War Memorials

War memorials are a major -and very visible - part of Australia's war heritage. There are over two thousand civic memorials to the dead of the First World War alone in Australia. This is the equivalent of one memorial for every thirty soldiers killed. Only France comes anywhere near matching this, with the equivalent of one memorial for every forty-five men killed in the war of 1914-18. To these First World War memorials have been added tributes to the Australian dead in the Second World War and later conflicts. War memorials are testimony to the profound trauma that war has represented for Australian society over this century. They reveal to us how communities have grieved and remembered war. They represent publicly the grief of private individuals. They also tell us how communities tried to give meaning to their aching personal loss. We do not remember the past in a cultural vacuum. When constructing war memorials and composing the inscriptions to commemorate the dead, Australian communities adopted - and adapted - existing cultural forms and public rhetoric. In war memorials therefore we can see the way in which cultural forms transplanted from Britain were adapted in Australia. We can also trace the processes of creating new national myths. War memorials also have an historical interest because they reveal that the way in which memories of war have been contested. In some ways, how we remember the past is itself a battlefield. In many communities the building of war memorials was accompanied by much community debate (see Warrnambool). War memorials came to embody a whole range of meanings: about power and social status, ideology, notions of nationalism, commitment to the empire and the place of religious faith in the community