Visual integrity in the setting for the Western Australian State War Memorial.

Ref.: 256
Área temática: 03 Integridad visual de los paisajes urbanos históricos
Fecha de recepción: 30/10/2008

AUTORES (* Autor principal)

STEPHENS, John Richard * (Australia) - Curtin University of Technology

ABSTRACT

Kings Park in Perth, Western Australia, is a large area of 412 hectares of native bushland bordered by the Swan River and Perth City and suburbs. It was established in 1896 on the instigation of the Premier Sir John Forrest and claims to be one of the largest city parks in the world. Kings Park is also a vast memory landscape holding fourteen war and civil memorials and two substantial honour avenues where each tree has been planted for a soldier fallen in a war. Of the memorials, the most visually significant is the State War Memorial ­ a large muscular granite obelisk built in 1928 and perched on the top of a cliff overlooking the river. It is visible from many parts of the city. Coupled with the obelisk is a series of ceremonial courts and grassed areas that have developed over time. The memorial is the stage set for large important war commemoration ceremonies, including Anzac Day and Remembrance Day services, throughout the year and as such is an important focus of collective memory and national and regional identity. To many Australians, war memorials are `sacred places' in which coalesce the notions of national and cultural identity, and the ideals of `Anzac'. Memorials are rooted in a collective memory for a distant place and event that may have had profound effects for a local community. They are deliberate and evocative mnemonics in a present landscape that evokes and celebrates the past. Their visual setting and integrity is often critical to their performance a place for ceremony and ritual. While the State War Memorial is chiefly successful as a place of ceremony and reflection, the development of this historic urban landscape has been far from smooth. From conception, the memorial design and its visual setting in the park were bitterly contested. Even now, after eighty years, the visual setting of the place is still a point of conflict as the keepers of the memorial ­ the Returned and Services League ­ try to maintain its visual and historical integrity in the face of encroaching development proposals and adjacent competing memorials. This paper uses the history of this historic urban landscape as a rich background to discuss the problems of conserving visual integrity and its relationship with collective memory and cultural identity.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA

K.S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001
Pierre Nora, `Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire'. Representations. 26(Spring, 1989), pp.7-24, 1989,
B. Osborne, 1998, "Constructing landscapes of power: the George Etienne Cartier monument Montreal". Journal of Historical Geography. 24(4): p. 413-458
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Stephens, J. (2007) "Community meaning and heritage of Western Australian war memorials" in C Miller and M Roche (eds.) Past Matters: Heritage and Planning History, Case Studies from the Pacific Rim, Newcastle UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Fussell, P. (1975). `The Great War and Modern Memory'. New York, Oxford University Press
There will be other sources accessed as the text and argument of the paper demands.

Primary
I will be using primary sources from the Returned and Services League archives in Perth, Newspapers and minutes of meetings of the War Memorial Committee and the Kings Park Board.