Memorials and sacred sites

ANNE FARIS: Welcome back to our second session today. My name is Anne Faris and I work here at the Museum in the Centre for Historical Research. Our second session of the symposium looks particularly at memorials and sacred sites and responds to the question: ‘How are certain places invested with spiritual significance or defined as places of memorialisation?’ Our speakers will be Dr Peter Stanley and Associate Professor Claire Smith, and following their talks, as in the previous session, we’ll have 20 minutes of question time.

‘The exact spot’: using the ground to tell a human story – 9 Platoon in the fight for Mont St Quentin by Dr Peter Stanley

ANNE FARIS: Firstly, I’ll introduce you to Peter. Dr Peter Stanley is the head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia. He was appointed to this position in 2007 after 20 years at the Australian War Memorial as Principal Historian. He contributes to historical interpretation in print and broadcast media, including the television series Revealing Gallipoli, Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery and Monash. He has written over 22 books, including two published this year: To the Far Side of Tears: Remembering the St Nazaire commandos [that was its working title but it is published now as Commando to Colditz: Micky Burn’s journey to the far side of tears – remembering the raid on St Nazaire] and Men of Mont St Quentin: between victory and death. His talk today will draw on the research he gathered while writing these books, reflecting on memory, memorials and sacred spaces. Thank you, Peter.

PETER STANLEY: Thank you, Anne, and thanks, Leanne, for the invitation to promote my recent book – I’m sorry, to speak at this conference. Good afternoon everybody. What I’d like to talk about is one tiny place in France, a place called Mont St Quentin. Those of you who are militarily historically inclined will know that, on the first of September 1918, Mont St Quentin, which is a hill in France near the Somme, was captured by the 2nd Australian Division. This is regarded as one of the triumphs of Australian military history, although I won’t be talking about it like that. When you do read the book Men of Mont St Quentin: Between victory and death, you’ll see that I regard this as a very contentious battle and I contest the received version that it was a triumph of Monash’s planning. But I don’t want to talk about that today.

I want to talk about one or a few of the men who were killed on that day – a man called Frank Roberts, who was an orchardist from South Sassafras in the Dandenongs – now a little town called Kallista. Frank’s father Garry – who actually was one of the people behind the move to rename it from South Sassafras to Kallista, but that’s a detail – Garry, as you would imagine, was traumatised by the death of his son Frank in that battle, and Garry’s response to this terrible event in the family’s life was to inquire into it and to document Frank’s experience obsessively. He created great thick scrapbooks which documented every aspect of Frank’s life and death, and he especially wanted to know the exact spot on which Frank was killed and then was buried. He gathered evidence from many, many sources, including contacting each of the eight survivors of his son’s 12-man platoon. As they came back to Melbourne at the end of the war in 1919, he badgered them and persuaded them and blackmailed them into writing down an account of what had happened to Frank.

So I want to look at a very specific site of memory. It’s one that, as you’ll see, was the site of intense interest, intense yearning on the part of Garry to understand what had happened, certainly from 1918 for the next decade – less so then but perhaps more so in the future because of this work. This is one of the books that Anne referred to called Men of Mont St Quentin. It’s on sale in the Museum’s bookshop and it tells the story of that one platoon on that one afternoon of September 1918 and then traces the survivors of that event through the rest of their lives through twentieth-century Australia. It’s really a study in Australian social history. It starts as military history and it becomes social history.

My interest in historical sites goes back a long way. But in this book which I published last year A Stout Pair of Boots [cover of book shown] – those are Manning Clark’s boots at the top, the boots in which Manning Clark tramped over many historical sites in the course of writing his epic history – I talked about historically hot places, places with historical radiation, and of course scientifically, it’s complete bunkum. You can’t run a Geiger counter over a place of historic interest. You don’t get anything. They’re historically hot because of the knowledge we bring to them, and that’s one of the themes of this talk.

