Memorial Articles

Art curator Alex Torrens couldn’t believe it when she opened her email. It was just before Remembrance Day, and there, hidden amongst the messages in her inbox, was a message offering the Memorial a rare pastel drawing from the First World War.

The Australian War Memorial has commissioned four traditional woven tais cloths from the LO’UD Cooperative, and represent the shared history between the East Timorese people and the Australian Defence Force during the Australian-led Peacekeeping mission, INTERFET, between 1999 and 2000.

There are some things Len Seto would rather forget, but the memories are never far away.

David Combe had gone out with a patrol on the Saigon River to capture images and footage for news agencies in Australia when the boat he was in capsized, leaving the group stranded with little to no food or ammunition.

The popular myth of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels has throughout the generations asserted the belief that Papuan carriers, during the 1942 battle for Kokoda, willingly provided assistance to the Australian war effort as volunteers. However, contradictions surround the history of the Papuan carriers concerning their recruitment, treatment, and working conditions.

Vern Roberts was guarding a Liberator bomber on the island of Morotai when he heard gunfire.  

Baden Pascoe was with his parents when the news came. His older brother Percival had been serving as a stoker aboard the light cruiser HMAS Sydney when it was sunk by the German raider Kormoran in November 1941.

Lance Sergeant Ronald Chambers sent 85 letters and postcards to his parents and siblings between 1941 and 1945, while a prisoner of war. 

For more than five consecutive years almost 2,500 unarmed Australian military and civilian monitors worked closely with the Bougainvillean people, at times in isolated and remote parts of Buka and Bougainville Islands, to support peacebuilding in a region that had been exposed to almost a decade of violence.