|
Publications : Chapters
in Books
Paul Gough
‘Planting Memory': the Challenge of Remembering
the Past on the Somme, Gallipoli and Melbourne'
in Garden History, Journal of the Garden
History Society, Vol.42, Suppl.1, 2014,
pp.3-17
In exploring the mnemonic role of gardens, this
paper will first focus on the value of gardens as both a palliative
for melancholy, as liminal enclaves, and as carefully constructed
surrogate memory systems. Their importance as places for reflection
and recovery is examined through the lens of post-war Flanders,
with a brief examination of the immense task required to recover
the land from the trauma of the First World War. The paper then
examines the manner in which pilgrims and veterans took their personal
narratives to the battle zones. With so little to see, the bereaved
had to reclaim lost names from the lost land; this process is explored
through the work of the gardeners who had to ‘plant’
memory and of architects who designed vast monuments to enumerate
those who had simply vanished without trace. Noting Fabian Ware’s
transformational contribution to this process, this paper examines
how the sites of battle became named and reclaimed, how shallow
ditches and slight mounds were rendered sites of reverence, and
how garden cemeteries have become the epicentres of ritual remembering.
Two ‘mirror’ sites of national memory are examined:
the ‘Anzac’ headland in Turkey, and the memorial parkland
and gardens of Shrine Reserve in central Melbourne, both hallowed
places strewn with symbolic trees, designed gardens and abundant
rhetorical ‘topoi’. They are also places where the seed
and soil of distant battlefields have been mingled with the national
landscape, where the front has literally been transplanted to another
country. The paper concludes by suggesting that the garden memorial
is an essential component in the future of remembering, creating
open and inclusive spaces that rely on participation and careful
nurturing to ensure that memory stays alert, relevant and passed
on from generation to generation.
The mnemonic role of gardens
Gardens have long been regarded as a 'palliative
for melancholy' and a congenial environment for solitary contemplation.1
In Western Christian teaching the garden is seen as a place for
spiritual reflection, a space designed to stimulate meditation,
introspection and the easing of the imagination.2
Furthermore, gardens are liminal enclaves, withdrawn from the customary
disruption of urbanization, where precious objects, memorials and
other sculpted forms can be placed under the open sky 'in
the eye of God' (figure
1). In their many different and varied
forms gardens, parks and arboreta have become closely associated
with memory systems, whereby themes, ideas and classical references
can be referenced in statuary, fountains and diverse formal objects.
Reflecting on the episodic arrangements of gardens such as those
at Stowe or Stourhead, John Dixon Hunt has examined how these objets
de jardin can act as a sequence of code that might be ‘strung
together into an iconographical programme or narrative’.3
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 1. the shrine of
remembrance in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, approached
along the avenue from the west.
all photos: Suzette Worden, June 2014 |
|
However, here the vgarden-as-mnemonic-text is at its most vulnerable.
Over even a short period of time cultural references can be lost
or displaced, and a ‘proper’ reading will be at the
mercy of the linguistic sophistication and foreknowledge of subsequent
generations. In addition,growth, decay and replacement will muddle
the narrative intent. over time even the mostvcarefully arranged
gardens face this erosion of their original purpose.
Those who design memorial gardens and arboreta, in particular, rely
on a parallel narrative of naming; using labels, captions and texts
to provide a running commentary on the origins, associations and
mnemonic function of particular trees, shrubs or plantings. We can
see this played out in the memorial parks on the former battlefields
on the Western Front and on other theatres of war. it has also been
realized on a grand scale in the National Memorial Arboretum in
Alrewas, Staffordshire, where the vast planting schema offers an
indexical account of British conflicts in the past century. At Alrewas,
the mnemonic structure of the designed garden is exactly synchronized
with the task of memorialization.4
Arguably, it is the most comprehensive theatre of symbolic memory
in europe, offering a dramaturgical spectacle populated –
one might say didactically enacted - by plants, shrubs and young
trees all on a scale that might have impressed the great landscapists
of the eighteenth century. Strewn with an assortment of sculpted
forms, arches and stones of remembrance at Alrewas, the iconic complements
the indexical. there is a well-scripted dialogue between neatly
arranged nature and well-crafted text that allows names and events
to speak ‘beyond the grave’, even though there are no
bodies interred in its vast acreage. It is a place where we remember
by proxy; a place where remembering the dead is linked to a life
cycle of planting, caring and nurture.
The staged setting of a garden such as alrewas can be usefully compared
with commemorative landscapes such as the Ehrenhaine, or ‘Heroe’s
Groves’, of post-war
Germany, or memorial gardens such as Coronation Park in Toronto
(where groves of maple trees were planted in memory of canadian
troops who fought overseas) or indeed the large parkland of King’s
Domain in Melbourne, which has been progressively filled with plantings,
statuary and other memorial markers since it was first initiated
in the 1920s. These revered public places might also be regarded
as dramaturgical spaces, with the natural and situated objects acting
out specific parts that represent both physical vulnerability and
transience, but also respectful reverence within a larger framework
of sacrifice and nationhood. In such places the seasonal cycle of
nature ‘confronts men and women with their own changes and
mortality’, to quote Doris Francis, concentrating the mind
on the brevity of life and swift passage of time.5
This paper explores the role of arboreal and natural ‘memorials’
in creating meaning, and looks at how the planting of commemorative
trees, plants and flowers requires wilful participation from those
who wish to remember. Planting, as George McKay and others have
pointed out, is at times a political act, requiring intervention,
nurturing and constant vigilance.6
Whereas the erection of a memorial in stone and bronze might bring
about a moment of closure, a memorial garden usually offers only
a start; gardening is seen as a means not an end. On the former
battlefields of the Western Front in France and Belgium the theatre
of war has been superseded by theatres of memory. These vary in
scale and intent from the declamatory and highly politicized tone
of the island of Ireland Peace Park on the Messines Ridge to the
more modest Sheffield Memorial Park near Serre, which has accumulated
a succession of private and regimental memorial components in
the past ninety years.
