 |
Overview of Mandurah War
Memorial during a ceremony.
|
Looking along the
main ceremonial approach. The “Eternal
Procession” of pillars marches across the site along
the axis of the rising sun on Anzac Day.
|
Water
from the pool of remembrance weeps back into the
estuary.
|
The pillars sink into the ground in a
pohutukawa grove.
|
The memorial seen across
the estuary. Photographs Hames Sharley.
|
Fragments of an anonymous poem
etched into the pillars.
|
The memorial offers a
personal and reflective experience.
|
The towering
pillars of the ceremonial space.
|
Looking over the
plinths of Kimberley sandstone and Western
Australian quartzite, with the estuary beyond.
Photographs Des Birt.
|
|
|
Narelle Yabuka contemplates the Mandurah War Memorial, by Hames Sharley, which remembers all those Australians who have lost lives in, or been affected by, war.
The expression of personal memory is
difficult, intimately embedded as it is with
emotion, individual experience and degrees
of perception. To express memory
sculpturally or architecturally on a
collective level would seem to be an even
more difficult challenge, though one that is
often undertaken. Further, the collective
remembrance of wars and their massive,
often anonymous, human losses may
include a political component, and
unavoidably flirts with the potential for the
ideological shading of historical events.
Writing on his recently completed
Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Peter
Eisenman remarks that ideas about both
memory and monuments have changed. The
Holocaust and Hiroshima, he writes,
dissolved the certainty that an individual
would die an individual death, which could
then be commemorated with a single
marker (a stone, slab, cross or star).
“[A]rchitecture can no longer remember life
as it once did,” he cautions.
Similar challenges faced the architects
from Hames Sharley’s Perth office as they
designed the Mandurah War Memorial and
their thinking oscillated between
conceptions of the memorial as monument,
place and space. The Mandurah War
Memorial commemorates lives lost and
damaged during all wars in which
Australian forces have served and was the
subject of a 2004 competition held by the
City of Mandurah.
The memorial is located an hour’s drive
south of Perth in one of the country’s most
rapidly expanding “sea change” cities. Here,
in a context of relaxed lifestyles and
tourism, the memory of war becomes a
journey to be experienced. Iconography and
abstraction clash, encouraging fluctuations
between mental, visual and bodily
experiences of architecture, historical
narrative and memory.
The memorial takes its place on a vast
and prominent grassed site on the western
foreshore of the estuary, around which life
in Mandurah is largely organized. An
artificial canal, leading to a waterfront
housing estate, hems one long boundary of
the site, with a car park, fairground and oval
on the other.
The memorial’s primary formal elements
are made of easily constructed and
replicated white concrete pillars – a
response to the powerful visual impact of
repetitive headstones in war cemeteries in
Europe and America, the small budget and
the need to work at a significant scale.
En masse the pillars form an “Eternal
Procession” that marches across the site
along the axis of the rising sun on Anzac
Day. Two and three abreast, the pillars rise
from the estuary water to maximum height
at a ceremonial space, before falling away
and sinking into the earth amongst a grove
of pohutukawa (New Zealand Christmas
trees). The human scale of the pillars at the
water’s edge clearly relates to imagery of
soldiers storming a beach, just as the
sinking pillars evoke headstones. Yet
despite this iconography, the simple and
constant geometrical pillar form also
maintains an abstract disjunction from the
site, and some degree of ambiguity.
Plinths of comparatively colourful
Kimberley sandstone and Western
Australian quartzite accompany the pillars
on their ascent to the central ceremonial
platform and a pool of remembrance, where
two other pathways join. The more
significant path follows the RSL’s preferred
Anzac Day processional approach from the
south-west, passing a garden of olive trees
(peace) and rosemary (remembrance). The
other path traces a trajectory between the
car park and a public seat at the head of the
site (surreptitiously installed by a local
resident at his late wife’s favoured place of
meditation). This confluence of axes, say
the architects, creates “a focal point where
the two marches meet – the procession of
the living and the spirit of those who
have passed.”
The pool water “weeps” back down to the
estuary in a fracture between the pillars and
plinths. A more direct narrative element
appears on the pillars in the form of
sandblasted fragments of an anonymous
Australian war poem. Facing the rising sun,
the fractured poem begins at the water’s
edge, running along the procession of
pillars and terminating with them in the
grassed area. These fragments contain the
reflections of an Unknown Soldier on the
experience of “a landscape pockmarked
with war’s inevitable litter” and “the
chaotic maelstrom of Australia’s blooding”.
Procession and, by implication, ritual are
at the core of military activities and of
Anzac memorial services. Although
functional requirements and siting issues
necessitated the processional approach to
the memorial, its configuration as a space
for movement rather than settlement
indicates that the body is a vehicle for the
experience of memory here. Viewing and
experiencing the memorial is likely to
prompt a range of readings and impressions.
The enclosing arrangement of offset
towering pillars and plinths has a
confrontational effect, casting shadows,
with gushing water nearby. However, there
is also a calm visual satisfaction in the axial
alignment of pillars of graduating height,
fringed symmetrically by trees.
The spatial itinerary suggests ritual and
the passage of time. The cycle of water and
the path of the sun call to mind the cycle of
life and death of the individual soldier, and
the individual civilian. Pleasingly, the
memorial’s most direct narrative element –
the series of etched poem fragments – is
perhaps also the most enigmatic, as for
much of the day it lies in shadow. This
degree of formal ambiguity presented by the
memorial as a whole is fitting – the regular
passage of pleasure craft on the water and
the presence of picnic-goers on the site
would perhaps jar with a more traditionally
monumental or nostalgic memorial.
Though the space is communal, open to
its site and visually prominent from the
opposite foreshore, one’s experience of
memory at the Mandurah War Memorial is
personal and contemplative – as much a
bodily encounter as a mental and visual
one. This brings an element of particularity
to the process of collective memory, which
is appropriate for the remembrance of a
collective of individuals by a collective
of individuals.
NARELLE YABUKA IS A PERTH-BASED FREELANCE
ARCHITECTURAL/DESIGN WRITER AND EDITOR.
MANDURAH WAR MEMORIAL
Architect Hames Sharley—project team William
Hames, Jessika Hames, Brook McGowan, Mason
Harrison. Structural and electrical engineer
Kellogg Brown & Root. Client City of Mandurah.
Builders Pindan, City of Mandurah.
|
