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.

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.

Back in September, I was doing some work out at our Treloar Annex, which is where our conservators work.  I was videoing the construction process of the mannequins being made for the 3 wedding dresses  that are to be included in the “Of love and war” exhibition. During a break in filming I got talking to Jessie Firth, who was working on one of the wedding dresses .  She was applying fake perspiration to material to see what effect it would have.  Picking up my trusty camera, I went down to the conservation lab and the following is an interesting account of just what 65 year old perspiration can do to a wedding dress and how conservators plan to tackle the problem it presents.  

Sweat on a 60 year old wedding dress

 As previously explained four wedding dresses were initially selected for “Of Love and War“. One of the wedding dresses, originally owned by Mrs N S Bissaker, required hundreds of hours of painstaking work before it would be strong enough for display, so unfortunately it will not be ready for display in “Of Love and War”.  Instead this dress with go on our Vulnerable Textiles conservation list and be conserved with all the care it deserves to preserve it for the future. In cases like this, it is the vulnerability of the dress that determined its exclusion from this exhibition. However, the Memorial plans to make images of this dress available on its website in the near future.

 

                   

You can see in the pictures the fragile state of the lace, which has many holes visible as black areas.  For full conservation of this dress, sheer silk panels will be inserted behind each piece of the dress and then the lace will be carefully stitched to these panels, giving the dress the structural support it requires.

One year ago today, the Australian War Memorial joined the Commons on Flickr.  We put up a set of 30 photos of soldiers, sailors, nurses, airmen, wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts, a prime minister, and a koala. The photos are part of our photo collection of well over a million images which covers the experience of Australians at war and Australian military history from the 1860s to the present.  We have uploaded other sets on the Commons since then, each with its own theme: Christmas, children, animals, ANZAC Day, and First World War aviation.

 The 103 images have been viewed almost 180,000 times; there have been over 530 comments, 2,000 favorites, 340 tags and 830 contacts. read on

Here is the first of several blog posts about the wedding dreses being considered and conserved for our upcoming Of love and war exhibition.

Recently the Textile Conservation Laboratory retrieved from storage four wedding dresses that are proposed for the up and coming exhibition Of love and war.  Three of the dresses – originally owned Mrs Isabel Bell, Mrs Audrey Norton  and Mrs Norma. Bissaker – are relatively new to the Memorial’s collection and have not undergone any detailed conservation treatment. The fourth dress – owned by Mrs Violet Glover – has been fully conserved as it was used in an earlier exhibition . The pictures attached show what the dresses look like in their storage boxes. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once curators select these items as potential objects for display in the exhibition, textile conservators have to carefully document the condition of the wedding dresses. Part of this process is to determine if they are stable and strong enough for display on mannequins for this exhibition. Special consideration is given to the materials when assessing if they are able to be displayed not only at the Memorial, but also at the venues around Australia they will travel to in 2010 and 2011.

On December 3, 2009, the Australian War Memorial will be opening its exhibition “Of love and war”.  

The impact of war on romantic relationships and the ways in which Australians incorporated affairs of the heart into their wartime lives  is a powerful subject and we would like the public to contribute their stories via our Flickr group.
This group is running in conjunction with the exhibition and we are excited to have this opportunity to allow people to tell their stories of love and war. The images can be photos or scans (there are already a number of wonderful letters in the group) and we would love you to tell us as much as possible about the subjects in the images as you can – you can do this through the comments area. 

You have to be a member of the group to add images and remember that you need at least 4 images in your Flickr account for them to become visible. If you have any questions, please contact me (I am the group administrator) via email emma.jones@awm.gov.au or leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll get back to you.

The Lambert exhibition has just opened at the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery and will be on show there until 25 May 2008. Toowoomba has a long relationship to the Australian Light Horse units so it is particularly appropriate that the opening should coincide with ANZAC Day. Throughout his tours in Palestine and Gallipoli, George Lambert was guided by Light Horse veterans of key events such as the Gallipoli landing, Romani and Beersheba.

