RE-MEMBERING REMEMBRANCE - Contextualising commemorative practice

Remembering who we have been as a people, while honouring those who fell, serving the nation we are still becoming. 

Illustration by Luis Crista Designs, commissioned by the author

This structure is intended as a place to connect with a story, not merely to lay flowers three or four times a year; and not merely to connect, but to engage in a life or death struggle for the soul of the nation. 

Here’s that story in just 33 words:

A little more than a hundred years ago we went to war in support of an empire to preserve White Australia, yet today we are a multicultural society that supports self-determination where ever that is possible in the world.

Those 33 words should set us dancing, rejoicing, even boasting! As a nation we have every reason to proud. And yet the race riot on Cronulla Beach in 2005 (1) sent a shudder down the spines of anyone who saw what was really happening and realised what was coming. 

Nationalism as an issue of race is not a thing of the past. The trajectory of change from White Australia to Multiculturalism seems to be in danger of faltering, being deflected, or even reversing. That's why there's a need to engage: to choose rather than merely to fall into step with one side or the other.
 

Before looking in the mind’s eye at the proposed structure there is one more point to make. What has this life or death struggle for the soul of the nation got to do with what is essentially a war memorial? 

It’s all about the need for we, the living, to do everything we can to ensure that those who fell securing the peace will not have died in vain.

 
The mission statement of the project is: to remember who we have been as a people while honouring those who fell serving the nation we are still becoming.

It’s all about the fact that what it means to be Australian is not fixed in stone but is, rather, a work in progress. It has a past, a present and a future. And we need to be, not merely alert to, but alarmed for its future.

A recent exhibition on the Second World War made the point that WWII was the pivot around which the rise and demise of Empire turns. For 5000 years Empire was assumed by everyone to be the natural, inevitable and inescapable order of human affairs. After the Second World War, Empire rapidly lost its legitimacy and was dismantled almost everywhere within 25 years. That would not have happened if the Axis Powers had won the war. We owe it to those who fell securing the Allied victory to ensure that having won the war we do not lose the peace.

It is important to be clear that the allied victory did not cause the demise of Empire, but that it provided the opportunity. The cause of the demise of Empire was twofold: our knowledge of and response to the Holocaust; and decolonisation. The former made us question and redefine everything that we previously believed about what it means to be human. For example, it definitively put an end to the legitimacy of racism. It extinguished the White Man’s Burden. Decolonisation gave us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves – to redefine our relationships with the people of former colonies – no longer masters but partners. 

Those two vectors are what drove our transition from White Australia to Multiculturalism. That is what the Allied victory made possible. That is why remembrance cannot be about merely turning up on special days and laying wreaths. It is why remembrance has to be about re-membrance.

Studies of memory show that a remembered experience has hundreds if not thousands of parts. When I remember an experience it is constructed anew from the ground up, each time with a slightly different set of parts and in a slightly different order. Every memory I have is not only about a thing or event in the past but also about the way I choose to re-member in the present. Every experience I remember is re-membered. The way I remember is mostly shaped by what is going on around me at the time. Context shapes the way I re-member. Though I am rarely deliberate in the way I choose to remember, I can deliberate. I can shape, change and choose the context in which I re-member. This structure is about deliberating on who and how we choose to remember.

That is the story that is mediated by the design of the proposed memorial.

At its centre is a cube of black granite. One or two people have sought assurance that this is not a representation of the Kabah! Looking carefully shows that it isn't. The Kabah is not a cube. But the City of God in the Book of Revelation is. Inside the cube is an empty catafalque, and a small still light, and artwork to rival the interior of any Egyptian tomb depicting the journey into the afterlife: the fallen of both sides equal before God and no longer enemies. The small still light functions in the same way as a sanctuary lamp which, in that context, signals a Real Presence;  but, in this case, bears witness to a Real Absence. That is what a Cenotaph is: a place where people go because there is no place to go. Loved ones are absent, in a war grave, or decayed into the soil where they fell, or in the ocean. That small still light bears witness to their existence and conjures their presence in this place, despite their absence.

Surrounding the cube are thirty three granite shards in concentric arcs that simultaneously convey two contrary possibilities. On the one hand they may represent the gradual on-going construction of secure borders – a work in progress. On the other hand they may represent the dismantling of walls previously built, in response to the achievement of lasting peace. Though partially demolished, parts of the walls are left in place to help people remember. They are covered on the outside with plaques recording the details of every war the nation has ever been to, and that includes the details of the enemy dead and wounded as well. 

On the inside of the walls the lower perimeter depicts to the infinite landscape of war graves. Above that are episodes from the Iliad - one of the foundational pillars of Western culture - and the Persian Wars. And then ascending to the top of the shards images depicting the changing relationship between the people we have been and the people we have collided with on our way to becoming the people we are still becoming. The narrative depicts the journey from White Australia to Multiculturalism within the larger context of the rise and demise of Empire. 

