Bean was deeply moved by the sufferings of the men. He wrote in his diary:. The men were simply turned in there as into some ghastly giant mincing machine. They have to stay there while shell after huge shell descends with a shriek close beside them — each one an acute mental torture — each shrieking tearing crash bringing a promise to each man — instantaneous — I will tear you into ghastly wounds — I will rend your flesh and pulp an arm or a leg — fling you half a gaping quivering man like these that you see smashed around you one by one to lie there rotting and blackening like all the things you saw by the awful roadside, or in that sickening dusty crater.
Ten or twenty times a minute every man in the trench has that instant fear thrust tight upon his shoulders — I don't care how brave he is — with a crash that is a physical pain and a strain to withstand. A month later the idea of a memorial museum for Australian soldiers was born, as Bean's assistant and confidant Arthur Bazley later recalled:. We used to sleep feet to head — C. Bean , Padre Dexter, myself, and others — and although I cannot recall the actual conversations today I do remember that on a number of occasions he talked about what he had in his mind concerning some future Australian war memorial museum.
He returned to Australia and worked as a journalist, and in was chosen by the journalists' association as official war correspondent. Bean went ashore during the landing on Gallipoli on 25 April , and for the rest of the war followed the movements and battles of Australian soldiers. As well as conceiving and lobbying for the creation of the Australian War Memorial, he was appointed to oversee the production of the volume Official History of Australia in the War of — and he wrote six of the volumes, completing the last in John Treloar — contributed more than any other person to the realisation of Bean's vision.
Treloar, who came from Melbourne, also landed on Gallipoli on 25 April In , as a captain, he was appointed to head the newly created Australian War Records Section AWRS in London, responsible for collecting records and relics for the future museum and to help the official historian in his work. After the war Treloar devoted his life to the Memorial, and influenced almost every aspect of its development. Lieutenant Colonel J.
Treloar devoted himself especially to improving the quality of the unit and formation war diaries, which recorded operations and activities daily, and to ensuring that after the war the official historian would have a well-ordered collection of the diaries and supplementary primary source material to work from. Others, such as Sid Gullett and Ernie Bailey, went out into the field to collect relics or material evidence of the conflict.
At the same time orders were given to soldiers to do their bit in collecting for the projected museum and, in this way, some 25, relics were gathered. Bean and Treloar also arranged for the appointment of official war artists and photographers. Last updated: 5 February Guided by the Council, teams from each of these areas contribute to the mission of the Memorial.
The Memorial's purpose is to commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war. Its mission is to assist Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society. About the Australian War Memorial. His evocative portraits of serving personnel offer profound insight to the inner turmoil of some soldiers.
Today, post-traumatic stress disorder is medically and officially acknowledged — although the Australian military still struggles badly with identification and treatment of the afflicted. While the memorial does tell the stories of first world war milestones and battles that Gallipoli has culturally eclipsed Pozieres, Fromelles, Ypres, Passchendaele, Hamel, Villers Bretonneux, Beersheba and Damascus , Nelson is mindful of recounting demobilisation and the generational social and emotional legacies of the great war.
A lot of them were gassed, limbless, disfigured, psychologically wounded — all of that. Families were carers, you had fatherless families, you had degrees of domestic violence associated with post traumatic stress, you had the pro-conscriptionists and the anti-conscriptionists still deeply embittered and polarised — the shirkers versus those who served. There was a sense that a man who had served or a woman who had gone off One of the things I will be thinking about then [in ] is some sort of special exhibition.
There is credible academic research pointing to 60, such deaths in Queensland alone a figure with profound national implication and which parallels the number of Australian fatalities in world war one.
The appointment of Nelson, long and correctly viewed as a progressive on Indigenous issues, brought false hope that the memorial would change its position on depicting frontier violence. Nelson has listened to and read the arguments from historians, Indigenous leaders and others about why the memorial should change its position.
But he believes the story of frontier violence should be fully told by the National Museum of Australia not the memorial; a monument in Canberra though not at the war memorial should commemorate those who died; frontier conflict was immensely complex and did not amount to war, and that serving Indigenous personnel do not support portraying frontier conflict at the Australian war memorial.
Prominent historians say this is wrong and point to, among other units, the Military Mounted Police, raised by the British army in Sydney in , which participated in numerous attacks on the Indigenous including at Slaughterhouse Creek in Australia was not North America.
The other problem is that after the British garrisons left, the violence where it was conducted, was conducted by colonial militia, mounted police militia and Indigenous militia. The gargoyles have long divided memorial historians between those who believe they are an offensive anachronism Indigenous people were officially considered part of the Australian fauna until that ought to be removed on cultural grounds, and those who believe they should remain as an historical testament to how Australia was.
A third, according to Nelson, believe the gargoyles were created out of respect to the original Indigenous owners of Canberra the Ngambri. In February it was determined that all 26 of the gargoyles would need replacing due to potential asbestos contamination.
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