy to her brother deriving from Milton’s Lycidas, the grieving sister Phyllis accepted the authenticity of the spiritualist’s message but shrank from pursuing it: Take your dark powers to others; we can wait To know the whole of what you tell in part.

Writing that poem may well have been therapeutic. Sigmund Freud, thinking about the process of mourning as he lived through the war in Vienna, reflected that the healthy mind, possibly helped by ritual, avoided melancholia by detaching its memories and hopes from the

The Great War 105 dead. In another idiom, it is good to lay ghosts. The bodily absence of the dead made that task more difficult. Bereaved people are counselled in the late twentieth century that they may find it harder to cope with

grief, and to accept the finality of a death, when they choose not to look at the corpse of the person they are mourning. In the Great War Australian mourners, among millions of others, had no choice. One consolatory device was to use civic cemeteries, inscribing on family monuments as some had done for men dead in South Africa the

names of sons and brothers killed at the war, almost as if their bodies were interred there too. Mervyn Higgins’ parents raised a Celtic cross over a grave-like site in the cemetery above Dromana, which would duly receive their own bodies. The custom could convey with appalling simplicity the weight of bereavement on a family. Across Port Phillip Bay from Dromana, in the little cemetery at Point Lonsdale, the names

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“THEIR PAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE! GO wh a > Inscription on family monument in cemetery Detail of family monument in cemetery at

at Ma Ma Creek, Queensland Cornelian Bay, Tasmania, to Driver

{p> reJudith ayMcKay) (formerly Trumpeter) E. R. Sweeney, who Photograph died of wounds in France on 17 August 1918 after four years in the AIF (Zasmanian Mail, 20 May 1920)

106 Sacred Places of George and Martin Keddle, who died in France in 1918 after serving

since 1915, were added to the headstones over the graves of their parents; the Whites’ plot bore the names of Alick and Cyril, dead in France, ‘MY ONLY BOYS’; and the Curlewis family commemorated four brothers, Gordon, Selwyn, Arthur and Kenneth, all of whom ‘FELL AT GALLIPOLI IN 1913’.

Though there is no way to calibrate anguish, the worst sufferers in homelands during and after the Great War may well have been the close kin of those men whose bodies had no known location. The telegram might say not that a man was dead but that he was missing, or missing believed killed. Entreaties from distracted relatives provoked the British Red Cross to establish a Wounded and Missing Inquiry Bureau, which had its own Australian section, first in Cairo and then in London, run by Vera Deakin, daughter of the pre-war prime minister Alfred. Australian Red Cross Visitors, searching hospitals in hope of finding men so far unidentified, or of getting clues about them, wrote thousands of sympathetic letters to relatives. W. K. Hancock suffered for years from nightmares in which his brother Jim, posted missing at Poziéres, came home mutilated and mad. His mother’s grief, he believed, had been poisoned by fretting over Jim’s fate.

The monument as recruiter As the governor-general and the mayor of Adelaide foresaw at that ceremony on 7 September 1915, the landscape soon began to receive monuments recording the names of men who had gone to the war. Some places already had honour boards. In the Sydney inner suburb of Balmain the council commissioned a board honouring local men in the AIF even before the invasion of Turkey; and on Empire Day, 24 May 1915, railway workers at Honeysuckle, near Newcastle, unveiled a board honouring workmates known to have died in the first days at Anzac. From now on, honour boards were fixed to walls all over the country, listing local volunteers and marking with star, cross or sword the names of those who were dead. They were installed in town halls, schools, churches, lodges, sporting clubs, tram sheds, railway stations and other workplaces public and private.

The Great War 107 | Pa OW UND, POON |

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Roll of Honour, Murringo, New South Wales, with names screwed on as required and terminal date of war left vacant. Supplied by Wunderlich Lid., Sydney, which stamped out boards standard in form with individual inscriptions to order. (Photograph Neil Gow)

The honour boards were unfinished, interim artefacts. They awaited new names. The signwriter would do ‘1914’ on the left, leaving the terminal date blank (or as at the Hurstville, Sydney, Superior Public School, in 1917 go as far as ‘191’, assuming that the war could not possibly last until 1920). New names were painted or screwed or hooked on as required: at Alexandria, on the edge of Sydney, 165 names filled the board by the end of 1916 and a second one had to be made.

The honour rolls became huge scoreboards of commitment, intended to encourage other men to follow those named. In New South Wales the Department of Public Instruction suggested to headmasters that ‘in order to stimulate recruiting’ each school in the state should erect

an honour board. On Anzac Day 1917, at the unveiling of an honour board constructed by the manual training class at the West Maitland, New South Wales, Superior Public School, the president of the district

108 Sacred Places women’s patriotic society asked the young men in her audience when they, too, would be answering the call. Two weeks later a marble board was unveiled at the entrance to the town hall in Warwick, Queensland,

honouring soldiers from the Warwick Amateur Rugby League: a memento of the glorious dead, said the mayor, and ‘an example to us to go and do likewise’. From mid-1915 ‘patriotic’ ceremonies were organized throughout

Australia, to raise money for war loans and soldiers’ comforts, to heighten popular enthusiasm for the war, and to induce men into the AIF. Every anniversary of the landing was celebrated for these purposes,

at well-advertised gatherings in public places with bands, marching soldiers, flags and banners. Honour boards, most of them fixed to inside

walls, could not contribute much to the decor of these ceremonies. Memorials to participation in South Africa found unexpected use as rallying points for dedication to the greater war. These monuments had been raised to mourn and to proclaim pride. They now gained a third purpose. Like the new honour boards, memorials of the previous decade became recruiting sites. In Hobart the old monument to men who had died in the New Zealand wars was hung with ropes of laurel, and there was talk of adding AIF names to the pedestal of the statue of a soldier which stood in the Domain honouring ‘Tasmanians dead in South Africa. In the event, however, the arrangers of celebration for Anzac Day 1916 installed there a broken column made of timber to look like marble, “TO

THE MEMORY OF THE HEROES OF ANZAC, APRIL 25TH, 1915’. For the new ceremony they had created a new monument. Though Hobart’s column was built to serve only for one day, the urge that created it, the conviction that memorials were ritually necessary, and that honour boards and embellishments to older constructions were not enough, moved people in many places to put up monuments giving public honour to men from the locality.

Possibly the first was erected in the Sydney inner suburb of Balmain, whose honour board had also been so early. A month after the landing the mayor proposed a drinking fountain with tablets recording ‘the names of soldiers from this district who have fallen in the service of

The Great War 109 e7i i i: gpg iS ‘ 54 ee Oe “

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Monument at Balmain, Sydney, unveiled Sunday 23 April 1916. The nation’s entry into history is signalled in inscriptions round the top of the pillar: DARDANELLES, GABA TEPE, AUSTRALIA, APRIL 25TH 1915’. Balmain’s dead—thirty-eight by now—are honoured on marble tablets bearing their names and inscribed IN MEMORIAM. Below four bowls of the since abandoned drinking fountain are the words PEACE, HONOUR, EMPIRE and LIBERTY. (Photograph Jan Brazier)

the Empire’. The council picked a site at a busy intersection and voted two hundred pounds for the structure. Four local business men offered to pay for the marble tablets. The timing and character of the unveiling show that the Balmain councillors needed no prompting from any central authority, military or civil, about how to honour their soldiers. They chose 23 April 1916, Easter Day, the last weekend day before the anniver-

sary. They arranged a programme of three dimensions appropriate to a community at war, which they described as the national, the sacred and

110 Sacred Places the military, and whose representatives they selected with flair. The national aspect was embodied in the Labor premier of New South Wales, W. A. Holman, the sacred in the Rev. Frederick Colwell, a popular Methodist minister who had served as chaplain at Anzac Cove, and

the military in Lieutenant A.C. Carmichael, politician spectacularly turned soldier: a former minister under Holman who had joined the AIF at the age of forty-nine (saying he was forty-three), and who would soon

embark for the war with a thousand men whom he had personally recruited. The first anniversary of the landing itself provoked the making of memorials. Three weeks before Anzac Day 1916 the foundation stone was laid in front of the Post Office at Newcastle, New South Wales, for a memorial that would incorporate the first soldier statue of this war. This monument was a gift from a retired naval officer much respected in the

city, Commander Frank Gardner, and it was known at first as the Gardner Memorial. Marchers on 25 April 1916, led by men wounded on Gallipoli, saluted the pedestal on their way to commemorative services

in city churches. The mayor, laying the first stone, had foreseen the placing of wreaths here every Anzac Day, anniversary of the day ‘the gallant lads of Australia placed on the pages of history an everlasting memorial of fame’. Here as elsewhere, the memorial was site for pride,

mourning and exhortation. An officer wounded at Gallipoli told the crowd at the laying of the foundation stone ‘he was sure the district would not be behind hand, and that every man that could do so would go forward and take part in the battle’. Private philanthropy also paid for the memorial unveiled on Saturday 14 October 1916 at the Sydney beach suburb of Manly, given to the

municipality by the family of Alan Mitchell, the first man from the district to die at the war. Five thousand people saw the governor-general

perform the ceremony on the Corso. ‘Manly soldiers from Manly’, wrote one admirer of the monument and its subjects. The Little Boy from Manly had indeed grown up. (If the original Little Boy, Ernest Laurence, now aged forty, was in the crowd, no reporter noticed.) Speakers in the name of nation, state and municipality spoke solemn words, many of them addressed to young men not in uniform. The

The Great War 111

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AR ROE Ay Gg ty Bee Oe a, EY ree OP ee ge. The unveiling at Newcastle, Saturday afternoon, 16 September 1916, before a crowd of thousands. The temporary stage is adorned with France’s tricolor as well as Union Jack and Australian flag, for the ceremony marks also Newcastle’s raising £4000 for French war victims. The mayor has pulled back a flag to reveal the statue. The Newcastle Band plays ‘Boys of the Dardanelles’ as returned soldiers in uniform advance to the monument and salute.

mayor pointed to the column as ‘a stern rebuke to those who chose the pathway of leisure and indolence’. The governor-general, adapting Lord Nelson, said ‘Australia expects every man to do his duty’. The New South Wales minister for public instruction, Arthur Griffith, spoke not only to potential soldiers but to voters, expressing the hope ‘that when, in a few days’ time, Australia came to give its vote on the Referendum issue, it would not turn its back on the brave young men who had died for us, and those thousands of other brave sons who were facing death today. Loud Applause’. In two weeks Australians would vote to deter-

mine whether the federal government should be given the power to compel men into the AIF. The unveiling of Manly’s memorial had become a conscriptionist rally.

112 Sacred Places

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ei. a, -— ee. : i sis q — > roth gt Memorial at Manly, Sydney, by architect Burcham Clamp, unveiled 14 October 1976. Above a Corinthian column thirty-five feet high is set a globe showing Australia and New Zealand and the word ANZAC. The base provides space to be filled later by the names of Manly dead and by bronze medallions illustrating grief, battle and rescue. (Photograph Jan Brazier]

Division In the election for the federal parliament held on 5 September 1914 both the Labor Party and its Liberal opponents were committed to the cause of the United Kingdom and its allies in the war which had just begun. Labor’s leader Andrew Fisher, about to become wartime prime minister,

assured the mother country that Australia would defend her to the last man and the last shilling. The image had long been familiar in imperial rhetoric. In the world before 1914, even during the war in South Africa, it was a cosy figure of speech. Nobody knew how close Australia would come between 1914 and 1918 to literally delivering the promised last man.

The Great War 113 Not all the adults in this nation of five million men, women and children were as ready as their political leaders to sign a draft sending to

London the nation’s human and material resources. Small bands of pacifists and revolutionary socialists denounced the war as a massacre

of innocents or an amoral contest between empires. Wary workers demanded assurances that the weight of war would not fall disproportionately on them, eroding hard-won conditions of work and letting the bosses thrive on a war economy. ‘BLARST the flamin’ war!’ shouts C. J. Dennis’ Ginger Mick; even after learning with horror of German atrocities in Belgium he is ‘not keen to fight so toffs kin dine On pickled olives’. But nearly every public opponent of the war in South Africa, including federal Labor’s deputy leader William Morris Hughes, accepted

the justice or at any rate the necessity of this one, agreeing with H. B. Higgins that in a continental war against Prussian military autoc-

racy the British empire really was in danger. Ginger Mick succumbs after a while to the call of stoush, joining young men free from doubt, like James Drummond Burns of Melbourne’s Scotch College, who have responded to ‘the bugles of England’. The rhetoric of Anzac, celebrating

a nation united behind its distant army, was not a gross distortion of Australian reality. More than 80 000 men enlisted in the AIF between the declaration of war and the landing at Gallipoli. News from Anzac stimulated volunteers: from around 6000 in April 1915 to more than 10 000 in May and over 12 000 in June. So far they had joined spontaneously, in the sense

that there was no organized campaign of recruitment. That changed in

June, when the British government signalled that it wanted every Australian man who could be got into uniform. Recruiting drives now began: rallies addressed by public men and returned soldiers, posters imploring ‘Will they never come?’, ‘Enlist now’ on the dials of town clocks. The response was at first gratifying, but during the last months of fighting at Gallipoli the numbers fell away.

As the survivors of Anzac were being evacuated, public servants and military men at home began to work more strenuously for their reinforcement. A network of recruiting committees was established throughout the country. Recruiting sergeants followed up messages posted to nearly a million men between eighteen and forty-five identified

114 Sacred Places in a special census, asking if they were willing to enlist. These devices elicited 22 000 recruits in January 1916 (compared with 9000 in December), 19 000 in February and 16 000 in March. In April, however, the number fell below 9000, and increasing resistance was evident to the means now being employed to flush men out.

A Universal Service League, formed in September 1915, now pressed hard for conscription. It was modelled on an English body which argued that the voluntary system of raising British armies was not supplying enough men to win the war. Other European powers on both sides had traditions of peacetime conscription, and simply increased the quotas to reinforce wartime armies. In the British empire only Australia exercised compulsion in time of peace, and that was limited to the training of youths for military service in their own country. Breaking with custom in the face of unprecedented need, the British government introduced conscription of single men in January 1916. William Morris Hughes, who had taken over from Fisher as prime minister, was in England in April when conscription was extended to married men. The emigrant pupil-teacher of 1884, returning to England as an imperial statesman, declared that Australia must follow the mother country down the road to compulsion. And that was even before the killing began on the Somme. In New Zealand the government put conscription through parliament in

August 1916. In Canada Wilfred Laurier imposed conscription on a divided nation. Conscription was never attempted either in Ireland nor in the precarious Union of South Africa. When the USA entered the war in 1917 its expeditionary force was composed largely of conscripts.

In Australia Hughes feared that if he put conscription to parliament, it would be rejected by a majority of his own party in the Senate. He resorted instead to the device of referendum, asking Labor parliamentarians to let the issue be settled directly by the entire voting population. Even that was too much for some Labor men. The Military Service Referendum Bill scraped through only with the unanimous support of the Opposition.

The Pros and the Antis threw terrible accusations at each other, dedicating themselves to convincing the electorate that the blood of Australia’s men stained their opponents’ hands, not their own. Hughes displayed a dangerous confidence in the outcome, issuing a proclama-

The Great War 115 tion calling men up for home service under peacetime Defence Acts and then, on the very eve of the poll, empowering returning officers to ask

single male voters of military age whether they had responded to the proclamation. The future Prime Minister John Curtin, organizer for the Australian Trades Union Anti-Conscription Congress, was sentenced to three months in gaol for not responding (and released after three days when the prosecutions provoked outrage). On 28 October majorities in Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia voted Yes and majorities in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia voted No. Overall, the electors resolved by a majority of 72 476 in more than two million that the AIF would not be reinforced by compulsion. This was a day to be enjoyed, perhaps even elevated above Anzac Day, by those who had been accused of representing a disloyal minority. ‘As America celebrates

the 4th of July’, wrote one exultant Anti, ‘so we should celebrate the 28th of October. By doing so we will commemorate our glorious victory’. But the victory was not yet secure: John Curtin warned fellow trade unionists in a manifesto on 5 November that conscription could still come. Not, however, on the initiative of a Labor government; for at a caucus meeting on 14 November one member moved that Hughes did not have the confidence of the party and the Prime Minister walked out, followed by 23 of the 65 men in the room. This was a devastating moment. The Labor Party was doomed to be out of federal office for more than a decade. Hughes remained prime minister, sure of solid support from Liberals and the enduring hatred of his old comrades. ‘National Labour’ became ‘Nationalist’, or colloquially ‘Win-the-War’, winning a general election in May 1917, Conscription was

not an issue, for Hughes had assured voters that his government accepted the voters’ verdict on that question. Later in 1917, nevertheless, after Bullecourt and Messines and Polygon

Wood and Passchendaele, Hughes asked the people again for compulsory reinforcement of the AIF. He accepted the experts’ judgement that only by compulsion could Australia’s five divisions be maintained, and announced a second referendum, for 20 December 1917. The rhetoric of class conflict was heard more loudly this time. In New South Wales the campaigning coincided with the most widespread and prolonged strike since 1890, involving 100 000 railway workers, coal miners and other

116 Sacred Places men. The mutual vilification became more strenuous and solemn. If No was treason, Yes was irreligion. ‘How would the Kaiser like you to vote?’ asked Pros. ‘How would Christ like you to vote?’ replied Antis. By a margin slightly larger than in 1916 the result was again No. The division of the nation was so nearly equal that any one of a variety

of factors could be invoked as decisive. Since three quarters of the soldiers in France and Belgium were believed to have voted No, it could even be argued that the AIF remained an all-volunteer army by the will

of its own members. Returned soldiers would later give two different reasons for having voted No: either they would not force any man to go through what they had endured, or they did not want the freemasonry of volunteers to be polluted. Some conscriptionists blamed another war, or attempted war, for the defeat of their cause: the Sinn Fein rebellion in Dublin at Easter 1916, followed by the courts martial and execution of its leaders. In the Irish Catholic quarter of the Australian population, most people were fairly contented members of the British empire. Ireland was an ever more distant mother country, even grandmother country, since Australians

of Irish birth were far outnumbered now by those of Australian birth and Irish lineage. The civil disabilities long suffered by Catholics in their

native land had never been experienced in this country and had in any case long been removed at home. To be sure, bishops and clergy sustained their consciousness of one large grievance, the refusal of governments to

help them pay for Catholic schooling; and the encounters of daily life might still engender abrasive conflict with zealously Protestant employers

or neighbours. But Irish-born bishops proclaimed from pulpits beneath soaring spires that the prosperity of Irish Catholicism in this country displayed the hand of divine providence. Clerical and lay leaders alike encouraged Irish Australians to trust the British promise of imminent Home Rule for Ireland. The few custodians of Fenian tradition had hard ground to hoe in the Australia of 1914. The firing squads at Dublin Castle were a godsend to their cause, turning Patrick Pearse and his quixotic comrades into martyrs. Coadjutor Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne had come from Ireland in 1913, approved the declaration of war but declined to do any recruiting

The Great War 117 in 1915, and when Catholics were accused of not doing their share he retorted: ‘Apparently not enough nuns are joining’. His acrid wit was to provoke anger in many a Protestant during Mannix’s long reign as archbishop, which began in May 1917 In January he had given deep offence to loyalists who read that he dismissed the war as ‘simply a sordid trade war’. Whether or not he had said ‘sordid’, Mannix had certainly decided after the Easter rising that the civil allegiance he owed to Australia did not entail loyalty to the imperial government which was oppressing his own people. He opposed conscription. Antis were delighted to applaud and quote an archbishop who was on their side. But if Mannix’s inter-

vention did move some Catholics to vote No, it may well have antagonized just about as many into voting Yes. Nor did the Easter Rising or the conscription referendums measurably deter Catholic men from joining the AIF. Archbishop Mannix’s continuing prominence as a turbulent priest

nevertheless helped people, especially bigoted Protestants, to infer a general hostility or indifference to the cause of the empire at war among

Australians of Irish Catholic origin. So did the persistence of dissent in such a place as Boorowa, in southern New South Wales, settled by emancipated convicts from Ireland, legendary for the density of its Irishness. ‘Have you been to Ireland?’ ‘No, but ’ve been to Boorowa.’ The Irish actually shared the district with more people of other migrant stocks than that anecdote suggests; but they remained after three generations a solid community, hoarding rich memories of injustice in the old land which were brought out of store by the news from Dublin and the threat of conscription. Later memories record a visitation in May 1916

by one of Hughes’ recruiting sergeants, named Perry, who was disappointed at finding ‘scores of eligible men’ in the town and getting only a dozen ‘to toe the mark’. When Sergeant Perry asked a farmer for his sons ‘to fight for King and Country’, so a local historian writes, the man replied: ‘my sons have no country and I have only 40 acres’. Boorowa voted three to one against conscription in 1916, four to one in 1917. The Catholic 35 per cent of the district’s population appears to have supplied no more than 10 per cent of local enlistments in the AIF. Boorowa is the Irish Catholic Australia of prejudiced Protestants’ imagination.

