Forgetting the wars: Australian war memorials and amnesia

While recent studies have revealed that the rate of memorials appears to be increasing in tandem with the memory boom, this chapter examines the role of forgetfulness in Australian war memorials—notably, the manner in which memorials, and their designs, are active participants in the role of forgetting and in ‘masking’ aspects of war and war memory. Traditional figurative memorials portray the digger as the ideal figure of the classical hero or a type of noble innocent and, in doing so, they preserve mythologies while masking the slaughter of the battlefield and the effects and cost of war to participants and survivors. It is the complex and fluid nature of remembrance and forgetting that is at the heart of this chapter

The Cultural Biography of a Western Australian War Memorial

In common with other western countries, there is resurgence in war commemoration in Australia indicating a serious pursuit of identity and a national story on a collective and personal level. A widespread academic and popular interest in war memory and material culture such as war memorials has emerged. War memorials often find their way on to heritage registers. This paper advances cultural biography as an approach to determine the significance of war memorials arguing that this may give a deeper understanding of its community meaning than present methods. Emerging in archaeology cultural biography considers the way that social interactions between people and objects over time create meaning. Using the Katanning war memorial statue in Western Australia as a case study, this paper argues that a cultural biographical approach may uncover a deeper cultural significance resulting from a focus on relationships than from the traditional focus on the memorial as object

Children's Literature, Text and Theory: What Are We Interested in Now?

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Picture Books, Mimesis and the Competing Aesthetics of Kinesis and Stasis

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: It has been a long-standing presupposition in Western art that a subject's inner self is made visible by physical movement. As an index of both self-expression and self-control, represented movement is understood as not only expressing what a character feels, but also revealing that character's ethical or moral state. This presupposition has dominated picture book art since its inception, so that conventional significances attributed to bodily postures and gestures, in the context of the particular narrative roles assigned to characters, readily convey an illusion of mimetic realism and— perhaps more importantly— orient audiences attitudinally and ideologically towards the represented material. To take a simple example, an upright stance expresses a range of positive meanings ranging from physical to moral well-being, whereas a character inclined to stoop or slouch expresses negative attributes, ranging from dejection to anti-social attitudes. "The latter is very apparent in, for example, the posture of Dave in Shirley Hughes's Dogger (1977), where, after the loss of his favourite toy, he is a dejected figure walking through the School Summer Fair (see Figure 1). The bowed head, stooped shoulders and hands in pockets signify his dejection, and the darkness of mood is perhaps underlined by the shadow at his feet. But as Thomas Pavel points out with reference to fiction, 'while it is right to see mimesis as essential for understanding what fiction is, it is nevertheless wrong to see mimesis as adequate for understanding what fiction does" (2000, p.521). The posture here might rather connote pensiveness, except that the accompanying verbal text details Dave's dislike of the pleasure his sister is finding in the day and his consequent decision to go off on his own, and if is this that prompts an audience to interpret the posture and the shadow as I have done. Text and picture interaction thus overdetermine meaning here

COMMEMORATION, MEANING, AND HERITAGE OF WESTERN AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIALS.

Recent widespread interest in commemoration has underlined the continuing role of Australian war memorials as sites of memory and places of community identity. These memorials are heavily contested sites at the confluence of diverse community meanings, memory and politics. Current challenges are to maintain the relevance of war memorials in the face of changing meaning and local planning circumstances. This paper discusses recent Western Australian research in collaboration with the Returned and Services League to study the contested meanings of war memorials, their design, setting and planning issues and recover them as significant heritage and markers of community identity and citizenship

Constructions of Female Selves in Adolescent Fiction: Makeovers as-Metonym

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From Eden to Suburbia: Perspectives on the Natural World in Children’s Literature

Books with a focus on the natural world are written for young readers with a variety of purposes, but broadly speaking constitute a spectrum measured by the degree of emphasis and/or explicitness falling on information or advocacy. At any point along the spectrum, therefore, the positionality of children, whether as participant characters and/or as implied audience, is a key concern of text. Children are apt to be thought of as nature-associated, both because they seem more overtly to display organic embeddedness than do adults, and because they are commonly attributed with an affinity with nature-associated, indigenous peoples pursuing traditional lifestyles. Historically, moreover, the child body has been deemed 'irrational', lacking in discipline and uncontrolled, and hence it is constructed as being much closer to nature. By seeking to invert, or at least evade, the culture-nature hierarchy of Western rationality, nature writing has the potential, through form and function, to valorize the situating of (or the 'already situatedness' of) those bodies within pro-environment discourses. But because the natural world has been coded very differently in the past, other possibilities still exist. As Richard T. Twine reminds us, the intersection between the mastery of nature and nature-associated peoples takes place in organically embedded bodies (Twine 2001, p.32)

Forgetting, sacrifice, and trauma in the Western Australian State War Memorial

Built in 1929, the Western Australian State War Memorial was not the grand structure that many wanted, and its construction was hindered by the resounding failure of two appeals for funds from an apparently apathetic public. State government and city authorities refused to assist unless the memorial was utilitarian, a stance deeply opposed by a State War Memorial Committee committed to a monument and shrine. However, the familiar debate about utility versus monument in war commemoration not only underlined tensions about the visible public recognition due to returned soldiers and the way that the fallen should be honoured, but it coalesced around the problem of how the concepts of sacrifice and trauma generated by the First World War might be memorialised and represented. This article pursues the argument that sacrifice and trauma are crucial to understanding why the committee rejected a utilitarian memorial and persisted with their monument scheme

The Architecture of Discipline The Perth Drill Hall

The Perth Drill Hall located in Francis Street, Perth, Western Australia is an extraordinary military building consisting of a large open space covered with an immense and peculiar curved truss roof. Constructed in 1896 the building was the first on the site of Swan Barracks which served as the Headquarters of the 5th Military District until 1992. Coupled with an imposing stone gateway building the drill hall was originally built for the Perth Volunteers and was at that time the headquarters of the burgeoning military volunteer movement in Western Australia. The Perth Drill Hall was one of a number of such architectural spaces constructed in Western Australian at the end of the nineteenth century for various military volunteer groups in response to a perceived need for the colony to take some responsibility for its own defence. Drill halls are spaces designed for a specific purpose - military drill and other related military activities. In a Foucaultian sense they were intended as spaces which would support the moulding of young men into an efficient fighting force. However there were other benefits to drill and military style education which inculcated responsible and moral behavior. These benefits were not lost on parallel youth organisations such as the Boys Brigade, the Boy Scouts and various cadet movements also charged with the defence (in various measures) of the British Empire. Against this background this paper looks at the heritage and architecture of the Perth Drill hall and other Western Australian drill halls in terms of concepts of discipline and discusses how the designed spaces of the drill hall were intended as a support for particular architectural and social practices which were embodied in the purpose and motivation of military style youth and volunteer organisations. The purpose of this discussion is to enrich understanding of drill halls and similar military buildings in terms of their embodiment of social practices leading to an enriched heritage interpretation