Australian War Memorial welcomes new Bean electorate

The Australian War Memorial has today applauded the decision to name a new federal electorate in the Australian Capital Territory after official war historian and Memorial founder, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean.

Charles Bean was born in Bathurst in 1879. He was chosen by his own colleagues as Australia’s official war correspondent and landed with the troops on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. He remained with the Australian Imperial Forces through to the end of the war, refusing evacuation despite himself being wounded.

“Charles Bean is one of the truly great Australians of the 20th century,” Memorial Director Dr Brendan Nelson said.

“At Pozieres, France in July and August 1916 he was witness to 23,000 Australian casualties in just six weeks. A dying man asked him ‘will they remember me, in Australia?’

“It was from there that he conceived and resolved, at its end, that he would build the finest memorial and museum to these men of the Australian Imperial Forces and the nurses; the Australian War Memorial.

“He was appointed as Australia’s official war historian, and over 23 years, he would write and edit the 12 volumes of the official history of Australia’s involvement in the First World War. These two great achievements his life’s work and his legacy to us, to Australia.

“And such is the character of the man and his commitment; his life’s dedication to our history and our story, that on the day of the Armistice, the end of the war, he didn’t celebrate, he went back to Fromelles where in 1916 Australia saw 5,500 casualties in 24 hours. He quietly walked the battle fields and remarked on the bones and the skulls of our dead, lying everywhere.

“This man made an enormous contribution to our sense of who we are and what it means to be Australian. This is an immense recognition that is long overdue. This is a man worthy of remembering. I can think of no one more deserving of being the namesake of a new electorate in the ACT.”