If that’s the theme of the talk, the subject is the Robertses. Let me introduce you to the Roberts [image shown]: down at the bottom there is Garry and Berta, the parents, and their three children Gwen, Bert and Frank. Frank was killed at Mont St Quentin. This is them just before the war, and the war of course changed their lives. They lived part of the week in Melbourne in Hawthorn, in this house Eumana, and the rest of the time they lived at South Sassafras. They had a weekender up in the Dandenongs, and that’s where Frank Roberts lived all the time.

The building Eumana, as you can see, is still there today. It is not a site of memory, but it may now become one in the sense that the story of the Roberts family and what happened to them from 13 September 1918, the day on which the family learned of Frank’s death – and they learned of it here. So perhaps this will become a site of memory because of what we know about the story. The theme of this is the knowledge we bring to these places.

This is another place where the story begins – the Tramways Building on Bourke Street, Melbourne [image shown]. Garry Roberts worked in this building. He walked in to work at about 10 o’clock on 13 September, got to his office, had a chat with his staff, and then noticed there was a telegram on the desk. There’s the telegram – you might be able to read it [image shown]: ‘I regret to inform you that London advises that your telegram of the 14th of August addressed to Roberts as being undelivered, the addressee having been killed in action.’ That’s the very banal and cruel way that Garry Roberts learned of the death of his son, and that started an obsessive search for knowledge about this place and about that event.

Well, how do we know about this? Because of Garry’s obsessive documentation, and you can see the telegram was stuck into one of the scrapbooks. And here’s his diary where as you can see it says: ‘Friday, the 13th of September, the most awful day in our lives’. That’s where the book begins and it’s where this search begins. Garry had the desire to know more, and we can understand why.

The subjects of the story [image shown]: here’s Frank and Ruby on their wedding day, and there’s Ruby with her baby Nancy who was born in November 1917, by which time Frank was off at the Western Front. There are lots of sadnesses in this story, and one is that Frank never knew his daughter.

These are like the men that Frank served with on 1 September 1918 [image shown]. If I told you that this was his platoon, several people in the audience would say, ‘Hang about, that’s not the right colour patch,’ and indeed it is not. These are men of the 24th Battalion and Frank was in the 21st Battalion – but it’s exactly the same. It’s the same group of men with the same range of weapons. They have both got two Lewis guns. They’re in the same trench. It’s Elsa Trench just below Mont St Quentin minutes before both units went over the top to attack Mont St Quentin.

These are some of the actual men that Frank served with: Les Baker, ‘Norrie’ Norwood in the middle and Godfrey Dobson. Each of these men has stories, which of course are told in much greater detail in the book. I’m not going to tell you their stories now, except to say that every single man in the platoon can be traced through the extensive records – not least being Frank’s diary: their Repat records, their AIF personnel files, and indeed the citations. You’ll see Godfrey Dobson on the right has a medal ribbon. That’s because he was awarded the Military Medal at Mont St Quentin, so there’s a citation for him. So you can see their individual stories which I won’t go into.

Of the 12 men that went over the top with Frank in his platoon, four of them died as a result of the battle – three of them on the spot; one of them six weeks later of a terrible stomach wound which eventually killed him – and four of his comrades were wounded. But of the eight who came back to Melbourne, six of them completed accounts of the day. This is one of the accounts that they wrote. You can see the type of documentation that you can get. There are about 10,000 words here that Garry Roberts managed to obtain typed by the Tramways Trust’s typists. Then, as you can see, Garry also edited it, went back to them to clarify and resolve inconsistencies, and constructed an account of the experience of this small group.

He hoped to write a memorial volume to Frank, but he was so overwhelmed with detail that in fact he wasn’t able to do that. But what he did do was to stick them in his record books, and most of the images I’m showing you come from the record books. He also gave a copy to Charles Bean, the official historian, who didn’t use them, but he did put them in his papers and that’s where I found them when I was searching for a way in to this event. So the platoon’s experience became the microcosm that I explored.