This paper also touches on the challenge for the imperial (later
Commonwealth) War Graves Commission in galvanizing and managing
the symbolic power of the cycles of natural decay and renewal. drawing
on the consoling properties of nature, they had to bring order to
chaos, soothe the memory of dreadful events that had occurred nearby,
and try to arrest the moment of untimely death. consolation is a
crucial factor in any garden memorial, and perhaps of all art forms
they have the unique capacity to evoke poignant analogies between
human existence, the fragility of nature and the assurance of ‘cyclic
regeneration’.7 Here,
the role of the gardener is crucial: a skilful gardener can appear
to deny death and disorder by planting, maintaining and caring for
plants within the walled domain. As Francis et al. observed, a well-tended
garden is a ‘symbolic bulwark’ against disorder, decay
and the occasional randomness of death.8
Nowhere was this more urgent than on the pulverized battlefields
of the Western Front, Macedonia (northern Greece) or the Dardanelles
(western Turkey). The green coverlet of carefully cropped turf that
was laid between the white headstones in the ‘silent cities’
on the somme, at Arras or around Ypres was intended to offer succour
to those whose loved ones had been lost in the calamitous void of
trench warfare.9 The scale of
that task is worth examining in some detail.
‘Freezing’ memory
Soon after the armistice had been signed, Winston Churchill (then
Minister of Munitions) recommended that the battered remains of
Ypres should be left forever in ruins as an enduring monument to
the sacrifice of British and Empire troops. For him and millions
of others, the ancient Flemish city had become a symbol of fortitude
and resilience. it was an historic and hallowed place through which
every unit of the British army had at one time passed. Its pulverized
buildings, he argued, would be more articulate than any carved memorial
or reverential monument. It was a powerful plea, typically Churchillian
in its rhetorical tone, but it fell on deaf ears. Within months
the townspeople were reclaiming the ruined town, diligently clearing
away the impact of war and patiently restoring its medieval order.
To many, the immensity of the task seemed overwhelming. across a
great arc of southern Belgium and northern France the land lay in
tatters, its soil poisoned and
villages levelled. the statistics are numbing: some 333 million
cubic metres of trench had to be backfilled, barbed wire covered
an estimated 375 million square metres, and over eighty thousand
dwellings had been destroyed or damaged, as were 17,466 schools,
public buildings and churches. In four years the population of the
devastated regions had diminished by sixty per cent.10
to illustrate the scale of the damage a comparative map was drawn
up by the British League of Help for devastated France. It superimposed
the scale of war damage onto the shires of england to reveal that
no fewer than twenty-one English counties would have been severely
blighted by war - a swathe of destruction that reached from Kent
to the north Midlands.11
While the native populations in France and Belgium toiled to reconstruct
their homes and land, pilgrims and war veterans roamed the former
battlegrounds to locate places that might contain the memory of
significant events. Outwardly there was nothing much to see; the
landscape that drew them was an imaginary one. it was a place of
projection and association, a space full of history, yet void of
obvious topography. A place where physical markers had been obliterated
but where the land had been overwritten with an invisible emotional
geography. tens of thousands made individual and group pilgrimages.
they hoped to unite intense memories of loved ones with places that
no longer existed. Veterans, such as the poet Edmund Blunden, always
sought to go ‘over the ground’ again, recognizing that
there were fragments of the ‘old front line’ that had
the power to activate his imagination and to bring the memory of
his dead comrades closer to him.12
Invariably, however, the wasted landscapes in france, belgium, the
Dardenelles and Macedonia were largely bereft of landmarks except
for painted signposts indicating where things once were - former
villages, churches, chateaux, farmsteads - and littered with war
refuse and unspent ordnance. they were, as Paul Shepheard has stated,
blank places which ‘you took your story to’.13
Although many veterans were most drawn to very particular tracts
of the old lines, it is little wonder that bereaved pilgrims homed
in on the military cemeteries dotted across Flanders and Picardy.
these soon became, and still are, the epicentres of grieving, marked
now by gleamingly clean stones deeply inscribed with the high diction
of mourning. many insightful narratives have been told about the
work of the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC), and what Rudyard
Kipling termed ‘this dead sea of arrested lives’, and
this present volume contains insightful essays on the systematic
audit of the dead, the process of recovery and burial, and the transformational
work of individuals such as Fabian Ware.14
To complement these narratives, this paper now focuses on two adjacent
aspects: firstly, the process of remembering, or what we might understand
as re-membering, the bringing together of parts that had been pulled
asunder and dis-membered through violence and trauma; and secondly,
the spatiality of commemoration: the arboreal, floral and vegetative
contexts in which the headstones, obelisks and memorial arches are
so thoughtfully placed. To this end, next examined is the interrelationship
between plinth and place, touching on the tensions that can be aroused
by officious procedures, and an exploration is made of the mnemonic
value of the cemetery garden. But first, to start with names and
naming.
