“Excitement is intense – at last the ‘real oil’ is given out, and we are to embark on the H.M.A.T. Miltiades on Tuesday 2nd August. We can hardly realize this – although we have been waiting through six long weary months… From now on, our life was to become something different to anything it had ever been. The ‘Big Thing’ had begun in earnest.”
Cecil Bostock
Cecil Bostock was 29 when he enlisted with the Australian Imperial Force on Valentine’s Day 1917. He was relatively old for a new recruit, but his diary entries from the beginning of his military career abound with the enthusiasm and naivety of a young man off to see the world. He began his journey late in the night of 1 August 1917, when he boarded the troopship Miltiades, which was to carry 1020 young Australian men to the Western Front. Before he reached the Front, he described his mission with the bombast of a soldier yet to experience an artillery barrage: “to restore to those unfortunate peoples their liberty, and to crush the ravaging octopus of the unscrupulous Hun organism”.
At the front, Bostock’s belief in the nobility of war was quickly shattered. “I have seen tanks which have been hit, & the ammunition exploded inside,” he wrote, “the whole of the interior being a charred & twisted mass of metal – the inmates sharing a similiar (sic) fate”. Neither did his faith in capacity of the class- based British Army long survive combat. He thought British officers were “inclined to be a snob & would never think of associating the ordinary rank & file… We are known as ‘those beastly Australians’.”
Bostock arrived at the Western Front in the final stages of the war, when the Allied powers were beginning a great push towards the German Hindenburg line. In spite of the dangers of trench warfare, he found time to sketch and occasionally take photographs of life on the Front. Like many other soldiers, this act of recording in words and pictures may well have helped him make sense of his experiences. Luckily for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the wartime diary and sketches of this fascinating man – who would go on to be one of Australia’s most inventive pictorialist photographers – are part of the collection of the Gallery archive.
Bostock’s story is one of three stories of Australian artists at war told in the new online interactive documentary Hidden War: stories from the trenches of the First World War, from the Gallery archive, which brings together rarely-seen archival material including diaries, letters, sketches, photographs and paintings, along with audio recordings and video footage. The words and images in Hidden War are those of the artists themselves. Their stories are candid and at times confronting.
Such was the case for the young English painter Weaver Hawkins who, on the morning of Saturday 1 July 1916, waited for the arrival of the day in the trenches of the upper Somme Valley. As morning dawned, a fire summons was given and Hawkins’ regiment began its assault. A thick mist surrounded him as the enemy opened fire and he was hit in the calf by a bullet. Then followed a great explosion; shrapnel tore the whole side of his arm open. He stumbled through a gap in the barbed wire and fell face down into a shell hole. His right arm, hanging loose, was caught and hit again by a machine gun bullet.
Trapped for the length of the hot summer’s day in no man’s land, Hawkins was eventually rescued. “I thought of many things during that day!,” he later wrote. “I thought not least of the madness, stupidity, primitiveness and barbarity of warfare. I thought of beautiful things and felt intense longing for peace with danger and hardships all gone. I could see the magnificence of the sky and the glory of the sunlight.” Twelve operations and two and a half years spent at an English hospital gave him back partial use of his hands.
The experience of war not only changed the way Hawkins worked as an artist, but also his entire understanding of art. An ardent pacificist, he later made the futility of warfare and the dangers of human ideologies a constant theme in his art. He moved to Australia in 1935 with his wife and three children and in an unpublished essay on the “Impact of war on art in Australia” he argued that artists could not continue to churn out paintings as luxury commodities or tokens of prestige, for art’s “artificial and objectionable exclusiveness” had been challenged.
As Hawkins’ story suggests, in the post-war years artists struggled to rationalise and understand the effects of the war on themselves and society. In this light the final story, told through the letters of sculptor Dora Ohlfsen, is about the battle for the commemoration of Anzac.
When war broke out Ohlfsen was working from her studio in Rome, where she had become known as a sculptor and medallist. Prior to the war, she had trained as a nurse, which allowed her to serve in the Italian Auxiliary Hospital in Rome. Working there brought her closer to the effects of the war. “Great preparations are being made for bringing English wounded to this country,” she wrote. “I found my founder was dead and my reducers for medals – all killed. The number of artists killed too is appalling.”
Ohlfsen had been commissioned by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW to design a bronze commemorative panel depicting classical themes for the frieze of the Gallery’s entrance portico, but it was the subject of the Anzacs that inspired Ohlfsen’s greatest wartime work. Greatly moved by the tragedy of Gallipoli, she began work on a series of commemorative medals to raise money for the relief of wounded soldiers and their families.
“If it should be put to any use by the Government I should like half of the proceeds to go the mutilated,” she wrote. “I have made ‘Australia’ and her son very young – representing as they do the youngest country and the youngest army.” The resulting Anzac Medal was a striking and patriotic tribute that was reviewed with great enthusiasm. The Sydney Morning Herald described it as being “marked by delicately vivid touches, and is charming in the humanity of its appeal”.
Ohlfsen’s story however, is more complex. She was an admirer of the Futurist movement, whose political aims were closely associated with the Fascists, and in 1925 she was commissioned by the Fascist Italian Government to produce a war memorial at Formia, titled Sacrifice, on the Mediterranean coast of Lazio. She was also later commissioned to create a relief portrait of Mussolini himself, which was well received. Ohlfsen took her role as a memorialist seriously; she was particularly scathing about plans for the construction of the Anzac Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park in 1934 and delivered a thinly-veiled accusation of plagiarism to fellow sculptor Raynor Hoff over the title of his work Sacrifice.
Ohlfsen could not have foreseen fascism’s role in bringing about another war, but her work on the war memorials of two countries highlights the complex politics of veneration and commemoration. Indeed, the stories of Bostock and Hawkins also ask us, looking back a century after the First World War, to question the consequences of war and the role of artists in transcribing and preserving the experience of battle.
View the interactive exhibition