All of this is directed towards Garry finding the exact spot. Here’s a photograph of the exact spot at about 25 minutes before Frank was killed taken by the official photographer Hubert Wilkins [image shown]. That’s the summit of Mont St Quentin, its forest on the top almost completely destroyed by the shellfire, not just on the first of September but this had been a site of battle for the previous two years. But that’s the objective – that’s the place they attacked towards – and that’s more or less the same view today [image shown]. The forest has grown back; the village church has been rebuilt. The trench has been filled in, but you can just about trace where it was because it’s chalk soil and the chalk shows through the beet field so you can see where the excavations where.

This is the view that Charles Bean saw [image shown]. Charles Bean was the official historian, as I say. It just happens that he was standing on an adjacent ridge watching the battle. He arrived just too late to see Frank killed. But if you see that red cross on the left there, that’s more or less the exact spot where Frank was killed. The Australians attacked following the edge of that wood from right to left across the screen. Where that X was, was a quarry, which the Germans had turned into a strong point. Frank’s platoon attacked that strong point and, in attacking it, he died. I won’t go into the circumstances of his death.

We talk about memory: there are about four different accounts by eyewitnesses of Frank’s death. Two of them mention bullets, another mentions a grenade. All of them mention different times from when he was wounded to when he died, so it just bears upon the fragility of memory that Judy was telling us about.

That’s the view of the Mont today [image shown]. Some weeks later the Australian war artist Sir Arthur Streeton turned up. It was suggested that he painted the Mont because it was a scene of a great triumph by Monash and Monash’s men, and that’s what he painted [Mont St Quentin by Arthur Streeton shown]. If you look at it, it’s quite different from the scene I’ve just shown you. It’s from almost exactly the same spot – you can see the road running up the centre. Streeton exaggerated the height of the Mont to magnify the achievement that the troops had done. Here’s a bit of irony. Streeton’s picture is in the National Gallery of Victoria, and has been since about 1924. Arthur Streeton was a neighbour of the Robertses in South Sassafras. Sadly it seems that, although Garry was a friend of Tom Roberts the painter, he didn’t know that Arthur Streeton, another neighbour, had painted the exact spot that Frank had died. Given the degree of interest he took in it, it’s just extraordinary that he never found out.

There’s some of the record books [image shown]. There’s about 20 of them that are about a foot and a half thick. They’re absolutely chock-a-block with Roberts family memorabilia and documents, local history stuff, Tramways history, Victorian local history. They’re also full of this sort of page [image shown]. There are literally dozens of photographs of Frank’s grave taken by various visitors at various times and indeed of various graves, because Frank was exhumed and then buried in the war cemetery at Péronne just down the road. There are pictures of all these places in it – he was absolutely obsessed – including a plan of the battlefield drawn by one of Frank’s comrades Tom Wignall, I believe it was Tom Wignall, which shows the exact place. You see, you come back to this obsession with ground.

There’s even a photograph taken of General Monash and his daughter Bertha who visited the grave in May 1919 [image shown]. How on earth this happened – Monash, the great commander of the Australian corps, only visited two soldiers’ graves in France, one of them was Frank’s. How this happened is another story. But the fact is that this went into the scrapbooks as well. There’s a mourning broach that Garry commissioned to have made to remember Frank [image shown]. It’s a very sad story.

The three men who were killed on the Mont are buried together in the war cemetery at Péronne. There are also German graves down the road. This is not a site of memory in many ways, because the German cemeteries are neglected. They’re very bare; they’re very sad places. It always seems to be cloudy when you go into the German cemetery, and I don’t know why. But it seems that these places are not sites of memory. Although there may be families who come and visit, they’re not subject to the great tourist traffic that goes through Commonwealth war grave cemeteries.

Also on the top of Mont St Quentin was built a memorial. There’s some sappers hanging around on the side of it [image shown]. Very soon after the battle, within days, it was determined that a memorial would be built on top of the mount. You can see why it was captured. It’s a very commanding view. The sculpture that was erected on top of the Mont was done by a friend of the Robertses, Webb Gilbert. Charles Webb Gilbert was a friend of the family. He had sketched Frank in London just before he died and he told Garry that the face he put onto the statue was Frank’s, so Frank’s face turns up on the memorial.