Naming and Knowing
In a detailed account of re-designing the Menin Gate at Ypres, Sir
Reginald Blomfield focused on the key challenge for him and his
design team: ‘I had to find space for a vast number of names,
estimated at first at some forty thousand but increased as we went
on to about 58,600.’15
inscriptions had to spread across the walls, over arches, columns
and even the stairwells, but Blomfield could still fit only 54,896
names into the tunnel-like arch. six thousand were transferred to
national burial sites nearby.16
Many miles south in Picardy, the design of the gigantic arch at
thiepval was dictated in part by the need to display the names of
73,367 men with no known resting place who had died during the Battle
of the Somme. designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the huge arch consists
of sixteen enormous load-bearing columns each faced by stone panels
carved to a height of some six metres, each name clearly identifiable,
the words never quite beyond legibility.
Little can prepare the casual visitor for the scale of the monument;
it defies easy description and is almost ‘unphotographable’.17
no image can seize its daunting scale, its weight and the panorama
of names, ‘So interminably many,’ wrote Stephen Zweig,
‘that as on the columns of the Alhambra, the writing becomes
decorative.’18 It is also
unnervingly precise in both its grammar and specificity: individuals
who may have served (and died) under assumed or false names are
listed; common names - Smith, Jones, Hughes - are further identified
by their roll number, and the memorial includes an Addenda and even,
according to Julian Barnes, a Corrigenda.19
not only is it an impressive totem on the ‘memory-scape’,
it is a gargantuan roll of honour built in brick and stone. as Shepheard
has convincingly argued, it is this painstaking attention to detail
- the assiduous ‘Clip and mow and prune’ of the gardening,
and the insistence on specificity at every level that makes it possible
for the Commonwealth War Cemeteries to commemorate the dead without
glorifying war.20
N aming, and the precise evocation of names, was central to the
cult of commemoration after the Great War. as a process it grew
out of the complex bureaucracies developed by the industrial armies
during years of total war; the administration of death echoed the
regular rhythm of the military machine which had by the time of
the Great War become ‘rationalised, routinised, standardised’.21
however, initial attempts to coordinate the burial and recording
of the dead were haphazard. in Flanders it was the diligent zeal
of Ware and his graves registration unit that laid the foundations
of a systematic audit of the dead and their place of burial.22
Ware established a method for graves registration, a scheme for
permanent burial sites and a system for photographing any grave
requested by a relative. Within a year Ware’s makeshift team
had registered over fifty thousand graves, answered five thousand
enquiries and supplied two thousand five hundred photographs.
Little over a year later the work to gather, re-inter and individually
mark the fallen had become a state responsibility. the dead, as
Michael Heffernan pointed out, were no longer allowed ‘To
pass unnoticed back into the private world of their families’.
they were ‘official property’ to be accorded appropriate
civic commemoration in ‘solemn monuments of official remembrance’.23
as others in this volume have observed, it was not long before visiting
gardeners began to dress the military cemeteries with shrubs, small
trees and indigenous plants.24
the process of ‘softening’ had begun. it soon became
an integral part of the cemetery designs through the systematic
involvement of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. horticulturalists
such as Gertrude Jekyll brought a unique touch to the planting regimes,
despatching forget-me-nots from munstead nursery so that the cemeteries
would more closely resemble english gardens. Working closely with
Lutyens and others, she required that indigenous plants be used
to enhance the associations with the gardens of home, whether that
be Britain, South Africa, New Zealand or Australia.
Ware’s innovative programme of recovery, identification and
remembering had at the same time introduced another quite radical
process - indeed his approach heralded a new era, an epistimological
shift, in the diction of commemoration - the era of the common soldier’s
name. on monumental structures in France and Prussia during the
nineteenth century, the naming of dead soldiers of all ranks had
been occasionally adopted, but never in Britain. When such a proposal
was considered as a way of honouring the dead of Waterloo (1815)
it was rejected by parliament.25
More usually, only officers were named, rankers were simply identified
by the number of dead and it was left to military units to initiate
and raise the money for memorials that listed all ranks.26
this was certainly the practice after the wars in the Crimea (1853–56),
but by the end of the Boer Wars (1880-81, 1899-1902) it had become
commonplace for local military memorials in britain to contain lists
of those who had died, often denoting rank - a practice that was
avoided after the Great War largely to connote ‘Equality of
sacrifice’, irrespective of class, rank or status. by late
1918 the administration of death and grieving had become organized,
regulated and marked by ‘a historically unprecedented planting
of names on the landscapes of battle’.27
indeed, the very words chosen for the Stone of Remembrance in each
of the larger cemeteries underlines this fact: ‘Their Name
Liveth Evermore.’ a phrasing that caused Lutyens to ask provocatively,
‘But what are names?’ for the bereaved, however (and
especially for those in the distant reaches of the Empire), they
were often all that was left.
