Blog category - Exhibitions

Putting our exhibition together (#2, IWM loans)

13 August 2007 by Mal Booth. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Loans, Our exhibition

In this post I will begin to cover my second trip to London in late June 2006 to negotiate

loans from the UK, mostly for the Lawrence side of our exhibition. It really was a great priviledge to be able to do this and to return to London so soon after my quick visit over Easter to see the IWM’s Lawrence exhibition. Museum’s are not made of money and this trip was made possible because my colleagues here in Art and Travelling Exhibitions, Lola Wilkins and Jude Savage, generously allowed for me to travel as their courier, bringing our art works in Shared Experience back from their London show.

Before packing up Shared Experience, I had almost two weeks to race around, negotiating loans from various collections in and around London. So, on to my stories about loan negotiations and at last, some interesting facts about the items we will be bringing out to Australia for the first and maybe the only time. read on

Exhibition launch

10 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 1 Comment
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

Last night the Australian War Memorial’s latest special exhibition, To Flanders Fields, 1917 was officially launched.  A large gathering of invited guests saw the Chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, Major General Adrian Clunies-Ross AO MBE (Ret’d), give the opening address and introduce the guest speakers.

The Ambassador for Belgium, His Excellency Mr Frank Carruet gave a sincere and heart-felt speech, followed by The Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, The Hon. Bruce Billson MP, who also made an excellent speech before officially opening the exhibition.

The exhibition opened to the public this morning (10 August).

Photographs by Hans Reppin, Australian War Memorial. Copyright Australian War Memorial, 2007.

Putting our exhibition together (#1)

10 August 2007 by Mal Booth. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Loans, Our exhibition

A while back, one of our regular readers was talking to me about what we were doing and expressed some surprise at what effort is going into this exhibition. He said that he thought we just went out the back and grabbed things to put into cabinets and presto, an exhibition is born. Well, words to that effect. Others have emailed me recently about being interested in what goes into putting our exhibitions together.

The process isn’t actually that simple and with about half of this exhibition being devoted to international loans regarding Lawrence, it is even more complex than our normal temporary exhibition process. So, for those of you who might be interested, I will now attempt to outline the key elements of our process thus far. I suspect that it’ll take a few posts, based just on my rough notes and there won’t be too many relevant images, so if you don’t have a deep abiding interest in our process, I suggest you turn away very quickly now and do a crossword puzzle or look at one of our other blogs. My colleagues working on the To Flanders Fields, 1917 exhibition are doing a great job with excellent content, so maybe check that one out. read on

Latest media articles

10 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 2 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

10 August – Year of bloodshed best not forgotten, The Sydney Morning Herald

10 August – Exhibition evokes cruel days of 1917, The Canberra Times

11 August – Miners of Messines, The Australian

Reminder – Exhibition opens tomorrow !

09 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. No comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition

Just a reminder that this exhibition will open here at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra tomorrow – Friday 10 August.

Admission to the Memorial and this exhibition is free. Hope you can come and see it.

Check our web page ‘Planning your visit’

Also check out online, an excerpt (nearly 3 mins) from the exhibition’s 15 minute film

/blog.awm.gov.au/awm/2007/08/06/exhibition-film-preview/

Exhibition Film – Preview

06 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 2 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Exhibition, Photographs & Film

The exhibition will feature a 15 minute film, based on the photographic and film work of Captain Frank Hurley, Official War Photographer during the Ypres-Passchendaele Offensive.

This is a short excerpt from that film (2 mins 43 secs).

[MEDIA=1]

Title: To Flanders Fields, 1917: through the eyes of Frank Hurley
Produced by: the Australian War Memorial
Producer: Ray McJannett
Sound & sound effects: Lenny Preston
Original music: Antoni Rudnicki
Narrators: Craig Marvel, Sharron Parmeter
Archival film and photos: Captain Frank Hurley
Diary extracts of Frank Hurley (courtesy of National Library of Australia)
Copyright: Australian War Memorial (2007)

The Drivers

03 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 4 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Frontline troops, Passchendaele (Ypres)

The following extract is from C. E. W. Bean’s Official History, Volume IV, pp 729-730.  It highlights an often overlooked branch of the AIF during their most gruelling trial at Ypres during 1917.

From the August fighting [at Ypres in 1917], the Australian infantry was so fortunate as to be spared, but the detached artillery bore its share. That of the 2nd Division, whose new battery positions were north of Hill 60, now began to suffer severely, but the impact of the suffering had somewhat changed; in this morass of a battlefield the services of supply bore a heavy share of the strain.  A war correspondent records on August 17th a statement of Major Manton, whose battery, the 15th, had so far lost 35 men.

Manton said that in this phase of the battle the palm should go, not to those who, like himself, worked at the battery positions, but to the drivers from the waggon-lines at Dickebusch, who daily and nightly brought up ammunition across the mud.

‘It was looked on almost as a cold-footed job before,’ Manton said, ‘one which did not take a man into action.  But . . . . like all those Australians who were supposed to be in fairly safe jobs, the drivers took a pride in showing what they could do when they came into the thick of it.’

He added that even the animals came to know when a shell was coming close; and if, when halted, the horses heard the whine of an approaching salvo, they would tremble and sidle closer to their drivers, burying their muzzles in the men’s chests.

These Australians (he added) had won themselves a special name on this battlefield for the way in which they went straight through the nightmare barrages laid on the well known tracks which they and their horses had to follow.  Where many might hesitate, these men realised that the loss would be less, and the job better done, if they pushed on without hesitation. This comment was justified.  It was undoubtedly through the conduct of the drivers, as well as through that of the gun-crews and observers, that the Australian divisional artilleries in this battle – as General Gough wrote when they left his army in September – ‘earned the admiration and praise of all.’

                            

Read C. E. W. Bean’s Official History online, Volume IV, pp 729-730

Rain and Mud: the Ypres – Passchendaele Offensive

01 August 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 3 Comments
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Battles, Commemoration, Exhibition, Passchendaele (Ypres), Research material

Swamp around Zonnebeke, Oct 1917 (E01200) E01200

When considering the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, what immediately springs to mind is a desolate, shattered landscape of mud.  So when looking through the photographs of this battle here on the blog, and in the exhibition, it may be puzzling that some depict this morass with men and horses up to their waists in mud, yet many others show a rather dry and dusty landscape.  The answer is that this was a lengthy campaign (July to November), and the weather conditions proved quite changeable and fickle.  The same applies to the Somme Offensive which ran for a similar period during the previous year.  The other factor at Ypres was the physical characteristics of this part of Flanders.  The water table in this area is very high and indeed parts of the battlefield were swamp or reclaimed swamp.  So even when the surface appeared dry, it could in places be sodden below the crust and digging into the ground even to a shallow depth would invite water.  Naturally the blanket coverage of shell craters only made the situation worse.

According to Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson in Passchendaele: the untold story (p 97), during August 1917, 127 mm of rain fell in Flanders, which was double the normal average for that month.  October also proved another very wet month, with 30 mm of rain falling in just the five-day period 4-9 October (pp 126, 159).  However the month of September was mostly dry and this coincided with the three major pushes that the Australians spearheaded in the Ypres sector (Menin Road 20 Sept, Polygon Wood 26 Sept, and Broodseinde 4 Oct).  During these attacks the troops marvelled at how strong and utterly dominant their supporting artillery fire was. 

But in the afternoon of 4 October, right after the Broodseinde operation had been completed (it was over by noon), the weather broke and the rain set in, quickly turning the devastated battlefield into a quagmire.  In these conditions it was impossible to drag forward enough artillery and ammunition to maintain such strong support.  So the troops that attacked in the wet after 4 October noticed a dramatic drop-off in supporting artillery fire to the point where at times it was barely noticeable.  Another pitiful result was the greatly increased difficulty of evacuating the wounded.  The decision therefore to continue the offensive and capture Passchendaele in the rain and mud was a weighty one.  As C. E. W. Bean later wrote,

‘In these circumstances Haig made the most questioned decision of his career.’ (Bean, Vol IV, p 883).

