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How do our war memorials adjust to new conflicts and a changing world? This is a question that museums that deal with conflicts have had to face for their entire existence. And increasingly, it's been social changes which have been forcing museums to make new curatorial considerations. You're listening to Tall Stories, a monocle production brought to you by the team behind the Urbanist. I'm Andrew Tuck. In this episode, Andrew Muller takes us to the Australian War Memorial and Museum in Canberra to find out the nature of and the reasons for their recent refit.
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Australians have been fighting wars since before there was an Australia, aside, obviously from the irregular campaigns waged by the early British invaders against Australia's indigenous peoples. From 1788 onwards, Australians were enthusiastic participants in many of the United Kingdom's imperial endeavours of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, around the time the original Australian colonies became a nation in 1901. Sudan against the Mahdi, South Africa against the Boers, China against the Boxers. And we'd have turned up for more if the boat could have got there in time. By the time Australia's Parliament moved to the new capital of Canberra in 1927, there was all of the above and World War I to acknowledge it, was decided to establish a national memorial and museum in Canberra. Work started in the 1930s, and by the time it was open to the public in 1941, there was obvious cause to wonder if it was going to be big enough. I went there pretty often in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I lived in Canberra as a kid, a reflection partly of the fact of being a military brat, mostly of the fact that in Canberra in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there wasn't a lot else to do on weekends. I went back a few weeks ago for the first time in ages. It was, in some respects, an underwhelming visit. This is not anybody's fault. The museum is in the process of a massive refit, so many of its more spectacular exhibits are temporarily elsewhere, including its usual centrepiece, G for George, the Lancaster bomber, flown by no. 460 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II, which survived a statistically freakish 90 missions over Germany. But there is still plenty to see, and the plenty there is to see strikes me as more or less an exemplar of how such an institution should present itself. It's not just that the war memorial is a beautiful building, though. It is that an Art Deco cathedral looking down Anzac Parade across Lake Burley Griffin to the old Parliament House at the foot of Capitol Hill. And its replacement looming above it's that it is a demonstration of how to commemorate the rather than celebrate. And this isn't new. The dioramas which intrigued me as a kid, sprawling three dimensional representations of Australians in action in World War I from Gallipoli to the Western Front to the Middle east have been there since the museum was established, but lack the jingoism which might have been expected of that age. They depict war as a grim but occasionally necessary task rather than any noble or glorious adventure. Some more recent exhibits have been correctly adjusted to recognise that war brings out the worst as well as the best in US. An updated commentary Next to the kit worn in Afghanistan by Australia's most decorated soldier of the modern era, Corporal Ben Robert Smith of the Special Air Service notes the recent legal actions which have left him damned as a war criminal. The exhibit on Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War includes the protests against it, but heroism is acknowledged when deserved, whether the ingenuity, solidarity and forbearance of Australian soldiers imprisoned by Japan during World War II or the indubitable dash cut by the fourth Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917, launching what may have been the last successful mounted cavalry charge in the history of warfare. Overall, however, the Australian War Memorial presents conflict as something to be endured, not enjoyed. Outside stands an appropriately unfussy statue of General Sir John Monash, a relatively recent addition to the surrounding gardens. Monash was very arguably the finest commander of World War I, unarguably one of the greatest Australians of any era, though the sculptors Sarah Holland Batt and Charles Robb have adorned him with his formidable chest full of medals, they have dressed him in a suit, not a uniform. Monash, whose loathing of war was commensurate with his aptitude for it, would have approved.
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Tall Stories is a monocle production from the team behind the Urbanist. This episode was written by Andrew Muller and produced and edited by David Stevens. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes every week. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City Lovers.