Where is Aboriginal Australia in this? The 140 year defence of their country is depicted on the exterior of the cube. It is the primary focus of the Memorial Precinct because it is the the war that made us all, indigenous and non-indigenous Australians alike, the people we are today.  Accomplishing this would involve negotiation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians that would integrate pre and post contact histories into a shared consciousness of what it means to be Australian.

The two pillars at the front of the precinct acknowledge National Service in Australia, on the left, and serving personnel on the right.

A retired General to whom I spoke about the project was adamantly opposed to, in his words, singling out one not very significant part of the Australian military (National Service). But more than merely acknowledging the men who were called up, it remembers the debate – the furious campaigns over conscription, starting not in 1964 but in 1911. It remembers the 300,000 boys who turned 12 between 1911 and 1915, 150,000 of whom refused to undergo military training, 30,000 of whom were prosecuted, and 7,000 of whom went to gaol. It remembers the Militia, so despised by Regulars that they were called Chocolate Soldiers (Chocos) – the very blokes who stopped the Japanese from reaching Port Moresby while the 2AIF was on its way home to defend Australia. It remembers the Korean conscripts, and of course it remembers the 60,000 conscripted for Vietnam out of the 800,000 who were eligible for call-up between 1964 and 1972; and the 15,000 who went to Vietnam and died at twice the rate of Regular soldiers because they made up the bulk of the Infantry Battalions. The Regular Army has always prided itself on being a volunteer Army. It did not want National Service any more than university students did. But from the outset, Nashos became indistinguishable from Regulars in both training and deployment. Aussie blokes, when called upon to do what they wouldn’t ordinarily have chosen to do, rose to the occasion and didn’t flinch. That, General, is not an insignificant part of Australian Military history.

The pillar that acknowledges all those who are serving at any particular time calls attention to the role of armed forces in maintaining peace – underpinning the dramatic decline in violence in recorded human history – from a rate of 60 men in every hundred dying at the hand of another man to less than one in our time.(2)

The artwork in the whole precinct is intended to work in exactly the same way as the stained glass windows of a cathedral. The parallel between the Cenotaph and a Cathedral is neither inappropriate nor over the top. 

ANZAC has been described as Australia’s Civil Religion. In those terms this project could be thought of as Mullumbimby’s Cathedral Building Project. Its circular exterior echoes structures such as Stonehenge and other Standing Stones; and the cube at the centre echoes the Heavenly City of the Book of Revelation. These shapes were not chosen to imitate other sacred sites. Rather, Stonehenge and the Heavenly City were built and imagined the way they are because those geometrical forms mediate the sacred in our psyche.

The proposed project, if realised, will function as a sacred site in the same way as a Cathedral. A Cathedral proclaims a vision of what it means to be human. This project’s artwork is intended to proclaim a vision of what it means to be Australian – by acknowledging who we have been as a people and honouring those who have fallen serving the nation we are still becoming... a becoming simultaneously constrained and enabled by two fundamental principles: the fair-go and the rule of law - justice & equity. By embracing past present and future, the artwork would proclaim change and diversity as the essence of what it means to be Australian and what the Anzac Spirit is now called upon to defend.

But, can such a small community afford the price of such a project - or should it?

Could the people of medieval Europe, with access to a fraction of the resources available to us in our times, afford to build Cathedrals? If not, how is it that they flourished into the cities we know today?

Such flourishing has the potential to be much wider than the town, district, and region. For the same reason that the Prisoner of War Memorial in Ballarat was designated as a National Memorial, the first outside of the National Capital, this precinct could become the epicentre of a national metamorphosis (3) - a temple of the nation’s Civil Religion, or, more realistically, a shrine (think of the difference between the Temple of Jerusalem and the Shrine at Bethel), promulgating a narrative of change, driven by the core values of justice and equity, yet ever vulnerable to the denial and repudiation of those values by barbarians at the gates and within; attended by a Corps of Guards who also function as visitor guides; and maintain a website which promotes Community, Regional, State and National events; and stimulates dialogue about what it takes to ensure that “having won the war we do not lose the peace”; and thereby ensure that those who fell serving the nation we are still becoming will not have died in vain.

Illustration by Luis Crista Designs, commissioned by the author

 (1) The 2005 Cronulla riots were a series of race riot in Sydney which began in the beachside suburb of Cronulla on 11 December and spread over the next few nights to additional suburbs.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots

(2) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a 2011 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author argues that violence in the world has declined both in the long run and in the short run and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

(3) Roughly 11,000 years ago, a temple was constructed at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. The temple is comprised of large circular structures with walls made of unworked drystone and numerous T-shaped monolithic pillars of limestone that are up to 10 feet high. A bigger pair of pillars is placed in the center of the structures. There is evidence that the structures had a roof. Perhaps most interesting are the reliefs on the pillars, which include all sorts of animals, including foxes, lions, cattle, hyenas, wild boars, herons, ducks, scorpions, ants, spiders, snakes, and a small number of human-looking figures. The temple at Göbekli Tepe suggests that civilization did not precede religion, but that religion preceded civilization. In other words, it is a religious temple that was built thousands of years before the first cities began to appear, which seems to show that cities arose around the temple.
Andrew Newberg, The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience