Preparations for the Memorial’s new travelling exhibition Of love and war are nearly complete. The showcases are being built, all the labels and captions are being printed and we’ve been in the recording studio as well.

A large part of the Memorial’s collection relating to love during wartime comes from private records, particularly the letters that were exchanged between lovers separated by conflict.

However, an exhibition is a very visual experience and actually reading many of these letters (faded by time in some cases, terrible handwriting in others) is a hard task, especially in an exhibition setting. So we decided to bring them to life in another way. Last week several Memorial staff members put aside their day-to-day tasks and assumed the identities of 15 men and women who not only experienced the hardship of separation from their loved ones, but wrote about it in amusing, eloquent and often heartbreaking letters.

Jennifer Selby, Assistant Curator of Film and Sound, tastes life on the other side of the studio, recording letter extracts from the collection

Extracts from these letters were recorded in the sound studio and will be cut together in the next week or so to provide an audio backdrop to the section of the exhibition which looks at the importance of receiving letters, and gifts, from husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends. We plan to make this recording available on the website soon. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one of the extracts:

“Marie mine, I want to get back to you again, I want so much to have you in my arms, making love to you and cuddling you close to me. When will that come again, Girlie? If I had ever thought I would be so long away from my own Wifie, I would never have enlisted. This is not life to me, being away from you.”

That was written by Lieutenant Peter McFarlane, 34th Battalion AIF, to his wife Marie in June 1917. He was killed in action at Villers-Brettonneux a year later.

HMAS Parramatta (author's collection)

The Australian War Memorial faces unique challenges presented by the modern age to its collection development for recent conflicts, including Iraq and Afghanistan. With email, phones and internet communicative tools largely replacing traditional keepsakes such as diaries and letters, this has made identifying and retaining objects of the ADF experience in modern conflict rather difficult. Furthermore, given that the number of ADF personnel serving overseas is far less than those who saw service in such conflicts as the World Wars, this also limits the amount of material representing recent conflicts and therefore what will shape the Memorial’s collections in the future.

One attempt to address this issue involved a representative from the Memorial being sent, in late 2008 to accompany Australian forces in Iraq. Mal Booth, former Head of the Memorial’s Research Centre, was fortunate enough spend time with Australian forces in Iraq and was able to identify and target items which would be of interest to the Memorial. Some of this material was identified on the industrious HMAS Parramatta, which was at that time conducting its second tour of the Gulf as part of Operation CATALYST. Mal travelled with the ship on his journey and found that the vessel and its crew provided extensive opportunities for proactive collecting.

In September 2009, the Memorial returned to HMAS Parramatta in order to gather further material…

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The Western Front was epitomised by the brute force of men against machine and each other. Tens of thousands were lost in the maelstrom of war. In the horror, friendships were forged that endured even through death. This is the story of one such friendship…

Wally Brown was a grocer. He did not necessarily want to be a grocer but neither did he want to follow in the footsteps of his father as a miller. The small Tasmanian community of New Norfolk, into which he was born in 1885, was a progressive ‘postal, telegraphic and money order township’. The town boasted the New Norfolk Literary Institution complete with a library of some 1200 volumes and a ‘very fine and well built lunatic asylum’. Progressive it might have been, but at 26 years of age Brown had itchy feet. In 1911 he left New Norfolk for the bustling lifestyle of Petersham in Sydney.

Walter 'Wally' Brown ART09490

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On the 19^th November 1941, Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney II was lost, with all hands, off the coast of Western Australia after engaging with the German raider HSK Kormoran. The discovery in March 2008 of the final resting place of the Sydney and the Kormoran attracted much attention. Understandably, there has been much discussion over the circumstances surrounding the loss of the Sydney; however the story of the Kormoran’s Commander, Theodor Anton Detmers, and that of his crew, continued long after the battle. Almost a week after the sinking of the Kormoran, Detmers was picked up in a lifeboat along with other crewmen. Brought to Australia as a prisoner of war, he and several of his countrymen were detained in Dhurringile Prison Camp, Victoria. It was not long before the Commander and his countrymen had formulated a plan to escape their fortress using a hand-drawn map of Australia’s east coast, now held by the Australian War Memorial.