If you go to Mont St Quentin today, and some of you may have, you won’t see that because the Germans came back in 1940, saw that a statue of an Australian bayoneting a Prussian eagle was not only an insult to the Reich but could also fund its foundries and they melted it down and took it away. It’s been replaced by this statue today, a more contemplative figure, but it remains a site of commemoration [image shown]. You can see on the left there the poppy, the flag and the koala, which indicate that Australians still come back to this spot in order to remember in various ways. And that’s the exact spot today [image shown]. It’s no longer a quarry; it’s been filled in.

The point about this is that if you go back to this spot and you can find it on maps – you can use maps that you can find in the war diaries, in Charles Bean’s papers, in Garry’s scrapbook and in the official history – you can triangulate where this place is. You can go there and stand on it. But if you go there and stand on it you won’t find anything; you find a very pleasant bit of field next to a French wood. My point is that it’s only because you bring to it knowledge, it’s only because you know the stories, it’s only because you’ve read those soldiers’ accounts that you can make any sense of this place.

So ask yourself what would’ve happened if Garry hadn’t collected that material, if he’d simply withdrawn into himself and perhaps mourned Frank for the rest of his life – he died in 1933 – but not written anything down. This place would be indistinguishable. Lots of people died at Mont St Quentin – French, Germans, Australians, British – but we know a lot about it because of this man’s consuming interest. So Frank and his platoon, No. 8 Platoon, become the subject of our research and reading not because of the site but because of the documentation. So in fact I’d argue that we work from the paper to the place and not the other way around. That’s all I wanted to say. My point is fairly straight forward. Of course I want you to read the book, but I very much look forward to your questions and comments later. Thank you very much. [applause]

Sacred sites, memorials and sites of memory in Aboriginal Australia by Associate Professor Claire Smith

ANNE FARIS: I’d like to welcome Associate Professor Claire Smith as our second speaker. She’s from Flinders University in South Australia where she commenced teaching archaeology in 1998. Her primary research interests are in Australian archaeology, especially rock art. While she has conducted field research with Aboriginal communities in Australia, Asia and North America, she mostly works with Aboriginal people from the Barunga and Wugullar communities in the Northern Territory and has completed fieldwork there annually since 1990, and she also works with the Ngadjuri people from South Australia. She has a particular interest in bringing about sustainable, long-term changes in community attitudes to Aboriginal people through the school curriculum and through enhancing community appreciation of the unique accomplishments of Indigenous Australians.

In addition to teaching, writing and editing books, Claire is the President of the World Archaeological Congress. She has been part of a project to support archaeological education and training in economically disadvantaged countries. Her talk today will discuss social issues around a range of memorials and sacred sites in the Barunga–Wugullar region of the Northern Territory. Thank you, Claire.

CLAIRE SMITH: For those of you who are attentive, you might notice that the title of my talk has changed slightly. I started off calling it ‘Sacred sites and memorials’ but when I was preparing it yesterday I wanted to move more into the present because I think there are some interesting things happening at the moment. So I’ve added in sites of memory, a little bit extra.

I work in Barunga and Wugullar in the Northern Territory. I work there with my husband Gary Jackson who’s an anthropologist. We originally went to Katherine in 1976. I worked as a barmaid, he worked at the meat works and we had all sorts of interesting normal lives long before I became an academic. Then in 1990, when I was looking for somewhere to do my doctorial research, I went through my local contacts there and went back and did my research there. We’ve been there every year since then. People come and stay with us; we stay with them. We also work in South Australia with the Ngadjuri. I would just like to say that I know the Barunga–Wugullar region very well because I work there all the time. Some of the things that I say can be extrapolated a bit, but some of them are really specific as well. I just don’t want to pretend to be an expert on all of Aboriginal Australia. I really should’ve called the presentation ‘Sites of memory in Barunga Australia or Barunga region’.

