For Our Country — Design Anthology

Daniel Boyd and Edition Office have created a war memorial for Indigenous Australians, its inclusive design bridging individual and collective contemplation and deeper memory

Harold West’s war story starts out as a quintessentially Australian one. Joining the army with his childhood best friend George Leonard, the country kid set off with the 2nd AIF in 1941, serving with Leonard across the Middle East, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. But barely a year in, during the Kokoda campaign, Leonard was killed in action and West’s story took a rogue turn. He would leave his unit for days on end, sans uniform but carrying rations and grenades, patiently stalking enemy machine-gun nests, moving close enough to silently roll the grenades in and then slipping away amid the chaos. The ‘Ghost of Kokoda’ rode his luck until it ran out, breaking his leg behind enemy lines and contracting a fatal case of typhus while being treated. West was held in high enough esteem to be posthumously recommended for — though not awarded — a Victoria Cross, the highest military award in the Commonwealth.

But Harold West wasn’t even a citizen. He couldn’t vote, and had he survived, would’ve been ineligible for grants under the Soldier Settlement Scheme, which gave lands like those the Murrawarri man’s ancestors had lived on for millennia to returning white soldiers.

As white Australians who grew up with ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day, and all that they entail, the words ‘Lest We Forget’ are seared into our consciousness. But clearly, for Australia’s original inhabitants, forgetting has occurred too often when it comes to a military history that stretches back to the Boer War, if not earlier. To do justice to an historical injustice such as this is no easy task, but that history has begun to receive some attention in recent years; now, the Australian War Memorial’s commission of a built monument to the service of First Nations men and women is a welcome physical embodiment.

Late as it may be, it’s an architecturally interesting time to commission a memorial: their typology in the post-Second World War era has continued to shift from triumphalist monolith to quiet, abstract space that evokes contemplative individual experiences, connecting the visitor with memories of deep tragedy across spatial and temporal divides. Indeed, there are few spaces that encourage introspection quite like a modern example; perhaps we pour into them the careful deliberation that is missed in the righteous thundering of casus belli.

Within this approach, however, forms are manifold. Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe provides an existentially harrowing descent evoking that of its titular people into powerlessness and death, geometrically discomfiting monoliths looming overhead until disorientation and dread take over. By contrast, Kenzo Tange’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park frees the spirit in open, shared space, where universally appealing natural elements of open green swathes, trees and water are complemented by symbolic sculptures and the literal memorial of the A-Bomb Dome to send the same ‘never again’ message in a more calming, hopeful way.

The latter echoes the approach taken by acclaimed Indigenous artist Daniel Boyd and Melbourne-based architecture firm Edition Office, who won the Australian War Memorial’s commission for the new memorial, titled For Our Country. This was their first collaboration, though Boyd and Edition Office director Kim Bridgland are decades-long friends.

‘Daniel was invited by the AWM to participate amongst a small selection of esteemed contemporary Indigenous artists in a design competition for a new memorial sculpture to commemorate the service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women of the Australian armed forces,’ Bridgland explains. ‘He asked if we wanted to do it together, in the hope of elevating an incredibly significant project beyond the sculpture initially commissioned.’

As Bridgland describes it, Boyd and Edition Office established a conceptual framework for an ambitious memorial that would seek to reflect the lived experience and memory of all Indigenous communities, encompassing not only the sacrifice of serving men and women of the Australian armed forces envisioned by the original brief, but also the trauma and sacrifices of the frontier wars of colonisation. ‘Once we felt that we had an understanding of the responsibilities of the task,’ he says, ‘we shared sketches between us that began to form an architectural facilitator for patterns of understanding and sharing memories and stories of time, self, sacrifice and country through an Indigenous gaze.’

The creators visited the site, at the Australian War Memorial in Ngunnawal Country, multiple times so as to understand the relationship that the new memorial would have to its surroundings, particularly the existing memorial’s elevated terrace, the dome atop the Hall of Memory and the silhouette of Mount Ainslie, which flanks the site. ‘Aligning the work with the path of the sun together with these elements was crucial,’ says Bridgland. ‘The work is sited to emerge from a sheltered recess amidst a row of trees, all planted from cuttings taken from various sites of conflict around the world, and is overhung by the branches of the Lone Pine. The broad mirrored face of For Our Country faces back towards two great oak trees, to the rising sun.’

The approach to the memorial is a field of fractured basalt shards, which establishes a gathering space as well as providing a symbolic link to Indigenous history via a material used in toolmaking for tens of thousands of years. This gathering space is bordered at one side by a small pavilion whose face is a two-way mirrored veil formed from of a myriad of mirrored lenses, which captures both the landscape and the viewer in such a way that their reflection is seen to exist behind the veil. In this way, the memorial immediately creates an ‘empathetic othering’ whereby the visitor witnesses the scene existing elsewhere in space and time; for the designers, the field and its positioning of the viewer in front of the veil is critical in creating a space for contemplation of the range of the Indigenous experience of conflict and sacrifice.

The pavilion itself is a semi-circular structure of black-pigmented rammed earth, its size making for an intimate internal space with an aspect of the basalt field and landscape through the cloud of mirrored lenses. ‘The reflections within the dot-cloud veil capture the dome of the Hall of Memory rising over the shoulder of the two great oak trees, identifying its significance and importance within this site and within the armed forces, while also reflecting the silhouette of Mount Ainslie, acknowledging the difficult past of exclusion of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community,’ says Bridgland.

At the heart of the memorial, within the basalt field, the tradition of ceremonial fires is continued by means of a cast bronze fire plate, alongside which is the cast bronze mouth of a sealed earth vessel; four metres in length, the subterranean vessel holds offerings of earth — pieces of country — brought to the memorial by Aboriginal and Torres Strait elders, commemorating each nation individually while bringing them together.

A memorial does not erase injustices suffered in war or in life, but perhaps it helps us to find a path forward. Perhaps those affected will find solace, and perhaps each moment of profundity experienced by a visitor will allow some form of communion with a deeper truth. ‘It has been a profound honour to have been entrusted with the creation of this work, which is so highly significant not just to the Indigenous community, but to us all,’ says Bridgland. ‘It’s one of the many vital steps that we all must take as nation in order to pay respect to our Indigenous history and to collectively learn and share the stories so that together, we can walk a path that breaks from the cycles of trauma that have come before.’

Text / Philip Annetta
Images / Ben Hosking