Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408:front:0:p298
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00408
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Character Range: 913189–915990

he describes how the establishment of virtually every memorial was advocated by those with direct connections to the events, people and organisations to be memorialised.

The importance of memorials in Australia is seen to be connected to the nature of Australia's experience of war as fought overseas, with the bodies of those who died buried overseas – it was not until 1964 that Australia started the practice of 'bringing them home' (a phrase now more closely associated with the Aboriginal 'stolen generations').  For generations of Australians, war memorials, were the graves.

    'Those war memorials are a collective cemetery for those we lost in the Great War'  (Focus Group 2)

Today there is still a perceived need for memorials, some to 'complete the picture' – such as the Boer War Memorial and Peacekeepers Memorial which were realised in 2017.  Focus group participants saw that Anzac Parade and the Australian War Memorial should remain the focus for memorialisation of armed conflicts, but recognised that the valued attributes of the place should not be sacrificed for more memorials.

At a personal level, 'memorials remain sites for mourning victims of war after war', and ceremonies held at memorials combine both shared grieving and personal loss (Inglis 2005, p. 472).  Inglis notes that memorials are significant 'sites of memory', with practices such as the laying of wreaths containing personal messages, and the placing of poppies an expression of this (Inglis 2005, p. 472).  These practices are common across Australia's war memorials, and have recently become a practice associated with public expressions of grief for tragic or deeply felt community losses.  The outpouring of grief around the deaths of celebrities, and the roadside memorials to lives lost in car accidents are contemporary examples.

Showing the people who served
War memorials, according to Inglis, also often symbolise those who are missing, perhaps buried overseas in a marked or unmarked grave, or simply 'missing in action'.  The figure of a soldier, the most common of all war memorials across Australia, can be seen as 'an absence, a representative of those dead men whose bodies never returned to their own people' (Inglis 2005, p. 474).  Interestingly, the memorials on Anzac Parade are almost all 'peopled'.  However, not all were originally conceived with the human form as part of the design.

For example, the Air Force Memorial, with its starkly beautiful airfoils designed by sculptor Inge King, was seen as 'a tribute to the service, rather than to the men and women who have served' and, following advocacy by the Air Force Association, a plaque to the service personnel was added in 1993.  In 2002 a granite backdrop with images of airforce operations and people from World War I to