This is the general region where we are [image shown]. I have this to show you some of the linguistic diversity that’s there [image shown]. You can see the scale on the map. Barunga is down in Jawoyn country, but it also has a lot of Ngalkpon-speaking people, Rembarrnga, Mielli and others. The kind of linguistic diversity is the kind of linguistic diversity that you get in Europe and the kind of social sophistication is the kind of social sophistication that you get in Europe as well.

I work on Bagula clan lands of Jawoyn people. This is just a little example of the country [images shown]. These are the people that I work with. This is our camp. We’ve worked there for 20 years and this is our camp. It’s our little camp. The caravan is usually used as an office, and we sleep in tents around it and students come up and so on, but that’s our site of memory there.

In terms of the social system, I wanted you to be aware of the moiety system, which is Dhuwa and Yirritja. These are the 16 subsections [diagram shown]. When you become part of the community you’re given skin. My skin is Bangirn, which is in the Yirrijta side. My husband – I have to marry a man of the opposite moiety, Gammarung, and so on. So at the first level of complexity there are 196 relationships held in the oral history, in the minds of people, and once you go to the second level of complexity, it’s over a thousand. And all this information about who you can sit next to, how far, who you can talk to, who you can’t talk to, who you can marry – that’s all held in people’s heads. This just gives you a little bit of an idea of who you can marry and who you can’t [image shown]

I am going to talk a little bit about sacred sites first. I will try to take Peter’s direction and talk less and leave more time for discussion. So if someone can warn me when I’ve got seven minutes to go, and then I’ll talk faster. The points at the beginning here are probably things that most of you know. It’s an informed audience so you understand that the Dreaming still exists today; you understand that the land is impregnated with meaning, that it’s a living landscape, that it’s a powerful landscape, that it can be a dangerous landscape, that if you go to the wrong place, you can get sick. That’s how people really seriously feel it. And I certainly believe it now, having been there. It’s a subtle and sophisticated social system [image shown].

This is Edith Falls [image shown], which is not a sacred site in the sense that you can’t go there. Obviously I can’t show you sacred sites that you can’t go to, because I can’t go there. But it’s a frill-necked lizard Dreaming spot and there areas around here that are restricted sites that sometimes only men, sometimes only women, sometimes one Dhuwa and one Yirritja person has to go that place. It’s so powerful that if a person of only one moiety goes, then they can get into trouble and have a problem.

This is a cockatoo Dreaming place [image system] very close to Barunga, with a little Sacred Sites Authority marker there. This is just there. It’s the goona of the white cockatoo, the faeces of the white cockatoo is the story. And there’s a trail and so on, but this is all an ochre spot.

This is a women’s site. I knew for about ten years only one little secret thing that ever got told to me and I thought, ‘I’ll just keep that to my little heart. I’ll never tell anyone this.’ And then I was in a minivan with a whole lot of young boys in the back and I heard someone say this secret thing. And then I found out all the kids know this. This isn’t so secret. I thought it was secret. It wasn’t told to me, ‘This is secret,’ but I thought it was secret. This is a bipi, a breast of a lady, and it’s an old lady [image shown]. There’s a young woman’s breast nearby. And this is physical evidence for people that these women went in this place. This secret thing that I kept to my little heart for ten years is that part of the proof that it’s bipi, a breast, is there’s a little spring at the top of it, and that means like when a woman gives milk.

This is a site which is not an initiation site for young men, but it is part of the initiation process [image shown]. This is Old Jimmy, who I work with very closely. It’s a mukmuk site. This is a Rainbow Serpent and it’s giving birth to these mukmuks, which are owls. As part of young men becoming adults, in the old days they would collect kangaroos and they would have a ceremony here at a particular time. And that meant young men were then able to go out to hunt kangaroos for their wives – they were more suitable.