Place and the ‘Anxiety of Erasure’
While names can be recovered, even recuperated from the past, language
strained to describe the calamity and depravity of modern war. John
Masefield, author and future Poet Laureate, struggled to find the
vocabulary necessary to describe his first sight of the Somme battlefield
in 1916:
To say that the ground is ‘ploughed up’
with shells is to talk like a child … to call it mud would
be misleading. it was not like any mud i’ve ever seen.
it was a kind of stagnant river, too thick to flow, yet too wet
to stand, and it had a kind of glisten and shine on it like reddish
cheese, but it was not
solid at all and you left no tracks in it, they all closed over,
and you went in over your boots at every step and sometimes up
to your calves. Down
below it there was a solid footing, and as you went slopping along
the army went slopping along by your side, and splashed you from
head to foot.28
After the war words did not come any more easily.
The sites of memory that attracted visitors in their thousands were
often little more than tracts of wasteland to which historic significance
had to be attached. It was in fact a spectacle of absence, a potent
emptiness of flattened earth, ruined and shattered forms, interspersed
with cemeteries strung out like the ‘beads on a rosary’.29
Robert Freestone suggested that the structures and relationships
between the many sets of stakeholders who have some authority over
a given ‘site of memory’ are ‘complex, incomplete,
sometimes unfair, confused, and conflicting’.30
identifying, conserving and managing the ‘places we want to
keep’ because they are deemed to have layers of significance
is strewn with competing demands.
These tensions are brilliantly captured in a short story by Julian
Barnes, Evermore
(1996), whose central character, Miss Moss, makes regular visits
to her brother’s grave in a military cemetery in northern
france. on one of her annual pilgrimages she travels prepared to
dig up the coarse French grass, which by her standards is inappropriate
for British soldiers to lie beneath, and replace it with a home-grown
substitute:
After dark she dug out the offending French grass
and relaid the softer English turf, patting it into place, then
stamping it in. she was pleased with
her work, and the next year, as she approached the grave, saw
no indication of her mending. but when she knelt, she realised
that her work had
been undone: the French grass was back again.31
This attention to an authentic nature of memory
has long historic roots. it is possible to trace a pattern of commemoration
to the battle of Gettysburg (1863), which continues on to the barren
ash hills around Verdun, through to such Second World War sites
as the beaches of Normandy, the ‘martyred village’ of
Oradour-sur-Glane and the razed city of Hiroshima.32
on each of these battlegrounds the moral resonance of the site itself
is seen as paramount. ditches, mounds, ruins and barren tracts have
been maintained, preserved and sometimes enhanced because they are
seen as ‘historical traces’ which have an unassailable
authority. however, the semiotics of commemorative spatiality are
complex because they must be constantly negotiated and redefined.
This difficulty notwithstanding, a semiotics of place has been clearly
articulated by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who was
compelled by the qualities of particular sites and examined their
role in the formation of collective memory. ‘Space is a reality
that endures’, it has the capacity to unite groups of individuals
and believers concentrating and ‘moulding its character to
theirs’.33 So saturated
in potentiality are some sites that pilgrims have been continuously
drawn to places that ‘contain’ the memory of overwhelming
events. in this sense, the terrain around the Brandenburg Gate,
the ‘raised knoll’ in downtown Dallas and the land at
‘Ground Zero’ in New York can be considered secular
shrines capable of rekindling memories of awesome events, as locales
of embodied potentiality.34
In the same spirit, Robert Harbison, wandering over historic sites
of battle and musing on the manner in which we help create ‘significant’
landscapes, has suggested that ‘serious tourists’ actually
monumentalize - and re-construct - the landscapes they pass through.
pilgrims, especially recurrent visitors such as Miss Moss, ‘classicise’
certain places by concentrating on nodes of significance - the Butte
de Warlencourt on the Somme, Hill 60 near Ypres, the ash mounds
around Verdun - which gradually acquire ‘ceremonial eminence’
whatever their outward condition.35
The cemetery gardens designed and planted by imperial gardeners
on the Western Front battle lines play a key part in serving as
nodal markers in a landscape that is now largely returned to agriculture
but is littered with significance. However, military cemeteries
play only one part in these memory-scapes: they need to be seen
in a commemoratively spatial context. next examined are two such
memory-scapes, one created on the sites of battle in Turkey, and
the other - in Australia - that was created in response to those
distant battles.
Contested Nature in Gallipoli
In Western Turkey, the Great War battlefields are perched on the
tip of the Dardanelles peninsula. a complex historical site, it
has been recurrently invested in and contested by ‘insiders
and outsiders’ since the allied and empire troops evacuated
its bloody ridges in early 1916.36
Along the line of the old No-Man’s-Land the terrain is peppered
with statuary, museums, revered landscapes, facsimile trench lines
and cemetery gardens. the main period of cemetery planning and memorial
building took place in the 1920s when the IWGC assumed responsibility
for situating and planning thirty-one cemeteries and five allied
memorials.37 they are carved in the restrained neo-classical style
that characterize the work of the IWGC, work that was carried out
in challenging climactic, geological and socio-political conditions.
Sir John Burnet, principal architect, complained about the insecure
ground, its poor drainage and the propensity of the impoverished
locals to remove the essential materials intended for the commission.
he had also to work in an emotionally charged context. as at Ypres,
there was a vociferous lobby by Australian and New Zealand ex-servicemen
to designate the entire ‘Anzac’ area as consecrated
ground; a lobby that, while unsuccessful at the time, would later
lay the foundation for territory disputes that have become spasmodically
inflamed since the Turkish government agreed the treaty of Lausanne
in 1923.
