Australian War Memorial
Canberra, ACT, Australia

16 February 2005

Canberra, the capital city of Australia, is a relatively young, entirely planned city approximately halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. One of the central sights, or focal points, of Canberra is the long stretch with the Parliament House on a lake at one end and ANZAC Parade and the Australian War Memorial on the other. The centrepiece of the Australian War Memorial is the Roll of Honour, shaded walls on a courtyard with plaques of bronze listing the names of every last Australian killed in military duty up through Afghanistan, 102,000 in all. Only twice as many names as are listed on the Vietnam War Memorial in the US alone, yet still a staggering number in light of the fact that Australia's population today (and historically) is a fraction of the population of the United States.

Putting the numbers into context is only one example of the strangeness of visiting another country's war memorial. My sense of being a "foreigner," an alien, was more keen, I think, at the war memorial than anywhere else I've been (including the grocery store). Beneath the memorial itself is an extensive museum of Australia's military history: first a colonial army defending and serving the crown, later a force for hire, eventually the means by which Australia earned itself the right to call itself an independent national power. Australia's federation into a constitutional monarchy (the transformation from colony into country) occurred in 1901, and the "Great War" less than 15 years later was both formative of the national spirit of Australia and devastating to its actual population count. World War I is thus deeply imprinted on Australia's national psyche; their emotional involvement with it even today is comparable only to the US's emotional involvement with Vietnam. (But, oh, the gist of those emotions is so very different.) On the Gallipoli peninsula in what is now Turkey, there is a beach where Australian military forces fought early in the war holding the Turks to a stalemate for months before finally withdrawing under cover of night. The legends of Australian fortitude and camaraderie during that first major Australian battle on Gallipoli were such that many today regard it as the birthplace of the Australian national spirit. The Turks later renamed that beach on Gallipoli "ANZAC cove," for the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps that fought there. On ANZAC Parade in Canberra there stands a memorial to the Turkish general who (successfully) defended that beach.

I can learn these stories, these histories, but still I cannot escape the feeling of strangeness, of deep unfamiliarity at the memorial. (I wonder if Brits and Aussies, Chinese and Congolese-- I wonder if they have felt similarly when visiting memorials in Washington, DC.) I suspect that the exhibits below and the Roll of Honour above are simply keyed into Australian nationalist symbols and myths to which I am just not sensitive, symbols that I recognize and probably even value highly, but that are not part of my sense of self-as-part-of-nation. As has happened to me before while travelling overseas, I find that my sense of nationalism-- which at home seems at best non-existent or at worst oppositional-- is much more apparent when surrounded by other, different senses of nationalist "spirit."

On a related note, after spending the day here, I find there is something very powerful about the fact that the lawmakers in Parliament House at the other end of the axisway here look out every day over a memorial to the country's citizens who died in military service. If only my own country's lawmakers had such a present reminder.