The Australian War Memorial has many pencil portrait sketches Lambert made of the Light Horse men he travelled with. This sensitive sketch of Lieutenant General Henry (Harry) George Chauvel GCMG, KCB (1865-1945) was made on 15 February 1918 during Lambert’s first tour of Palestine as an official war artist. At this time Lambert was travelling with the ANZAC Mounted Division around the Ayunkara / Richon le Zion area.

Lambert also made a sketch of Brigadier General William Grant CMG, DSO (Bar), MID when he travelled to Belah in March 1918. Grant commanded the 11th Light Horse (a largely Queensland regiment) at Romani. While in Belah, Lambert attended the Divisional Sports day and made several sketches of the participants and events.

For those able to attend, there will be a special floor talk on ‘George Lambert, the Light Horse and Palestine landscapes’ presented by Assoc Prof Christopher Lee of the University of Southern Queensland at the Toowoomba Gallery on 11 May 2008.

I was in Gosford over the weekend opening the George Lambert exhibition at the Regional Art Gallery. Adjacent to the Gallery are the Edogawa Commemorative Gardens, beautiful restful Japanese-style gardens with lotus ponds, pavilions and a dry stone garden. As I was sitting in the tea house looking across the pond, I was reminded how much the scene resembled a Hokusai Japanese woodcut print as the rain raked across and partly obscured the pavilion in front of me. These are beautiful gardens and well worth a visit in any weather.

The Gosford Regional Gallery is hosting the George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine Landscapes exhibition until 30 March 2008. They will be organising some special events to coincide with the exhibition so check out their website for further information.

www.gosfordregionalgallery.com

Well folks, that’s it for another of the Memorial’s special exhibitions, To Flanders Fields, 1917.  Today we started dismantling the show in readiness for the next special exhibition, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, due to open in the same space on 7 December.

To Flanders Fields has been a very successful and popular exhibition over the past few months, confirming that the memories of Passchendaele are still deep within the community’s psyche.  As we said from the start, 1917 was the worst year of the war for Australian casualties, and Passchendaele was by far the most costly battle of that year.  With the entire AIF involved, these losses touched so many families, and as you have seen, many more than once.

We on the exhibition team and at the Memorial in general, hope that all visitors to the exhibition and to this blog have found them interesting, informative and thought provoking.

On a personal note, I’ve must say I’ve enjoyed immensely running the blog for this exhibition.  I’ve learned a great deal more about the campaign and battles of 1917 and about the troops of our AIF.  It’s all been a very rewarding experience.

Last but not least, I would like to sincerely thank all those that visited the exhibition and this blog, especially those that took the time to post a comment.  The quality of the comments has been exceptionally good and have added a great deal to the blog itself.

While the exhibition is now closed, this blog will remain on the Australian War Memorial’s website.  It’s no longer featured on the home page, but if you look down the left side of the home page you’ll see it listed under ‘Blogs’.  If at a later date it moves, just use the site search to find it. 

I’ll probably leave the comment function on for a little while, but I haven’t yet decided if or when this will cease.

‘Bye for now…

Craig Tibbitts.

I should have done this ages ago, but as the saying goes, ‘better late than never…’

These are just a few snaps I took of the exhibition today.

The entrance to the exhibition featuring Frank Hurley’s well-known photograph

A replica cast of the ‘Big Digger’ stands guard near the exhibition’s entrance. The real statue stands atop the Bullecourt Memorial

Portraits and uniform jackets of two prominent AIF commanders at Bullecourt. Brigadier John Gellibrand of 6th Brigade (L) and Lt Colonel Raymond Leane of the 48th ‘Joan of Arc’ Battalion (R)

 

Typical battledress of a German and an Australian infantryman on the Western Front in 1917

 

Two large artworks of Polygon Wood and Messines, plus a foot bridge used to cross the Douve near Messines and a stretcher that saw action at Passchendaele

 

This part of the exhibition presents the commemorative aspects, both then and now

 

Signposts from the battlefields

 

A long view down the first corridor of the exhibition

 

Looking back from the far corner