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Lights Everlasting: Australia's commemorative stained glass
BY DR BRONWYN HUGHES OAM
Stained glass windows have long been an art form used to remember the service and sacrifice of men from the First and Second World Wars. From Victoria, to South Australia and Thailand, take a glimpse into the subjects, symbols and motivation behind these installations.
When the Shrine of Remembrance opened its Galleries of Remembrance in 2014, Victorians were given an expanded opportunity to examine and reflect on those who lived and died in war and war’s impact on generations since. Like the Shrine itself, commemoration of the men, women and events has always been a part of the public recognition of service and sacrifice since the Boer War, most notably in the stone digger, obelisk or cenotaph erected in cities, country towns and villages throughout the country.
At the same time, hundreds of memorials in stained glass were installed. It became an accepted, if somewhat limited, form of commemoration after the Boer War, but with increasing numbers of deaths among the Great War volunteers, more windows were commissioned for individuals or groups within congregations, communities or districts. These were generally in churches, but also in hospitals, schools, and civic buildings. Despite their significance, they remain – hidden in plain sight – and sometimes lost or forgotten, particularly as many church buildings are now not as well patronised.
The beauty of stained glass, with its vibrant colour and play of light, is only part of the full story of each window. Each one becomes a record of Australian history, telling the stories of the men and women inscribed on the glass, the artists, designers and makers, and the families, parishes and communities who raised considerable funds to install them, as well as the art history that underpins the iconography of each window. In this article, I explore just three of the hundreds of significant windows found in Australia and across the world.
Caulfield RSL Sub-Branch, Victoria
This pair of windows were among the last of the First World War memorial windows. They were installed in the Caulfield RSL Sub-Branch in Victoria to mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Great War; as Australia was to go to war again. The building was officially opened in 1938 by the Minister for External Affairs, and Australian Prime Minister during the First World War, William Morris Hughes, who stressed the ‘dangers confronting the nation’ and ‘the need for a vigorous defence policy’.
From the Boer War onwards, subjects for commemorative stained glass favoured British saints and heavenly warriors, St George and St Michael topping the list. In the two decades after 1918 however, images of the Australian soldier were gradually accepted, not only in secular buildings, as seen at Caulfield RSL, but also in churches across the country. By the late 1930s, driven in part by economic demands, leadlights were now popular in domestic settings, and at the Caulfield RSL, which was formerly a substantial suburban residence, leadlight was an appropriate choice. Despite being neither painted nor stained, these windows dramatically depict a helmeted, khaki-clad soldier in the trenches in 1914 in one, with the dynamic charge of the Light Horse at Beersheba in 1918 in the other, thus neatly bookending Australia’s involvement in this war.
The designer of the Caulfield RSL windows was Bernard William Patrick (Bernie) Bragg, a returned serviceman and a member of the sub-branch. Bragg had first-hand knowledge of the war in France, having enlisted as a 21-year-old draughtsman in 1916. His skills were utilised preparing maps and diagrams during his service with the 15th Brigade; illustrating covers for the Brigade Unit Diaries, and Australian soldiers’ magazine, Aussie. In the 1930s he was working as an illustrator and caricaturist with the Melbourne newspaper, The Argus, and contributed to the press until well after the Second World War. Despite working with glass, an unfamiliar medium, Bragg’s distinctive window designs for Caulfield RSL demonstrate his skilful draughtsmanship and ability to capture the moment.
Point Macleay, South Australia
Sometimes it took many years to raise sufficient funds for a suitable memorial in stained glass. At the formerly government-controlled Mission Station, Point Macleay in South Australia, 350 residents took several years to raise £217 to erect a tribute to four Ngarrindjeri men who died in service to their country: Cyril Rigney and his brother Rufus, Francis Alban Varcoe and Miller Mack.
