Russell Drysdale at war
07 February 2012 by Sally Cunningham.
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News
Drysdale was not an official war artist, yet felt compelled to document his experience to provide future generations with a visual account of the period. His imagery was inspired by a period he spent living in Albury, New South Wales and explores the loneliness and isolation of war and the displacement experienced by those involved.
Experimenting with new techniques and mediums, his wartime imagery marks an important prelude to his much loved imagery of the Australian outback. In works such as Study of ‘Exercise new Hume Camp NSW’ the agitated application of ink and coloured washes show an important shift from the formalist approach he had learnt at art school. It creates a scene replete with a sense of restlessness and eerie tension.
The exhibition includes iconic works such as the painting Soldier as well as a collection of less-known illustrations that Drysdale was commissioned to produce for the wartime publications The Australian Soldier by John Hetherington and Soldier Superb by Allan Dawes. It will be on display until February 2013.
Victoria Cross records and ephemera
03 February 2012 by Craig Berelle.
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Collection Highlights,News
Documents supporting the award of the Victoria Cross are now on display at the Reading Room of the Australian War Memorial. The display is arranged to show three themes associated with Australia’s highest award for gallantry. These include official records produced leading to the award of the Victoria Cross; the ceremony of the award, which includes VC memorials and reunions; and items of commemoration, which are often autographed, such as invitations and correspondence between VC recipients, their communities and clubs.
Item of correspondence relating to Sgt Tom Derrick, 2/48 Bn RC09912The sovereign traditionally reserves the right to make the award in person, at a ceremony called an investiture. The Governor-General of Australia invested Trp Mark Donaldson with the Victoria Cross for Australia in 2009, and Cpl Benjamin Roberts-Smith in 2011. The programs of their investiture are displayed. The sovereign may honour recipients of the award with memorials and services. On display are tickets and programs of the VC Centenary, held in London in 1954. In 1992 Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a display at Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building. The three living Australian VC recipients at the time autographed the souvenir program.
Program cover for the investiture of Tpr Mark Donaldson, SAS RC08096Australia has a tradition of exhibiting the achievements of its VC recipients. A popular way of doing this is through commemorative issues of everyday products, such envelopes, stamps, and even cigarette cards. Recipients were also given first-class rail travel or memberships of clubs by a grateful nation. Acts of commemoration helped perpetuate the memory of those who died performing the actions for which they received the VC. On occasions where VC recipients gathered for a journey or reunion, menu cards and theatre programs were often autographed, exchanged or presented to the host.
It’s Dan’s Life.
30 January 2012 by Daniel McGlinchey.
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Collection,New acquisitions,News
As a duty curator in the Military Heraldry and Technology section, you discover some unexpected stories when items are donated to the Memorial. One such story was that of Sergeant Daniel Gallogly of the 6th Field Company Engineers and the embroidered souvenir from Egypt that he purchased in 1916.
The souvenir was found recently at the 5th Combat Engineer Regiment’s facilities but nothing was known about how it had come to be there. The souvenir was originally purple, representing the engineer’s colour patch but has faded significantly. The only clue to its history was embroidered on the souvenir, ‘6th Field Coy Eng, 1916, 2nd Division, Souvenir of Egypt, To Mimmie from Dan’. A search of the nominal roll of the 6th Field Company Engineers from the First World War revealed only one Daniel who had served in the unit. Confirmation was found in a letter written by Miss Mary ‘Mimmie’ McMahon in Daniel Gallogly’s service record.
Gallogly was born in Darlington, Durham, England in 1883 and arrived in Brisbane on the ship SS Perthshire on 28 June 1909. At the start of the First World War he was living in Toowoomba, Queensland, working as a bricklaying contractor. He enlisted on 24 July 1915, aged thirty two. Four months later the 6th Field Company Engineers embarked at Sydney on board HMAT A40 Ceramic.
The unit arrived in Egypt on 18 December and started training at Ferry Post. In the first three months of 1916 unit life consisted of training and surveying of railway lines and the Australian trench systems east of the Suez Canal. These were reinforced in case of any Turkish attack. Gallogly gained promotion to second corporal and in March Australian troops started to make their way to the Western Front in France.
By the beginning of January 1917 Gallogly had recovered sufficiently from his wounds to attend a rifle course in Sidmouth, Devon, England. He attained a first class qualification and passed Lewis gun training with a ‘fair knowledge’ of the weapon. After spending the next seven months in a training battalion he was deemed unfit for front line duties and returned to Australia in August.
In Gallogly’s service record, Mary ‘Mimmie’ McMahon wrote in September 1917 to the Officer in Charge of the Base Records in Melbourne to know when she could expect him home. He was discharged by the end of November 1917. Mimmie and Daniel reunited and were married on the 16 January 1918 in Queensland. They had three children Vincent, Felix and Kathleen.