Group portrait of German Officer prisoners of war (POWs) interned at Dhurringile. Detmers is in the front row, third from left. 030185_05

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Shrapnel from an American ranging shell, Colditz Castle 1945. REL38251

This 8 cm piece of shrapnel is a souvenir from the liberation of the infamous prisoner of war camp, Oflag IVC - Colditz Castle. It was collected by an Australian soldier, Lieutenant Jack Millett. Millett was an ‘incorrigible’, one of the prisoners held by the Germans at Colditz for making repeated escape attempts from other camps. In 1942, Millett was caught trying to dig a tunnel out of Oflag VIB at Warburg with another prisoner. In 1943, he took part in a mass escape from Oflag VIIB at Eichstatt. Millett was on the run for five days before he was finally captured by two Hitler Youths with large dogs. After his recapture, he served 14 days detention as punishment and was then sent to Colditz Castle, where he remained until April 1945.

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Phoebe Chapple (1879-1967) Image courtesy of the State Library of South Australia. B 25677/34

Phoebe Chapple was always going to be someone special. She grew up in a family of high achievers. Apart from her father, Frederic Chapple, who was headmaster at Prince Alfred College Adelaide, five of her seven siblings held university degrees: Alfred a lecturer in engineering at St John’s University Cambridge; Ernest, another Cambridge graduate at Jesus University and president of the Fresher Debating Society before taking up a position in Rangoon, Burma; Harold a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London; Marian an arts graduate from the University of Adelaide; and Fred, another doctor. However, Phoebe stood apart even in such accomplished company.

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 A donation came to my desk in the days following Anzac Day that caught my attention.  It was a maroon and white identification badge that featured the image of a young girl, her name, an I.D. number and the words, ‘C.S.I.R. Radiophysics Division’

Fortunately the depositor of the badge provided details of the original owner and I was soon speaking to Valerie Briggs who at 79 years of age still possessed all of the enthusiasm and intelligence that I saw in the eyes of the girl on the badge.

Valerie Briggs' identification badge. REL40008

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As an assistant curator at the Australian War Memorial, I deal with many personal stories of Australians and other nations during war time. One story has really inspired me lately, that of Ludwig Marx. I had an email from his granddaughter recently about his service medals we hold in the collection. As I read the catalogue records, the brief description “served German Army in the First World War, Imprisoned at Dachau” grabbed me. I wanted to know more about Ludwig, not only to assist me in re-cataloguing his medal group, but to know more about his life and what led him from Germany to Australia. My research, with the assistance of Ludwig’s granddaughter, has uncovered the story of his incredible journey to Australia.

Ludwig Marx was born on 19 January 1892 at Krefeld, near Dusseldorf in Germany. As a young man, he worked in his father’s real estate and mortgage broking business. He learned how the property market worked and assisted his father in making the business successful.

Ludwig Marx, Tilsit, Russia c1916 (photograph courtesy of Lindy Stockwell, Geoff and Warwick Marx)

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Anzac, the landing 1915 by George Lambert ART02873

For ninety four years the story of Gallipoli has galvanised Australians to remember, on ANZAC Day, those that have served, and continue to serve, in conflicts around the globe. The description by poet John Masefield in 1917 of the landing on Gallipoli creates an indelible backdrop to the fighting:

Those who wish to imagine the scene must think of any rough and steep coast known to them, picturing it as roadless, waterless, much broken with gullies, covered with scrub, sandy, loose, difficult to walk upon, and without more than two miles of accessible landing throughout its length…Then let them imagine the hills entrenched, the landing mined, the beaches tangled with barbed wire, ranged by Howitzers, and swept by machine guns…

(See rare movie footage of Anzac and Suvla here) 

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As we ready ourselves to commemorate ANZAC Day at the Australian War Memorial, we can gain a small insight what it was like at the Gallipoli landing. Personal diaries held by the Memorial describe what it was like landing at Gallipoli on Sunday, 25 April 1915 under the heavy fire of Turkish machine guns. Although the photos accompanying this blog post do not relate directly to the diary entries, they are able to illustrate the stories in a different way.

Sergeant Apcar de Vine of the 4th Battalion writes: “landed myself at … midday under a hot shrapnell [sic] fire, all landed safely…

Soldiers landing on ANZAC Cove A02462

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