As for marking their part in the campaign, there was no comparable
response from the Turkish authorities until the 1950s, and then
again in the late 1960s when a number of imposing modernist structures
were built at Cape Helles, the most southern point of the peninsula.
during the late 1980s a number of islamic memorial sites were built,
and in the last decade several large figurative statues - some strident,
even bombastic, in tenor - have been located at Anzac and Helles.
although the war ended here in 1916, an understated battle for monumental
supremacy has been waged ever since. Turkish and Commonwealth memorial
sites are located uncomfortably close to each other on the cliffs
over the once-disputed beaches, and immense statues of Turkish heroes
stand face to face with the commission’s obelisks, locked
forever in ‘parallel monologues’.38
On the eve of the eightieth anniversary of the allied landings in
1995 the Turkish authorities supplemented the martial statuary with
an ambitious - but not uncontroversial - planting regime designed
to dress the battlefield with appropriate symbolic floral designs.
Although
the cemetery gardens were largely untouched, the surrounding areas
were liberally planted with non-indigenous ceremonial shrubs and
trees. few have proved able to survive the extremes of the climate.
since then the native brush and thick undergrowth have largely reclaimed
much of the ground beyond the shallow walls and ditches that mark
the edges of the cemeteries. although some have been creatively
preserved many other trench lines, dugouts and other fragile remains
have become overgrown and softened by indigenous plant growth.
As a hallowed site of national memory, the preservation of the Gallipoli
battlefield as a physical and inviolable entity has helped maintain
a strong consciousness of the past. David Lowenthal argued that
this is ‘essential to maintenance of purpose in life, since
without memory we would lack all sense of continuity, all apprehension
of causality, all knowledge of our identity’.39
However, as is evident on the contested ravines and beaches of the
Dardanelles, memory, identity and purpose are rarely values that
are evenly shared, especially between nations many thousands of
miles apart. such spaces are invariably politicized, dynamic and
contested. as barbara bender noted, they are constantly open to
negotiation and their meaning needs to be constantly renewed through
regular interaction by successive generations of visitors and second,
even third, generations of relatives.40
They are no longer singular sites of memory but have become multilayered
and deeply stratified places of personal and public memory.
Just as there are several distinct phases in the creation and reception
of public monuments, so the commemorative spatiality in which they
occur has a number of similar phases. Jay Winter has proposed a
three-part cycle in the afterlife of lieux
de memoire. he defined the first as an
initial, creative period - the construction of ‘commemorative
form’ - which is marked by a programme of siting, building
and the creation of ceremonies that are periodically centred on
the reverential object. during a second phase, the ritual action
is grounded in the annual calendar and becomes institutionalized
as part of civic routine. there is then a critical, transformative
period when the public monument either disappears or is upheld as
an active site of memory. This final phase, as Winter reminded us,
is largely contingent on whether a following generation of mourners
inherits the earlier meanings attached to the place or event and
adds new meanings.41 Without
frequent reinscription the date and place of commemoration simply
fade away as memory atrophies. Very soon the monument loses its
potency to re-invigorate memory: it becomes ‘invisible’.
equally, this second generation of carers must pay attention to
the space that surrounds or contains the once-revered object; they
must preserve its perimeters, attend to its maintenance, and significantly
they must tend to the symbolic shrubbery and flowers that surround
the totemic stone. neglecting to do so indicates a lack of attention,
a loss of faith, a waning interest in preserving the memory of those
whose names are inscribed into the stone. Withered wreathes, unkempt
lawn and badly pruned shrubs are regarded as a prompt reminder of
a negligence of the past. as mnemonic devices in a funerary environment,
flowers are powerful purveyors of information.
In the post-war period the distance between the battlefields of
the Dardanelles and the soldier’s homelands of australia and
new zealand proved too great for many relatives and pilgrims. Instead,
in an adaptation of Winter’s third phase of commemoration,
proxy measures were created. this took the unique form of seed and
soil exchanges which were initiated by Anzac troops, and then became
part of a rich discourse of remembering shared between the once-belligerent
countries.
This aspect of re-membering began as early as 1915, soon after the
bloody struggle for one of the tactical strongholds at gallipoli
(known now as the Battle of Lone Pine,
August 1915). a young Australian soldier, Thomas Keith McDowell,
was reputed to have retrieved a single pine cone from the slopes
of the bloody ridge. stored in his kit bag during military service
in turkey, North Africa and the Somme, the convalescent corporal
returned to Melbourne with the cone in late 1916. some twelve years
later, nurtured by the fertile Western district soils at Grassmere
near Warrnambool - so the story relates - McDowell’s aunt
managed to propagate five seedlings from the cone, of which four
were coaxed into small saplings. all four were handed over to the
military and between May 1933 and January 1934 they were planted
amid high ritual in key locations in Melbourne (figure
2). one tree was destined for King’s
Domain, a thirty-six-hectare tract of wellmaintained lawns, pathways
and mature trees that acts as the Commemorative hinterland to Shrine
Reserve, a highly revered tract of land dominated by the classical
edifice of the Shrine of Remembrance, one of the largest war memorials
in Australia. an imposing granite structure, the Shrine is based
on the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus and the Parthenon in Athens,
and was initially intended solely as a memorial to the men and women
from the state of Victoria who had died during the First World War
(figure 3). However,
within a few years, its scale, imposing location in the city and
the grandeur of its commemorative environs meant that it soon came
to be seen as Australia’s premier memorial to all sixty thousand
nationals who had served in the war.42
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 2. A ‘Lone
Pine’ tree in the Shrine Reserve in Melbourne, planted
on 24 April 2006
‘in memory of the service and sacrifice of Victorians
in the First World War’ |
|
A fter a prolonged, and at times strongly contested, process of
development, during which many native and exotic trees were systematically
(and controversially) culled to make way for a commemorative planting
regime, the Shrine was officially dedicated on Armistice Day 11
November 1934. an estimated three hundred thousand people - one
third of all those living in melbourne at the time - gathered to
witness its inauguration by the Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester.