After the war Gallogly continued his building work and constructed buildings around Queensland, though this was not without problems as his industrial dispute with the United Operative Brick- layers’ Society of Queensland (Toowoomba branch) would suggest. Some of the buildings he built were the Harrison Home, Toowoomba, St James’s Catholic Church and school at Coorparoo in 1925, the Marist Brothers’ Monastery at Rosalie in the late 1920s. His tender for the erection of the Commonwealth Bank in Gympie was accepted in 1927.
The Depression years affected Gallogly’s business and a newspaper article in the The Brisbane Courier suggests that he was declared bankrupt in 1931. The Second World War was not kind to the Gallogly family. Mary died in 1940 and the eldest son, Vincent, was killed while serving as a flight Sergeant in Bomber Command’s 103 Squadron RAF on 23 June 1942 over Germany.
The electoral roll of 1943 has the surviving family living in the Brisbane suburb of Albion, with Daniel listed as a public servant. He appears to have lived at this address until 1963. His date of death is unknown but he was buried in Nudgee cemetery, Brisbane, along with his wife and two of his children, Felix and his daughter Kathleen who died in 2008.
From the limited information provided by the donor of the souvenir, the Memorial through the use of digitised records, has discovered Daniel Gallogly’s story and recounted it. His narrative just one of the many that are uncovered by the Memorial during its work to remember the Australians who have served for this country.
Lockheed Hudson – Turret Structure Trial Fit
23 January 2012 by Jamie Croker.
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Collection,Conservation
After months of work treating and reproducing induvidual pieces, the complex structure which supports the Boulton Paul turret has been trial fitted. It was great to see all the seperate items come together. These parts, after final undercoating, will now be rivetted into the airframe permanately. Rear fuselage skins can then be rolled, and the Boulton Paul turret fitted.
Boulto Paul turret support structureDreaming of sponge cake in Yokohama
19 January 2012 by Emma Campbell.
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News
Fried shrimps and scallops, ham “a la King” and lemon sponge: these were the dishes that six Australian Army nurses would dream of while they were held captive in Japan during the Second World War.
Instead, the prisoners received a monotonous diet consisting mostly of rice and soya bean soup, and stew with questionable pieces of meat. On the eighth day of each month – known as “degradation” or “humiliation” day – the meagre vegetables that were issued were thrown into a cesspit and the women made to retrieve them; occasionally they were made to eat scraps from a pig bucket.
The nurses’ ordeal, which was to last three years and seven months, began 70 years ago when they surrendered to the Japanese after the invasion of Rabaul on 23 January 1942. Rabaul was the administrative capital of Australia’s Mandated Territory of New Guinea. It had a strategically important, deep-water harbour and airfields that were well-positioned for reconnaissance and bombing sorties over the Japanese naval bases in the Caroline Islands. But few resources were allocated to the protection of the garrison, and the men who tried gallantly to protect it from attack were overwhelmed by a much larger invading force.
The Australian army nurses were mostly country girls who had sailed from Sydney on the converted troopship Zealandia in April 1941. The nurses were the only servicewomen on the island and served with the 2/10th Field Ambulance, which consisted of two doctors and 20 male orderlies.
The army hospital in Rabaul had been evacuated on 22 January and transferred to the Roman Catholic mission at Vunapope. The army doctors didn’t stay on and took with them the ambulances, most of the medical supplies and the orderlies. The head nurse, Sister Kathleen Parker, and an Anglican chaplain surrendered on behalf of the hospital when the Japanese arrived.
The nurses were made to stand for hours in the blazing sun with Japanese machine-guns trained on them. That day the Japanese killed about 20 patients, as well as the chaplain. The army nurses expected to be killed too; instead they were imprisoned in a convent within the mission until July 1942, along with a small number of missionary and administrative nurses and one civilian woman. Some Australian soldiers were also imprisoned in the mission.
In early July the nurses and other internees – including the Australian soldiers — were taken by ship to Yokohama, Japan. The women spent most of the next two years under guard in the Yokohama Amateur Rowing Club, not allowed to write to their families. At first, the conditions were tolerable: they had clean toilets and cold showers were always available; hot baths were occasionally allowed. There were ping-pong sets, badminton and cards, and during the warmer months they swam in the club pool. But conditions declined after the first year in captivity: the women were regularly slapped and occasionally they were lined up at gunpoint. Red Cross officials were stopped from visiting them. They suffered greatly in the extreme cold of the winter months: their bed coverings were flimsy and heating within the building was poor or non-existent, so to stay warm they slept two to a bed.
Food was always on their minds, and a recipe book compiled by Sister Eileen Callaghan and held at the Australian War Memorial reveals just what they desired: cheese dishes, hearty roasts, fresh salads, luscious desserts, and cakes.
Nurse Daisy Keast recalled that after her release, her first letter home to her parents demanded that her first meal when she arrived home be roast pork and steamed date pudding.
“That’s all we thought about and talked about,” she said. “My family said we never talked to them at all, all we talked about was food.”
The women were moved in April 1944 to a farmhouse at Totsuka, about 50 kilometres from Yokohama and with a view of Mount Fuji. The house had no heating or showers so they washed from buckets. They were made dig air-raid trenches for the Japanese, and in winter had to shovel paths in the snow. They grew weaker from hunger and suffered deficiency diseases such as beri-beri.
The women had scant news from the outside world, but by 1945 they could tell the war was going badly for the Japanese. They watched the bombing raids over Yokohama and Tokyo. On 17 August, 1945, the internees were told that peace had been declared. The women were free, but afraid of reprisals, they remained in the compound. Food suddenly improved, a doctor visited and gave them medicine, and they also received coats to cover their tattered nurses’ uniforms.
On 31 August, after three years and seven months of imprisonment, two of the army nurses intercepted an American convoy and were finally rescued from Totsuka. They were flown to Okinawa Island and then to Manila. They were among the first prisoners of war to arrive home, most of them arriving in Australia on 13 September 1945. Sister Callaghan, who had contracted tuberculosis and received no treatment, arrived back in Australia one month later. She died in March 1954 from continuing problems related to the disease.
The nurses had survived because of a determination to not let the Japanese defeat them. “If we had given up we wouldn’t have come back, it’s as simple as that,” said Sister Marjory Anderson. “If we gave up hope we’d have just died.”
Sources and further reading
Catherine Kenny, Captives : Australian army nurses in Japanese prison camps (University of Queensland Press, 1986)
Second World War Official Histories, Volume VI – The New Guinea Offensives (1st edition, 1961)
Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses: The History of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps 1902-1988 (Boolarong Publications, 1988)
Mike Coleridge, Australian Vietnam War photographer, 1933-2012
13 January 2012 by Ian Affleck.
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News,Personal Stories
Michael (Mike) Coleridge will always be remembered for the photograph he took on 26 August 1967 of a group of soldiers of 5 Platoon, B Company, 7RAR, waiting for an Iroquois helicopter to land and take them back to Nui Dat at the end of Operation Ulmarra. This photograph has become an Australian icon of the Vietnam War and is graphically featured on the Vietnam National Memorial on ANZAC Parade in Canberra. But this is just one of 558 still photographs and 54 films taken in Vietnam by Mike Coleridge in the Australian War Memorial’s collection.
Canberra’s Summer Bonus Card
20 December 2011 by krikra.
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News
Get the most out of summer in the national capital with blockbuster exhibitions and family programs at
From 1 January to 1 February 2012 look for the Summer Bonus Card brochure at selected cultural institutions, Canberra Centre and the Canberra Visitor and Information Centre.
Detach the card from the brochure, slip it into your wallet and enjoy bonus benefits wherever you go.
Simply present your card at each attraction for great rewards, such as two-for-one offers, free posters, recipe booklets and parking vouchers, and special offers at the Canberra Centre,
while stocks last.
Stinking Farm Trench Sign
06 December 2011 by Dianne Rutherford.
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Collection,From the collection, Battles, First World War, Heraldry, Western Front
My name is Romy Turner. I am a work experience student from Canberra Girls Grammar School at the Memorial for this week. As part of my work experience I had to research an item, a trench sign, from the Memorial’s collection.
RELAWM06263 Trench sign to Stinking FarmThe trench sign ‘To Stinking Farm & Currie Ave’ was collected during the First World War by Lieutenant Colonel John Basil St. Vincent Welch, whilst he was serving as part of the 13thField Ambulance in Belgium. Welch arrived in Marseilles on 13 July 1916 as a member of the Australian Field Ambulance. He was appointed the commanding officer of the 13thField Ambulance and was stationed around the village of Messines, which would be the site of the Battle of Messines 11 months later. Stationed at Kandahar Farm, Welch assisted in this battle, tending to the wounded as they came back from the front and organising the transportation of the men further back the line to the field hospitals. read on
Hospital Tent at Rest Gully Gallipoli
02 December 2011 by Dianne Rutherford.
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Collection,From the collection, First World War, Gallipoli, Gallipoli Mission, Heraldry, hospital
My name’s Sean Limn, and I’ve been doing work experience at the War Memorial for the past week. One of my tasks whilst at the Memorial was to research a collection item, a piece of an old tent found at Gallipoli in 1919. The tent piece was found at Rest Gully, and is from a hospital tent left during the evacuation in December 1915. The tent was left behind as part of the ruse to prevent the Turks from realising that an evacuation was taking place.
RELAWM00433 Remains of Hospital tent from Rest GullyLockheed Hudson – Boulton Paul Turret Build
02 December 2011 by Jamie Croker.
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Collection,Conservation
The Boulton Paul Turret was the first of the major componemts to undergo restoration, with work commencing in late 2009 on a large pile of turret pieces. Over an eight month period, the parts were individually treated, and the turret slowly took shape. The frame is a complex assembly, with literally hundreds of small brackets, all rivited together to make up the cupola, or frame.
One of several piles of BP Turret components used to construct the turret