Rufus, aged only 16, received permission to enlist from the South Australian Chief Protector of Aborigines, officially the ‘Legal Guardian of all Half Caste Aboriginal Children’ who apparently accepted his stated age – 19 – at face value. Rufus was wounded and captured at Passchendaele and died on 16 October 1917, while Cyril was killed in action in Belgium and his body never recovered. Varcoe and Mack enlisted together in August 1916, but Varcoe was killed in action with the 27th Battalion in May 1917. Mack suffered tuberculosis and returned to Australia ‘medically unfit’, before his discharge in May 1918. His death in 1919 was rightly accepted by the community of Point Macleay as the result of his war service.
Today, Point Macleay is known as Raukkan and is managed by the First Nations community. The commemorative window in the Uniting Church is simple, elegant, full of light, but with limited colour, and appropriately sited above the holy table in the white-washed interior of the building. Each of the two centre lights of the window has ‘The Great War’ inscribed above the AIF badge and laurel wreath set against a leadlight background. The texts, one in each laurel wreath, read ‘Honor the Dead’ (sic) and ‘Faithful unto Death’, with names of the men on scrolls below. The outer lights each have a shield with ‘1914’ above the Union Jack in one and ‘1918’ and Australian flag in the other.
The four lights are linked by leaded ribbons and united by an inscription across the entire base: ‘To the Glory of God and in sacred Memory of our Men who died for Justice and freedom’. Brigadier General S Price Weir DSO unveiled the window in August 1925. It remains the only known commemorative window to First Nations Australians and must stand for the thousand or more Indigenous men, who despite their treatment by the early white settlers and the generations that followed, fought for God, King and country.
Thai-Burma Railway Museum, Thailand
Unlike either the commemorative windows at Caulfield RSL or Raukkan, the windows at the Thailand-Burma Railway Museum, known as the ‘Death Railway’ Museum at Kanchanaburi in Thailand, were donated by the artists. The museum is sited on the west side of the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery where more than 5000 soldiers are buried or commemorated. It tells the stories of the notorious Thai-Burma railway, built by British, Australian, Dutch, and American prisoners of war, as well as local labour, driven by the need for improved communications to support the large Japanese army in Burma.
After a visit to the museum in 2014, Gerry Cummins and Jill Stehn were inspired by the artistic possibilities in the stories within the abundance of historical documentation, photographs and artworks on display. Setting up a temporary studio on site, Cummins and Stehn shipped in tools, paints, kiln and other equipment, as well as crates of glass, which was all cut, painted, kiln-fired and leaded to create images that encouraged contemplation of the past and reflection on the future through a prism of peace and compassion. The windows were installed in 2015, seventy years after the end of the Second World War.
Humanity towards one’s fellows, no matter their colour, faith, or nationality, is exemplified by the windows, The Cutting and The Bridge. In the foreground of The Cutting, is the riverbank where an exhausted Tamil woman is offered a water canteen by an emaciated Australian digger, while to the right is a steamboat nudging up the river; a Thai smuggler bringing medicines for the POWs despite the risk of death.
In the second window, the scene shifts to the view from inside the bamboo frame of the hospital, where doctors are treating the ill and dying with very few medical supplies and improvised surgical equipment.
Across the middle ground of both windows, the relentless building of the railway continues, with teams that appear like ants in the huge expanse of the cutting, or on the trestles of the bridge, always overseen by the ever-present, ever-watchful guards. The backdrop to both scenes is the jungle that will ultimately reclaim this land and try to obliterate this period of history, while prominent in the foreground are lotus flowers, a symbol of peace and respect among the Thai people. The border incorporates the simple word, ‘Peace’, painted in languages of the nationalities involved in this massive engineering project; the site of so much suffering.
Although not among the lost or forgotten windows, these three examples provide only a snapshot from Australia’s remarkable corpus of stained glass. Each tells of a different war, from a different time in Australia’s twentieth-century history. Each one recognises Australian war service and sacrifice through subjects and symbols that remain universally acknowledged, allowing us to glimpse the wealth of artistic, military, and social history of our past. They and hundreds of other stained-glass memorials stand as representatives of the men and women who fought for God, King and country and, by ensuring they remain in safe hands, generations of Australians will remember them for decades to come.