This is a hand stencil at this place of a young man [image shown]. Again, we went to this site for maybe 12 years, and I knew this as a young mans’ kind of initiation site. When they had that ceremony the area was closed off for the ceremony, but then it is open the rest of the time so people can go there. And it’s quite open: white people can go there for swimming and so on.

After a long, long time Glen told me the story. She was often there. She said, ‘But you know how it really works, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes, young men go there, the men do their men’s thing and the women sit at home and knit.’ She said, ‘Yes, but that mother has to provide those bones.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘Well those kangaroo bones down here, that mother has to provide those bones.’ So the young man goes hunting, he collects the kangaroo, he gives the bones to his mum, she looks after them and when there’s enough bones you can have that ceremony. So the mother actually has a lot of power there because she can find those bones, she can look after them carefully, she can lose those bones. She can say, ‘You know, you have that ceremony coming up. I don’t know where I put all those kangaroo bones you gave me. I don’t know where they are.’ There’s a lot of hidden power for women there that wasn’t there in the original story.

The point there is that that information only came out after working there for more than a decade, and working there continuously. I lived there for one year once and another time six months. People lived with us for eight months at a time sometimes. So there are many, many levels of stories that will come out after a lot longer. I just wanted to make the point that that site was open and closed; it’s not just that sacred/secular dichotomy that I am sure everyone here would be aware of.

In terms of sites of memorials, this sign was up for – I don’t know how long, but a long, long time. When we were first there we saw the sign saying: ‘No entry, Aboriginal ceremony in progress.’ So we thought ‘Oh, no entry.’ And after about a year and a half we thought, ‘Gee, it’s gone on a long time, that ceremony.’ Of course it was a memorial site, it was a memorial to that group [who conducted the ceremony].

I am going to talk a bit about memorials which I’m going to interpret in terms of dead people in this case. This is a funeral of someone we know [image shown]. This is actually a little bit contested because where he was buried was a highly contested thing. One part of the family wanted him buried up in the hills old way, and another part of the family wanted him buried the Christian way. The part that we’re closest to of that family is the Christian side – we heard both sides, but the Christian side was very upset because he got buried up in the hills at a place that women can’t go to.

These are lorkorns, which are burial poles where we are [image shown]. There’s one for each individual and their personal possessions go into that. And actually sometimes two people. One of these has two people, one at one end and one at the other. I think you’ve got some in the galleries here at the Museum that are done tourist-ways with lots of designs. Aboriginal people where I work do them two ways: plain way for themselves, for the community; but if you’re making something for tourists they have to be short – and not long like this although I know that they do them long in other places – and plain. This has to do with the moiety of the person, their skin and so on.

There is another kind of memorial to individuals, which in this case is to Willy Martin [image shown]. Some people here possibly know Willy because he’s a very strong and powerful man. We have some of these kinds of stones around the community. Again, this is a memorial to someone who passed away [image shown]. You put your hands with ochre and you go around that. There’s a little kind of ceremony that goes with that, and sometimes it goes around the car that held the dead people and those kinds of things. People who work in communities will be aware of all that.

I just want to talk briefly about hands as memorials to individuals, and that’s also crossing cultures a little bit I’m going to talk about. This was from a video that we made in 1992 where these old men were painting rock art [image shown]. This is Paddy Fordham Wainburranga. There’s Paddy Fordham stuff here in the Museum. I know because you guys bought some when I was up there. This is Jack Chatham. They were making these rock paintings, and I said, ‘Can we video them?’ Paddy wasn’t actually even going to be involved and then he saw the other men going off, and he jumped on board and came that day. These are kids visiting a little bit later that hand stencil [image shown]. Then this is Peter doing some other paintings at that time [image shown]. I can maybe tell the story of how Peter – he hasn’t really passed away; he walked away a couple of years ago.

That’s Paddy, and that’s his painting [image shown]. It’s beautiful art, but nothing there today – it all washed away because it was in an exposed place. And they knew that when they did it, although this is what Paddy says about hand stencils: