Restoring Shrine Memories

BY TOBY MILLER

On 2 April 1928, the National War Memorial Committee launched a state-wide fundraising appeal to meet the costs of building a ‘Shrine of Remembrance’. The goal was to raise £90,000 by Anzac Day. Donation forms were posted to all corners of the state and shortly thereafter signed pledges, some promising an annual donation for the next five years, began returning in the mail.

In somewhat unusual fashion, contributors were also encouraged to return a detachable portion of the donation form ‘so that it may be lodged in the Crypt of the Shrine of Remembrance.’ In this way, the names of individuals who had made a financial contribution to building the Shrine would be preserved for posterity; as had the inaugural donation from Melbourne City Council, which had been recorded on parchment and sealed in a leaden time capsule beneath the Foundation Stone on Armistice Day 1927.

It would be another decade before the individual donation slips, then numbering between 30–40,000, would be sealed in airtight containers made of zinc and deposited inside a stone and bronze encasement in the Crypt of the Shrine. The encasement, like the crypt itself which had been envisioned in the beginning as a simple vault for housing records, took on added significance as construction of the Shrine progressed and the possibility of transforming the space beneath the Sanctuary into a commemorative sanctum took shape.

It was then that the Graecian inspired decoration and ornament, already a feature of the Shrine’s façade, was added to the ceiling and walls of the Crypt. The Records Cenotaph, as the encasement was then called, completes the illusion of being transported to the Classical world with its polished brass meander frieze and acroteria.

Such was the prominence given to the encasement that the architects, Philip Hudson and James Wardrop, proposed storing a copy of their original architectural designs within it. In fact, discussions as to what should be stored inside the encasement were lively, with proposals that—in addition to the architectural plans—copies of the Duke of Gloucester’s and the then Premier Sir Stanley Argyle’s dedicatory speeches be included, alongside a gramophone recording of the 1934 dedication ceremony. In the end, there would only be room for the names of those individuals who had contributed money.

All of this would be history had it not been discovered that the zinc containers holding the donation slips had swollen in size. For reasons that are still partly unknown, one by one each of the rectangular zinc containers began swelling to the point where they were no longer able to rest comfortably in the encasement. Clearly, the efforts by the committee to preserve the records from silverfish, moisture, and mould had worked and hermetically sealing the records had prevented anything getting in, but it was also clear that the seal was preventing something from getting out.

To assess the situation and to assist in opening the containers and transferring the records to new containers, the Shrine enlisted the help of paper and object conservators, Peter Mitchelson and Evan Tindal, from Grimwade Conservation Services at the University of Melbourne. With their assistance, the containers were carefully opened and the contents examined.

While a cause for the swelling could not be concluded definitively, there is reason to suspect that acidic deterioration of the original cardboard boxes holding the slips released a gas that caused the sealed containers to swell. Having opened the containers, the slips were assessed and photographed before being re-housed in new acid free cardboard boxes and returned to the encasement in custom manufactured transparent acrylic containers.

While the idea of a Records Cenotaph has seemingly not taken wing, the practical idea behind it—that the names of individuals who made a financial sacrifice to the building of the Shrine should be preserved, in anonymity, alongside the names of the Australian fighting units of the First World War and beneath the regimental colours— invites reflection.

For nearly 90 years, the Shrine has been the focus of wartime commemoration and remembrance within the Victorian community. While the meaning and experience of remembrance has changed across the years, the permanence of the Shrine, its lapidary qualities and symbolism, are deeply entangled in these experiences, a defining feature, one might posit, of what makes them our experiences.

It is for this legacy, one that the National War Memorial Committee could have only imagined at the time, that we have now played our part by honouring the names of Victorians who contributed to the 1928 Shrine Appeal. The question now is how can the community continue to carry this legacy into the future?

The Shrine acknowledges the National Library of Australia's Community Heritage Grant Program for funding the conservation of the donation receipts.