ANZAC Memorial student reflection

On Monday, the 23rd of May, the Company of Mandatory History students of the year 9 Battalion planned to arrive at the ANZAC war memorial in Hyde Park at 0900 hours. Due to the heavy rain the previous night, the ground was saturated with water, and the land was muddy, like the trenches on the Western Front. Our excursion was already off to a less than ideal start, and our departure delayed. Instead, our morning began by watching two documentaries, one about Gallipoli and the Anzac Cove landing and the other about the Western Front battles, which were almost suicide missions.

Then it was off to the ANZAC War Memorial in Hyde Park. The main objectives of the excursion were to study the role of women in WW1 and how Australians commemorated the Anzacs.

I think many of us spent the whole visit just revelling in the beauty of the memorial’s architecture. The outside was just as crisp as the inside, and it was warm too.

The first activity or performance that we participated in was a performance of four different war experiences. The performance featured actual accounts from letters and diary entries of three nurses and a matron: Clementina Marshall, Muriel Wakeford, Alice Cashin and Evelyn Wright. Through this performance, we learned about the hardships faced by nurses during WW1, how they had to pay for their transport, work incredibly long hours and endure the worst nurse to patient ratios. Yet, despite all the hardships, these nurses still managed to see the bright side of things and made admirable decisions. Staff Nurse Mary Marr’s autograph book is a prime example of how nurses eased the emotional burden of the war on the soldiers. The autograph book contains heartfelt poetry and musings of soldiers after Gallipoli.

We reflected on whether we’d risk the whole sinking ship’s population for one nurse’s life, break censorship laws and tell the media back home about the brutality of war.

Following that, we had a tour of three different parts of the memorial, the Hall of Memory and the Hall of Silence, the Hall of Service and the Museum attached to the memorial that contains items from WW1. Some exciting things we learnt were that each star in the Hall of Memory was bought by a person when the old part of the Museum was built and that the statue of the naked young man, dead on the shield, represents soldiers that died on both sides of the war. Later, at the Hall of Service, there were earth samples from all the suburbs of New South Wales that sent men, and at the centre, the memorial displayed a hundred samples of earth from significant battles. These samples are important because the government thought to bring only two soldiers’ bodies back to Australia, leaving many parents and family members with nowhere to pay their respects.

Remember the autograph book? Near the end of our excursion, we were all given sources, one which was a soldier’s entry in the autograph book, and the other was a document of all the physical injuries of the soldier. We then wrote a letter home to the family of that soldier. Writing the letter and the reflecting on the questions about what we’d do if we were nurses during WW1 assisted us in understanding the substantial emotional role that nurses played and allowed us to be in their shoes and assess what that was like for them so close yet so far away from the action.

To sum up, our excursion was insightful and fun despite the wet weather.

Akshaya Rameshbabu (Year 9)