6
Introduction
Before the First World War (1914-1918) Australia had very few civic monuments. The war memorials constructed after 1918 irrevocably changed the Australian commemorative landscape and in doing so they became the new Commonwealth’s first national monuments. By the mid nineties, well before the renewed construction associated with the war’s centenary, it was estimated there was one monument for every 30 soldiers killed. The comparable figure for France is one memorial for every 45 soldiers killed (Hedger, 1995). War memorials are far from being a uniquely Australian phenomenon – indeed, the first known example, the White Monument at Tal Banat, can be traced to Syria in the third millennium BC. Nevertheless, their domination of the commemorative landscape ensures they are an Australian icon, which makes their limited use in Australian schools even more bewildering. Educators do need to ensure, however, that their students understand that they are inherently ideological, usually offer a state sanctioned version of history, are indicative of the views of the generation that built them rather than the generation they commemorate, and that how they are ‘read’ can alter over time.
Traditional war memorials
During the first great wave of memorial building in the 1920s and 1930s, sculptors and designers used symbols that were familiar to most people. During this period commemoration often ‘reconciled triumphalism and sacrificialism within narratives of Australian heroism and achievement’ (Crotty & Melrose, 2007, p. 681). Your local war memorial may therefore include any of the following symbols:
- urns and broken columns as symbols for death
- wreaths for mourning, eternal light and torches for remembrance
- crosses for sacrifice
- the laurel
- triumphal arches
- Winged Victories for victory
- globes for mankind
- columns for honour
- lions for fortitude
- water and obelisks for regeneration
- rising suns for national birth.
These symbols of Edwardian classicism brought ‘together all that seemed best and most noble in the artistic life of the civilization they had fought to preserve’ (Borg, 1991, p. xii). Traditional war memorials were therefore not considered an appropriate forum for artistic experimentation and innovation and therefore usually confined themselves to symbolic forms that were familiar to Australians of the time.
If your town or suburb has a memorial that was built during the interwar years it is likely that it is either an obelisk, a stone monolith originating in ancient Egypt, or an Australian soldier or ‘digger’ with an upturned rifle. The obelisk is the most common form of war memorial, with Queensland the only state preferring this symbol instead of the soldier statue. The obelisk possessed certain advantages: it was nonsectarian, widely recognised as a symbol of death or glory, and for communities struggling to raise the necessary funds, it could also be easily and cheaply supplied (Inglis, 2008). The obelisk at Macquari