A Mausoleum for the People? The Shrine of Remembrance, Naarm

I acknowledge the First Nation owners of Country throughout Australia in this blog on the Shrine, and in particular to the Bunorong People of Kalin Nation, whose land it is and whose soreignity was never ceded. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging.

On Monday, I took the tram from the Central Business District (CBD) area of Melbourne across China Town (from 1850s Gold Rush), past Flinders Street Station (1854) and St Paul’s Cathedral (1880-1892), past the arts centres and NVG (1960s-70s) on the south bank, to the Shrine of Remembrance. Walking up a green bank towards the Botanical Gardens, the shrine came into view. . .

It is a war memorial unlike any other I have seen. Much vaster than the Cenotaph in London, it is an example of Monumental and – I would argue – Imperial Classicism on an unprecedented scale. In an upcoming epilogue to our book on archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton, Thomas Kiely and I argue that after WW1, classical architecture played a central role in mourning culture with:

the central and underlying message of classicism: stability, even transcendence, in a period of devastating loss and change.

Newton was the lead excavator behind the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos in 1856-58 on the west coast of Turkey and this wonder of the world lent its name to the very concept of a mausoleum.

The Melbourne architects Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, both veterans of the ‘Great War’, won the commission to design the Shrine in 1923 (from 80 international submissions) and based it on the Mausoleum with some features from the Parthenon – Doric simplicity being key – and the symbol of glory at the top of the shrine on the ancient Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. The Shrine is flanked by four women (Greek goddess style) with a Cupid / child figure in chariots pulled by lions standing for Peace & Goodwill, Justice, Sacrifice and Patriotism. On the West Wall is a quote on ‘greater love hath no man’ from at the gospel of St John and on the East Wall a quote from Simonides of Ceos written written for the fallen 300 Spartan soldiers in 480 BCE:

Let all men know that this is holy ground. This shrine established in the hearts of men as on the solid earth, commemorates a peoples’ fortitude and sacrifice.

The interior is now a mini museum with galleries documenting the world wars, as well as the conflicts of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and peacekeeping missions. The Crypt is in classical style too with colourful ceilings and two men in army uniform stood aside each other. It is very much a male space of mourning – as shown in the frieze above. The original ancient frieze showed Greeks fighting Amazons. There were no women in this modernist expression of modelled grief, which made me wonder about the mothers, wives, and girlfriends of The Sullivans TV show about WW2, which I remember watching, after school, with my dad in the 1980s.

The Shrine is classicism writ large. Yet, the landing boat from Gallipoli on display gives a strange contrast to the loss of thousands of men troops in Turkey (then the western shores of the Ottoman Empire), a few hundred miles north up the coast from the site of the Mausoleum that the shrine is based on. Did this factor in the choice of design?

On 11 hour of the 11 day of 11 month (11 November 11am), a shaft of sunlight enters the opening in the roof on the word love.

The memorial was opened by Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in 1934 with 300,000 people present. The same year the centenary of European settlement of Melbourne was also memorialised. But there was no shaft of light in a monument with a focus on love for the First Nation people in Melbourne, whose population in 1800 was 60,000 and by the 1840s was decimated to 15,000. The trauma of the war and of European settlement is writ large in a classical monument - there is seen masculine European loss and absent loss.