118 Sacred Places Though they were wrong to think Boorowa typical, they were right to see the Labor Party as being disproportionately Irish Catholic after the turmoil over conscription. Until 1916 Catholics were proportionately

no more numerous among Labor members of the federal parliament than among their opponents: on each side, one in five. Between 1917 and 1930 the Catholic proportion stayed steady on the anti-Labor side and rose to half for Labor. After Hughes, the next three Labor prime ministers would be of Irish Catholic origin, including the briefly imprisoned anticonscriptionist John Curtin. The former Labor men—in ex-comrades’

parlance, the rats—were welcomed as the truly loyal element in their movement by new conservative allies. Before the war Labor’s opponents had been Protectionist, Liberal, and for a while, drably, the Fusion. Labor

had not only represented a class, the workers, the ordinary people, but had done at least as much as the conservatives to create national institutions and symbols, from the Commonwealth Bank, Commonwealth postage stamps and currency to the Royal Australian Navy and compulsory military training But in 1916 anti-Labor people appropriated the nation, and began to portray Labor as representing, with dubious loyalty, a mere section of the people. Vigorous recruiting continued for the rest of the war, though with diminished success. The word ‘Eligible’, given official meaning as an

adjective in the war census of 1915, became a noun in Australia as nowhere else, for this was the only belligerent nation in which men were

still being exhorted to join the army. ‘Stay-at-homes’ was another Australianism, and ‘shirker’, a usage which declined in the United Kingdom and elsewhere when conscription came in, had also a wide currency. White feathers, emblems of cowardice, were handed or posted to young men. In Hamilton, Victoria, a white feather was delivered to Lance Learmonth, son of a Western District pastoral dynasty with mili-

tary traditions, who had tried to enlist but was rejected as medically unfit. To protect such men’s reputation and peace of mind the authorities devised a Rejected Volunteers badge. At the University of Sydney Bert Evatt wore it for the rest of the war after three times failing eyesight tests. At the University of Melbourne R. G. Menzies could not wear it because he remained a civilian by private decision of a family which had already two sons in the war; nor could W. K. Hancock, who was eager to enlist

The Great War 119 (‘we divided the adult male population into soldiers and shirkers’) but whose parents would not let him, when their sons Jim and Justin had gone already and Jim had been posted Missing at Poziéres. After the conscription referendums as before, the unveiling of a monument erected in honour of soldiers was a recruiting rally. Governors,

mayors, clergymen, wounded returned soldiers, all did their best to make the memorial speak to men not yet in uniform. Opponents of conscription, however, originated the memorial unveiled at Bateman’s Bay, on the south coast of New South Wales, where No votes were twice as many as Yes in 1916. An obelisk unveiled soon after the second referendum, on 26 December 1917, was inscribed ‘Bateman’s Bay and District Volunteers 1914-1917 AIF’. Volunteers: as a local paper observed, that word, and the 74 names recorded below it, would ‘testify for all times

that Bateman’s Bay and district did their duty under the voluntary

G@ eh bo £28 ea @eee- ro ae) ae eo. 2A

Memorial obelisk at Toogoolawah, Queensland, unveiled on 31 March 1917, with soldiers posed to

form an instructive tableau vivant (Australian War Memorial, AWM negative no. H17771)

120 Sacred Places system’; they had not needed to be forced into serving their country. This monument also bears evidence that once its sponsors had made this declaration they lost interest in completing the record: the names of men in Bateman’s Bay who enlisted in 1918 were never added.

The exhortations went on right to the end. Though the president of the local Patriotic League unveiling an obelisk at Wilberforce, near Sydney, on 12 October 1918 thought that victory was imminent, the crowd applauded a retired army officer on the platform who warned that Germany’s ‘peace kite’ might be a ruse. “There was still need for men’, he said, ‘and the best way to show gratitude to the men whose names appeared on that honour roll was to go and take the places of those who fell, and those who came back’. Memorials erected during the war are more common in Australia than in other belligerent countries. They are far more numerous than in New Zealand, which in all but one

respect shared experience of the war with Australia. The difference is that once New Zealand enacted conscription, appeals for volunteers were no longer necessary. Lacking that element in the movement to build memorials, New Zealanders waited until the war was over to honour their soldiers.

Memorials would have been still more numerous in Australia had the federal government not controlled their construction. From October 1916 a regulation under the War Precautions Act prohibited appeals unauthorised by state War Councils for any monument or memorial costing more than £25. The New South Wales Council explained that while ‘appreciating the good effect which the erection of such memorials

would probably have upon recruiting’, there might be ‘such a drain upon the community’s resources as to seriously affect other more urgent

patriotic effort’. Until the war was won, the Council advised, honour boards would do. Possibly the makers of this policy, anticipating a Yes vote in the coming referendum, assumed that recruiting appeals would soon be unnecessary; in that case money spent to make memorials would be serving a grief less helpful to wartime morale than the raising of money for war bonds and comforts for men in the trenches. In forty

or more places committees ignored the law, making the safe judgement that authorities would not prosecute them for illegally honouring their soldiers.

The Great War 121 en

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PR i eee Memorial at Lithgow, New South Wales, unveiled 13 October 1918: possibly the last wartime monument. Photographed in the studio of its makers, the monumental masons Anselm Odling and Sons, Sydney.

There was another issue. The New South Wales War Council resolved not only that permanent memorials could await the end of the war, but that they should then ‘serve some humanitarian and utilitarian purpose’. Some wartime memorials did. Anzac Parade, for example, the remodelled Sydney roadway dedicated in 1917. But utilitarian memorials were few, compared with obelisks and columns and statues. The Minister for Repatriation received letters from critics who not only welcomed the wartime control of such memorials, but foresaw when peace returned an orgy of ‘jerry-built statuary’ and urged him to require, as the New South Wales War Council wished, that every monument ‘should be of some

122 Sacred Places use to the living as well as a perpetuation of the “glory that is Anzac”’. If not, warned the editor of the Dubbo Liberal, Joseph Lesina, ‘these fantastic erections will disfigure an otherwise pleasing landscape, and make us the laughing-stock of European visitors with aesthetic tastes’. The minister replied cordially though vaguely, assuring the writer that the present regulation would prevent rash expenditure. But for how long, once the fighting stopped? From Perth on 5 Decem-

ber 1918 repatriation officials advised headquarters of ‘numerous appli-

cations for authority to collect’. Was the ban to be lifted? Unnamed officials of the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia

wanted the regulation to remain in force, not for fear of ridicule by European aesthetes but because ‘until the last man has returned and been satisfactorily placed, and until the last deserving case among soldiers’ dependants has been removed’, there should be no relaxing of the policy which had prevented large sums from being spent on ‘obelisks and similar memorials’.

That view came readily to leaders of an organization whose first purpose was to make politicians recognize the rights of men returning to

the country they had served. Once home, however, many ordinary members might well take a more sentimental view of memorials. More-

over, whatever the League’s strategists thought, a prohibition which

had caused some friction and much evasion even in wartime was widely judged to be intolerable by the end of 1918. In January 1919 the Repatriation Commission yielded. The minister declined to put himself

on one side of a debate now buzzing all over the country about the character of commemoration. Here, as on larger matters, the federal government was putting away its wartime truncheon. If any authority were to police memorials on grounds of purpose or taste, it would have to be a state government. In the first issue of the building trade paper Construction for 1919 a Sydney firm of monumental masons advertised that the temporary honour rolls could now be replaced by ‘Appropriate and Lasting Memorials’, preferably in marble or granite.

4| The War Memorial Movement

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SS ee one 28, ee eee Bundaberg, 1921 (Photograph Richard Stringer)

The right way As survivors of the AIF’ sailed home, people all over Australia were planning to honour both the returning soldiers and their dead comrades. To memorials erected after the South African war and during the Great War were now added tributes which would transform the landscape, as committees all over the country raised money, chose a site, decided on what form the tribute would take and how it would be inscribed, and then invited the whole community to a ceremony at which the memorial was unveiled and its meaning proclaimed. The term ‘war memorial’ was novel. Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial or

Monument, common for South African War tributes, became less so between 1915 and 1918, when so many monuments were constructed in honour of the living as well as the fallen. They were ‘the Soldiers’ Memorial’, ‘the Soldiers’ Monument’, or simply the Memorial, the

123

124 Sacred Places Monument. The new name did not prevail until after 1918, when the war had become a past experience and the memorial was created to stand as a community’s statement of bereavement, pride and thanksgiving: the accomplishment, as people in many places said, of a war memorial movement.

Some individuals and families made private essays in commemoration, humble or grand, on their own land or in cemeteries or with permission on public property. The most elaborate memorial in the country was the tall stone monument designed and built by Alfred Perrott on a

corner of his own pastoral property near Armidale, in northern New South Wales, with a symbolism so intricate that it required an explanatory tablet. Most memorials, however, were created for civic committees

who wanted their messages to be generally intelligible, and who therefore opted for less esoteric forms. Soldiers were given public honour not only as fellow-citizens but as employees, worshippers, and in other settings of work and leisure. Government departments and private companies, churches and schools, lodges and sporting clubs everywhere installed honour boards and in

many places put up more substantial monuments. Sir John Monash dedicated memorials to Jewish soldiers in King’s Park, Perth, in the Melbourne General Cemetery, and in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. A Methodist Freemason railwayman who had been to a state school and

belonged to a rowing club might have his war service commemorated in five places as well as on the memorial created by neighbours. Regimental memorials, mourning men as comrades rather than citizens, were confined almost entirely to the Light Horse, an army within an army: in King’s Park, Perth, to the 10th Light Horse, and in Adelaide, at the corner of East and North Terraces, to the whole force and to their horses, honoured in words from the Book of Job including ‘he goeth on

to meet the armed men’. The horses were commemorated also by memorial troughs: one in Barmera, South Australia, and one in St Kilda Road, Melbourne, erected by the Purple Cross Society, a band of women who loved animals. Thirroul was among places where the movement to make a memorial was well under way by the end of the war. Early in 1917 the Thirroul Progress and Ratepayers Association opened an appeal for funds and set

The War Memorial Movement 125

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ene os ES NI AS ee i oe

Eg ett BeBae Teles: 3igs| ge —ggme. Ny

Monument by Alfred Perrott on a corner of his own property, Dangarsleigh, near Armidale, northern New South Wales. Conceived as a

memorial to the maker’s son, killed at Passchendaele, and enlarged to celebrate all soldiers of the empire who ‘went west’; unveiled

on Empire Day 1921. A tablet interprets the symbolism: ‘CIRCLE AND GLOBE

REPRESENT THE WORLD. FIVE PILLARS AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, SOUTH AFRICA, CANADA, INDIA. TRIANGLE ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND. OCTAGONAL SPIRE THE EIGHT COUNTRIES UNITED’. The gateway has the form of a temple bearing the Hindu-Buddhist word ‘Nirvana’, and surmounted by a cement bell, as if calling souls to rest.

up a committee to see the project through. The Fountain Fund, the appeal was Called, for the memorial, like Newcastle’s in 1916, was to be both a monument—the statue of a soldier—and a civic amenity. Anybody in

126 Sacred Places the Thirroul of the 1920s who read Kangaroo would have been surprised

by D.H. Lawrence’s omission of the fountain. Reticulated water had reached the town only in 1915, when a railway locomotive depot and shunting yards were established; a public drinking fountain was a symbol of municipal progress.

The official collector was the widowed Mrs Margaret Riach; as everybody knew her, Granny Riach (pronounced Reesh); she had 3

turned seventy in 1916. The first pound was subscribed by the local state

member of parliament, J. B. Nicholson, a former Labor man expelled

from the party for endorsing conscription. Another of the first ten pounds was subscribed by the Governor-General, Sir Ronald MunroFerguson, on a visit to the town.

The Fountain Fund was, not, however, a partisan enterprise. It represented a healing rather than a perpetuation of wartime division. Some of the men to be named on the pedestal were railwaymen and

a —~Seee _- | lf ee” ( e ee

‘ pa cnOe 7 oo ee

a fF ee Mrs Margaret (‘Granny’) Riach (sometimes spelt Reach, pronounced Reesh), official collector for the

Fountain Fund, Thirroul, with Alessandro Casagrande’s model. In D. H. Lawrence's account she becomes Granny Rhys.

The War Memorial Movement 127 coal miners who had responded to recruiting appeals. Mrs Riach, whose late husband had worked in the railways, collected money also for his comrades engaged in a conflict that entered labour history as the Great

Strike of 1917; and when the strike was over the railwaymen held a social attended by three hundred people in the School of Arts Hall, ‘to mark their esteem for Granny Riach and assist her efforts for the Fountain Fund in acknowledgement for the assistance rendered by her in collecting for their funds during the late strike’. The two causes were not here

in conflict. Those three hundred people had had a serious grievance against the Railway Commissioners, and anti-conscriptionist sentiment was strong among them; but they had no misgivings about honouring men who had gone to the war. Donations to the Fountain Fund during

1918 included one pound and eleven shillings from men at the locomotive sheds and seventeen shillings and threepence from workers at the Excelsior Colliery.

Everybody at Thirroul agreed on a site. As in many other small towns, the School of Arts (or Mechanics’ Institute) had seen better days— ‘a tin cinema show’ is all Frieda Lawrence saw—but it remained a place

of common assembly, and the Bulli Shire Council readily gave a piece of ground outside the hall for the monument. Thirroul’s postmaster took on the job of collecting the names to be inscribed on the pedestal. Free labour was guaranteed from an architect in Wollongong and a plumber in Bulli, and free cement from merchants and builders. Workmen gave up their Eight Hour holiday early in October 1919 to put in the foundations. As Lawrence observed, it was ‘a real township monument’. The committee accepted a tender of £230 for pedestal, fountain and sandstone figure from Alessandro Casagrande, a stonemason in Hurstville, Sydney, who was known to make pleasing and well-priced monuments. (In this pre-multicultural Australia, reporters struggling with his name gave at least five different spellings, including Cassingandra.) He and his wife had emigrated from the Veneto region of Italy shortly before the war, in response to news that Sydney had plenty of work for a man of his craft.

Thirroul’s memorial was ready to be unveiled less than eighteen months after the killing had stopped, in good time to help grieving people mourn their distant dead. Most tributes took longer, and their

128 Sacred Places forms and sites were not always chosen so harmoniously. The prominence of a woman in the movement is unusual. All over Australia, local circumstances put their imprint on a common movement of commemoration. The theme was universally the mourning and honouring by

name of the men who went to the war from this place; and on that theme people in every city, suburb, town and township improvised their

own variations, negotiated their own communal understandings of the meaning of the war in appropriate monument and ceremony. The making of Great War memorials in Australia was a quest for the right way, materially and spiritually, to honour the soldiers.

When shire and municipal councils and less formally constituted bodies deliberated on how best to commemorate the deeds and deaths of their men they might first have to settle contention about who owned the project. The Welcome Home committees which had been created all over the country? And what if, as at Mernda, near Melbourne, a district had two Welcome Home Committees in hot contention? Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, also had two committees each determined to erect the town’s monument, divided by passions connected with conflict between

Catholics and Protestants but otherwise as impenetrable to posterity as to the Equity Court judge in Sydney who declined the plea of one faction to put a stop to the other. Twenty years earlier people in Wagga had erected peaceably an obelisk in memory of the one local man to die in South Africa. This time the town had more than two hundred men to

mourn. One committee raised a pillar to their memory, the other an arch to them and to the more than eight hundred who had gone away and returned. Between the unveiling of the pillar in 1922 and the arch five

years later, hatchets were buried: the alderman who had been chairman of the committee for the pillar spoke as mayor at the ceremony beside the arch on Anzac Day 1927, observing that the names on the monument represented every phase of life and religion in Wagga, ‘and the message to be learned from those names was that unity was essential in peace and war’. Amicable discussion generally yielded one representative committee, whose first decision was about the size of the region a memorial should represent, and so the catchment area from which to collect the

The War Memorial Movement 129 money for putting it up. Combined effort could make more substantial monuments. At Erina, north of Sydney, the handsome rotunda opened in 1923 honoured also men from Matcham, Terrigal and Wamberal. But parochial frictions could make joint enterprise difficult. Amosville, in northern New South Wales, became the site for a soldier figure in 1920

only after people in three small towns had disagreed about where a commonly-sponsored memorial should be installed, and Amosville won in a ballot (see photographs p. 163). Promoters of a memorial for the whole of central Queensland failed to persuade people that an impressive monument in Rockhampton could serve them all. Even within what a stranger would think was the same town, municipal imperatives could prevent the erection of a single memorial. In New South Wales, East and West Maitland each had one (monuments, said the local paper, to those ‘petty jealousies between neighbouring towns’ which ‘prevent them from

uniting in movements of benefit to the whole province’), and so did Grafton and South Grafton. Failure to co-operate with neighbours might or might not be quickly forgotten. Nobody from Burra, in the mid-north of South Australia, accepted an invitation in 1922 to come over for the

opening of the memorial hall at Mount Bryan, built in defiance of a campaign for joint commemoration; but when a committee at Wolumla, in southern New South Wales, put up memorial gates for the recreation

park rather than contribute to a monument over at Candelo, people from Candelo brought good wishes to the unveiling in 1925, understanding the will to honour men on their own home ground.

Raising the money Territorial jealousy could also turn fund-raising into a competition. A local paper in south-eastern New South Wales cried ‘Bravo, Binda! What will Crookwell do—will she fail? It’s unthinkable’. In Victoria’s western district, town after town in a rich pastoral region—Colac, Camperdown, Terang, Warrnambool—put up grand monuments which were at once tributes to the soldiers and essays in conspicuous emulation: ‘second to none in the whole Commonwealth’, it was said of Warrnambool’s. One

of the most striking memorials outside capital cities stood at Maryborough, in the south-east of Queensland, where an obelisk with five

130 Sacred Places statues, costing £2300 and installed in 1922, was a rejoinder to Bundaberg’s marble soldier on a column, unveiled the previous year at a cost of £1650. The task of committees in some rural areas was made easier by gifts from squirely pastoralists. In South Australia Henry Dutton, owner of Anlaby station, gave a Soldiers Memorial Garden to the mid-northern town of Kapunda, and a bronze figure of the archangel St Michael was

commissioned and designed by Charles Angas for Angaston in the Barossa Valley. The goldfield town of Boulder, Western Australia, had more plebeian patronage: the hotel keeper David Donaldson, who had

lost a son in the war, engaged the sculptor Pietro Porcelli to create a bronze soldier.

Most committees raised money for the memorials as they had done

for wartime funds, by appeals in the press, door-to-door canvassing, fétes and dances and any other device they could think of—or almost any: at Mudgee, in central New South Wales, the committee decided in 1923 that it would not be ‘in harmony with the sacred nature of a memorial’ to make money out of amusement or gambling. This stand, though

unusual, was consistent with a widespread judgement that no public pleasures should be licensed on Anzac Day.

An energetic committee would encourage as Thirroul’s did the giving of goods and services as well as money. Water pipes for draining, wiring for lamps, cement and stone and timber, and in country districts part of the wheat crop or wool clip. A ‘war memorial pool’ in an agricul-

tural district meant not an amenity for swimming (that was still called baths), but a pile of grain to be sold for the fund. The architect Varney

Parkes refused to take even a token gift for designing the arch at Wollongong. Too old himself to go to the war, this son of the colonial statesman Sir Henry was giving his professional skill to honour the men who had served, among them his brother Cobden, who had almost been hit by the bullet that killed General Bridges at Gallipoli. Worthy son of a worthy father, said the mayor.

Such gestures were well publicized in the cause of extracting money from citizens at large. That could become more difficult as the war receded in memory. In the first post-war year all civic activities were

dislocated by an influenza epidemic which killed 12 000 people, put more than a million to bed, and made public gatherings a hazard to

The War Memorial Movement 131 health. When the influenza passed, fund-raisers complained that patriotic generosity never returned to previous heights. One of the ten people who turned up to a public meeting in the Grafton town hall in 1921 said it would be ‘a dastardly shame’ if the town were to have no memorial and asked how people were to be stirred up. ‘Dynamite!’ replied one of the other nine. By less violent means the committee managed to erect a granite column honouring thirty-five dead men in time for Armistice Day 1923.

Here and elsewhere an appeal to revive a wartime spirit of dedication could touch civic conscience. At Kiama, on the New South Wales south coast, a sluggish movement was stirred in 1924 by the intervention of a local war hero, Colonel Colin Fuller, younger brother of the premier

Sir George Fuller. The premier was able to unveil a memorial arch in 1925. By that year most committees had done their job. For those still at

work in 1929 the depression made the going harder. At Balgownie, a mining town not far from Thirroul, the chairman declared the memorial unveiled in 1930 a solid achievement for such hard times, and in a place

without rich inhabitants; the £310 had been ‘practically donated from every home in small sums by poor people’. Balgownie was just about the last place in its region to make a memorial, not having had a Grannie Riach. Women were often assigned the job of canvassing. They had more time than men, so men said, and were harder to refuse. Young women were elected queen for a day at fund-raising carnivals. In many places

women did more than knock on doors and parade themselves. At Toowoomba, southern Queensland, a column with globe and wreath was named the Mothers’ Memorial because many mothers of the 430 soldiers commemorated on it believed that the male committee was taking too long to honour their sons. The soldier figure unveiled in 1920

at Gladstone, in the mid-north of New South Wales, was mainly the doing of the town’s ‘women workers’. That term did not normally refer to female wage-earners, who had become more numerous since 1914, especially in factories vacated by men, and who were discouraged once

the men returned from doing what a judge of the Arbitration Court called ‘men’s work’. ‘Women workers’ were helpmeets, hearth-tenders, who had undertaken voluntary war work for the comfort of their menfolk. ‘A token of gratitude to our women war workers’, says the inscription on a tablet in the vestibule of Sydney’s Town Hall, ‘from the returned

132 Sacred Places sailors and soldiers of New South Wales’; and similar tributes were inscribed on halls elsewhere. Titles signalled the character and purpose of women’s organizations established during the war which kept going after 1918 to raise memorials. In Sydney the Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, founded in 1915 by the imperially patriotic and feminist

physician Dr Mary Booth, erected on Anzac Day 1922 a memorial drinking fountain close to a wharf at Woolloomooloo where husbands

and sons had boarded troopships. The memorial at Maryborough,

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C. Web Gilbert makes sure that a figure 1s ‘true in every detail’ Sergeant W. H. (Abdul?) Guest puts on his old uniform in 1921 to pose for a figure in the Australian War Memorial’s diorama of the battle of Mont St Quentin. He posed again for ‘The Bomber’, Broken Hill (p. 167).

post-war immigrants Paul Montford and Raynor Hoff. Committees had nevertheless to tolerate a measure of creative independence when they engaged an artist. The stock character of the artisan’s figure, though cultivated people might wince at it, let clients know exactly what they were getting. If they wanted something unique, the mason would oblige by combining stock forms. ‘] can supply 2 figures on top like Design No 28’, a Sydney mason suggested; ‘you would then have a design entirely different to any other’. And they could have it for less than a sculptor or an architect would charge. The difference in cost alone made it easy to opt for a mason. Commissions did flow, or at least trickle, to professional sculptors. Richardson, Baskerville and Web Gilbert each did memorials for several clients, Montford at least two. Hoff, the most able sculptor working in post-war Australia, executed bronze panels of battle for a tall pillar at Dubbo, New South Wales, built in 1925. That was his only work for a town committee. He would later do more adventurous figures for state memorials in Adelaide and Sydney. From a base in England the doyen of Australian sculptors, Bertram Mackennal—Sir Bertram from 1921, the

148 Sacred Places first Australian-born artist to be knighted—designed a number of civil monuments after the war, but appears not to have been approached by any local committee; perhaps they all thought him out of their reach. He was to design one memorial of state-wide character, the Cenotaph in Sydney. Nor was the painter George Lambert offered any commissions

for civic war memorials when he turned his hand to sculpture after the war, though he was engaged to make monuments for St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney and Geelong Grammar School. The sculptor who attracted most commissions for war memorials, all of them in Western Australia, was Pietro Porcelli: born in Italy, informally apprenticed in Sydney to Achille Simonetti and then trained in Naples, well known in Perth before the war as a maker of statues and

other monuments. In the landscape of Perth and country towns stand seven of his obelisks, three statues of soldiers and one of Peace, and a wayside cross. The demand for Porcelli’s services is not unrelated to his absence from histories of orthodox sculpture: he advertised for custom as tradesmen did and professional people were supposed not to, kept his price low (using a stonemason’s yard for want of a studio) and worked for wages when necessary as artisan on other makers’ jobs. Two other sculptors engaged by memorial committees are also outside the canon of high art. In Sydney Gilbert Doble, maker of female figures in the Sydney suburbs of Marrickville, Leichhardt and Pyrmont and at Wellington in the central west of New South Wales, had been first a stonemason, and as sculptor he employed a hammered bronze method

cheaper than traditional casting. So did William Macintosh, another stonemason who came to be recognized as a sculptor, and who had had

a busy practice making figures for the facades of public buildings in Sydney and Brisbane before he was engaged to do the statue on the South African memorial at Allora, Queensland. Like Porcelli, he advertised, offering ‘architectural sculpture and decorative details’. He created a striking soldier in the Sydney suburb of Double Bay at about half the price Shepparton paid for Web Gilbert’s bronze figure. The works of all these makers were far less numerous than those

carved in stone by masons, some of whom traded on the fact that anybody was free to call himself a sculptor. Did a committee want sculpture? In Brisbane the firm of A. L. Petrie & Son, ‘Monumental

The War Memorial Movement 149 sculptor, Cemetery Gates, Toowong’, would supply it to order, and between 1918 and 1925 did so for about forty places. Francis Rusconi of Gundagai, ‘ monumental mason’ in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, offered the public his services as ‘Monumental Sculptor and Designer’. Not all craftsmen appropriated the word. In Sydney the long established

firm of Edwin Andrews stuck to ‘monumental mason’ and enjoyed plenty of war memorial custom, and Anselm Odling & Sons in Sydney were content with ‘Workers in marble and granite’, though they proclaimed themselves a cut above ordinary traders by saying: ‘We do not

quote for Cemetery Work, other than through an established Monumental Mason’. Anselm Odling advertised a model marble Digger captioned: ‘He did his job. Are you doing yours?’ In the idiom of a later age the work of all these firms might be called vernacular sculpture. Custodians of public taste in Australia and other countries did their best both to encourage the commissioning of artists rather than tradesmen and to mitigate the crudities of the masons’ craft. England’s Royal

Academy of Arts established in 1918 a War Memorials Committee which put out a series of ‘suggestions’, beginning with advice to call ina professional artist, either as designer or as judge. The American Federation of Arts issued the Royal Academy’s document, slightly revised, in 1919, and it was welcomed in the world of public art as likely to save the republic from suffering in new incarnation ‘the deplorable army of

soldiers in stone and bronze and baser metals scattered through our country as memorials to the soldiers of the War of the Rebellion’.

The English and American discussion was familiar in Australia. George ‘Taylor reprinted the Royal Academy’s suggestions in his journals Building and Soldier in 1918. (He had himself designed the Sydney Town

Hall’s tablet honouring George Griffin, killed in South Africa.) As Michael Roe has shown, in an essay placing Taylor among those Australian ‘Progressives’ who propagated the gospel of efficiency, two

items in his bag of thoughts were a belief in policy-making by disinterested professionals—in a word new to his generation, expertise—and

a determination that Australia should ‘hallow her soldiers and find in their service lessons for building a better nation’. These two ideas joined to form a proposal, published in Building for September 1918, that ‘no

memorial constructions be allowed to be erected unless they pass the

150 Sacred Places scrutiny of an expert or board of experts’. The journal Architecture, organ

of the profession in Australia, noted with approval in its last wartime issue the English recognition ‘that there should be some constituted authority of qualified people to guide—if not to actually control—the national expression of hero worship’. In the first month of peace the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects called a meeting in Melbourne to consider how best to prevent the erection of unsuitable memorials. From this meeting, at which the state

governor presided, came the War Memorials Advisory Committee of Victoria. The chairman was Sir Baldwin Spencer, professor of biology at the University of Melbourne for as long as most people could remember, and involved in just about every public cause they could think of.

The committee had no more authority than derived from the declaratory force of its membership, a formidable representation of government, architecture and visual arts. Its terms of reference were those of the Royal Academy, with two significant changes. The first, urging makers to employ the services of an architect, reflected that profession’s initiative. The second, substituting ‘a professional expert’ for ‘a professional artist’, must have pleased George ‘Taylor.

Like the Royal Academy committee, Victoria’s was hardly ever consulted. Amateurs in town and country evidently believed that they had no need of professional counsel. In New South Wales, however, the experts were given power. The Nationalist government of W. A. Holman,

responding to a proposal from the Institute of Architects and John Sulman, senior man in the profession and pioneer of town planning, created in 1919 a War Memorials Advisory Board similar in composition

to the Victorian committee but granted authority by a clause inserted into the Local Government Act requiring its approval of design and site before any monument could be erected in a public place. The name of the body was changed in 1921 to Public Monuments Advisory Board in recognition that the clause had a wider application. Sulman was chairman. He and his wife had mourned their own airman son by endowing in his name a memorial prize, later converted into a memorial lectureship, at the University of Sydney. Though then in his seventies, Sulman put much energy into the job of influencing how other people commemorated their war dead.

The War Memorial Movement 151 Parliamentarians debating the bill in 1919 took each other on an imaginary tour of Sydney inspecting monuments that would not have been put up had experts been consulted. From the South African war J. D. Fitzgerald, minister for local government, pointed to ‘squat figures on squat pedestals’, and in particular the statue commemorating Lieutenant

Gideon Grieve at Watson’s Bay (see photograph p. 43). (To George Taylor’s eyes the figure ‘might have been fashioned by an aboriginal’).

The principal intended victim of the new law was clearly the stonemason’s soldier. From the war just ended, the most notorious exhibit cited in debate was a soldier at Miranda, south of Sydney. George Taylor had contemplated this statue as an example of anarchic amateurism, and

it may well have been decisive in persuading parliament to give the experts power to disapprove and amend. When the Board put out a booklet of advice on war memorials a photograph of Miranda’s (unidentified) was included as the one illustration of what to avoid.

The power to prevent any more Mirandas was granted with only one dissenting voice. Jim McGowen, long a Labor man, premier 191013 and since the calamity over conscription a Nationalist, was an old boilermaker who had had three sons in the AIF, one of them killed at Gallipoli. Both as artisan and as grieving father he was reluctant to prohibit memcrials people wanted. McGowen feared that parliament might inhibit popular sentiment in the name of art. No other state had a war memorial advisory committee. Elsewhere views like Jim McGowen’s prevailed. South Australia got only so far as a select committee of parlia-

ment in 1920. Queensland’s Institute of Architects in 1918 ‘observed with regret the deplorable artistic character’ of many memorials in the state, but nobody responded to their offer of advice. In the matter of war memorials, Sydney was national capital for the new faith in expertise.

Shires and municipalities were told of the new requirement on 30 January 1920. If they wanted to put up hospitals, halls and other amenities they could go ahead, for a building was not a monument as defined by the Act. Twice a month the Board met to examine plans for proposed monuments, and by 30 June the minister, on its recommendation, had approved eighteen designs and disapproved eleven. Thirroul’s was among projects accomplished before the law was invoked. At the end of the first full year, 1920-21, the Board noted an improvement in

152 Sacred Places © , Statue outside public school at Miranda, a0 nt eT as George Taylor saw it, “.. so badly

Pa \ . Sydney, 1918: ‘a grotesque figure in cement’,

y - aj moulded, that if the face were not

- gle placed on one side of the head, it would on , —— be difficult to tell which was its front ; er ) Se = 2. a or its back’. It was possibly decisive in the

ae eee creation of the New South Wales Public

wiles. | Miranda memorial on a new site and without JS le _ _ «4 - statue, 1920. Accounts of its fate differ. 4 ee - oi According to a history of the local RSL the

a Ne statue ‘was an embarrassment to the

. - A oe ef headmaster who arranged for robust senior cate i ne stein, ead ; wae pupils to dig a hole and bury the OLD

pe - een ele eae DIGGER... Some old soldiers resented the a ae ees removal and one dark night the body was — ods = a ee — disinterred and set up in a prominent position ’. ie ‘capeesies aeaeemace aa “ “oe Another version, written in 1920, has it ‘taken

en péo. down by some soldiers having the strength of Tn — ficir artistic convictions, and buried. It has

KOO PO EN aN Nab since been unearthed and remains on the

Nn ee ee ec and skull on its chest) as a thing of scorn, to the sculptor, if he thus be glorified by such a title, and to aldermanic ignorance of art in allowing the thing to disfigure the place’, Hurstville

Propeller, 26 November 1920. In the first story returned soldiers perceive the effigy,

however ugly, as sacred; in the second, and in

another one reporting a returned man tarring and feathering the figure, they do not.

The War Memorial Movement 153 the standard of plans: seven were approved, five not, and thirty approved after revision. Next year seven went straight ahead, nine were rejected,

and twenty-six approved after revision. In 1922-23 the numbers were six, three and nineteen.

From committees asked to amend their designs the Board could quote appreciative responses. When people at a meeting in the northern town of Tamworth resolved to thank the Board for ‘deep and kindly interest’ in the design of memorial gates, one speaker expressed exactly the view the originators had hoped for: they ‘could say that the proposed

monument was not the outcome of their own amateurish ideas, but of those of the highest authorities on the subject in the land’. Such tributes, however, were less common than complaints. Under the heading ‘ART

OR STODGE? OUR SOLDIERS’ MEMORIALS’, the Sydney Sun reported on 10 September 1921 that local bodies were still ‘frequently hard to convince that their chosen designs conflict with all the established canons of art’. A firm of stonemasons whose plan for the town of Candelo was rejected in Sydney complained ‘that no one can get a design

passed by this Board unless he belonged to the Architects’ Society’. Don’t blame us, committees told subscribers when their vision was vetoed

or held up by the distant experts. Sometimes the locals put up their memorial while the Board was still deliberating, or built it in defiance of a ruling, and many committees simply took no notice of the law requiring them to get permission. The number of plans submitted fell away after 1922 as the making of new memorials decreased. The Board was asked for advice on two projects in 1928 and did not meet at all in 1929.

The experts had intervened often enough to make the memorials of New South Wales express less straightforwardly than others the unimpeded and unaided will of local committees. Incomplete records suggest that the Board may have vetted nearly half the monumental memorials erected in New South Wales between 1920 and 1928. It may

also have had an influence in other places where makers read the Board’s mind. The Macleay Argus was exaggerating but not inventing when it reported in 1920 that the men in Sydney ‘will not pass figures’. Many committees nevertheless persisted obstinately with their stone soldiers, either contesting the Board’s proposal for some other form, as at Braidwood in the south-east, or more often ignoring the law.

154 Sacred Places The Public Monuments Advisory Board represented an unusual intrusion of the state into cultural policy, provoked by a respect for both the expert and the citizen soldier, enabling the one to have some effect on how the other was to be honoured—though not enough to create in New South Wales a memorial landscape notably different from elsewhere in the nation.

Forms The hall was the most common of utilitarian memorials, often used as clubroom for the fellowship of returned soldiers, sometimes doubling as town hall or more broadly as community centre, especially in regions of post-war soldier settkement, where it served a variety of purposes supplied in older neighbourhoods by mechanics’ institutes and schools of arts. Among purely monumental forms no single type predominated. Objects familiar already in cemeteries and at sites of South African war commemoration—arch, column, pillar, urn, cross, obelisk, statue—were chosen as appropriate to honour the men of the AIF. Clockless towers and purely commemorative pavilions appeared here and there. The

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figure with reversed arms and bowed head Lhe bomber’: bronze figure by by Margaret Baskerville, Alexandra, C. Web Gilbert, Broken Hill, New South

Victoria, 1924 Wales, 1925

‘Fortman Postcards, Australian War Memorial) (Photograph Richard Harding)

168 Sacred Places pedestal, tablets naming the dead—was erected not only to celebrate the

Australian soldier but ‘to express the sadness and sorrow entailed by the War’.

Two effigies of fearsomely tough soldiers in Melbourne were, paradoxically, reminders of how restrained Australian sculptors had been in their representation of men at war. ‘The Driver’ and ‘Wipers’ (soldiers

; . . . . \ c Ry . . . . . by)

English for Ypres), installed in 1937 outside the Public Library and National Gallery of Victoria, are replicas of figures by the English sculptor

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Figure by Margaret Baskerville for the ‘Wipers’: this and its companion figure ‘The Women’s Patriotic League, Maryborough, — Driver’ are replicas of bronzes by C. Sargeant Victoria, 1926. ‘He gazes at the enemy as he Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial in

loads his gun, but his face is sad. The London, purchased out of the kelton Bequest Australian soldier was not a man fond of for the National Gallery of Victoria, 1937. taking life, but he had his duty to perform. That is what I have tried to portray in his face.’ Margaret A. Rose, Victorian Artists.

Margaret Baskerville 1861-1930 and C. Douglas Richardson 1853-1932, [Melbourne] 1988, p. 205.

The War Memorial Movement 169 C. Sargeant Jagger, detached from his Royal Artillery Monument in London and erected here not primarily with commemorative intent but as works of art, like the earlier equestrian statues of St George and Joan

of Arc which stand between them and the Corinthian facade. The Driver and Wipers have been described as ‘brutally intimidating’, as ‘confident louts’, and there is nothing quite like them by any Australian hand. The great majority of soldier statues depict men in passive rather than active stances. ‘Stiff and pathetic’, Lawrence’s description for Thirroul, fits many others. They stand less often at attention than in the casual stances of men off duty. For every figure showing warlike action, about ten depict repose: five or so standing at ease or easy, another three with reversed arms, head bowed, hands resting on rifle butt, as men had stood for the burial of comrades. The soldier is nearly always standing, unlike the figures lying dead or dying in Catholic countries where the recumbent Jesus, often in the

arms of Mary, became model for the hero-victim of war. The most

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Dead soldier’: George Lambert’s figure in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 1931. T have produced a serious combination of a real dead tin-hatter of the French front and a saint’. Graeme Sturgeon,

The Development of Australian Sculpture 1788-1975, London 1978, p. 94. (Fortman Postcards, Australian War Memorial)

170 Sacred Places striking exception, and that not in civic space, is George Lambert’s recumbent bronze soldier commissioned in Sydney by the Catholic Sailors and

Soldiers Memorial Committee for St Mary’s Cathedral. The face he made ‘Australian yet handsome’. Uniform and equipment are utterly accurate, and the puttees are caked with mud; but the realism of the trenches stops short at the body. A bullet has surgically pierced the soldier’s left breast pocket on its way to his heart. Otherwise he is unmarked, as peacefully intact as the men dead at Gallipoli whom Lambert had painted when he was an official war artist. The soldier resembles effigies on tombs in churches of the old world; he is in a state of sublime repose, an exercise in euphemism. Lambert called the figure ‘Dead Soldier’. He himself died before the work was installed, and an obituarist began the custom of giving it informally the same name as the actual body interred in Westminster Abbey: the Unknown Soldier. Here as in some other places, people evidently drew comfort from imagining that Australia too had its actual surrogate for the absent dead. This one, however, was doubly unknown: seen by few people other than Catholic

worshippers, and then only if they made their way down from the nave to the crypt. Lambert created one other bronze unusual in Australia, also for a private client. Before a memorial cloister at Geelong Grammar School two diggers, infantryman and Light Horseman, wearily support a huge

eagle which is in turn surmounted by a naked young man despatching the creature with two-handed sword. Heroic youth to the rescue: pagan equivalent of the hero saints, Michael and George. On civic pedestals the statue most nearly like him is the bronze St Michael at Angaston, South Australia, winged, carrying both sword and laurel wreath, standing for the triumph of right over might and also for the freedom of a district to erect whatever its people choose as a monument, however puzzling to observers who may wonder why this figure in a region of German settlement wears a helmet distractingly like the enemy's.

The digger shares pedestals with other forms: soldier in front of obelisk, on pillar or column, surmounting an arch. Rarely is he accompanied by a sailor. As the Royal Australian Navy had only five thousand men, engaged in few notable actions, and suffered proportionately fewer

The War Memorial Movement 171

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Australia, 1921 ueensland, 1921. The most informal o

‘Photograph Ashley Ekins - ‘q Digger d Photograph Ashley Ekins; figures: ‘a Diggerjust justreleased released from from duty,

with the throat of his tunic unloosed, pipe in hand, and rifle carelessly slung from his left 2

d

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shoulder’, Brisbane Courier, 29 September 1921. By W. E. Parsons of Brisbane. ‘Photograph Don Watson)

° La ° e* **. .e

casualties than the AIF’, nearly all makers of memorials decided that including any local sailors’ names on tablets would be recognition enough. Merewether, New South Wales, has busts of soldier and sailor

on matching gate pillars. Maryborough, Queensland, is unique in having soldier, sailor, airman and nurse, surmounted by a winged

**.

female. Diggers also combine with female figures at Auburn in Sydney

and at Warrnambool, Numurkah and Yarrawonga in Victoria, the male figures realistic and Australian, the women archaic abstractions: Victory, Peace, Justice.

172 Sacred Places

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Soldier with sailor, airman and nurse around obelisk, | = ,; ao ONE

Maryborough, Queensland, 1922. Installed on the corner iE ce of Bazaar and Sussex streets, at the entrance to Queen’s | ae ay a Park, after bruising conflict between utilitarians and oT €£ 2 monumentalists. The figures were carved in Italy to the \ fe | | N order of Anselm Odling & Sons and paused on ther =< +“. "9 SS journey to be exhibited in a Sydney shop window. —— 8=—f ss ss ae

The four figures at Maryborough are surmounted bya (Mh kg if 7 -” :

Jemate Victory, also from Italy; a cross high on the RN |i /

Female figure

A few allegorical females stand alone on monuments, or in the company of sisters. The form was a stock-in-trade both of academically trained sculptors and of stonemasons, and was proposed in some places by the

maker himself. Gilbert Doble, for one, appears to have had his own reason for preferring the symbolic woman to the fighting man. He was described by a friend as ‘a hater of war. No weapons or fighting poses in

his work ...’ Whether or not committees had asked for such figures, they were evidently content to buy them. Doble’s design for a female trio of of Victory, History and Fame at Wellington, New South Wales, won a competition after its popularity had been tested by exhibition in

the town with other short-listed submissions. Their meanings were

The War Memorial Movement 173

be Me oe ak nine Re eee eer Oe. ee Allegorical female figures in bronze by Gilbert Doble, Wellington, New South Wales, 1933. Chosen in 1920 after a competition which attracted seventeen designs, all hung for public inspection in the School

of Arts; the Wellington Times described the winner on 6 May 1920 as ‘one of the finest memorials in the Commonwealth’. The sculptor happily accepted changes proposed by the Public Monuments Advisory

Board, but his ill health caused a long delay. In 1920 the figures are named as Victory, History (right) and Fame (left). By 1933 the central figure is ‘Australia mourning for her sons’ and the one on the right is typifying courage and fortitude: the spirit of the women of Australia’, Wellington Times, 22 May 1933. Doble made allegorical females for Sydney suburbs of Marrickville (Victory) and Pyrmont (Peace). (Photograph Jan Brazier)

sometimes clear, sometimes not. Montford’s figure for Camperdown, Victoria, is immediately recognizable as Britannia. Justice is identifiable if you know to look for scales and blindfold, Peace if she holds a dove. But the female figure leaning towards a cross at Mildura, in the north-

west of Victoria, was familiarly known as both Grief and Peace. Who was to say whether a winged woman was a Christian angel or a messenger of classical gods? If she carried a laurel wreath, was she Peace or

Victory? And who cared? Unlike the statue of a digger, she was not inspected for authenticity; neither in body nor in spirit was she supposed to be either a representation of Australian women or a depiction of their qualities and aspirations. As Marina Warner observes, the recognition of a difference between the symbolic order occupied by allegorical figures

174 Sacred Places and the actual order of statesmen, soldiers and other men often ‘depends on the unlikelihood of women practising the concepts they represent’. The allegorical female had no more to do than display a beauty and a gravity calculated to inspire appropriate sentiments. Doble’s Winged Victory at Marrickville, Sydney, ‘conveys to the mind’, a reporter wrote, ‘the nation’s pride in the victories of our heroes and our sorrow for their deaths’. That was enough to make her and her sisters suitable accompaniments to the honoured names inscribed below. They were not chosen quite at random. No community wanted a statue of Bellona, Roman war goddess, though she was much to the taste of sculptors; when Sir Bertram Mackennal gave a bust of Bellona to the nation as a war memorial, she was moved from site to site like a vagrant. No Venus stands on a war memorial: the goddess of love and fertility is not perceived as fit for that position. Nor does Liberty, who appears

on French and American war memorials; for Liberty is a republican, and imperially loyal Australia had no call for statues of her. Nor did the

war yield an allegorical female Australia, unless we count a figure at Wellington, New South Wales, intended by its maker to be Victory but known informally as Australia, or a bas-relief head and shoulders on a small bronze medallion on the memorial below at Mornington, Victoria,

which you could read as Australia if you chose. The effigy of an Australian man in uniform sufficed to stand for the country.

