War Memorials in the Australian Landscape

Small town memorials

No matter how small every town has one;

Maybe just the obelisk;

A few names inlaid;

More often full-scale granite, Marble digger (arms reversed),

Long descending lists of dead:

Sometimes not even a town,

A thickening of houses

Or a few unlikely trees Glimpsed on a back road

Will have one.

1919, 1920:

All over the country; Maybe a band, slow march; Mayors, shire councils; Relatives for whom

Print was already Only print; mates, Come back, moving Into unexpected days;

A ring of Fords and sulkies; The toned-down bit

Of Billy Hughes from an

Ex-recruiting sergeant. Unveiled;

Then seen each day -

Noticed once a year; And then not always, Everywhere.

The next bequeathed us Parks and pools

But something in that first Demanded stone.

By Geoff Page

Geoff Page's tender and vivid poem has opened many eyes to an Australian icon. It gave the title to a collection of his verses in 1975, and was republished in Shadows from wire: poems and photographs of Australians in the Great War, which he edited for the Australian War Memorial. The poem has become, with Les Murray's "Lament for the country soldiers" (1972), possibly the best known of poems about Australians and war.

Page and Murray are among a number of poets (Thomas Shapcott and Alan Gould are others) who look back with compassion and wonder on the terrible lists of names on those memorials. Like the makers of the film Gallipoli (1981) - which the director, Peter Weir, has called a war memorial in celluloid — the poets had been influenced by Bill Gammage's book, The broken years: Australians in the Great War (1974). The novelist and poet Roger McDonald, reviewing Shadows from wire, observed that Gammage "cracks open the box where the letters and diaries of ordinary soldiers have been stored away," opening up their language to poetic imagination. Those letters and diaries have been stored in a memorial to their writers, the Australian War Memorial, an institution unique for being a combination of monument, museum and archive. One of its principal makers, C.E.W. Bean, would have been pleased to know the creative uses Bill Gammage, Geoff Page and other writers have been making of the Memorial's riches.

Writers and film-makers were looking back at the men of the AIF across two generations. They were grandchildren of the people who lived through what contemporaries called the Great War. Page, born in 1940, is grandson of the returned soldier politician, Earle Page; both Page the younger and Gammage had great-uncles on Gallipoli. Since about the mid-1980s, the works by these writers have helped to provoke a resurgence of regard for the makers of the digger legend, expressed in ever-larger numbers of men, women and children at Anzac Day gatherings around war memorials.

The memorials themselves are increasingly cherished: repaired, renovated, moved away from the endangering traffic fumes into landscaped parks. In 1995, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War, the federal government encouraged custodians everywhere to engage in Operation Restoration. As never before, the memorials are now objects   of  study:   in Judith McKay's pioneering report on conservation for the Queensland RSL, in Trevor and Shirley Mclvor's loving and colourful Salute the brave: a pictorial record of Queensland war memorials, and in War memorials of Victoria, published by the RSL in Victoria.

Scholars in many countries have turned to the subject of war commemoration in recent years, and have wondered why it was neglected for so long. How was it possible, a French historian asks, to ignore all those monuments erected after 1918, constituting as they do the greatest efflorescence of public art in the nation's history? For the neglect they point to a dislike among liberal humanist scholars of everything to do with war and a distaste among custodians of high culture for the products of artisanship. To interpret the recovery of interest they invoke the transition of 1914-18 from memory through limbo into history, the fashion for cultural studies, and other reasons both general, such as the boom in genealogical history, and local, such as the creation of the astonishing Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall at Washington DC in 1982.

 In Australia, awareness of war memorials was sharpened by the entombment of the Unknown Australian Soldier on Remembrance Day 1993. This ceremony, watched by millions on television, was both a valediction to the men of the first AIF and a culminating event in the making of the Australian War Memorial.

The state memorials of Australia, in capital cities, were inescapable presences in their landscapes: obelisks in Hobart and Perth, circle of columns with "eternal flame" in Brisbane, arch with two sets of sculpted figures in Adelaide, Cenotaph and Anzac Memorial in Sydney, and above all, high on the mound created to display it, Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, modelled on two wonders of the ancient Greek world, the Parthenon at Athens and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Love, hate or fear it, you could not easily ignore that shrine. At any rate, I, born in 1929, couldn't. My book begins with it, as I think my awareness of war memorials began with it.

The "smalltown memorials" for a long time impinged less, I think, on my generation. Search Australian literature, and I doubt whether you will find before Geoff Page's time an account of a local memorial to match this one by a visiting writer who was here for only a few weeks in 1922:

It was really a quite attractive 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 overhead on a tall pedestal it looked small and stiff and rather touching. The pedestal was in very nice proportion, and had at eye 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 Granny Rhys. Wonderfully in keeping with the place and its people, naive but quite attractive, with the stiff, pallid, delicate fawn­coloured soldier standing forever stiff and pathetic.

I have read those words from D.H. Lawrence many times since I first looked at the monument in the  New South Wales south coast town of Thirroul ("Mullumbimby" in his novel Kangaroo), and I still find them wonderfully perceptive. The figure was carved by an immigrant Italian, Alessandro Casagrande (at a time when such names were so unfamiliar that reporters spelt it at least five different ways, including Casanova). Studying its history with the help of the late Ted Johnson and more recently with Ken Dobbs, both of the Thirroul RSL, I know that its survival "forever" has been put in doubt from time to time by dangerous drivers and by officials of the RSL club who had to sell the over-capitalised site on which the "Tommy", or as we say, Digger, stood. It's safe now, thanks to the present RSL custodians and a grant from Operation Restoration enabling it to be moved back from the garden and into the newly created Woodward Park. "Old Shorty", the workers who shifted the figure in 1995 called him. For good or ill he is no longer a delicate fawn-colour, his flesh and his uniform and his gun having been painted in the cause of realism. But he is deeply cherished, and not only by Anglo-Celts.

On Anzac Day 1996 I met three people in front of the figure, inspecting the new memorial wall, Tammisha Alachlar, aged nine, and her brother Elie, aged seven, escorted by their Lebanese grandfather, looking for and finding the name of their other grandfather, W.A. Jordan, killed at Tobruk.

Their quiet act of homage has helped me to understand the endurance of regard to war memorials large and small in a multicultural Australia.

This article was written by the late Ken Inglis for the Australian War Memorial’s Wartime Magazine edition 4.