Interestingly, at this point Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig acknowledged the weather and terrain problems, telling war correspondents on 11 October:

‘It was simply the mud which defeated us on Tuesday [9 October].  The men did splendidly to get through it as they did.  But the Flanders mud, as you know, is not a new invention.  It has a name in history – it has defeated other armies before this one…’ (quoted in Bean, Official History, Vol IV, p 908).

One wonders with this admission of the difficulties presented, why Haig then persisted with the offensive.  However it must be considered that there were real dangers in halting the offensive where they stood.  They were still short of the final ridge at Passchendaele and had they remained short of it, it would have been very difficult and costly in lives to hold such a poor position.  So perhaps it can be argued that the final push to capture Passchendaele through the dreadful mud of October and November was a combination of this tactical necessity, Haig’s perception of an imminent German collapse and his desire to see his grand plan through to a successful conclusion.

For the Germans the onset of rain was a Heaven-sent.  Indeed Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the Field Marshal in command of the entire northern sector of the Western Front (i.e. that principally opposing the British and Commonwealth forces), made a relieved note in his diary;

12 October 1917

‘Witterungsumschlag.  Erfreulicherweise Regen, unser wirksamster bundesgenosse.’

(trans. Sudden change of weather.  Most fortunate rain, our most effective ally).

It should also be remembered that despite these dreadful conditions and the grievous losses, the British Army and its Commonwealth troops did succeed in capturing Passchendaele and part of the final ridge.  It was the Canadian Corps that finally achieved this on 6 November.  The Canadians would by 1918 become past masters at providing massive artillery support for their infantry, but in the mud before Passchendaele in November 1917, these techniques they were trying to perfect must have been greatly frustrated.  With this in mind, their capture of Passchendaele is all the more impressive.

Finally, in one of the war’s ‘what ifs’, it may well be speculated that the offensive at Ypres during 1917 might have succeeded had it gotten underway several weeks earlier, and the final ridge at Passchendaele been captured in early October, before the weather really broke.  One can only wonder…

Viewing the IWM exhibition, Part Two

13 July 2007 by Mal Booth. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Less than six degrees of separation, Loans, Our exhibition

A while back, actually a long while back, I promised to enlighten you about a couple of inspiring things that I saw in London in 2006 during my visits to view the IWM’s Lawrence of Arabia, the Life, the Legend exhibition and to negotiate our UK loans. So after a long delay and absolutely no requests to read the second part of my story, here it is. I must tell you that what I’ve written below were my impressions, recorded in London over Easter 2006. Since then, I’ve worked on the challenges presented by our exhibition and I’ve developed an even deeper appreciation of the work that went into these exhibitions.

Firstly, I found the IWM’s relatively new Churchill Museum absolutely stunning. Located with the Cabinet War Rooms, it is visually splendid and makes full use of modern exhibition technology to educate visitors about Churchill’s amazing life by very clever use of sound, documents, images, film footage, interactives and the display of selected objects. I went for a quick visit, just to breeze through and found myself there for some hours. You get a very good sense of the man and his achievements without being confused or overwhelmed by too much content or context.

read on

Commemoration – Latest news articles

13 July 2007 by Craig Tibbitts. 1 Comment
To Flanders Fields, 1917, Commemoration

Pilgrimage to Passchendaele: a killing field haunted by family memories, Telegraph (UK), 30 July 2007

Diggers remembered in Passchendaele ceremonies, ABC News (Australia), 13 July 2007 (includes online audio feature)

Last Post sounds again at Passchendaele, but no old comrades are there to hear it.  The Times, 12 July 2007.

Hell on Earth: The never before seen colour photographs of the bloody battle of Passchendaele, The Daily Mail, 12 July 2007. 

Queen honours fallen soldiers 90 years after Passchendaele.  CBC News (Canada), 12 July 1917.