Blog category - News
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.
Dreaming 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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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.
In the collection: Conflict T-shirts
25 November 2011 by Sue Ducker.
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Collection,Collection Highlights,From the collection,News
The Australian War Memorial holds T-shirts from the numerous Peace Keeping missions in which Australians have served. A usually inexpensive and useful type of souvenir, the T-shirts are often humorous and visually creative. They are an example of how soldiers have adapted a civilian item of clothing to a deployment context.
The Memorial is interested in making contact with anyone who contributed to the designs printed on the three T-shirts below. If you can provide more information on these items please contact sue.ducker@awm.gov.au.
MOvember MOtivation
23 November 2011 by Lauren Hewitt.
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From the collection,News
We know that some of you out there are neglecting your razors in the name of raising money for a good cause, even some of the good men here at the War Memorial have put their hand up to cultivate magnificent moustaches. So we thought we’d bring you some MOtivational photos from our archives, to show you that competitive MO growing has been going on for decades!
During the Second World War, naval ships such as the HMAS Perth and Shropshire held beard growing competitions. Above, a champion beard grower, Able Bodied Seaman Cooper, shows off his award winning crop aboard the Perth; and on the Shropshire, Able Seaman Evans has his beard trimmed by fellow champion growers.
In other forces, where beards were perhaps not allowed, we start to see some imaginative moustache examples. This one below is an example of one of the longest, grown in Japan in 1946.
KAITAICHI, JAPAN. 1946-12-25. A MEMBER OF THE BCOF AUSTRALIAN MILITARY FORCES WORKSHOPS UNIT, WHO HAS THE LONGEST MOUSTACHE IN JAPAN. 132411
Studio portrait of Warrant Officer Class 1 (WO1) Henry Thomas 'Jack' Harwood, the Regimental Sergeant Major (RSM) of the 3rd Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment (3RAR), (previously the 67th Battalion). DUKJ3662
During the Korean War, soldiers took great pride in the cultivation of their moustaches, waxing them especially for the occasion of having their portraits taken. Official Photographer, Phillip J Hobson, took a series of portraits of men and their moustaches.
Private Moore, seen below receiving a haircut from a Korean barber, worries about the fate of his moustache, which, when waxed, is an impressive 6 inches from tip to tip.
Happy Mo growing!
The Iconic Changi Quilts
16 November 2011 by Sue Ducker.
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Collection,Collection Highlights,News
The Memorial is interested in making contact with the relatives or contributors to the famous Changi quilts. If you can provide more information about the women who made these quilts please contact sue.ducker@awm.gov.au.
When Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, 400 women and children were interned. The quilts were the idea of Mrs Ethel Mulvaney. Supposedly made for the wounded in Changi hospitals, the quilts were actually meant to relieve boredom, to boost morale, and to pass information to other camps. Three quilts were made, one each for the Red Cross organisations of Britain, Australia and Japan.
Remembering the first-year battles of the Pacific war
15 November 2011 by Emma Campbell.
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News
On 7 December 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States’ Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, destroying dozens of ships and planes, and killing thousands of American servicemen. Japan and the United States were at war.
Australians were already fighting in Europe and the Middle East, but Prime Minister John Curtin quickly expanded Australia’s Second World War commitments, declaring that we, too, were at war with Japan because of its “unprovoked attack on British and United States territory”.
In the first year of the war in the south-west Pacific, Australians and Americans would fight the Japanese in Malaya and Singapore; in Ambon, Java and Timor; the Philippines; Papua, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Borneo. Not often, however, did they come together on the ground, and so some of the best known land campaigns fought by Australians – on the Kokoda Trail, and at Milne Bay – are unknown to Americans. Australians, meanwhile, play down the importance of the concurrent US campaign at Guadalcanal and the naval battle at Midway Island.
In December, on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an international conference of experts and veterans from America, Australia and Japan will meet in New Orleans to discuss the first-year battles of the Pacific war, and to share the experiences of each of the nations involved, as well as some of the misconceptions that exist. Among the speakers are two of the Australian War Memorial’s senior historians, Dr Steve Bullard and Dr Karl James.
Bullard, a Japanese-speaker, has translated extracts from the Senshi sōsho (War history series), the official account of the Japanese experience of the Second World War. His talk on “Japanese operations in New Guinea: a prelude to invasion of Australia?” will introduce an American audience to Australia’s wartime fears of Japanese invasion , and our continuing misconceptions of Japanese intentions.
In the early part of the Pacific war – January, February and March of 1942 – the Japanese were discussing a partial invasion of Australia, but this idea was quickly rejected, Bullard says. Japan’s main motivation for going to war was to secure natural resources, such as oil, rubber and tin, in south-east Asia and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Occupation of bases in Papua and New Guinea, and attacks on the Australian mainland, were designed to protect the supply of these resources.
“There is a common misconception that they [the Japanese] were coming south and they weren’t going to stop until they had captured Australia; and that our boys in Papua stopped them. But in actual fact the Japanese had clear objectives … and it never involved them continuing on to take Australia,” Bullard says.
James will deliver a talk on “The Kokoda Trail” that takes in the Australian actions along that well known track in Papua, as well as the fighting at Milne Bay.
“Kokoda and Milne Bay were among the best known Australian campaigns in the Second World War, but an American audience will probably have never heard of them,” he says. “A conference like this helps give the global perspective to the first year of the Pacific War, and remind an American audience that Australians were heavily involved in the south-west Pacific.”
The Japanese suffered their first defeat in the Papuan campaign at Milne Bay. The Japanese saw the Allied airstrips in the area as a stepping stone on their way to Port Moresby. On the night of 25 August 1942, they landed by sea at Milne Bay. Two Australian brigades (about 4,500 men), some American engineers, and two RAAF squadrons were awaiting them. A savage battle raged along the shore, but the Japanese never took the airstrips. They were evacuated by sea on 4 September.
The Kokoda campaign, fought between July and November 1942, saw some of the most desperate and vicious fighting encountered by Australian troops in the Second World War. The Australians were ultimately successful in stopping the Japanese from capturing the Papuan capital of Port Moresby.
Both Kokoda and Milne Bay were part of a larger campaign fought in Papua that – after the bloody beachhead battles of Buna, Gona, and Sanananda at the end of the year, from November 1942 to January 1943 – cleared the Japanese from Papua.
James says Australia’s victory in the Kokoda campaign is linked to the US victory at Guadalcanal: severe losses suffered by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands resulted in their South Seas Detachment on Kokoda being ordered to withdraw, which was the beginning of the end for their campaign in the Owen Stanley Range.
James says being able to share the Kokoda story with American historians – and, in turn, to learn more about what happened at Guadalcanal – will “help to put the Australian story into context, which makes it more meaningful”.
The conference, from 7 to 9 December, is the first of a series of five on the Second World War that will be convened by the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana.
