The Age Online

Home   >   Features   >   National   >   Article

Australia remembers its war dead

November 2, 2003

Printer friendly version Print this article
Email to a friend Email to a friend

The memorial is crafted from 200 tonnes of Western Australian granite and features the names of battles and the home towns of those who served.
Picture: Richard Frith

A distinctive new war memorial will remind Britons what our 'magnificent fighting men' did for their country, writes Marion Frith in London.

The John Howard who steps forward on November 11 to unveil the Australian War Memorial in London will be more than a prime minister who has deployed troops of his own. He will also be a son and a grandson - an Australian like so many others shaped by the legacy of their family's war-time service.

Howard's reverence for Australia's military history, and the men and women who suffered and died with unwavering patriotism for a still infant nation, is a matter of record. His father, Lyall, was gassed and wounded on the Western Front; his grandfather, Walter, wounded in the war that was to have ended all wars. It was a determined PM who in 2000 finally found the place where father and son had come across each other on the battlefields of France in 1918 - a meeting recorded in Lyall Howard's diary with a poignant "Met Dad".

So when John Howard dedicates the memorial, speaking to a crowd that will include the Queen, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and 28 Australian war veterans and widows, it will be, few doubt, one of his proudest moments. His family's personal story and his country's political one will have merged in a monument at the heart of the Commonwealth.

"It is to be hoped this memorial brings awareness to a new generation of the role Australia played," says historian Terry Charman from the Imperial War Museum, London. "Sadly, I think, over time the role the white dominions played in both those wars has been somewhat overlooked by most British people - not by museums such as ours - but by ordinary people. They often have no idea. And yet I was on the Western Front recently . . . and I was again deeply moved and struck by the graves of just two young Australians, aged 18 and 19, boys really, who had come so far, so far from home, to fight.

"Earlier generations, of course, knew that. They knew of the reputation Australians had as magnificent fighting men . . . not very good when it came to discipline . . . but tough fighters. That's lost with most people nowadays, though. They just don't know what Australia did for Britain."

The memorial curves in a sweep evocative of the Australian landscape around traffic-snarled Hyde Park Corner. Still hidden by hoardings, the grey-green of its huge granite blocks sings of gum trees, billabongs and wide horizons - memories of a landscape that more than 100,000 young men who went off to war never saw again.

Etched into the stone, and caught by the light, the names of the battles that became part of our history rise from the names of the towns that gave up their sons to fight them. Water and light wash over both. It is a powerful and moving tribute, but it's also a complex engineering feat that has been completed to exasperatingly unrealistic deadlines.

The memorial curves in a sweep on Hyde Park Corner, "a nightmare to finish on time", says Australian stonemason Pieter Boer.

"In theory, there's no way we should have been able to get this finished on time," stonemason Pieter Boer says as he stands back to watch a preliminary clean-up of the structure. His company, Stoneplus, from Sydney, only got the final go-ahead for the project at Easter.

Since then it has crafted close to 200 tonnes of Western Australian granite into the design developed by the architectural firm Tonkin Zulaikah Greer in association with artist Janet Laurence. It is the same firm that created the Vietnam Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Canberra.

Boer has had a team of 14 in London for three months, living out of a hotel and working dawn to dusk and beyond, seven days a week, to get it finished for its Remembrance Day unveiling.

"It's been a nightmare," Boer says. "I've done nothing except worry for the past six months. It's been one big bloody headache." As he lists the challenges, including the fact that each of the 500-plus blocks and 1640 pavers is a unique, computer-generated shape and measurement and that "there just isn't the geometry" for the distinctive curve of the wall, Boer projects the spirit and humour he and his multicultural Australian workforce have imbued into the project.

Like Howard, Boer has his family's story invested in this. Among his team are his two sons, Pieter jnr, 20, and Phillip, 19 - the three have toiled together and are now ready to head home to the southern summer, clearly thrilled that they are carving their own place into their country's history.

"My parents lived through occupied Europe," the Dutch-born Boer says. "I came to Australia when I was a kid. Mine is the first generation that's never seen war...

"It's an honour to be part of this; of course it is. But the only thing the boys don't like is that." He points to the bronze inscription, a 1941 quote from Robert Menzies: "Whatever burden you are to carry, we also will shoulder that burden." Boer mimes a cheerful vomit, an impromptu tribute to the diggers' attitude that Terry Charman says so appalled the British officers. "That's the only thing that's not Australian, that sort of grovelling, that sort of promise... No, we don't like that."

The idea for a memorial to Australians had been floated almost from the end of the First World War. But it was not until the centenary of Australia's Federation that Prime Ministers Howard and Blair announced it would finally be built. Blair spoke then of the fantastic sense of comradeship between the Australian and British forces who fought alongside each other. Once a site was finally chosen, Westminster City Council's approval for the plan was swift.

The principal architect, Peter Tonkin, described the design as the "sweep of the Australian landscape, the breadth and generosity of our people, the openness that we believe should characterise our culture". And the Australian high commissioner, Michael L'Estrange, who took up his post about the same time the project was given the go-ahead, and has had carriage of the London end of it since its inception, says it has fulfilled that promise.

"The thing it evokes for me... is that in an intensely British part of the world you have this intensely Australian landscape," L'Estrange says. He believes its beauty and pathos is amplified by the fact so many young Australian soldiers were stationed in Britain en route to the front, many even in Hyde Park itself.

The 24,000 place names etched into the memorial record the home towns and birthplaces of those who served. They're superimposed on the names of 47 hauntingly iconographic battles: Gallipoli, of course, Kokoda, Pozieres, Rabaul, Gaza, Coral Sea, Lone Pine... a long list of courage and of loss.

The huge, seemingly haphazard mountain of granite rests on a reinforced concrete base, supported by a complex underpinning system that ensures the adjacent underground subway was not put at risk of collapsing.

"It's fairly complex for what people actually see," says the British site manager Paul Mock. "One of the challenges is this has an infinite lifespan. Most buildings are designed and built with an anticipated lifespan of about 90 years." A substantial underground plant room houses the electrics, hydraulic pumps, 7000-litre water tank and filters.

Mock also cites, good-humouredly, the challenge of welding the very different British and Australian building-site cultures into one. He shakes his head at the site drawings pinned up behind him, for instance, which are boldly headed: "The big bloody picture." It's a cultural gap Boer has also enjoyed.

"The Brits think we're weird," he says. "They can't work out why half the country would get up at 4am to go to a dawn service. I think they are more about forgetting. I don't know that they really get what this stirs in all of us."

Still, the positioning of the memorial defies Londoners not to notice it. It shares the park with the imposing Wellington Arch, pivotal in the processional route linking Buckingham Palace and Admiralty and Marble arches.

"When you look at the huge losses suffered by Australia, especially in proportion to its very small population, it is very sobering," Charman says. "Especially in the First World War, but also in the second, Australia was very much seen as the lion cubs rallying to the motherland. Any interests of its own Australia had were seen by Britain as parochial and irrelevant."

Come this Remembrance Day, though on the 85th anniversary of Armistice Day, the origins of the sacrifice will again be temporarily lost to history, as for those who gather to mourn the political becomes the personal. Finally, the footprints of the Australians who answered Britain's call to war will be indelibly marked in the centre of the city where their individual fates - and their descendants' stories - were so indiscriminately determined.


General features

National features

World features