Realistic female figures are still rarer than allegorical ones. The nurse at one corner of the monument at Maryborough is the only repre-

sentative of her service portrayed on a local Great War memorial. Melbourne has Margaret Baskerville’s bust of an actual (though English,

not Australian) nurse, Edith Cavell, shot by a German firing squad in Belgium. A sprightly young woman holding a baby is reunited with her

uniformed man in Paul Montford’s group inside the town hall at Malvern, Melbourne. At Gatton, west of Brisbane, an older woman, face

lined with suffering, sits wearily above a mausoleum-like enclosure which houses the names of the men for whom she grieves. This work came to be known as the Weeping Mother Memorial. There is nothing like her in any other town or suburb. The figure is as singular as Angaston’s St Michael, at the other end of the spectrum of

The War Memorial Movement 175

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Pillar at Bairnsdale, Victoria, (unveiled Obelisk in Anzac Parade (formerly Randwick 1922) decorated with wreaths and Union Road, Sydney, unveiled 1917) decorated for

Jacks on Anzac Day c. 1925 Anzac Day 1931 ikortman Postcards, Australian War Memorial: iFortman Postcards, Australian War Memorial)

and spectators increasing as state governments made Anzac Day what one RSL sub-branch called a sacred and industrial holiday. Freed from work, returned soldiers—in some places alone, in others accompanied by members of civic organizations—paraded to gatherings around the memorials at which flowers were placed, speeches made, hymns sung, prayers and secular statements spoken, and heads bowed in a silence enclosed by Last Post and Reveille. As at unveilings, the ingredients varied according to organizers’ own notions of the right way and the need to accommodate a variety of views on what was permissible and proper. The ceremony at the memorial displayed a sometimes intricate pattern of harmony, tension and accommodation, as the parties worked to create an occasion that reconciled commitments to churches, to the freemasonry of old soldiers, and to the civic community. At Muswellbrook, in the Hunter valley of New South Wales, returned men marched

Anzac Days 241 through the town and then broke into two groups, Catholics to their own church, Protestants to the Church of England for a sermon and a roll call

of the local dead and then to the war memorial, a column outside the shire hall (unveiled on Anzac Day 1923), for another ceremony in honour of the 54 dead, the 167 returned men and the five nurses named on the pedestal. For some years Thirroul had a ceremony that was in two senses combined. Catholic and Protestant returned soldiers joined in a service at a picture theatre (a new one, not the old School of Arts) attended also by returned men from the neighbouring town of Austinmer,

followed by a march first to Thirroul’s statue and then to Austinmer’s pillar. From 1937 the ageing diggers of Thirroul marched only to their own monument. Briefer and simpler rituals were performed on 11 November. The central elements in celebration of Armistice Day were the two minutes silence at 11 o’clock, first observed around the empire in 1919, and the wearing of artificial poppies, a custom (inspired by John McCrae’s poem of 1915, ‘In Flanders Fields’) which reached Australia in 1921. ‘Poppy Day’ was taken up by ex-service organizations in many countries, and

most of the takings from the sale of the red silk flowers worn by Australians on 11 November went to the RSL. The day was not here a holiday, as in the USA and Canada and France. It was not the main day

of the year for remembering the war, as in the United Kingdom. Australians paused for the silence in workplace or school, often around honour boards decorated with wreaths of poppies. They laid wreaths on public memorials, with or without ceremony. At Hamilton, in the

western district of Victoria, seven thousand people assembled in the evening of Armistice Day 1937 to see the town’s monument floodlit for the first time. In other places the day came and went with little or no ritual activity around the war memorial. Where people in most countries had chosen for their principal wartime anniversary the day the killing

stopped and the soldiers began to pack their kitbags for home, Australians and New Zealanders looked back to the beginning, the separation of soldier from civilian, the national baptism of fire.

Memorials were used for other significant days of the year. On Empire Day, 24 May, poppies and other flowers might be laid; on Wattle Day, | August, the emblematic native blossom. Mourners might

242 Sacred Places choose anniversaries of a man’s death to commemorate him with flowers,

when many people also put ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the papers. Except in those notices, the history of private bereavement is almost invisible. H. V. Evatt grieved for his two dead brothers whenever he heard the bells of his university’s war memorial carillon, having paid for their names to be inscribed on one of the bells. Along Ballarat’s fourteen-

mile Avenue of Honour it was ‘nothing unusual’, a reporter wrote in 1921, ‘... for a family party to drive up and have afternoon tea beneath the tree which represents their particular soldier son or brother’. The same observer noticed that a man would raise his hat before a tree honouring a near relation. The gesture was one customarily made by men in the street as a funeral cortege went by, and like most mourning procedures it was being eroded by modernity. In 1925 an observer of

Campbelltown, South Australia, could report that ‘the roughest man never passed the Cenotaph without raising his hat.’ But several RSL forums in the 1930s passed resolutions calling on men to raise hats at war memorials, as delegates wondered how best to make the war experi-

ence live in the minds of those younger people, more numerous each year, for whom it had little or no personal meaning. Here and elsewhere, those who enjoined the practice did not sound optimistic, sensing

that the spirits of both the age and the nation conspired against the raising of men’s hats at memorials or anywhere else.

Inside memorial halls and other club-rooms, at regular meetings,

RSL members contemplated honour boards and spoke the solemn words recited also during ceremonies at outdoor monuments, constructed from lines of Laurence Binyon and Rudyard Kipling. Leader: At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them. Members: We will remember them.

Leader: Lest we forget. Members: Lest we forget.

One early motto of the RSL had been ‘the brotherhood of men who fought’, and at that ritual moment men of the RSL expressed most intensely their separateness and solidarity and their trusteeship for dead mates, distinguished as they all were from men too old and too young

Anzac Days 243 for the war as well as from those who did not go, and from families who

could not know what they had experienced. The returned soldier Leonard Mann had ended his novel Flesh in Armour with the men of the

AIF laying aside their armour and becoming, ‘what remains of them, just the sort of fellows you know—or so they seem’. Writers were saying

that all over the European world. The burnt ones, they were called in Italy; and Adolf Hitler described himself as the unknown soldier.

The resort to a veterans’ organization was more common in Australia than elsewhere in the British Empire or the USA. RSL membership rose from the mid-1920s (as the Anzac Day marches were beginning) to pass eighty thousand by 1939, close to half the survivors of the AIF. Men were drawn to the League as a lobbying agent for repatriation benefits, but also as a lodge, a haven, even a church. The editor of one RSL paper proposed that the calendar should begin not at Galilee but at Gallipoli, 25 April 1933 to be the first day of 19 AA, the nineteenth after Anzac. Another League paper carried an article headed ‘“Saint Anzac” Australia’s Patron Saint’. There were men who put on the RSL badge only for special occasions and men who, as the saying went, wore it in the shower. There were men who never joined the League because it was too militaristic for them or simply because they wanted to forget the war, and men inside and outside the League for whom its leaders were

too moderate, too tolerant of parliamentary government. The Old Guard, the New Guard, the White Army: such incipiently fascist forma-

tions expressed the frustration of returned men who craved military solutions to peacetime problems, and their failure was a credit to the RSL leadership, the politicians, and their constituencies. The peaceful informality of Anzac Day parades and rallies at war memorials testified to the strength of Australian democracy.

Some returned men avoided all Anzac occasions because they were too fastidious for the boozing that was part of the fellowship. When Russel Ward, veteran of a second AIF, looked back in sympathy at the

fusion of bush legend and Anzac legend on 25 April, he dwelt on the illegal games of two-up as counterpoint to the official rituals of the day, played by men to whom ‘it seems both natural and fitting to end the day with a serious attempt to make it the greatest alcoholic debauch of the

year, and he called up the spirit of Henry Lawson to celebrate the

244 Sacred Places camaraderie of drinking mates. Later in life, remembering childhood in the 1920s, Ward wrote less genially of the debauch: a boy from England at his first Anzac Day march asks: ‘Daddy, why do they have so much pink sick in the streets in Australia?’

A returned man might be alienated by more than the drinking. Fred Farrall, who had come through the Somme and Polygon Wood, revealed himself long afterwards to a sensitive interviewer as a man who ‘could not connect the celebratory postwar Anzac legend with his own experience, and lacking a public language for his war, he lapsed into a

lonely silence.’ None of his surviving mates ever saw Farrall at any reunion of the 55th Battalion or at any Anzac ceremony, unless they happened to notice him arrested on Anzac Day 1937 for distributing leaflets written in the public language of the Movement Against War and

Fascism. The Repatriation Department accepted responsibility for the ‘nervous breakdown’ Farrall suffered in 1926. Donald Horne’s father, a state school teacher who had been a trooper in Palestine, suffered nearly twenty years after the war ‘a catastrophic change in his personality’, diagnosed as a nervous breakdown; he joined other afflicted veterans in a Repatriation ward at Sydney’s Callan Park mental hospital, and was released as an empty imitation of himself. Damaged returned men turn up in other narratives by their children. The father of Jill Ker Conway, survivor of the Somme, gassed at Passchendaele, would wake screaming

from nightmares about France, and ended his life drowned in a dam. Janet McCalman, interviewing boys and girls who enrolled at private secondary schools in Melbourne in 1934, learns that just over half the fathers who had gone to the war suffered lasting disabilities. “The Repat-

riation hospitals and nursing homes’, she writes, ‘were full of broken men’. Iwo thousand returned soldiers lived permanently in ‘repat’ hospitals and mental asylums, between twenty thousand and fifty thousand were in and out of them, and ninety thousand were on pensions for warcaused disabilities of body or mind or both. Old Diggers wearing TPI badges—for Totally and Permanently Incapacitated—waved crutches from lorries in Anzac parades and leaned on them at war memorials. If they could not get out, mates would bring Anzac Day to them.

Incapacitated men might even make war memorials of their own. In 1931 the governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, much

Anzac Days 245 decorated for imperial war service, unveiled in Sydney two memorials created by war-damaged survivors of the 13th Battalion. In Kuring-gai Chase, north of Sydney, W. T. Shirley, patient in a repatriation hospital, carved small replicas of the Sphinx and the two pyramids familiar to Australians who had camped outside Cairo; the work was dedicated to ‘my glorious comrades of the AIF’, and became a memorial also to its

maker, who died of tuberculosis too soon to see it dedicated. In the grounds of the Repatriation Military Cottages, Leichhardt, a haven for ‘chronic nerve cases’, Douglas Grant constructed a replica in miniature of the new Sydney Harbour Bridge. Returned soldier patients formed a guard of honour for the governor on 4 August 1931, the seventeenth anniversary of the war’s beginning. In his unveiling speech Sir Philip

Game interpreted the bridge as a symbol of unity and hoped that it would stand for years as ‘an inspiration to you all to do what you did during the four years of the war, and have been doing ever since—sticking

it out in the good old Australian and British way’. The patients applauded, the medical superintendent moved a vote of thanks, and the

governor planted a wattle. The maker, Douglas Grant, was a man of Aboriginal parentage and white Australian upbringing who had joined the AIF and become a prisoner at Bullecourt. For a while after the war, working as a labourer in Lithgow, he was secretary of the local RSL. He drank heavily, and in the sanctuary of the Leichhardt Cottages he called himself and other inmates the Lost Legion. He was bitter about the fate of both returned soldiers and Aborigines. For the RSLs Reveille Grant wrote of ‘A Broken Pledge’, and a Sunday newspaper published in 1929

his protest at the Coniston massacre (reproducing some of the hand-

written manuscript as proof that an Aborigine could write). The Memorial Bridge of Remembrance was Douglas Grant’s tribute to dead

comrades of the AIF, and the Lost Legion conducted ceremonies around it. Over the Bridge, on the north shore at Mosman, lived Frank Morris, blinded at Passchendaele, and Frank Cluett, paralysed from the waist down since Gallipoli. They were close friends, and ‘became a familiar sight in Mosman’, writes Gavin Souter, ‘indeed a sort of living war memorial’. Such men provoked complex emotions in men of their

age who had not gone to the war, and who might or might not participate in the ceremonies of Anzac.

246 Sacred Places Younger people were taken to memorials as Scouts and Cubs, Guides and Brownies, representatives of Junior Red Cross, in school groups or with parents; and the speakers, as unveilers had foreseen, usually put in a homily for their benefit. They had ceremonies of their own at schoolground monuments and honour boards, and they might be

given tasks at memorials away from school. In Roseville, Sydney, children at a ‘combined’ service laid sprigs of rosemary before the honoured names. The two thousand trees outside Ballarat were cared for

by neighbouring children. War memorials, recalls Alan Moorehead, born in 1910, were the dares and penates of childhood. What they stood for was inculcated into children by so many other means that there is no point in wondering just how much the monuments themselves contributed to a child’s comprehension of the Anzac tradition. Among people born in Australia between 1918 and 1939 I know a woman who can cite to this day every name under the obelisk at Sevenhill, north of Adelaide, including her mother’s brother and her father’s brother, and a man who grew up in loowoomba and has no memory at all of his town’s Mothers’ Memorial.

The memorials had other, unprescribed uses. In the years of depression a workless man tramping from town to town might exploit the Australian propensity to honour living as well as dead soldiers by picking a name from the memorial and pretending to be its owner in order to get a handout. Cartoonists for radical and populist papers made the soldiers’ monument a symbol of betrayed promises to heroes now unemployed. Custodians were vigilant to prevent political, commercial and other activities which they judged to be profane. When Nationalist party speakers appropriated the base of the column at Hornsby, Sydney, as a rostrum in 1930, ‘Soldier’s Mother’ wrote to a local paper on behalf of returned soldiers and relatives of the dead, deploring such misuse of

‘this sacred spot’. The site of another memorial column in suburban Sydney, at Railway Square in Hurstville, was patrolled vigorously by the municipal council to prevent its use for political meetings, posters

advertising a picture theatre, stalls for a shopping carnival, and a jubilee celebration of the railway line. The Square had become sacred,

the Council ruled in forbidding the street stalls; the carnival ‘would amount to desecration’.

Anzac Days 247

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Dedication of Australian National Memorial, Villers Bretonneux, 22 July 1939. Sir Earle Page, deputy prime minister, stands with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. (Australian War Memorial, AWM negative no. H 17480)

in London, was there, alongside the deputy prime minister, Sir Earle Page, and so were two other ministers, T. W. White and R. G. Menzies. Page and White were returned soldiers, Menzies was not. Page was soon to strike at Menzies, accusing him of cowardice for not having enlisted in the AIF. For publication he reported the occasion with evasive blandness. White wrote in his diary that certain members of the Australian

party, ‘if they had any shame should not have been there, having shirked their responsibilities during the sacrifice which was now being commemorated’. [Twenty years after the end of the war, the unveiling of an Australian war memorial could still release divisive feelings.

Pilgrims In The Anzac Book, written on Gallipoli and edited by C. E. W. Bean, Hector Dinning describes men killed in the act of burying a comrade: ‘To die violently and be laid in this shell-swept area is to die lonely indeed’. He goes on: ‘The day is far off (but it will come) when splendid

270 Sacred Places mausolea will be raised over these heroic dead. And one foresees the

time when steamers will bear up the Aegean pilgrims come to do honour at the resting places of friends and kindred . . .. Another survivor

wrote just after the evacuation, and published in a book of his verse called The Anzac Pilgrim’s Progress:

Say, those dead of yours and mine Make this barren shore a shrine; All these graves—they’ll draw us back; And for ever in our track,

Down the years to come, will pace Pilgrims of our Anzac race: God, while this old earth shall stand,

Where but here’s our Holy Land?

Bean, surveying Anzac in 1919, could see the area becoming ‘the goal of pilgrimage’-—though not too soon, for ‘numerous skulls and bones of both sides remain on the surface until work is completed. These sights would be unspeakably distressing to soldiers’ relations if they visited the place prematurely’. The ground was tolerably clear by the time Mr and

Mrs Norton Grimwade visited Anzac carrying a tribute to their dead son. “This stone from the home of George R. Grimwade, Melbourne, Australia, was brought and placed here in ever loving remembrance by his parents, April 1922’. Their rough block was allowed, though it was against the rules, to lean against the white headstone recording that their son, a stretcher-bearer, had been killed on 23 September 1915 at the age of twenty. Such visitors were envied by the mother of Jack Fothergill,

killed on the first day. ‘If only I could see your grave’, said her In Memoriam notice in the Melbourne Argus eight years later, ‘I would die happy’.

S. M. Bruce, who had been there in 1915 from April to June and from August to October, returned to Gallipoli in 1924 not as pilgrim but as prime minister, to observe how Turkish officials were acting on commitments under a treaty signed the previous year to respect the sanctity

of graves and memorials. The first organized group of pilgrims, four hundred strong, arrived on a chartered Orient liner in 1925 to unveil New Zealand’s National Memorial at Chunuk Bair, and another three

In Foreign Fields 271 hundred came to Gallipoli on a British pilgrimage in 1926. An Australian

couple in this party were photographed making a rubbing from their son’s name on the Memorial to the Missing at Lone Pine. In 1929 the shipping company Burns Philp took a group of eighty-six Australians. An expedition described as ‘the first official pilgrimage to the Australian

war areas’, sponsored by the RSL, landed at Gallipoli on Anzac Day 1931. They too spent time at Lone Pine. A journalist with the party, J. C. Waters, described one mother placing a wreath below a row of names on a wall: ‘She knelt and prayed and sobbed’. Another mother expecting to find her son’s name there among the Missing learned that his body had been discovered in the scrub and buried. ‘I think her tears were half in thankfulness that her son had a resting-place known to man.’ Other Australians were in a company addressed in 1934 by the President of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, whose command of defending forces above Anzac Cove as Colonel Mustafa Kemal had become a nation-making saga. Later pilgrims would find his words inscribed on a plaque on the cliffs, telling mothers that their sons were at peace. ‘After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well’.

Ce _ —_—__

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ae Ne 7 a. OO OE GEE GE I age ee ji ce rn eae

Be aos tee ae aan -= Gos

Pee ee = =—C ts Australian pilgrims at Anzac, Anzac Day 1931

272 Sacred Places Tasman Millington, the Australian superintendent of Imperial War Graves Commission activity in the region, was always on hand to help visitors find graves and names, and did his best to find the right way of

marking each Anzac Day. On 25 April 1922, down at the beach, the Millingtons’ infant son was baptized Anzac. Millington arranged for an English clergyman based in Constantinople to sail down for services,

and when a Turkish holiday stopped all shipping in the days before 25 April 1925, he improvised a ceremony for the laying of wreaths, including one from the RSL. On Anzac Day 1935, the twentieth anniversary, in a ritual anticipating one element in the unveiling at Villers-

Bretonneux, he scattered on the beach ashes made by burning the ribbons on wreaths in Australia; and he sent home some earth from Lone Pine in the urn that had carried the ashes. The pilgrims of 1931 visited sites of Australian death in the Middle East and western Europe as well as Gallipoli. In the book he wrote after the journey, Crosses of Sacrifice, J. C. Waters quoted a versifier who spoke of all these places as sacred: A nation’s cherished holy grounds are these ‘Trim cities where the brave have found their rest. . .