One year earlier, the shrine reserve tree, grown from one of the
four cones nurtured by McDowell’s aunt, had been planted with
full military honours on 11 June 1933 by Lieutenant-General Sir
Stanley Savige.
McDowell’s gift and his aunt’s green-fingered prowess,
while impressive, were not, it seems, unique. another soldier, lance
corporal benjamin smith from the 3rd Battalion, had also retrieved
a pine cone from the Dardanelles and sent it back to his mother
in Australia. two seedlings were raised in 1928 - one was presented
to her hometown in New South Wales, while the other was forwarded
to Canberra, where it was planted, once again by Prince Henry, at
the Australian War Memorial in October 1934.43
In fact, the pines were part of a comprehensive exchange of seeds
to and from Australia, France and Turkey during and since the Great
War. the transplantation of
memory brought seeds from afar as picardy and Ypres. in Melbourne,
soil from Verdun was scattered at the foot of beech trees from Flanders,
‘mingling the sacrifice of one country with the soil of another’,44
causing one French official to comment at the ceremonial planting
that the ‘trees could not feel that they were in a far away
land now that they were near the Shrine’.45
Despite the local clamour for native Australian trees, instead of
the strict regime and funerary dignity offered by clipped yews and
cypresses, the designers managed to integrate imperial planting
with indigenous trees. by the mid- 1930s, as Bruce Scates observed,
avenues of box, kauri and cypress were flanked by English oaks,
New Zealand Christmas tree, American elm and beech brought over
from the Flemish battlefields. To augment further the scale and
span of the British Empire, a memorial grove was planned around
‘a nucleus […] of trees from South Africa, Canada and
India […] terminating with an olive tree from Palestine’.46
More than any other single ceremonial event, the planting of the
lone pine in the Shrine Reserve Pine was invested with ‘sacramental
significance’, which lent it a lead part in the dramaturgical
layout of the Domain. a living link to the legions of the lost,
its symbolic value was consistent with the commemorative vision
of general sir John Monash, former Commander of all Australian forces
in the First World War, who was the driving force behind Victoria’s
extraordinary war memorial. in addition to resolving the political
tensions behind its location and design, he played a critical part
in raising the necessary funds, managing the construction and attending
to a great many of the symbolic details, including redrafting the
words of the inscription on the Western Wall:
'Let all men know that this is holy ground. this
shrine, established in the hearts of men as on the solid earth,
commemorates a people's fortitude and
sacrifice. Ye therefore that come after, give remembrance.'47
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 3. Visitors walking to the Shrine of
Remembrance past the water trough memorial |
|
With this proclamation in mind and with a clear emphasis on the
emotional potency of ‘solid earth’, Monash forbade the
siting of statues to war leaders in the immediate vicinity of the
Shrine. instead, the commemorative surround was planted with one
hundred trees, each dedicated to a Victorian state military unit
that had been engaged in the conflict. For decades, the trees served
as places of commemoration for veterans and their descendants. Acting
as surrogate graves, their trunks and footings were regularly strewn
with wreaths, ribbons and personal mementos. they also became the
focus of formal wreath laying services and ceremonies (figure
4).
Monash’s clear instruction held firm for some two decades.
Although many more commemorative trees were planted, it was not
until just after the Second World War that the memorial ground became
crowded with rhetorical topoi,
both newly commissioned pieces as well as those relocated to the
memorial precinct. an equestrian statue of Monash in 1950 heralded
the concentration of remembrance around the Shrine. Queen Elizabeth
II unveiled the Cenotaph to the Second World War in 1954, followed
by statues to military leaders (Thomas Blamey in 1960) and to popular
figures (‘Weary’ Dunlop in 1995) and a host of more
generic sculptures - a widow and her children (1998), two facsimile
sculptures by Charles Sargent Jagger the same year, and an Australian
Hellenic Memorial three years later.48
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 4. Memorial tree
in the S hrine reserve. note the poppy placed on the trunk |
|
Further monumental pieces by Peter Corlett have been added to its
collection of statuary, and a memorial horse trough and other city
monuments have migrated there. Gathered in between these nodes of
significance, a number of small formal gardens have been laid out.
