Welcome to the video series Site Study: Ypres Salient, my name is Brad Manera.
When I was a boy it felt like every home that you went into you found photographs of heathly young men in ill-fitting uniforms. Usually they were sepia toned photographs on a mantlepiece or a piano.
It was as if there was an unspoken presence of the First and Second World Wars, still living in those photographs. That has disappeared now from the broader Australian community.
Our reason for remembering the war has changed. Has it become more sophisticated? Has it become more complex? I don't know but certainly the numbers of people attending commemorative ceremonies, whether it's a national event like Anzac Day or a more localised event, are growing.
It is fascinating that the war is still such a part of our identity. You would have thought that once those people who remembered the men and women who had gone to the war, and who had died as a result of it, had all gone, perhaps it was time to stop trying to remember. How do you remember something you've never experienced yourself? But that has not been the case for Australia.
Indeed, the war had such an extraordinary, all-pervasive impact. During the war our young men and women were away for a long period of time. as the war went on and the casualty figures grew there was a growing demand for memorials to the war and its victims.
In Australia in the early 20th Century, part of family life was visiting cemeteries. Family stories were relayed from one generation to the next when families would make a monthly or a yearly pilgrimage to visit where their grandparents, or their great grandparents were buried. Imagine those families unable to visit the last resting place of a loved one because they had died in a war on the far side of the world. It was a break in a tradition that existed for generations.
When a generation suffers so dreadfully from a war and 60,000 of its sons and daughters haven't come home to continue those traditions, the country needed places to remember their loss.
Australians who died in the Great War may have a headstone in France or Belgium or a name on a wall at the Menin Gate or at Villers-Bretonneux, that's all fine but of course Australians in the 1920s and 1930s couldn't travel as easily as we do today and so it became important to remember those people back home on memorials back in Australia. The memorials were primarily created as sites of commemoration.
Our national identity has sort of emerged initially through the galantry of our soldiers then contributed to by the expression of admiration of others. When Australians go to somewhere like Villers-Bretonneux in France you can see kangaroos worked into the design of the town hall and 'Do not forget Australia' in the school. But that was put there by the French, not by the Australians.
It's an interesting contrast that the Canadians at the Newfoundland Memorial in Beaumont Hamel built a massive caribou overlooking the battlefield where the Newfoundland Regiment was wiped out, but nowhere on the Western Front are you going to see a huge kangaroo.
What we have done is use the symbolism of our soldiers. For example the 2nd Division's Memorial is a digger with a slouch hat. At Bullecourt, the Australian Government paid for a Collet statue of an Australian soldier, again full battle gear but he's taken his steel helmet off and strapped it to his pack so he can wear his slouch hat. So we've got symbols of the Australian military rather than symbols of Australia and I think there's a bit of a difference in that the slouch hat dominates Australian memorials whereas you know the Canadians and the New Zealanders tend to use fern leaves or caribou. In that way the Anzacs themselves have become a symbol of Australia and our national identity.
The memorials to the First War were made by people who knew that ordinary people did extraordinary things. No memorial can depict the horrors of the war. The meaning lived in the hearts and minds of the veterns who created those memorials. No built monument in Australia could never adequately express or encasulate the terrors of the Ypres Salient or the personal tragedies of the loss of friends and loved ones.
Each memorial was expected to reflect and recognise the suffering that had reached into every home in Australia. There are some things that are so common that they don't need to be mentioned. Everybody had suffered the trauma of the Great War, so it didn't need to be restated for them. Instead they created heroic images of the Anzacs that represented all that we were proud of.
The community that produced the memorials knew the trauma nd had endured the cost. They didn't need to be reminded of it. All they wanted was somewhere that they could go and somehow feel closer to the son or daughter that they had lost and whose remains would forever be on the other side of the world.