They were thanked by the children in the village school at VillersBretonneux, and they saw the cemetery near by and the ground where

no Memorial yet stood. They attended the evening ceremony at the Menin Gate outside Ypres, and from there travelled to the most densely

populated of all British cemeteries, Tyne Cot, near Passchendaele. Among nearly twelve thousand graves they found 1368 Australians, 578

of them named and 790 nameless. The dead and the Missing here numbered altogether forty-seven thousand. Waters was overwhelmed. A central theme of his book was that people such as himself, who had been

children during the war, should be made to understand the nationmaking sacrifices displayed in the war cemeteries. ‘I wish that all my generation could see that place’, he wrote after seeing the acres of graves at Tyne Cot. But of course they would not. George Taylor’s journal Building had been sceptical from the start about the monument at Villers-Bretonneux, ‘where not more than a fraction of the Australian people could ever view

In Foreign Fields 273 iv. That perception helps to explain why federal politicians more cautious than W. M. Hughes were so slow to put up the money. In the USA, Congress voted money for every widow or bereaved—‘Gold Star’—

mother who wanted to see a man’s grave in France. From England the traffic was quickly dense enough for Michelin to publish Illustrated Guides to the Battlefields. The YMCA ran cheap hostels in Ypres and ten French cities close to cemeteries. In Australia and New Zealand, the uttermost ends of the earth, pilgrims had to come from the small class of people rich enough to travel across the world in ocean liners. Norton Grimwade, pilgrim with his wife to the grave of their son at Anzac in 1922, was a rich business man. H. B. Higgins and his wife, desolated by the death of their son Mervyn in 1916, could draw on a judge’s stipend for a pilgrimage in 1924 to the grave in Egypt. A Sydney entrepreneur hoping in 1919 ‘to induce Patriotic Australians to visit the graves of our Boys among the Battlefields of Europe’ imagined a tour by no more than a hundred ‘prosperous’ people, whose experience might then be disseminated in lantern slides and a book. Poziéres, C. E. W. Bean reflected in 1934, was ‘Australia’s most sacred acre’, though ‘few people are aware of it’. He was composing a text for a tablet on the site of a ruined windmill, lately purchased on behalf of the Australian government to inform such visitors as came by that Australian troops ‘fell more thickly on this ridge than on any other battlefield of the war’. Most of their compatriots could hope to see and hear about such places only in lantern lectures. Will Longstaff’s painting Menin Gate at Midnight owed some of its immense popularity to the fact that it enabled Australians to contemplate in expressive reproduction a monument, honouring thousands of their Missing men, which few could ever hope to see for themselves. The artist himself, cousin of the more famous painter Sir John Longstaff, had been present at the unveiling of the Memorial on 24 July 1927. He had served in South Africa as well as in the Great War, and in 1918 he was

appointed an official artist, assigned to create both camouflage for the last offensives in France and paintings of record for Australian posterity. The ceremony at Ypres had moved him deeply. He read the names of comrades on the walls. After the event he kept hearing words spoken at the unveiling by Field-Marshal Lord Plumer, under whose command in

274 Sacred Places Belgium thousands of the men commemorated had died: “They are not missing. They are here’. The painter could not rest until he set down in his London studio a vision of the monument and its landscape. Menin Gate at Midnight, or Ghosts of Menin Gate—both titles were used at first—portrays the Memorial under a deep blue sky, the lights of

Ypres in the distance, and moving through a field of corn and red poppies, a crowd of figures which could at first sight be flowers but are really men, transparent, in steel helmets and with fixed bayonets. The

ground in front of the Memorial in 1927 was actually covered with

buildings, but the artist wants the Gate to open directly on those Flanders fields. Sassoon’s Dead rise to deride a sepulchre of crime; Longstaff’s become soldiers again, moving from the Gate towards the front line. The longer you look, the more of them you see. ‘Longstaff’s

painting is like a dream’, writes Anne Gray, an art curator who has looked at it as long and hard as anybody; ‘the impressionistic shadows of soldiers that hover in the cornfields are like a mirage’. As a camouflage artist Longstaff knew how to perform tricks on the viewer’s eyes, and as an old soldier he was attuned to the resonance of the word Missing.

A private collector in London bought the painting late in 1927 for two thousand pounds—twice the sum paid that year for another soldier-artist’s image of death and life, Stanley Spencer’s ‘Resurrection,

Ce EE eee

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Patriotism’: Paul Montford’s sculpture for western wall of the Shrine

Capital Monuments 325 not easily distinguishable from each other; and in tympana over the north and south fronts classical groups symbolizing The Call to Arms and The Homecoming. Unlike Hoff for Adelaide and Sydney, Montford

was required only to provide decoration: the sculpture was not here integral to the design. The only public criticism, and that made mildly, was that when you looked at the Shrine you did not see Australia. The chairman of the Melbourne City Council’s parks and gardens committee observed that there was nothing to associate the Shrine with the deeds of Australians in the Great War; ‘it was merely a tomb’. He wanted ‘group statuary commemorating the work of the various sections of the A.LF.’ Evidently he did not find memorable the twelve relief panels high up on the interior walls, close to the stepped pyramidal ceiling by Montford’s young assistant Lyndon Dadswell depicting scenes from the war. They neither compelled the viewer’s attention, as Hoff’s Sacrifice in Sydney

did, nor portrayed Australians with the gritty candour of his figures around Dellit’s exterior. The sentinel on the steps, policeman dressed as Light Horseman, may have appeared all the more striking a presence to me and other visitors because only in him did we see on the Shrine the men whom it had been built to honour. The architects had actually proposed ‘four equestrian statues of war leaders’. When the Herald was sceptical about how far the ‘cold, squat tomb’ would be humanized by ‘statues of Sir John Monash and other generals’, Monash briskly denied that he wanted any such thing. The

one statue, and that not actually on or in the Shrine, was Wallace Anderson’s bronze effigy of Simpson and his donkey with a wounded soldier, installed in 1936. This was the first statue anywhere of an individual member of the AIF.

The man with the donkey came closer than any element in the Shrine itself to expressing a female perception of the war. The humble saver of lives at Anzac had been put there on the initiative of women who established a fund for a ‘Mother’s Tribute’, and they were to be in

the shelter of a ‘Lone Pine’, planted in 1933 and said to have been grown by the mother (or in another version the aunt) of a soldier at Anzac who had sent home a cone from that legendary tree. Seeds from this one were soon being planted around the country, Lone Pines invested

with a sentimental and on some lips even sacramental significance.

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‘THE MAN WITH THE DONKEY’, beside Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, 1936

Miss Philadelphia Robertson of the Victorian Red Cross Council, who did more than anybody else to realize the monument, thought also of children. Rightly expecting them to be awed by the Shrine, she trusted that Simpson, ‘with his donkey and its pathetic burden, will appeal to the child’s natural love of animals, and sympathy with all suffering’. That

was certainly how he came to us at school in the Reader. In the land-

scape of the Domain, however, he could appear insignificant and remote; for the group was less than life-sized and stood at a distance from the Shrine. No one man, general or private, was to be honoured in that holy place. Even out in the grounds, Simpson was not named. The inscription had him dying at Gallipoli on 19 May—that had to be Simpson—but

Capital Monuments 327 identified the figure only as ‘THE MAN WITH THE DONKEY’ and declared that the group commemorated “THE VALOUR AND COMPASSION OF THE AUSTRALIAN SOLDIER’. These words gave the monument a generality of meaning fit for a national memorial and deferred to the sentiment expressed by an old Anzac who thought that to elevate Simpson above all other stretcher-bearers was to ‘single out one man because his work was a little more picturesque’. The text also dodged puzzles about what his name really was. When he landed in Australia after deserting from the merchant navy in 1910 he was John Simpson Kirkpatrick. When he landed in Turkey he was Simpson. Some survivors of Anzac remembered him also as Murphy, though others said

that was the name of the donkey. All that confusion helped him enter legend, and to be represented in effigy, as an almost unknown soldier. Might the Shrine accommodate a thoroughly Unknown Soldier, in a tomb? The Parthenon housed a statue of Athena and the Mausoleum the tomb of a king. Why not, some returned soldiers asked in 1922, an Australian equivalent of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey?

The answer, repeated whenever necessary in response to other proposals for most of the century, was that the Unknown in London represented the dead of the whole empire: there could only be one of him. The Stone of Remembrance was laid where he might have been; and

some people, even scholars, who gazed down at that stone with the words ‘GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN’ carved into it, confidently remembered that they had seen the tomb of an unknown soldier. In form the interior was an ambulatory around an ‘inner Shrine’. Along the ambulatory, books in glass-topped cabinets recorded in alpha-

betical order the names of all 114 000 volunteers from Victoria who went to the war, a fresh page open each day. The dead and the living

were thus honoured together in Melbourne as in Sydney’s Anzac Memorial, though here by actual name rather than merely by symbolic star. In commemorating the dead, Melbourne’s equivalent to the Sacrifice, at the sacred centre, was the Stone of Remembrance. Victoria’s dead

were mourned also down in a crypt where their comrades honoured them division by division, unit by unit. Here the civilian would feel least at home, privileged intruder into a solemn fellowship of the living and the dead. The crypt was a chapel dedicated to the spirit of Legacy.

328 Sacred Places The Legatees had made certain that Melbourne could boast the grandest war memorial in Australia, possibly the world, so situated that

nature, public works and regulation—the ground chosen, the mound added, a law controlling the size of building near by—would make it permanently conspicuous in the landscape.

How did Melbourne acquire so vast a monument? Why has the Shrine a grandeur, a dominating presence, so far beyond Sydney’s Anzac Memorial? Three reasons stand out. First, planners of commemoration in Melbourne could most easily think of their project as standing for the nation, when their city was filling in as federal capital. Voluntary bodies, among them the RSL, chose to have their own head offices here, close to federal action. Nor was it certain, when the making of Victoria’s memorial began, or even for that matter when it was accomplished, that

the infant federal capital would be given a national war memorial worthy of the name. Secondly, Sir John Monash lived in Melbourne, and was involved in the project from inception to fulfilment. Even if you disliked him or it, as the populist Smith’s Weekly did, you still had to give him credit: ‘a hollow and specious monument to one man’s egotism’, the

paper grumbled. Thirdly, the Shrine appealed to civic leaders, and to enough other people whose support had to be enlisted, as a declaration of their city’s recovery. Thirty years earlier, when the makers of post-war

commemoration were young, Melbourne had had a great fall, greater than Sydney’s. The Shrine of Remembrance was an affirmation that the city in which the Parliament House, the Public Library, the Exhibition Building, had been raised so proudly before the fall was still capable of grandeur. A citizen looking down Swanston Street and along the boulevard of St Kilda Road might well feel that Melbourne could once more create municipal marvels.

The people whom the Shrine addressed did not all respond immediately to the declaration that it was ‘ESTABLISHED IN THE HEARTS OF MEN’. The hearts of some women, at any rate, remained with the cenotaph erected in front of Parliament for each Anzac Day. In 1933, as the great grey temple rose over the Domain, the War Widows and Widowed Mothers’ Association asked the men in charge of Anzac commemoration to make the temporary cenotaph permanent. ‘A number of speakers said that the cenotaph held a more sentimental appeal for

Capital Monuments 329 the womenfolk of deceased soldiers than the Shrine of Remembrance’;

to many bereaved women, said one, ‘the cenotaph represented their deceased relatives’. The women were not alone. On Anzac Day 1935, months after the Shrine had been dedicated, the marchers kept to their

habitual route through the city and on to the Exhibition building, passing and saluting the cenotaph as they had done since 1925. Should they not be marching south to the state’s new memorial? ‘Since the Shrine of Remembrance had been erected’, said Ernest Turnbull, a man of influence in the RSL, ‘it was inconsistent to turn their backs on it and march away from it’. Delegates to the state conference in July 1935

agreed, including some who preferred the old route but knew that ageing veterans now found the long uphill march hard going. The voting

was not unanimous. “The Shrine of Remembrance was essentially an Armistice day conception’, said one supporter of tradition. This was literally and architecturally true. “Remembrance Day’ was already being

canvassed as a new name for Armistice Day, and that ray of light was made to touch the Stone on 11 November. He believed also that ‘the whole conception’ of Anzac Day ‘came with those few impressive moments at the Cenotaph’. The planning for Anzac Day 1936 deferred to such sentiment by incorporating both the Shrine as terminus of the

march, and the portable cenotaph, placed on a new site just south of the Yarra River on St Kilda Road. That was its last appearance, though as late as 1938 some people were still pressing for Melbourne to have in permanent form its half-sized replica of London’s empty tomb.

Dawn In Sydney the Cenotaph had become a cherished institution well before the Anzac Memorial was built. On the empty tomb’s first Anzac Day, in 1928, the Sydney Morning Herald reported ‘a continuous stream of people’

and ‘many poignant scenes’. ‘“Is that my daddy’s grave?” asked one little girl, whose father died recently from war wounds after long years

of suffering. The mother turned her head aside and the question remained unanswered.’ A small boy borrowed a pencil and sat on the base of the monument as he wrote on the card attached to his bouquet “To my dear daddy’. The monument in Hyde Park never challenged the empty tomb outside the GPO as site for commemorative activities. The

330 Sacred Places silence on 11 November was still observed there. The marchers on Anzac Day, after 1934 as before, moved in columns of twelve down Martin Place, parted into sixes after Castlereagh Street, and as they reached Pitt Street removed hats, held them over hearts, and turned heads towards the wreath-laden Cenotaph. Marchers and spectators then proceeded not to Hyde Park but to the Domain, half a mile or so north-east, for a combined service. The Domain offered a natural amphi-

theatre more spacious than Hyde Park, and the Anzac Memorial itself did not beckon the arrangers of ceremony. Some men who had marched, and some men, women and children who had watched, made their way later to the Memorial; but reporters noticed few wreaths and no poignant scenes, and nobody in the RSL proposed, as in Melbourne, that the state memorial should become the marchers’ destination. In the RSLs liturgical year, other anniversaries—of Fromelles, Poziéres, Passchendaele, Bullecourt—were commemorated in ‘sunset services’ at the Cenotaph, not the Anzac Memorial. And when Sydney men were rebuked for not

taking their hats off as they passed the Cenotaph (travellers’ tales differing about how commonly Londoners did so in Whitehall), nobody suggested that heads should be bared before the Anzac Memorial. Sydney’s Cenotaph provoked the spontaneous creation of a new ritual, the dawn service, at which the landing at Gallipoli became visual metaphor for the beginning of Australian nationhood. The monument which had been created to serve a ceremony, Armistice Day, now generated in turn a ceremony with powerful appeal to Australian imaginations. Life had imitated poetry when the invaders of Turkey waded ashore at dawn on 25 April 1915. Rupert Brooke had hailed dawn as a divine gift to the fighting man; and he had written of the Dead, whom he was to join on his way to Gallipoli: ‘Dawn was theirs’. The idea of com-

memorating that dawn of 1915 came to a group of returned men in Sydney. As their founding saga has it, five men ‘wending their way home after an Anzac Eve function in the early hours of Anzac Day 1927 held

by the Association of Returned Sailors and Soldiers Clubs (a body distinct from the RSL) happened to see an elderly woman placing a sheaf of flowers on the as yet incomplete Cenotaph. The men bowed their heads alongside her, and their Association resolved to arrange a

dawn service at the Cenotaph each year. A mourning woman had

Capital Monuments 331 inspired the ceremony, and thirty women and children were among the 150 or so people who gathered at dawn a year later to lay wreaths and observe ‘two minutes’ mute respect and remembrance’. An Australian

silence on 25 April had been added to the international silence of 11 November.

The ceremony attracted more people each year, delivered from 1931 in special trains, trams and buses. By 1935 ten thousand people, by 1939 twenty thousand, got up in the middle of the night, or stayed out of

bed altogether, to assemble around the Cenotaph. The ritual became more elaborate. Governors, politicians and clergymen were given parts, as the sounds of hymn, prayer and address enclosed the silence. Returned men marched down Martin Place in the last minutes of darkness as if in re-enactment of the landing. Mothers, widows and children of the dead

were among the congregation standing or sitting on the steps of the GPO and wearing sprigs of rosemary handed out by Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. The association of Anzac Day with this emblem of remembrance had been initiated by women—members of Dr Mary Booth’s Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers—in 1916, and its perfume enhanced now the feminine aspect of the occasion.

The dawn service was quickly taken up in other states. Perth’s began in 1929, on the site of the unfinished State War Memorial in King’s Park, where the sense of re-enactment was encouraged by the similarity of terrain; five thousand people were there for the dawn in 1930. By 1933 dawn services were held at every state memorial, as

well as in many suburbs and country towns. The left-wing novelist J. M. Harcourt, observing the crowd in King’s Park, Perth, imagined them deriving comfort, during the silence, from dwelling on Gallipoli and thinking ‘that it was an apotheosis, not a shambles, that had taken

place on the Anzac beach’. The custom did not reach New Zealand until 1939, introduced by veterans who had come to Sydney for Anzac

Day 1938 and been moved by the ceremony at the Cenotaph. The dawn landing as metaphor for Anzac had lacked a literal base in New Zealanders’ experience, for the first of their men had gone ashore late in the morning; by 1939 that seemed not to matter. In any case the meaning of the ceremony had been enlarged to take in other dawns. C. E. W. Bean at Wellington, New South Wales, for the dawn service in

332 Sacred Places 1931 remarked that this was the hour at which most great battles of the AIF had been launched.

In Melbourne, as in Perth, dawn services at the state memorial began before it was completed. In 1933, at a ceremony organized by the RSL, about six thousand returned men walked up the steps of the Shrine and filed past the Stone of Remembrance. Melbourne’s dawn service differed from Sydney’s in remaining entirely wordless, the only sounds being the bugled Last Post and Reveille, and from Sydney’s and those of other capitals in excluding everybody who had not been to the war. Except in Melbourne, the whole population was welcome. In Perth, J. M. Harcourt wrote: ‘Women who had lost husbands or sons or lovers wept silently, and men swallowed the lumps that rose in their throats’. In Melbourne the first person to arrive for the first dawn service, in 1933, had actually been an old woman who had misunderstood its purpose. No whiff of rosemary was to soften the hard, digger masculinity of the Shrine at dawn. Each later year a clear message was put out in the newspapers: ‘Men who are not returned soldiers and women are requested not to attend this ceremony’. ‘The beach at Anzac ... was no place for

women and children, no place for civilians. That should be enough.’ The ceremony was even described by the military term ‘Stand-to’. Sydney’s dawn service remained a family occasion. In Melbourne a band of brothers assembled outside the Shrine for the silence and then walked in single file through the inner sanctuary, pausing to drop a red poppy on the Stone of Remembrance set in the floor like a tomb awaiting an unknown soldier.

For ceremonies later on Anzac Day, centrally sited memorials in Hobart and Brisbane chose themselves as destinations. In Perth the main service was conducted not at the monument in King’s Park but down on the Esplanade, close to the centre of the city, for many of the marchers and the spectators (5500 and 35 000 in 1932, when Perth’s population was about 200 000) could not be expected to make the long walk up to the Park. In Adelaide the Advertiser reported heaps of flowers on the city’s ‘three great centres of remembrance—the State War Memorial, the Cross of Sacrifice, and the cross that dominates the Soldiers’ Cemetery at West Terrace’. The marchers saluted both the State Memorial and the South African Memorial before turning out of North ‘Terrace

Capital Monuments 333 and down King William Road for a service at the Cross of Sacrifice. Like

the Cenotaph in Sydney, this modest emblem of death went on being used for Anzac Day ceremony even after the more substantial State Memorial was available. The obelisks in Hobart and Perth became informally known as cenotaphs, like obelisks and soldiers and other forms in suburbs and smaller towns. The resonance of that word cenotaph evidently appealed everywhere. The original, in London, remained a vivid presence in Australian minds. Pressed by a federal congress of the RSL to issue a Commemorative stamp in 1935 for the twentieth anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli, the Post Office issued on the League’s advice not the image of Monash, or Simpson the life-saver, or Albert Jacka the valorous killer, or a generalized digger; not a scene from Anzac, not a representation of either Melbourne’s or Sydney’s new memorials, but a

design embodying the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the icon at the heart of empire standing for all the empire’s dead.

Canberra A war memorial had been no part of Walter Burley Griffin’s or anybody else’s vision for Canberra before 1914. Indeed, the nationalist imagin-

ation of George Taylor had conceived the new capital as the World’s City of Peace: ‘what more appropriate location is there than Australia— the only continent that has never known war?’ The very absence from Australian soil of any warfare (except, forgettably, against Aborigines), made the bloodshed of 1914-18 all the more demanding of commemoration in the federal capital. However ‘national’ the memorials in the states might be deemed by their makers, they were no substitute for a

Commonwealth project. The first commander of the AIF, General Bridges, was already entombed in Canberra. How was the nation to commemorate there all the rest of its war dead, the sixty thousand buried or missing in foreign fields?

That question was asked earliest, and with the highest hopes, by C. E. W. Bean. When the Australian War Memorial was completed, its character owed more to Bean than to anybody else. It was at once a museum, a repository of records, and a shrine, and it was alone among Great War memorials anywhere in the world in combining those purposes. Bean devoted to the project every moment he could spare from

334 Sacred Places his other monument to the men of the AIF, the Official History. By the time the last of those twelve blood-red volumes appeared, the shelves holding them had become in many living rooms a kind of household shrine.

On Bean’s advice the Australian government committed itself in October 1917 to an Australian War Museum, ‘Museum’ becoming ‘Memorial’ in the authorizing act of parliament. That was not passed until 1925, and the Memorial was not opened until Armistice Day 1941, two years into a still greater war; and even then it was unfinished. You could well argue that the Australian War Memorial was not completed

until it received the remains of an Unknown Australian Soldier on 11 November 1993.

All the state memorials were initiated by civilians within Australia. The Australian War Memorial originated in London with officers of the AIF, including the honorary Captain Bean. The project was unique also in starting out as a military museum, and without Bean’s intervention that is what it would have remained. In 1916 he prompted senior officers to secure custody of their own force’s war diaries rather than have them go to the British War Office. These and other documents recording the experience of the AIF were passed in 1917 to an Australian War Records Section whose head, Major John ‘Treloar, was to be Bean’s closest ally in the campaign for commemoration in Canberra. This section also admin-

istered ‘relics’, which meant both mementoes of battle picked up by soldiers and trophies captured from the enemy. Relics not handed over to state governments for distribution as trophies were to be held for the Australian War Museum. Soldiers were invited to send in exhibits. Licensed to souvenir (a verb created by the war), some responded too exuberantly: ancient cannon and old masters had to be returned to French chateaux, and labels addressed to the Australian War Records Sections detached from German prisoners. Relatives and friends were asked to send in souvenirs posted home by soldiers, as well as letters and diaries which could join other records in the Museum once they had been used for the official history. The Museum would also house pictures. Official Australian photographers were appointed after Bean found that images of battle by British cameramen were commonly faked. Official artists were engaged, among them Will Dyson, George

Capital Monuments 335 Lambert and Will Longstaff, members of the Australian colony in London, and others who happened to be serving in the AIF. After the war some of these artists were commissioned to do large paintings for the Museum.

