Dr Shanti Sumartojo

Monday 7th May, 2012 1pm- 2pm

Larry Saha Room, Haydon-Allen #2175

National monuments are a particular form of public art rich with layered meanings. They bear the strong imprint of their creators and the symbolic language of the time in which they were built, whilst also seeking to appear ‘timeless’ and to collapse the national past and future into its present. They also have very specific narrative intent. Whether they commemorate war, political change or national cultures, they are designed to be unambiguous in their messages. However, as with other forms of public art, they are subject to public use, which does not always conform to theirs designers’ intentions. This paper focuses on once such monument, the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, the biggest of several Australian war cemeteries in northwest France. It explores the relationship between the national narratives of loss and memory evident in the Memorial’s built environment and the use of the site by visitors.

In doing so, this paper draws on Nora’s (1989) notion of lieux de mémoire, sites of national memory where the past is explicitly evoked and represented, and which act as conduits for official versions of the past and seek to proscribe ‘appropriate’ public responses. It also examines the uses of the national past in the present, and the notion that such sites are as much about forgetting as they are about remembering or memorialising.

This paper explores how the meaning and import of such monuments rely on their practiced nature, and are determined in the discursive relationship between hegemonic official narratives and public responses to such narratives. Such public and quotidian engagements occur in relation to powerful spatial narratives that different users must negotiate in different ways, not least because certain types of uses (and users) are inevitably privileged in any spatial structuring. In doing so, I seek to highlight the power relationships that are exercised and negotiated through the use of place, discussing the capacity of practice to shape the meaning of place, in a discursive, dialectical power relationship with dominant cultural narratives.

Focusing on the preparation and observance of Anzac Day events at the Australian National Memorial in Villers-Bretonneux, this paper examines the ‘top-down’ narratives at work during these national days. It also seeks to unpick the vernacular and quotidian uses of the sites. By examining the relationships amongst the practices to which these sites are subjected, it explores how the Memorial can act as a nexus between public art and symbolic narratives of national power on the one hand, and public quotidian practice and use on the other.