Qualla: Australian War Memorial

Australian War Memorial: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shkuru Afshar, CC BY-SA 4.0. Every evening at half past four, a lone piper steps from the shadow of the dome, and the crowd in the courtyard falls silent. A volunteer reads aloud the story of one name from the wall - a stockman, a clerk, a teenager who lied about his age to enlist - and then the Last Post sounds across the reflecting pool. This is the Australian War Memorial's nightly ritual, repeated since 2013, and it is the closest thing the country has to a sacred fire. The cloisters that surround the pool carry the Roll of Honour: more than 103,000 names of Australians killed in war, set in bronze with no rank or distinction, on the principle that all of them died equally.

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Image: Shkuru Afshar | CC BY-SA 4.0

Australian War Memorial: A Memorial Before the War Was Over

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thennicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. The idea was born in the trenches. In 1916, the official war correspondent Charles Bean - moving through the mud of the Western Front - conceived a memorial that would gather the relics of the fighting and honour the men who fell. He and John Treloar, who ran the Australian War R...

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Image: Thennicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Australian War Memorial: The Land Axis

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thennicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand on the Memorial's forecourt and look south, and the geometry of Walter Burley Griffin's Canberra reveals itself. The building sits at the foot of Mount Ainslie, at the northern end of Anzac Parade, on the great land axis that runs 5.2 kilometres to Parliament House on Capit...

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Image: Thennicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Australian War Memorial: Known unto God

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beneath the dome lies the Hall of Memory, and at its heart, since 11 November 1993, rests the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. His remains were brought home from a cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux in France, where so many Australians died in 1918, and interred to mark seve...

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Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0

Australian War Memorial: Telling the Hardest Truths

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0. A memorial that honours the dead must eventually reckon with all of them. For most of its life the institution looked outward - to Gallipoli, the Somme, Kokoda, Korea, Vietnam - and the Hall of Valour holds 76 of the 102 Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians, the largest such c...

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Image: Brian ireland | CC BY-SA 2.0