Imagining the institution, Bean recalled a boyhood visit with his father to the site of Waterloo, where he had been stirred by a museum exhibiting weapons and memorabilia picked up from the field. Years later, in London, he was impressed by ‘plan-models’, or raised maps, and ‘picture-models’, or sculpted scenes, of Waterloo and other battles displayed at the Royal United Services Institution. From the avalanche of relics reaching the War Records Section a more ambitious version of the museum at Waterloo could be stocked; and in mid-1918 the sculptor C. Web Gilbert and the painter Louis McCubbin began to make preliminary models of scenes along the line in France for what would become dioramas in Canberra. As Bean talked in France with the artists, with sympathetic officers

and with other war correspondents, the Museum grew in his mind. Believing that the soldiers had made Australia into a nation, Bean and his comrades were confident that the nation was capable of honouring them in no merely colonial fashion. ‘It would be the finest monument ever raised to an army’, Bean told the government in 1918. After the war

he was apt to use interchangeably the words museum, monument, memorial, temple and shrine, foreseeing a place which would concentrate purposes dispersed in London between the Cenotaph, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the Imperial War Museum. The objects in that museum’s collection were not meant to have any memorial character: a ministerial committee had considered the possibility and ruled it out. The Australian War Museum, by contrast, was in Bean’s mind a holy place, a repository whose very relics, like those in shrines to saints, were ‘sacred things’.

‘I am not a religious man’, Bean wrote in his diary at Christmas 1916. ‘I don’t know that I bear any allegiance to the Christian faith.’ His doubting had not been induced by the war. An etherealized ethic of fair play between men, learned at his English public school, seemed to Bean

a sufficient guide to living; and as for death, he found congenial the spirit of resignation expressed in texts he had studied at school and at

336 Sacred Places Oxford from the warrior civilizations of Greece and Rome. Sometimes, as in the verses ‘Non Nobis, Domine’, written on Gallipoli and published in The Anzac Book, Bean affirmed that there must be some beneficent purpose behind all the killing; but he could not convince himself of that

while helping to bury a Tasmanian cousin—‘the finest specimen of manhood in Hobart’—killed at Mouquet Farm in 1916. Bean’s only certainty was that to commemorate such men was a sacred task. And when he imagined the building that would do them honour, he saw a structure of ‘white marble, in the purest Greek style, . . . as the memorial to those who fell in our “Thermopylae”’. Like all planners of Australian

war commemoration Bean had to work with the knowledge that sectarian division set limits to formal collaboration between Protestants and

Catholics and that Jews had also to be accommodated in the rituals of nationality; but these facts of cultural life were not, for Bean, constraints. They made it easier for him to conceive an institution that would express

his own spiritual values. When the time came for a text ‘epitomising the purpose of the War Memorial’s existence’ to be printed on all its stationery, the choice fell on words from Pericles’ speech over the dead warriors of Athens freshly translated from Thucydides by T. G. Tucker,

emeritus professor of classics at the University of Melbourne: “They gave their lives. For that public gift they received a praise which never ages and a tomb most glorious—not so much the tomb in which they lie, but that in which their fame survives, to be remembered for ever when occasion comes for word and deed’. Bean wanted Australia’s national memorial somehow to affirm the

personal identity of each dead man. At first he thought that actual, photographic images of them all might form a frieze around the central hall of the Museum, with names and ranks attached. By mid-1919 he had abandoned that idea as impracticable but wanted the names inscribed on panels around a central hall, so that Australians ‘would feel almost the presence of their fallen’. No such scheme was on the agenda of commemoration in any other country. For the dead of the United Kingdom or France, a single national honour roll would have run for miles. Even Scotland’s dead were too numerous for the makers of the Memorial in Edinburgh to think of displaying their names on it. For Canada’s or the USA’s dead the task would not have been impossible, but it appears not

Capital Monuments 337 to have been contemplated. Nor was it done in New Zealand, where the largest roll of honour, in Auckland’s War Memorial and Museum, listed only the dead from that city and region. Like so much else that is singular in Australian public memory of the war, the national roll of honour was the doing of C. E. W. Bean. It would record names only, without the rank always preceding them on the tombstones and memorials created by the Imperial War Graves Commission. Moreover, the names would be listed not by men’s last military unit, as on all those Memorials at war sites, and not by date of death, which Bean thought would be equally baffling to relatives, but by place, identifying the dead not as military personnel but as citizens, friends, sons and husbands and fathers. ‘When you restore to each man his name’, he wrote, ‘(and still more when you classify him as Bill Jones of Dubbo or Jim Smith of Dunedoo) you give him back his individuality’. The War Museum Committee was convinced.

Forms went out to next of kin all over the country listing Particulars Required for the Roll of Honour of Australia in the Memorial War Museum, including ‘With what Town or District in Australia was he chiefly connected (under which his name ought to come on the Memorial)?? By 1923 Bean believed that the central hall should be a ‘special shrine’ housing only the names, and the federal cabinet duly agreed that ‘a central feature of the design be a Hall of Memory or ‘Temple to the Dead, on the walls of which shall be permanently recorded, in bronze, the names of the fallen, grouped under towns or districts, for convenient reference by visitors’. So ran the brief prepared for a competition to design the Australian War Memorial held in 1925. Canberra’s planners had given it, as Bean hoped, a site both prominent and symbolically separate from both the ‘governmental’ and ‘civic’ groups in Walter Burley Griffin’s plan, north of the Molonglo River and at the foot of Mount Ainslie. The building would sit on Griffin’s land axis, opposite Parliament House, just as (one

of the planners observed) in Lutyens’ New Delhi the All-India War Memorial Arch and the Viceroy’s Palace were to face each other at opposite ends of a ceremonial avenue. The institution described for competitors had been devised largely by Bean and his collaborators Henry Gullett, fellow-correspondent in the war, official historian, first director of the War Museum, and John Treloar, late of War Records,

338 Sacred Places who became director in 1922. They had been well placed to lobby prime ministers: Hughes the Little Digger to 1923, then Bruce the returned soldier. But before the politicians would act, the sort of public opinion articulated in newspapers had to be satisfied that this institution would not be a vehicle for the celebration of war, and the project had to make its way into the federal budget. From Anzac Day 1922 people in Melbourne could see something of the Museum’s character when its holdings were put on show in the Exhibition building. The popularity of this display, which attracted more than 750 000 visitors before moving to Sydney three years later, helped give the promoters confidence that when the project came before parlia-

ment nobody would condemn it as militaristic. (To the five-year-old Donald Horne the exhibition in Sydney was ‘a secular temple with war paintings on its walls instead of stained glass windows’.) The proposed lodging under Home Affairs rather than Defence may have reassured some doubters. The Australian War Memorial bill went through parliament in 1925 unopposed, though Labor members, uncomfortable as usual on the subject of war commemoration, expressed hope that the exhibits, as their leader Matthew Charlton put it, would ‘train the young minds of the future in the paths of peace’. Nationalist and Country Party members applauded without reserve. The Memorial would be ‘a shrine sacred for all time’, said one. The project was to cost no more than £250 000. Behind the lines in France, when that sum kept the war going for a few minutes, Bean

and his companions had not needed to think about the budgetary imperatives of peacetime that would trim their vision of grandeur. It would cost exactly as much as the largest of state memorials, in Melbourne, though having to accommodate more complex purposes. Still, it would be for a long time the only monumental building in the new Canberra, where the parliament house, which the politicians occupied in 1927 was merely provisional. The makers of the Memorial were relieved to get so much, having feared that politicians would do it on the cheap. An unexpected danger

had been posed by the idea of bringing home an Unknown Australian Soldier. Hugh D. McIntosh, conductor of the first wartime appeal for Sydney’s Anzac Memorial, begetter of the Cenotaph, floated the proposal in May 1920, even before a project began in England to inter an

Capital Monuments 339

ee

“ts et Zee

5 A 4 Gaerne eee, =e & eS ES SES.

Ee See es Se =e eS

eg 2 ee IS Fe ale fn tone. YO ge ere nage SS eee

NSS 0 Bes as Ne mesh a ARON ro a led oneal rr Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the Australian War Memorial, Canberra: too little or too much? Cartoon in the Australian Worker, Sydney, 28 March 1928. D. C. (‘Bull’) McGrath was a Labor member of state parliament, a returned soldier, and a battler

for repatriation benefits.

unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey. So at the same time did the Western Australian branch of the RSL. Many people, among them the Minister for Defence, George Pearce, were attracted by the thought of bringing home one Australian body to represent all the others. When McIntosh suggested Canberra as site for the tomb, people in Sydney and Melbourne asked why an unknown soldier should be buried in the unknown capital, unvisited by the crowds of mourners who could gather in proper cities. The War Museum Committee resolved that Canberra was the only city fit to receive the tomb, and that it should be lodged in the Museum.

340 Sacred Places On 21 November 1921 their chairman wrote to the prime minister, W. M. Hughes, asking for a meeting on the matter. But on that very day John Treloar, director of the Museum, declared in an address to the New South Wales Congress of the RSL that no unknown Australian soldier should be brought home. The warrior entombed in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920, Treloar told his comrades, represented the whole empire. There could only be one of him. ‘If we were to bury one of our own men in our own country it would take away the beautiful idea of the burial of unknown origin.’ A few days later Treloar explained in a note to C. Ek. W. Bean why he had turned against the plan to which his employers were committed: “The big danger in my opinion is that if the proposal to bury an unknown warrior at Canberra be considered apart from the future of the AWM it may become the basis of the Commonwealth memorial. That would be disastrous to the future of the AWM’. Having come to fear that a penny-pinching federal treasury would make the tomb of an unknown soldier in Canberra not a part of the institution to which he was dedicated, but a substitute for it, Treloar proclaimed what proved to be a persuasive imperial doctrine, invoked whenever the idea appealed afresh to somebody. Australians came to believe that the

principle had originated in the imperial metropolis and been merely accepted at the periphery. In fact nobody in London had formulated it before Treloar, who invented the imperial veto to ward off a possible threat to the Australian War Museum. That episode apart, the Museum/Memorial did not have to weather the sort of public debate that accompanied the making of state memorials. Underwritten by the federal government, responsible to no citizens’ committee at whose meetings people could argue about forms and sites and whatever else came to mind, this project could proceed almost entirely

behind closed doors. When they had to be opened, to announce the result of the competition, Bean was not above a little management of information. It would be helpful, Bean wrote in 1926, recalling the fuss over the choice of the Shrine of Remembrance in 1923, if the Chairman of the Federal Capital Commission could withhold the news until after a decision had been made to act on the adjudicators’ report; otherwise ‘critics

—possibly disappointed competitors—might raise an agitation, as they did in Melbourne to prevent the recommendations from being adopted’.

Capital Monuments 341 The competitors had to be British subjects resident in Australia or

born here and living abroad. (They did not have to be returned soldiers.) Their entries were to be sifted by Professor Leslie Wilkinson, Sir Charles Rosenthal (general and architect, chosen by the profession) and J. S. Murdoch, federal director-general of works. The best were then to be sent to London for adjudication, as was done in the other competition conducted by the federal government, for the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. This time the imperial judge was Sir Reginald Blomfield, designer of many works for the Imperial War Graves Commission and above all the Menin Gate. The appointment of an English adjudicator provoked no public comment. Bean himself, though believing

that Australians could create the finest war memorial in the world, appears to have shared the view that their designers’ best efforts should be submitted for imperial evaluation. Why Bean was apprehensive about public response to the results became apparent when it was announced that all sixty-nine competitors

had been defeated by the specification of a Hall of Memory large enough to display all the names at the prescribed cost. The Australian judges concluded that no selection could be made, and sent no entries to London. That offended Blomfield, and several competitors also pro-

tested. Prompted by Bean, the adjudicators proposed a way out. As always in competitions, they knew the entrants only by number. No. 41, like most, had put in a design which was conventionally classical but had

an ingenious solution to the problem of finding spaces for names, placing them along the walls of cloisters rather than, as specified, inside

the Hall of Memory, which could then remain economically small. No. 52, though costing too much, met skilfully the requirements for museum accommodation and was ‘exceptionally restrained and expressive of the purpose of the building’. Why not ask the authors of these

two designs to collaborate on a fresh one? Their names, it was now learned, were John Crust and Emil Sodersteen. Crust, born in Yorkshire, had come to Australia in 1903 and was employed as an architect in the federal department of Works and Railways. Sodersteen, born in Sydney in 1900, was a young private practitioner in Sydney, of Bruce Dellit’s

generation and taste; the two had actually worked together. His entry evoked not classical antiquity but modernity and Byzantium, combining

342 Sacred Places long, low and plain lines with a dome over the Hall of Memory recalling the church of Santa Sophia in Constantinople. The middle-aged public

servant and the young man on his own agreed to work together, and delivered a new plan late in 1927. Bean thought it ‘a noble conception’,

and it was approved also by the War Memorial’s Board, the Federal Capital Commission, and Walter Burley Griffin (no longer connected with the capital but respected as its creator). Sodersteen’s design had been modified to incorporate Crust’s cloisters, but his style prevailed.

The government approved the new plan. On Anzac Day 1929, when the Governor-General, Lord Stonehaven, unveiled a commemoration stone on the site, it seemed safe to say that the Memorial would be finished within three years. Before the end of 1929, however, Scullin’s Labor government came to office and deferred the building as it struggled to administer the depression. While the staff waited, they prepared for publication in 1933 a volume of reproduced paintings by Australian war artists with commentaries intended, in the words of director John Treloar, to ‘idealise the men who served’ and ‘counteract the debased outlook in many recent war

books’. He had in mind such works as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The federal govern-

Se

ment of Joseph Lyons, which succeeded Scullin’s in 1931, had banned the importation of these and other books portraying the events of 1914-18

as murderous horror. The makers of the Australian War Memorial

Joint design for Australian War Memorial by John Crust and Emil Sodersteen, 1927 Australian War Memorial, AWM negative no. XSO003)

Capital Monuments 343

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Returned soldiers in uniform again for the day stand in a Canberra paddock around the commemorative stone of the Australian War Memorial, Anzac Day 1929, before its unveiling by the Governor-General, Lord Stonehaven; the microphones will broadcast his words around the nation. (Australian War Memorial, AWM negative no. H15613)

decided that part of their job was to contest such accounts, and to reanimate the war as a noble cause, entitling their book Australian Chivalry. Their main task could begin at last when the Lyons government authorised construction on 1 June 1933. The Duke of Gloucester came by in 1934 and planted near the foundations a pine tree grown from the same seed, recovered at Lone Pine in 1915, as had yielded the tree giving shade to the Man with the Donkey near Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. The building was now expected to be ready by the end of 1938; but disagreement between the architects caused more delay. Neither had much time for the other, Bean observed. The older man, Crust, thought Sodersteen a slave to fashion, and Sodersteen found Crust stuffy. Their dislike of each other’s style may not have proved fatal to the partnership had it not been for the problem of the Hall of Memory. The problem was simply stated. The Hall had come to Bean’s mind as a repository for the Roll of Honour. Now that the names of the dead

were to be inscribed elsewhere, along cloisters, what was the Hall of Memory’s purpose? What should be put in it? Bean himself suggested in

344 Sacred Places 1928 the statue of a fallen soldier, possibly inspired by the recumbent figure George Lambert was making for St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. The most precious relics, he thought, might also be lodged there, such as

the Archbishop of Amiens’ tribute to the men of the AIT. Sodersteen proposed mural decorations and paintings of war subjects. Sir John Sulman, chairman of New South Wales’ now moribund Public Monuments Advisory Board, suggested ‘some fine and inspiring memorial fulfilling the same artistic function as the altar does in a church or cathe-

dral’. The idea came readily to an architect who had designed many churches but it begged a question about this building. An altar serves no mere artistic purpose, but a liturgical one. What ceremonies would be performed at an altar-like object in the Hall of Memory? More gener-

ally, what messages would be conveyed to people who entered this space? Having toured the galleries and taken in lessons about the valour and suffering of their men at war, what should visitors be encouraged to think and feel as they paused beneath the dome? What symbols, verbal or visual, should direct their reflections on soldier and nation, war and peace, life and death?

Sodersteen proposed an enlarged Hall of Memory whose walls would share with the cloisters the names on the roll of honour. Crust complained that if Sodersteen had his way the Hall of Memory would ‘altogether over-power the rest of the building’. Sodersteen resigned. His eclectic modernism had gained him many commissions in Sydney; he had no need to waste more time defending his half-share of one in Canberra.

Crust was left to supply drawings for a slightly modified version of the joint design accepted in 1927. ‘Still, it will be a great Memorial’, observed Treloar, ‘if only we can get it finished before the next war!’ Artists would now have to supply what was lacking in the Hall of

Memory. The painter M. Napier Waller and the sculptor W. Leslie Bowles—‘two returned soldiers’, as the Board noted—were given the job,

and collaborated happily. Waller, who had taught himself to work with the left hand after his right arm was amputated in France, had made his

name doing murals, mosaics and stained-glass windows, mostly in Melbourne. Bowles was head sculptor at the Memorial, modelling miniature soldiers in action for dioramas and life-sized heads for showcases of uniforms. Each was content to work in a style he had learned

Capital Monuments 345 from academic elders, Waller in Melbourne and Bowles in Brisbane and

London. Waller was commissioned by the Board to give the Hall of Memory stained-glass windows depicting Australians at war, and to cover its walls and dome with glass mosaic, partly decorative, partly showing Australian service personnel. The Board also decided what should go into the body of the Hall. For its northern bay, opposite the entrance—where Sulman had proposed an equivalent to an altar— Bowles would create the statue of a woman and a sarcophagus, or stone tomb. This figure would resemble Rayner Hoff’s ‘Sacrifice’ for Sydney’s Anzac Memorial in representing the female nation mourning the dead

soldier; but where Hoff portrayed three women and embodied the soldier, Bowles proposed the single figure of Australia—‘symbolizing’, guests at the opening in 1941 were told, ‘Australia proudly and courageously giving her all in the cause of freedom and honour’.

The opening had been originally planned for Anzac Day 1940. Less than eight months after the German invasion of Poland the new war had so little affected Australian lives that the Board hoped thousands

of returned soldiers and other people would make a pilgrimage to Canberra for the event. By 11 November 1941, when at last the building was ready, the war had provided ample reason for the opening to be ‘on a reduced scale’. The Australian War Memorial was declared open by the governor-general, Lord Gowrie, who as Sir Alexander Hore-Ruthven had dedicated the South Australian National War Memorial in 1931. He

was followed by John Curtin, who had been prime minister for only a month. It is unlikely that any returned soldier present, from Lord Gowrie down, thought this anti-conscriptionist, gaoled briefly in 1916, the ideal

embodiment of the nation on this platform; but many of them would have been no happier had the office been held, as it was on the preferred opening date in 1940, by R.G. Menzies. Labor’s coming to power affected what was sung at the ceremony as well as what was said: the music included not only “God Save the King but ‘Advance Australia Fair’.

The programme also contained hymns and prayers, and as the Catholic bishop of Goulburn, Terence Maguire, was on the platform, a casual observer may have concluded that for once the Catholic church had agreed to take part in a ‘combined’ service. That observer would

346 Sacred Places have missed the subtlety of the ceremony. The Board of the Memorial had opted, though not unanimously, for a religious service. C. E. W. Bean voted with the majority, evidently believing it compatible with his own

unbelief, and with the Periclean purpose of the Memorial, that people

attending the ceremony should be offered the familiar public consolation of Christian language. Otherwise, he argued, ‘ex-servicemen and their relatives of all denominations will feel that they have not adequately commemorated their fallen comrades’. All? Not to the mind of Bishop Maguire or of the two Catholics on the Board, Sir Gilbert Dyett, federal president of the RSL, and Paul Jones, a Labor member of parliament. A spectacular display of communal disunity was avoided only by intervention at the highest level of government. The War Cabinet, fearing that the conflict would damage the nation’s morale, asked Sir Harry Chauvel, respected general and devout Anglican, to negotiate with Norman Gilroy, Catholic archbishop of Sydney and a veteran of Gallipoli. Together they worked out an ingenious compromise. There would be a religious service before the two minutes silence at eleven o'clock, in which Catholics would not participate, and a national ceremony beginning at two minutes past the hour for everybody. Never was the silence put to more ecumenical use. It was actually extended to let Maguire and other Catholic dignitaries mount the platform and children from Catholic schools join the congregation. Led by the English governor-general who had served on Gallipoli

and the lapsed Catholic Labor politician who had not gone to the war, the official guests and possibly five thousand other people became the first Australians to inspect the galleries created to convey to them the experience of their soldiers and sailors in the Great War. Old soldiers with medals pinned on their suits expertly examined lifelike models of their own battles. Not that the visitor needed to be a returned soldier or a war buff to understand the context of a skirmish or the use of a weapon: civilians as well as returned men found that more than, say, the Imperial War Museum in London, this place was intended to be a people’s museum.

They had been attending what was carefully described as an opening, not a dedication, for the building lacked the two elements Bean

had seen as together composing its sacred centre. The walls of the

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, urt, cloisters Memorial as it stood in 1945: forecourt, without names, shell for Hall of Mem 0ry .

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° i4

99 3

to a dead comrade. This group and ‘perpetual flame’ were dedicated by Queen Elizabeth H before an estimated 300 OOO people,’ about the same number as had seen her uncle dedicate the original building twenty years earlier. (Shrine of Remembrance!

°N h i in’ : Id War IT d by j li in S b 1939 ever sucn Innocence again

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suddenly changed the meaning of inscriptions on memorials to service and sacrifice in the war called Great, which had now to be re-named the

First World War or World War I, ‘its greatness’, as the young Janet

From World War IT to Vietnam 349 Frame reflected, ‘being finally in doubt’. ‘Never such innocence again’, wrote Hal Porter in a poem of 1978, recalling ‘khaki uncles’ marching off in 1914. The Australian writer was appropriating words by an English poet, Philip Larkin, imagining the same moment. They were looking

back after another war and across the period that had now become ‘between the wars’. Not only the mood of embarkation but the later rhetoric of commemoration, proclaiming a durable victory for the cause in which khaki uncles fought and died, could now appear pathetically innocent. “Erected by the citizens of Lambton to perpetuate the memory of the men of the district who fought in the world’s greatest war 19141918’: that memorial, near Newcastle, New South Wales, had mourned 28 men and honoured 112 more. ‘Few street memorials when erected’, the Melbourne Herald observed matter-of-factly in 1946, ‘were designed to provide space for the names of men who might serve in later wars’. So where, if at all, were the next generation of names to be recorded, and in what spirit? World War II imposed on Australians another difficulty not experi-

enced by most other peoples in constructing a rhetoric of commemoration. You can’t be born, or come of age, twice. As those analogies had been used so strenuously for the AIF’s gift to the nation, what was left to say now that history had turned the force into the First AIF? The new men had to be inheritors, upholders, bearers of standard or torch. Tradition hovered over the typewriters of World War II’s official war historians, inspiring but also inhibiting authors who were writing in the shadow of Bean’s proud volumes. The new war delivered to its

historians no testing encounter quite like Gallipoli, no turning-point like Villers-Bretonneux, no crucial dash like the one to Beersheba. The Australian contribution at E] Alamein in November 1942 might plausibly be counted as decisive, but that story was too complex to be the stuff of national legend. The fate of thousands imprisoned by the Japanese was painful to interpret, and showed that the sun was setting on the British empire. Among place names to be commemorated from this war was the Coral Sea, in which American naval planes turned back a Japanese fleet on its way to invade Port Moresby, the capital of Australia’s colony

Papua. The general whose name and face became most familiar was the American Douglas MacArthur, who commanded all Australians

350 Sacred Places serving in the south-west Pacific. Towards the end they fought in New

Guinea and Borneo. Even if Australia’s senior officer Sir Thomas Blamey had been skilled with pen as well as sword, he could have written no equivalent to Sir John Monash’s mythopoeic The Australian Victories in France in 1978.

Two battle sites of the new war did supply the stuff of Anzac legend. Tobruk and Kokoda both celebrated initiative and endurance, and both exhibited distinct Australian performances in theatres of war. But rarely this time did Australians constitute a separate brotherhood of arms. Most fighting men had leave at home with family and friends between postings to battle zones. More civilians than in 1914-18 were engaged in work connected with the war, and some—not as many as in the United Kingdom, but enough to blur the dichotomy of soldier and civilian—were directly exposed to bombing. Thousands of women wore uniform. One cherished ingredient in the Anzac tradition disappeared when conscripts as well as volunteers fought and died for Australia. In 1939 the law still prevented conscripts from being sent overseas; but the Torres Strait between Australia and its ‘external territory’ Papua did not count for this purpose as a sea, and the first Australian soldiers to encounter the Japanese invaders of Papua, on the Kokoda track, were men of militia battalions, belonging not to the second Australian Imperial Force but to

the Citizen Military Forces. In 1943, as the Pacific war moved north, parliament decided that conscripts could be made to serve anywhere in the south-west Pacific. They were ‘Chockoes’, a coinage from ‘chocolate

soldiers’ which mocked the conscripts from the vantage point of volunteers. The objects of derision defiantly embraced the name, turning it, as one wrote in 1945, ‘from a term of opprobrium to a title to be proud

of, like the “Rats of Tobruk” ... The men call each other “Chocko” as they might say “Mate” or “Digger”’. This new element in Australia’s wartime army was bound to affect post-war commemoration. If conscription for overseas service had been introduced by an anti-

Labor government, that might have deepened the alienation of Labor from the Anzac tradition. But the accident of political history that put Labor in office late in 1941 restored the party to the place it had enjoyed

before 1916 as a carrier of national values. The conduct of the war by

From World War IT to Vietnam 351 a Labor government re-elected with solid majorities in 1943 and 1946

made it immensely more difficult for opponents to equate the party with disloyalty. Australia’s armed forces suffered comparatively light losses in a war

that caused at least fifty million deaths, more than twice as many as the one hitherto called Great. Fewer Australians died at war in 1939-45 than in 1914-18. Seven million people had not quite thirty thousand dead to mourn, out of around a million enlistments, compared with more than sixty thousand out of four hundred thousand for the five million of 1918.

The millions who died in other armies, however, and in no army, included men and women mourned in wartime and post-war Australia. In the Melbourne General Cemetery a memorial complex was raised by Australian Jews in 1963, its central feature a concrete monument in the

form of a menorah, the holy candelabrum used in Jewish worship,

inscribed ‘1933-1945—IN SACRED MEMORY OF THE SIX MILLION JEWISH HEROES AND MARTYRS WHO PERISHED AT THE HANDS OF THE NAZIS’. In the outer Sydney suburb of Marayong, thousands of Poles from all over Australia gathered in 1966 for the dedication of a spectacular chapel built both to celebrate the millennium of Christianity in Poland and to commemorate their compatriots, also estimated at six million, who had died in World War II.

War cemeteries within Australia received the bodies of people killed in or near Australia. The largest was at Adelaide River, south of Darwin, which also became the site of the first Memorial to the Missing erected in Australia, honouring men and women lost to the north. Like all such cemeteries and memorials elsewhere in the empire after 1918, those in Australia were created and maintained by the Commonwealth (formerly Imperial) War Graves Commission. The homeland cemeteries were not opened to the bodies of people

killed elsewhere in the Pacific. Curtin’s cabinet decided in 1942 that now, as in the last war, no remains of Australian war dead were to be brought home. So even Australians who had died in the territories of Papua and New Guinea were buried there, in three war cemeteries which contained some eight thousand bodies and honoured more than two thousand other men and women on Memorials to the Missing. Whatever memorials were erected to the war dead after 1945 would be

352 Sacred Places almost entirely, as before, in commemoration of Australians whose bodies were buried in other lands or had not been identified or had not been found. The proximity of this war yielded a variety of memorials at sites where particular units had camped, commandos had trained, air crews

had been based. They were commonest in Queensland. At Cairns a tower commemorates 320 Australian airmen who did not return from operations over the Pacific in Catalina flying boats, mourning them as temporary citizens of the town. As in earlier wars, some mourners erected individual memorials to the absent dead. A plaque on gates in Cumnock, New South Wales, for a son killed in Borneo, expressed private grief in a public place. So did a stone seat in Broadford, Victoria, for a son and brother killed at Tobruk, a bus shelter in Mittagong, New South Wales, for a friend who died in Japanese captivity, and a sports ground at Cambridge, Tasmania, commemorating sons killed while serving in the navy and the air force: all three paid for by mourners who felt, as so many did now, that a memorial should be both an act of mourning and an amenity for the living.

The triumph of utility ‘What kind of war memorial do you favour?’ the newly established Gallup Poll asked a sample of the population in 1944. Whoever was to create memorials now would know much more than after 1918 about

what Australians wanted. The principle of utility had demonstrably triumphed: 90 per cent voted for useful memorials, only 4 per cent for

‘monuments, cenotaphs or shrines’, and 6 per cent were undecided. Hospitals, schools, halls, parks, they said, or ‘anything useful’. Should there be any new memorials? When asked in 1946, 58 per cent of people opted instead for additions to old ones. When polled a year later 20 per cent, answering a question they had not been asked, voted against any

sort of commemoration for World War II. It was uncommon, the pollsters noted, for so many people to choose an alternative that had not been put to them. The implication was that many more would have voted against any fresh commemoration if they had been given that option.

Throughout and beyond the empire, monumentality was out of fashion; ‘the notion of a modern monument is a contradiction in terms’,

From World War II to Vietnam 353 the American architectural sage Lewis Mumford had proclaimed in 1938. Distaste for statues and other monumental forms was at once utilitarian and aesthetic. R. G. Menzies, Leader of the Opposition in the federal parliament, could say at the end of 1945 that when he saw statues of

dejected-looking soldiers outside city and suburban halls, his first thought was ‘How much further forward are we by all this?’ The old eligible was lucky not to have some returned soldier ask what business it was of his. Ben Chifley, prime minister since Curtin’s death on the eve of peace, confessed a preference for utility but respected the traditional

view, as he told parliament, ‘that the essential character of the monuments as memorials would not persist if they were of a utilitarian charac-

ter. There is no violent dispute on the subject’, he concluded in pipe-sucking mode, ‘but there is room for honest difference of opinion’. C. E. W. Bean’s opinion, which carried much weight, was in favour of understanding ‘the general feeling that this time it would be better, more fitting, if local memorials took the form of utilities’. He had founded a Parks and Playgrounds Movement which proposed recreation areas as suitable memorials; and as he devoted himself to the completion of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra Bean was content with the preference elsewhere for arnenities rather than monuments. This time the voice of the RSL (RSSAILA now, adding airmen to sailors and soldiers) was louder in deliberations about the character of commemoration. The League had become a virtual estate, certainly to be consulted everywhere on such a matter. Though individual members still had diverse views, League spokesmen signalled clear sympathy for

the utilitarian. The RSL was ‘against statues and such like’, one announced in September 1945. ‘Two years into the peace Reveille, organ

of the League in New South Wales, made a declaration in favour of utility all the more eloquent for being phrased in the quasi-biblical idiom

of tradition: ‘If our fallen died that we might live, and have life more

abundantly, they cannot adequately be commemorated in the cold bronze statue or the lifeless monument of yesteryear’. The modern view of grieving had made inroads even into the leadership of a movement committed to the honouring of dead soldiers.

Misgivings began to simmer within the RSL, however, when it appeared that people were putting up useful memorials for the wrong

354 Sacred Places reason, not to honour service and sacrifice but to dodge taxation. Certainly the trend to utility was getting fiscal encouragement from governments. In Tasmania, municipalities could actually get a subsidy for buildings designated as war memorials, and scores of district memorial halls were erected with that help, their makers undeterred by an occasional complaint that they were engaging in pretence. The federal government offered not direct subsidy but tax relief, by allowing gifts for public war memorials to be deducted from assessable income. That provision had been written into the law too late—in 1927—to be of much use

for the makers of Great War memorials. It was doubly more attractive now, when all World War II memorials were yet to be constructed and when all income tax was collected by the federal government instead of

being divided between the Commonwealth and the states, as had happened until 1942. The Act did not specify, as the Tasmanian arrangement did, that the memorial be useful; but it was invoked by canvassers in every state. “The War Memorial’, observed the Sulletin’s Patricia Rolfe, ‘is to generate local interest by an appeal to sentiment and tax deductions’.

The RSLs national congress passed a critical motion about the practice as early as 1947, and resolved unanimously in 1963 “That the

indiscriminate use of the term “war memorial” as applied to undertakings such as swimming baths, sports ovals, public buildings and many

other such buildings should be discontinued where recognised memorials are established’. The League’s president in New South Wales, William Yeo, identified a form tactfully omitted from that list of examples.

‘Churches are the worst offenders’, he said. Yeo was a bluff veteran of World War I who enjoyed a fight with anyone, and who embodied a disposition among old soldiers to dispute the pretension of the clergy to be conscience-bearers of the nation. In Newcastle the diocesan council of the Church of England had actually anticipated the RSLs resolution with one of its own, opposing the erection of any more churches as war memorials simply to get tax concessions for donors. In New South Wales only, from 1956, a change in the law encour-

aged the making of one kind of memorial that was both utilitarian and thoroughly secular, when licensed clubs were permitted to make money out of poker machines. In suburbs of Sydney and throughout the state, RSL sub-branches became the base for new clubs, some of them

From World War IT to Vietnam 355

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Freeland, Canberra Cosmos, Leichhardt 1995, p. 99) dwells on the macabre emblem of the Vietnam Veterans of Australia Motor Cycle Club.

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the Washington memorial was to ‘make no political statement about the war’, Canberra’s was to express ‘the link between the Australian Vietnam Forces and the original ANZAC Force’, and also to represent ‘the controversy at home’. In the event it did the former and hardly began to do the latter. The Americans imposed almost no conditions,

b] ° °

5

408 Sacred Places and ended up with a long, low, black wall, tapering at the ends and set in the ground. Conservatives who did not like this outcome then made the

promoters add a conventional statue of three soldiers. The Australian committee prescribed conditions and chose assessors guaranteeing a design acceptable to all the parties involved. Where the American enterprise was wholly voluntary, Australia’s was the product of public as well

as private resources: the Hawke government put in $250 000 of the $800 000 estimated as necessary in 1989, and the National Capital Planning Authority administered both the competition for a design and the construction of the winner. Where the Americans named their project simply the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Canberra’s was Australian and National and military, named for the Forces. There was one more significant difference. The Australian mem-

orial was inaugurated much later. 1982 was the tenth year after the foreign armies went home, 1992 the twentieth—an interval about as long as between the end of the first great war and the beginning of the second. The war’s long passage towards history helped the makers to find more easily a rhetoric connecting Vietnam with the Anzac tradition. Certainly Anzac Parade provided a suitable site for representing

that connexion. The allotted niche placed the memorial between tributes to the horsemen of World War I and to the army of all wars, and

opposite the monument to the Rats of Tobruk. The ceremonies of inauguration drew powerfully on the rituals of Anzac Day: dawn service, dedication, march. The speakers dwelt also on one quality not until now necessary in statements about Australian wars: healing. At the dedication Peter Poulton said quietly: “This is the final healing process and we

can now join together as one nation’. More than half of the surviving veterans had made the journey to Canberra. Most marched in their old units, as on Anzac Day. Bringing up the rear, however, members of the Vietnam Veterans of Australia Motor Cycle Club thundered slowly down Anzac Parade in leather jackets that were themselves war memorials, created for their own bodies as they had waited for more conventional commemoration and bearing the club’s macabre emblem of digger hat on grinning skull, inscribed ‘In memory of all Australians who lost their lives in Vietnam 1962-1973 and since’.

From World War I to Vietnam 409 The Memorial was the joint work of the architect Peter Tonkin and

the sculptor Ken Unsworth. Up a ramp, over a moat, you approach a large etched reproduction of a photograph from the war, showing armed soldiers waiting to be lifted out by helicopters. This image—Vietnam’s closest thing to Simpson and the donkey—covers one of three walls in what becomes, as you enter, a kind of open-air temple or shrine made of three concrete slabs, each of which twists as it rises above you. The powertful form suggests stress, even anguish. A second slab is blank, and rises behind an altar-like stone set on one side of the floor. The third slab

is covered with quotations about the war, a device intended simultaneously to convey information and to invite diverse responses. When

the makers came to choose statements, however, they were better at expressing continuities with Anzac than at signalling conflict. You glimpse

controversy only in a soldier’s statement that he doesn’t seem to have

many friends since he came home, and ‘OUR FAMILY FOUND ITSELF DIVIDED OVER VIETNAM’. How? Why? A _ posterity depending on this wall of words will never know. High overhead is suspended a ring of black granite segments one of which, you may or may not notice, is marked by a cross. Here, mysteriously, are ‘entombed’ the names of 504 dead, laser-written on stainless

steel and locked into the granite container at a ceremony in the old Parliament House attended by their next-of-kin. In early planning the names were actually to be enclosed in the altar, which was to stand at the centre of the floor. Then the designers put the names up in the halo and moved the altar to one side, calling it now just a memorial stone. We are discouraged from sensing any similarity between this space and the interior of a church, and we are to look up at the halo. Why are the names not visible (say on one of the walls)? The makers gave no clear answer. Possibly they were deterred by the known difficulty of getting

the list exactly right: even the hidden roll of honour was opened up expensively after the inauguration to insert names belatedly deemed eligible. Perhaps they did not want to overwhelm us with the feeling that we were in the presence of a tribute to the dead instead of, as planned, a declaration on behalf of the survivors as well. The motto of the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia, militants who had contributed largely

410 Sacred Places to the project, is ‘HONOUR THE DEAD, BUT FIGHT LIKE HELL FOR THE LIVING’. The only men whose names are to be seen at the site of the Memorial are the six—just six, so confined was the Australians’ theatre of war—Missing in Action. The names of the known dead, to be sure, can be read a few minutes walk away, on the Roll of Honour in the cloisters of the Australian War Memorial; and some who attended the ceremony of 3 October 1992 made reverent rubbings from the Vietnam tablets. By encouraging bereaved people to go from the one memorial to the other, the absence of names may help to connect Vietnam with Kokoda and Gallipoli.

The two last niches were due to be occupied by the year 2000. After half a century a National Korean War Memorial would honour Australians who served in that country, and an Australian Service Nurses National Memorial was planned for the centenary of Australian military nursing in 1999. The first project, initiated by associated veterans of the Korean war, went smoothly and quietly, beginning with the placing of boulders, gifts of the South Korean government, taken from a place named Kapyong and installed on the forty-fifth anniversary of Australians fighting there, the eve of Anzac Day 1996. Of the seventeen thousand men who had served in Korea, some two thousand survivors

made their way to Canberra for the ceremony. The second project encountered turbulence when the RSL argued, as some people in Brisbane had done in 1992, that nurses should not be commemorated ahead of other women who had served in war. The initiators in Canberra

offered no compromise such as had seen emblems of three women attached to the statue in Brisbane. They deferred to the organization which was finding most of the money, the Royal College of Nursing Australia, whose president conducted a service to dedicate the site, the last of Anzac Parade’s ten niches, on Saturday 15 February 1997, one day before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day nurses were massacred at Banka Island. Along the sacred way from Athens to Eleusis, Atticans moved on foot. For most visitors to Canberra the monuments of Anzac Parade are blurred objects glimpsed at sixty kilometres an hour. Walkers, either on

From World War IT to Vietnam All their own or in Anzac Heritage groups, have to watch out for traffic. Pilgrims gather on special days. More than five hundred Rats and their families attended a service at the Tobruk memorial on 17 April 1991 for the fiftieth anniversary of the siege, and nearly as many assembled at the equestrian memorial on 31 October 1992—now designated as Beersheba Day—to lay a plaque marking the victorious Australian charge into that town. A body known as the Friends of the Australian Vietnam Forces National Memorial committed itself to making the anniversary of its dedi-

cation, 3 October, a day for services of remembrance, and pressed for official recognition of the date as Vietnam Veterans’ Day. The Memorial also became site for commemoration of a battle at Long Tan in which a

company of Australian infantry killed 245 Vietnamese for the loss of eighteen men. Long ‘Tan was being promoted by Defence Force publicists

as a place of Anzac memory fit to be remembered alongside Gallipoli and Beersheba, Tobruk and Kokoda, and the thirtieth anniversary of the battle was observed with solemnity at the Vietnam Memorial on 18 August 1996. Friends and relatives read out the names of all dead men, following a practice introduced at the memorial in Washington. Many cars whizzed by, and some were parked along Anzac Parade. To one participant that was a kind of sacrilege. “The red gravel in Anzac Parade’, he wrote to the Canberra Times, ‘is a stark reminder of the blood they shed, so let’s keep any kind of pollution away from their memory’.

Unwanted motor vehicles are kept well away on the morning of 25 April, when hundreds of returned service people more or less in step with military bands march up Anzac Parade to the service around the

Stone of Remembrance and down again later, turning eyes right and eyes left as they pass the niches.

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Operation Restoration ‘RUNDOWN WAR MEMORIALS TO GET FACELIFT’ id a , said media release issued jointly by the Ministers for Veterans Affairs and for Employment, Education and Training on 11 November, Remembrance Day, 1994. The federal government would spend ten million dollars to

restore memorials in suburbs and country towns. Local committees would oversee the project, engaging unemployed people. In the glossy idiom of public relations, Operation Restoration was an initiative of both Australia Remembers 1945-1995 and Working Nation. P)

For some years the Department of Veterans Affairs (formerly Repatriation) had been getting requests for money to refurbish war e

Australia Remembers 413 memorials. The petitioners evidently believed, as hardly anybody in earlier times had done, that the federal government had responsibility

for local memorials, as if the monuments as well as the men they honoured had a right to repatriation benefits. The department responded with grants of a few hundred dollars here and there for conservation. Some people even asked the government for money to build a mem-

orial, saying that their community did not have one. These requests usually came from places where the makers had opted for a utilitarian form, and where their opponents had been proved right: the memorial had disappeared both from the landscape and from collective memory, or survived as an amenity whose commemorative character was no longer recognized. For memorials large and small of a monumental character, dilapidation and damage were graver threats than demolition. Surveys revealed

chipping, cracking, peeling, discoloration, loss of rifles, bayonets and

hands and even heads. In Melbourne a front-page headline on the Herald-Sun of 16 August 1993 shouted ‘SHRINE CRUMBLES’. The chairman of trustees assured visitors to the Shrine of Remembrance that they were in no danger, but confirmed that seepage over the years had done damage that would now cost $3 million to repair. The money was

being raised by a Melburnian mixture of public and private contributions. Sydney’s Anzac Memorial was actually more dangerously water-damaged than the Shrine; but as usual, that building made less news. Operation Restoration was for the local monuments, not the big ones, though other projects of Australia Remembers would involve state and national memorials in special activities. The Department of Veterans Affairs was normally a ministerial backwater; but when Paul Keating gave the job in 1994 to Con Sciacca, flamboyant member for a Brisbane electorate, the place began to hum. Where previous ministers had responded with cautious parsimony to requests on behalf of memorials, Sciacca thought up Operation Restoration and persuaded Simon Crean, Minister for Employment, Education and Training, to make it a provider of work for the unemployed. The wider vision of Australia Remembers 1945-1995 was also Sciacca’s own idea. Keating found it congenial, wanting as he did to move Australians’ consciousness of war away from the imperial encounters of 1914-18 to

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Australia Remembers 415 the independent nation’s campaigns of World War I], from Gallipoli to Kokoda. (Among gestures of reassurance to traditionalists, however, an Anzac Day bill went through parliament declaring 25 April to be the National Day of Commemoration.) A ‘task force’ in Sciacca’s department bombarded the media with material for the year. Australia Post portrayed war heroes and heroines on stamps and postcards, and the mint etched them on coins. Cadbury’s

chocolate came out in wartime wrappers; Toohey’s beer cans reproduced old recruitment posters. People were encouraged to create cer-

emonies of their own at war memorials to mark episodes of local significance, and the task force itself initiated anniversary gatherings. For 15 August 1995—jubilee of VP Day—the task force prompted ceremonies

all over the country, and in every capital city a parade on the scale of Anzac Day but different in spirit, expressing relief, reconciliation, victory, and excluding nobody who wanted to be in it. People at home could watch on ABC television the parade through Brisbane streets to the state memorial in Anzac Square. For this ceremony in his own city Sciacca, as political opponents observed, had engaged the governorgeneral, the prime minister, and the national president of the RSL. Australia Remembers turned out to be a more popular festival than anybody but Sciacca had expected. ‘He is a salesman’, wrote Marion Frith in the Age, ‘smooth and sharp, selling patriotism and sentimentality to 17 million people who had not realised they were craving it’. Oper-

ation Restoration stirred RSL sub-branches, municipal governments, and other custodians of war memorials. From all over the country came requests for help in repairing, restoring, adding to and moving monuments, and in making new ones.

Many guardians had been trying for years to protect their memorials against natural and human damage. Who, if anybody, was formally committed to doing that might be difficult to ascertain. In Thirroul the RSL sub-branch acquired ownership of the land on which the town’s statue stood when it bought the old School of Arts in 1934 as a home for its associated club. Fatally tempted by poker machines after 1956, the club built too ambitiously, went bankrupt and sold buildings and site to

an estate agent; but men of the RSL sub-branch remained vigilantly

416 Sacred Places committed to maintaining and protecting the monument whose site they no longer owned. In no place with a vigorous RSL would a memorial lack attention, whoever its actual owner. But the League, like the memorials, was showing its age. From a peak of 370 000 in 1947 numbers had dwindled to less than 250 000 by 1990, and more than two-thirds were over sixty-five. Members would have been fewer still had conditions of entry not been relaxed. From 1982 any man or woman could join, volunteer or conscript, who had served in the defence forces for six months

in time of war or peace. Changes of name registered what seemed to some stalwarts a dilution of the Anzac spirit: from the Returned Service-

men’s League to the Returned Services League to the Returned and Services League. As the proportion of members in retirement grew, welfare work on monuments joined bowls as an exercise for the elderly. But who was to look after a memorial after its last RSL custodians died or gave up? When the sub-branch in the Perth suburb of Mundaring disbanded in 1975, the shire council told a grateful state RSL that it would take over care of the war memorial rose garden. Professional conservators feared that work parties of RSL people and other enthusiasts might be killing, or at least injuring, memorials by kindness. In Burnside, Adelaide, the sculptor John Dowie intervened

just in time to stop municipal workers from scrubbing the patina off C. Web Gilbert’s bronze ‘Helping Hand’. At Thirroul, RSL custodians of the pale fawn soldier took to the stone surface in the mid-1980s with a cleaning machine and detergent and then gave it khaki uniform, white webbing, dark brown boots and rifle, white hands and white face. Judith McKay, surveying Queensland at this time, found many such cosmetic operations, and warned her RSL clients that painting stone monuments

could do them severe damage. The paint flakes, and removing it by caustic solutions or sand-blasting then does more harm. Moreover, she

deplored on aesthetic and symbolic grounds the painting of figures whose makers had never intended them to bear any colour than that of the original stone. McKay’s advice saved some Queensland memorials from being painted but was not much known in other states.

Of all actions taken to protect memorials, the most necessary but also the most controversial was moving them. Necessary, because the monument and the motor car were dangers to each other, especially

Australia Remembers 417

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The soldier at Thirroul from c. 1985, no longer pale fawn (and encroached on by commercial development) (Photograph Jeff Carter)

at intersections. The 800 000 motor vehicles of 1939 had become

ten million by 1991. At Thirroul the main road, unmade when D. H. Lawrence observed it, became part of a busy highway, and by 1980 the rising flood of motor vehicles had forced the custodians to change their notion of safe ground three times, most recently after the pedestal was clipped by a truck whose driver was having an epileptic fit. Moving a monument aroused controversy, however, where people believed that only the original location would do, or at least that no move should be made without the consent of trustees for the men and women

whom it honoured. A prudent local council would negotiate with the RSL, as at Shepparton, Victoria, where that town’s version of C. Web Gilbert’s ‘Helping Hand’ in 1959 was moved amicably from a widened Midland Highway to a new civic centre. Not far away at Wodonga,

418 Sacred Places

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however, the council provoked belligerent protest when it decided in 1988 to move the World War I monument out of harm’s way without con-

sulting the RSL sub-branch. Here the issue was whether the municipal authorities had the authority to override a sense among ex-servicemen,

sustained by their families, friends and neighbours, that any move without their approval was an act of desecration. Elsewhere the idea of sacred ground had a deeper resonance, signifying that a community had

Australia Remembers 419

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Vigilantes defend the memorial at Wodonga, Victoria, Anzac Day 1988. At the dawn service, RSL members scattered poppies on the monument to syinbolize its death, and later in the morning, boycotting a mayoral service, hundreds cheered at a counter-ceremony organized by the RSL when the sub-branch president called on the council to keep its hands off sacred ground’. Of the three central figures, Tom O'Neill (left) was a prisoner of the Japanese and Brian Lynchfield and Phil Brown are Vietnam veterans.

¢ °3bi° 5 (Border Morning Mail, 27 April 1988)

committed itself to maintain a memorial for ever on a particular site. This view was proclaimed most passionately at Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1985, when the city council, with informal consent from RSL leaders, decided to move the World War I column from its central intersection to make way for a ring road. This was the Mothers’ Memorial, and a quickly formed Mothers’ Memorial Preservation Association reminded the council of its history: raised at the place where World War I recruiting rallies had been held, called at its unveiling in 1922 a hallowed spot for mothers who would never see their sons’ graves,

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420 Sacred Places visited by many of them every Anzac Day year after year to lay wreaths below the names. Protesters organized a wake for the day of demolition,

wearing black armbands, playing a tape of the Last Post, and laying wreaths with bitter inscriptions, among them a comparison of the mayor with Adolf Hitler. The protesters lost. The poet Bruce Dawe, long resident in Toowoomba, wrote lines headed “The Names on the Mothers’ Memorial Speak for the Last Time’, making them say: The sacred has a time-clock on its wrist, And, when its hour has come, will be dismissed...

The monument was re-assembled within a newly named Mothers’ Memorial Garden in time for Remembrance Sunday, 10 November 1985. Among memorials in capital cities only Sydney’s Cenotaph, set in the bustle of Martin Place, was the subject of serious talk about relocation, when the RSLs state executive, troubled by ‘alarming disrespect’ from both drivers and pedestrians, decided in 1954 that the monument should be moved to Hyde Park. They were out of touch with their constituency; the state congress of the League voted solidly to have the Cenotaph stay where it was, agreeing with the Sydney Morning Herald that

its site was ‘a hallowed spot in the living heart of the city’. Modest defences were constructed: the plinth extended, chains hung, and in 1968 the RSLs executive and congress all endorsed a plan to make Martin Place a pedestrian plaza. As huge new buildings rose at the borders, and the promenade was dotted with colourful amenities and with sculpture in styles unknown to the Cenotaph’s maker, Mackennal’s

soldier and sailor and stone slab appeared ever smaller and more homely. The memorial remained an object of veneration, and nobody thought now of moving it. The word ‘facelift’? set off alarms within federal and state heritage

organizations. Would people hired simply because they were out of work be skilful cosmeticians? In any case, was the model of facial rejuve-

nation an appropriate one for old monuments? Copies of Judith McKay’s advice to the Queensland RSL were sent out to local committees in hope that they would heed her warnings about material and aesthetic damage.

Australia Remembers 421 Local opposition sometimes vetoed a project. In Charleville, Queensland, a plan for employing thirteen men to move the town ceno-

taph was abandoned in the face of protest similar to the campaign in Toowoomba. In Stanthorpe, Queensland, the shire council decided not to ask for federal money after residents branded as sacrilege a plan to make a picnic area around the memorial rest shed. Elsewhere schemes devised, as here, with tourism as well as commemoration in mind, went ahead without fuss. Hundreds of initiatives all over the country were

paid for by the federal government. Small projects, such as a plaque on a memorial, could be financed out of the $20 000 allocated to each electorate for activities on behalf of Australia Remembers. Larger jobs— moving a monument, constructing a new one—for which the main cost was labour, were enabled by ad hoc grants under Operation Restoration.

Thirroul was among the beneficiaries. Small grants paid for two plaques, one naming the fourteen local World War II dead and the other honouring men who served in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam, to be set in anew wall built with voluntary labour and donated materials. Operation Restoration gave $14 500 for a dozen unemployed men to help a stonemason and a landscaper shift the soldier a few metres from private to public land and set him up on a new pavement. The workers handled

Casagrande’s stone figure with a mixture of reverence and levity: surprised that when standing on the ground the statue was not taller, they called it Old Shorty. The memorial wall, the statue on a circular

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Australia Remembers 457 the opposite cloister, attaching flowers to names from World War I. Day by day the walls became more densely splashed with scarlet as people on their way to and from paying respect to the Unknown Soldier made

their own personal gestures in memory of the known, from brothers, husbands and fathers killed in Vietnam to great-uncles two world wars away. One celebrant in the service, a chaplain, had used Bean’s own words about the Memorial: ‘this sacred place’. The chronicler and memorialist of the old AIF might have been moved most deeply not by words, nor by the solemn splendour of the funeral procession, but by the spontaneous placing of poppies, the Great War’s emblems of death and life, against those names.

The Canberra Times Ian Warden, connoisseur of public rituals, found in this one ‘just the right blend of modest, unaffected pomp and melancholy’. Dissenting judgements in print were rare: Humphrey McQueen invited readers of the Australian to reflect that the Unknown Soldier was killed by international capitalism, and the Journal of the Australian War Memorial allowed Ric Throssell, son of Hugo Throssell VC, to protest, in the spirit of Sassoon, Owen and Graves, that the occasion was one more essay in disingenuous euphemism: ‘It does no service to the Unknown Soldier’s memory to deny the way that he died, to hide obscenity in the comfort of nicer words’.

One Aboriginal viewer of the ceremony, George Kennedy, was moved but also dissatisfied: all this solemn pageantry, yet no recognition of the likes of his father, also George Kennedy, a veteran of the first AIF

whose grave in the cemetery at Condobolin, New South Wales, was unidentified except by a numbered peg. Research had lately discovered that he had been the most highly ranking Aboriginal soldier of the Great War—Farrier Quarter Master Sergeant—and later the only Aborigine in New South Wales to be granted land as a soldier settler. With help from the Office of War Graves, the RSL, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and ‘Torres Strait Islander Studies, son and grand-daughter created a small monument to George Kennedy. On the eve of Anzac Day 1994, Condobolin’s parish priest performed a Catholic burial service over a grave now covered with a headstone. The president of the local RSL spoke a tribute and called for silence ‘in memory of our comrade’. A bugler played the Last Post. A wreath from the family lay on the grave,

458 Sacred Places

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Aboriginal ‘Unknown Soldier’: reburial of George Kennedy, Condobolin, New South Wales, 24 April 1994. Nearest to the grave is his widow Eliza; seated at left is his son George. (Photograph Lachlander

and RSL members dropped poppies. Young relatives stroked and kissed the weeping widow, now in her nineties. The headstone is inscribed with the dead man’s service record, a message of remembrance on behalf of his wife and their descendants,

from son to great-great-grandchildren, and a more general statement

that the son had begun to imagine when he watched the burial of Canberra’s unknown soldier on television: ‘In commemoration of all Aboriginals that served in the services’. Condobolin’s ceremony was also televised, the reporter describing George Kennedy paradoxically as the Aboriginal community’s Unknown Soldier.

Civil religion ‘Most nations practise, beside their formally acknowledged religion, the cult of some ideal of manhood or womanhood’, C. E. W. Bean wrote in 1943, when he had accomplished the two great projects, the History and the Australian War Memorial, devoted to making a cult of the Australian

soldier. The interment of an unknown and long dead member of the AIF in the Hall of Memory was a solemn ritual in the service of that cult, a climactic event in the making of a place in the nation’s capital sacred to the spirit of Anzac. In Bean’s early imaginings the Hall was a

Australia Remembers 459 Shrine, or Temple to the Dead, and that is what it has become, both officially and informally. The tomb is ritual centre of the nation, receiving

obligatory wreaths from every visiting head of state. Nearly all the private citizens and tourists who visit the Memorial now go into the Hall; they look down at the tomb and up at the mosaics and windows which form its reliquary, portraying and symbolizing the qualities attrib-

uted to the dead soldier and his comrades, up further to the mosaics in the dome signifying the flight of souls. They approach and leave the shrine along the cloisters bearing a hundred thousand names, above

the “eternal flame of remembrance’ in the courtyard. Attendants no longer stop them touching names, or adding poppies to the hundreds already there. In surrounding galleries they inspect paintings, dioramas, sculptures, relics, and spaces inviting more or less explicitly a response to the sacred: Will Longstaff’s spirit-soldiers in their darkened alcove;

the Hall of Valour venerating winners of the Victoria Cross, whose stories, set out in the chapel-like space, seem to the writer Barry Oakley ‘the nearest we have to a Dreaming’. Even the custodians could be surprised by the power of a popular

sentiment that this was a sacred place. When the Council decided to raise badly needed money by charging for admission, they had to withdraw the plan in the face of outrage from within and beyond the RSL. ‘A

charge to enter the Australian War Memorial’, declared one critic, ‘would be the same as paying a fee to enter a church’. The building became venue for events quasi-ecclesiastical in character. For several evenings before Anzac Day 1984 the stained-glass windows were made backdrop to a performance—or as the programme said, a ceremony—in the courtyard entitled “The Broken Years’, for which words from Bill Gammage’s book and other sources were blended with hymns and war songs to make a kind of oratorio. As staged, and as photographed for the Canberra Times, this could almost be the Messiah. All in all, is it farfetched to see the Australian War Memorial as temple of a civil religion? That term goes back to Rousseau, who defined civil religion as ‘a body of social sentiments without which no man can be either a good citizen or a faithful subject’. The American sociologist Robert N. Bellah gave it new life in 1967. Where Rousseau was prescribing, Bellah was discovering. He found that the American nation had long embraced a

460 Sacred Places

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¥ ye Met Bek, psy a Fae Forecourt of the Australian War Memorial as quasi-ecclesiastical space: ‘The Broken Years’, 1984 ‘Photograph Canberra Times

faith parallel to denominational Christianity and Judaism, a religion composed not exactly of dogmas but of two ‘themes’, one present from the beginning and the other emerging at the time of the Civil War: the theme of Americans as a people chosen by God, a new Israel; and the theme of death, sacrifice and rebirth. Among scholars who have applied the idea to other societies, Antoine Prost argues that France’s cult of the war dead, as practised after 1918, fits Rousseau’s definition. If the term is to help us understand Australia or any other country, it must pass two tests. First, we need to be sure that in defining certain phenomena as religious we are not weakening the meaning of words. Our culture now subjects the very language of religion to a process of secularization. We have cult films, pop icons, even, on television, a cult

icon. Thoroughly secular candidates are put up for the position of Australia’s civil religion, from fairness to football; but fairness is an ethic,

not a religion, and if we count football as a religion we are perilously

Australia Remembers 461 close to the joke that makes the game of two-up on Anzac Day a religious

pursuit because its devotees shout ‘Jesus Christ!’ The very idea of the sacred, traditionally used to encompass but extend beyond the religious, has undergone secularization. Protesters at the terracing of a mound at the Sydney Cricket Ground hold up a banner inscribed “The hill too is a sacred site’. If ‘sacred’ means only protected against questioning, or elevated or worth preserving, then applying it to war memorials does not quite define them as sites of a religion. But Australians commemorating the war dead have made the word mean more than that. They have used the term ‘sacred sites’ with solemn intent. The Australian War Memorial and other repositories of the Anzac tradition do enjoin not just respect but an awareness of the holy.

Australian history before 1915 could not supply that theme of divine national purpose which Bellah perceives as the first component of America’s civil religion. The first settlers were no chosen people, except in the sardonic jest that they were chosen by the best judges in England. The Great War delivered ordeal, achievement and loss comparable with

the Americans’ Civil War. From Gallipoli to Villers-Bretonneux and Beersheba, the fighting and dying of men in the AIF yielded a solemn new theme in their country’s rhetoric. The word ‘Anzac’, immediately and permanently protected by law from profane use, encapsulated the theme. Five elements had converged to create it. Three of them were shared with all other participant nations: the special place of military endeavour for European minds in an age when the spirit of nationalism was at its height; the unnaturally early death of so many men; and the inability of suddenly bereaved people to draw adequate comfort from their traditional Christian faith. For Australians there were two other elements. First, men from colonies had proved to be at least as valorous

and proficient on battlefields as men from the imperial heartland. Australians shared this reassuring discovery with New Zealanders and Canadians; but the squalid peculiarity of their own nation’s origin made the performance of the AIF especially precious. Secondly, theirs alone among the contending armies was composed entirely of volunteers, men

who could be celebrated for having freely offered their lives in the service of their country. For reasons global and local, the dead soldiers became objects of solemn reverence.

462 Sacred Places From the beginning the cult of Anzac combined in varying propor-

tions what the makers of the memorial at Balmain in 1916 called the national, the sacred and the military, as the soldiers were honoured for bravery and skill with arms, for making the nation, and for sacrifice. Around the earliest, wartime memorials, pride was signalled more vividly than grief, for the war was still to be won and more young men had to be induced into it. Mourning blended more richly with celebration after 1918; sounds and sights of triumph were rare. Christianity had a complex relationship with the cult of Anzac. Ina society with no church established by law, organizers of ceremony might

or might not remove prayers, bible readings and hymns in order to accommodate Catholic sentiment and canon law. They might even keep clergymen off the platform altogether, for that reason and also from a

feeling that the presence of denominational Christianity was not required for Anzac commemoration and might even impede it. The rarity of the cross as a monumental form had a similar significance, and

so had the scarcity of biblical inscriptions on memorials and the undogmatic character of such passages as were chosen. The makers might not like the branding of such ceremonies, forms and messages as secular, since that could imply, wrongly and even offen-

sively in their view, a lack of spiritual purpose. Nevertheless, for one reason and another, few of the artefacts devised for the cult of Anzac did

invite congregations to take comfort from orthodox Christian declarations about life, death and the hereafter. Their name liveth for evermore. We will remember them. Lest we forget. These were the basic texts of Australia’s civil religion.

The quest for the right words and images for life and death took makers back to pre-Christian Greece. When the plans for Melbourne’s Shrine were revealed, the Argus foresaw a continuous line of worshippers

ascending the steps into the inner shrine. Worshipping whom or what? The inscriptions on the outside wall were Athenian, and at the sacred centre the worshipper could read according to spiritual taste the truncated message ‘Greater love hath no man’. In Sydney’s Martin Place the

plain tomb and its guardian soldier and sailor could bear whatever reading the Anzac marcher, the wreath-layer, the passer-by, was moved

to make of its inscription to Our Glorious Dead. Around monuments

Australia Remembers 463 large and smali, people gathered for ceremonies accommodating a variety of judgements about the right way to mourn the war dead and honour the survivors. At every meeting of an RSL sub-branch, the presi-

dent led returned soldiers in reciting their solemn and civil litany composed of those lines from Binyon and Kipling. The words became so hallowed that nobody needed to ask exactly what they signified. Even the most articulate Australians might find the meaning of the cult inef-

fable. Thus Kenneth Slessor, poet and journalist, described in 1952 Anzac Day in Martin Place: ‘And here every procession pauses to look silently at the bronze figures, the stone covered with dying flowers, the Cenotaph which is our fumbling expression of something that can never be expressed’. On the eve of Remembrance Day 1959 a blind returned

soldier gave his own expression of that something by polishing the bronze sailor’s boots.

The second test for the notion of civil religion is more searching. When we use the term, do we beg questions about responses, assuming full commitment to a cult and not taking into account indifference, abstinence or opposition? That is certainly a defect in Bellah’s use of the idea for the USA. We need to consider not just the supply of statements and symbols and rituals but also the demand for them. The shrines of the cult can repel as well as attract. Ever since 1915 the message embodied in Anzac monuments, ceremonies and rhetoric has been contested by overlapping categories of dissenters—socialists, pacifists, Christians, nationalists unable to believe that the nation was born at Gallipoli. Sometimes the unbelievers spoke up and shocked: Hugo Throssell at Northam in 1919, Professor John Anderson at Sydney in 1931. The apostasy of Throssell VC might be forgiven. Anderson’s denunciation of the cult was intended and received as blasphemy. More commonly, the alienated and the doubters stayed away and shut up, so obligatory had the religion of Anzac become in public speech. Though the cult did not logically entail conservative politics, it was thoroughly congenial to bearers of anti-Labor ideology. Counter-rhetoric became bolder after World War II and especially from the mid-1960s, when youth

versus age became an issue throughout the western world and young Australians were being conscripted to war in Vietnam. The underwear on the Cenotaph was a youthful gesture of irreverence, and so was the

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