the legacy garden of appreciation is a cross-shaped planting of
hedges and red poppies – grown from seeds imported from battlefields
in northern France – which was established in 1978; nearby
a Women’s Garden incorporates highly crafted concrete memorial
violets within a grove of jacarandas, gathered around an Ex-servicewomen’s
Memorial Cairn. to the south of the Shrine a substantial stone and
water feature has been designed to mark the role of Australian service
personnel in wars - and on peace-keeping duties - since 1945. marred
by public controversy, particularly on how to accommodate the memory
of Vietnam, the ‘Subsequent Campaign’ memorial had to
be described not as a ‘structure’ (and therefore governed
by planning legislation) but as a piece of ‘garden furniture’,
to ensure that it was exempt from any such control (figure
5).49
New blocks
of polished stone have since been added to incorporate australia’s
part in recent ‘small wars’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Timor
and Somalia.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 5. Remembrance Garden
Palms in the Shrine Reserve presented by the Veteran’s
Federation of the Republic of Vietnam in Australia |
|
Conclusions
Shrine Domain is typical of many such ‘lieux
de memoire’, sites of hallowed memory
that accumulate emotional intensity as, over time, they become an
indexical account of national and state military activities overseas.
However, like many other memorial and monumental landscapes, even
those that appear benign and consensual, such spaces are inevitably
politicized and periodically contested. Across Shrine Domain every
attempt to devise or locate new memorials or cairns, or to modify
aspects of the garden, have aroused high-pitched anxiety and public
debate. perhaps the distance from the battlegrounds in Turkey and
Flanders has accentuated the historic divisions in Melbourne, lending
an intensity to every debate, from the culling of native trees in
the 1930s to the squabbles about separate memorials to the role
of women over the past twenty years.
Yet, these tensions aside, the garden memorials - at Alrewas, Serre,
Gallipoli and in the Shrine Domain - have proved remarkably resilient
and responsive to caring
management. They also benefit from cross-generational interest and
enthusiasm: in Australia the Melbourne Legacy organisation and nurseries
in Canberra have grown seedlings sourced from the trees at the Shrine
of Remembrance and the Australian War Memorial. These have been
presented to schools as well as ex-service and other organizations
throughout australia, as well as ensuring that memorial sites in
Turkey have been regularly replenished by stock from australia.
Furthermore, the global transaction in seeds, soil and stone - ‘transplanting
the front’ as it has been memorably phrased - is not only
an Anzac phenomenon.50 Canadian
memorials also incorporate stone fragments, seedlings, shards of
glass, fragments of materiel rescued and clandestinely transported
from battlegrounds in europe to north America.51
this global exchange of nature offers an interesting shift in the
paradigm of remembrance and the continuing value of gardening. it
introduces a new dialogic element into the idea of the garden memorial,
a dialogue conducted not in the past tense but in the present, and
is further evidence of the way that memory can be retrieved from
the past, made tangible and nurtured into the future.
Notes: 1
David R. Coffin, The English Garden:
Meditation and Memorial (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), p. 17.
2 John
Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape:
Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).
3 John
Dixon Hunt, ‘“Come into the garden,
Maud”, garden art as a privileged mode of commemoration and
identity’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
(ed.), Places
of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design
(Washington, dc: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), pp. 9–24 (pp. 20–2).
4 Paul
Gough, ‘“Garden of gratitude”:
the national memorial arboretum and strategic remembering’,
in Hilda Kean and Paul Ashton (eds), People
and their Pasts: Public History Today
(London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 95–112.
5 Doris
Francis, Georgina Neophytou and Leonie Kellagar, ‘Kensington
Gardens: from Royal Park to temporary cemetery’,
in Tony Walter (ed.), The Mourning for Diana
(oxford: Berg, 1999), p. 122.
6 George
McKay, Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism and Rebellion in the
Garden (London: Frances Lincoln, 2011).
7 Mara
Miller, The Garden as an Art
(albany: suny press, 1993).
8 Francis
et al., ‘Kensington Gardens’,
p. 122.
9 Sidney
C. Hurst, Silent Cities: An Illustrated Guide
to the W ar Cemeteries and Memorials to the Missing in France &
Flanders 1914-1918 (London: Methuen, 1929).
10 Hugh
Clout, After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside
of Northern France after the Great War
(Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996).
11 Brian
Osborne, ‘In the shadows of monuments:
the British League for the Reconstruction of the devastated areas
of France’, International Journal
of Heritage Studies, 7/1 (2001), pp. 59–82 (p. 69).
12 David
Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism
(Oxford: Berg, 1998). With regard to pilgrims and pilgrimages, see
Jennifer Iles, ‘Exploring landscapes
after battle: tourists at home on the old front lines’,
in Jonathan Kkinner (ed.), Writing the Dark
Side of Travel (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012),
pp. 182–202.
13 Paul
Shepheard, The Cultivated Wilderness: or, What is Landscape? (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 227.
14 Kipling’s
phrase is quoted in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard
Kipling , Vol. 5 (london: macmillan, 2004), p. 212. A further impressive
statement: ‘the greatest bit of work
since the pharoahs, and they only worked in their own country’,
is attributed to Kipling, although a slightly different form of
words is used in Fabian Ware, The Immortal
Heritage: An Account of the Work and Policy of the Imperial W ar
Graves Commission during Twenty Years 1917-1937
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 56.
15 Reginald
Blomfield, Memoirs of an Architect
(london: macmillan, 1932).
16 Philip
Longworth, The Unending Vigil
(London: Leo Cooper, 1967).
17 Geoff
Dyer, The Missing of the Somme
(London: Penguin, 1995), p. 126.
18 Ronald
W. Zweig, cited in Thomas Lacquer, ‘Memory
and naming in the Great War’, in
John gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics
of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press) pp. 150-68 (p. 154).
19 Julian
barnes, Cross Channel
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), p. 98.
20 Shepheard,
Cultivated Wilderness,
p. 227.
21 Alistair
Horne, The Price of Glory : Verdun 1916
(Allen Lane: London, 1962), p. 228.
22 Longworth,
Unending Vigil.
23 Michael
Heffernan, ‘For ever England: the Western
front and the politics of remembrance in Britain’,
Ecumene, 2/3 (1995), pp. 293–323 (p. 302).
24 Mandy
Morris, ‘Gardens “for ever England”:
Landscape, identity and the First World War British cemeteries of
the Western Front’, Ecumene, 4/4
(1997), pp. 410–34 (p. 428).
25 Alex
King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain:
The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance
(Oxford: Berg, 1998), pp. 184–5.
26 Nicholas
Penny, ‘“Amor publicus posuit
”: monuments for the people and of the people’,
Burlington Magazine, 109/1017 (1987), pp. 793-800 (p. 794).
27 Lacquer,
‘Memory and naming in the Great War’,
pp. 152-3. see also the work of Keith Grieves, in particular Sussex
in the First World War (Lewes: Sussex
Record Society, 2004).
28 John
Masefield, letter to his wife (21 october 1916), cited in Constance
Babington Smith, John Masefield: A Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978), p. 164.
29 Denis
Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the
Great War (London: Penguin, 1978), p.
289. see also John Pegum, ‘The old
front line: returning to the battlefields in the writings of ex-servicemen’,
in Jessica Meyer (ed.), British Popular Culture and the First World
War (london: brill, 2008), pp. 217–36.
30 Robert
Freestone, ‘From icons to institutions:
heritage conservation in Sydney’,
International Journal of Heritage Studies , 1/2 (1995), pp. 79–90
(p. 79).
31 Barnes,
Cross Channel,
p. 98.
32 Paul
Gough, ‘From Heroes’ Groves to
Parks of Peace’, Landscape Research,
25/2 (2000), pp. 213–29.
33 Maurice
Halbwachs, The Collective Memory
(New York: Harper Colophon, 1950), p. 401.
34 Jeremy
Forster, ‘Creating a tenemos, positing
“South Africanism”: Material memory, landscape practice,
and the circulation of identity at Delville Wood’,
Cultural
Geographies, 11 (2004), pp. 209–34.
35 Robert
Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt and the
Unbuildable (London: Thames & Hudson,
1991), p. 38.
36 Some
of this material was first used in Paul Gough, ‘Conifers
and Commemoration - the politics and protocol of planting’,
Landscape Research, 21/1 (1996), pp. 73-87.
37 Longworth,
Unending Vigil.
38 Phil
Taylor and Pam Cupper, Gallipoli: A Battlefield
Guide (Sydney: Kangaroo, 1989); John McQuilton,
‘Gallipoli as contested commemorative
space’, in Jenny Macleod (ed.),
Gallipoli. Making History
(London: Sage 2004), pp. 150–158.
39 David
Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), p. 103.
40 Barbara
Bender, ‘Stonehenge: Contested landscapes
(medieval to present day)’, in Barbara
Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives
(Oxford: Berg, 1983), pp. 245–79 (p. 276).
41 Jay Winter,
‘Rites of Remembrance’,
BBC History (November 2000), pp. 22–5. see also Jay Winter,
Sites of Memory , Sites of Mourning: The
Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
42 There
is an extensive literature on the Shrine, for example: Peter Isaacson,
‘Shrine of Remembrance’,
Victorian Historical Journal , 70/1 (1999), pp. 43–53; William
Taylor, ‘Lest we forget: the Shrine
of Remembrance, its redevelopment and the heritage of dissent’,
Fabrications, 15/2 (2005), pp. 95–111; and Catherine Moriarty,
Making Melbourne’s Monuments: The sculpture
of Paul Montford (Melbourne: Australian
Scholarly publ., 2013). for the history of the battle for Lone Pine,
see
www.awm.gov.au/wartime/34/article/.
43 Garrie
Hutchinson, Remember Them: A Guide to V ictoria’s Wartime
Heritag (Prahran: Hardie Grant, 2009).
44 Bruce
Scates, A Place to Remember: A History of
the Shrine of Remembrance (Cambridge and
Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 156.
45 The
Age (29 august 1935).
46 National
War Memorial Victoria, minutes 23 June 1933; also quoted in The
Age (6 september 1935), cited in Scates,
A Place to Remember,
p. 154.
47 Geoffrey
Serle, ‘Monash, Sir John (1865-1932)’,
in Australian Dictionary of Biography
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986), x, pp. 543–9.
48 For
a thorough appraisal of the Shrine’s many memorials, see Scates,
A Place to Remember,
pp. 146–93.
49 cited
in ibid., pp. 183–5.
50 Bart
Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War
Graves and the Great War (Perth: University
of Western Australia Press, 2007).
51 Jonathan
Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and
the First World War (Vancouver: university
of British Columbia Press, 1997).
top
back
|
|