11 minute read
Designing Remembrance
By Neil Sharkey
The Shrine of Remembrance’s special exhibition, Designing Remembrance: Alternative Visions for Victoria’s War Memorial, tells the story of the fateful 1920s architecture design competition that determined the form of the National War Memorial for Victoria. Designing Remembrance reveals the competing visions for the state’s war memorial, in particular the six shortlisted designs, and for the first time in a century presents alternatives to the Shrine of Remembrance—the competition’s winner.
It was on 4 August 1921, at a public meeting at the Melbourne Town Hall, that the Minister for Public Works, Frank Clarke, first moved a motion for a national war memorial for Victoria. Clarke proposed a nonutilitarian monument that would commemorate ‘the services of those who enlisted and fought in the Great War’. An architectural competition would determine the memorial’s form.
The conditions, devised in consultation with the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, were circulated just under a year later in July 1922, together with a survey map of the preferred site—an elevated section of Crown Land at the corner of Domain and St Kilda roads known as ‘The Grange’. The site had been associated with the earliest phase of European settlement and was, as it remains, important to the peoples of the Kulin nation.
The competition was open to ‘Australasians and British Subjects resident in Australia’ and the Lord Mayor’s office had received 83 preliminary designs by the competition’s closing date on 30 June 1923.
General Sir John Monash, wartime commander of the Australian Corps, was appointed competition judge together with George Godsell and Kingsley Henderson—presidents of the Federal Council of the Australian Institute of Architects and Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, respectively. These men selected a shortlist of six designs in July 1923.
Revealing the winners
Only Sir John Swanson, the Executive Committee’s Chairman, knew the identities of the architects of the six shortlisted entries when the competition judges passed final judgement on 9 December 1923. The winner, Philip Hudson and James Wardrop’s ‘A Shrine of Remembrance’, was publicly announced four days later.
More than a month passed before ordinary Victorians got to see the competition entries for themselves at an exhibition held at the Melbourne Town Hall between January and February 1924. A large plaster model and 15 drawings of ‘A Shrine’ were the highpoint among the ‘piles of costly plans and drawings’ arrayed around the hall.
The Shrine’s Doric porticoes echoed those of the Parthenon, while its stepped pyramidal roof referenced then-contemporary artistic reconstructions of the long-destroyed Mausoleum at Halicarnassus—one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. By employing the famous tomb as their starting inspiration, Hudson and Wardrop were acknowledging the Shrine’s solemn, funereal purpose.
Shrine pilgrims would arrive at a column-lined inner sanctum, enriched with carefully placed sculptures and friezes. A ‘quiet soft light’ would stream through a glassed opening in the steeply tapering ceiling, illuminating a ‘Rock of Remembrance’. This stone, sunk beneath floor level, forced pilgrims to look down—as if into an open grave—to contemplate the absent war dead.
General Sir John Monash enthused that one could walk into and through the Shrine, which would facilitate marches, pilgrimages and commemorative events. The Shrine provided ‘a soul … an interior (as well as an exterior) where an atmosphere of solemnity and reverence would be established’.
An original set of reproductions of the Hudson and Wardrop winning design and an actual 1923 watercolour by Philip Hudson, depicting the original concept for the Shrine of Remembrance’s Sanctuary, occupy pride of place in the new exhibition, just as they did in the Melbourne Town Hall exhibition a century ago.
Unfortunately, few visual records of the other 83 entries submitted to the design competition are so well represented by original material, not even the most important—the other five shortlisted designs.
All unplaced submissions were returned to their creators soon after the selection of the shortlist. No final list of names—not of the architects or their designs—was ever kept. The drawings and models for all six shortlisted entries became the property of the selection committee. The winning plans went into a Melbourne City Council strong room. The other five designs are recorded in a Shrine Committee minutes book as being placed in a storeroom off the Town Hall. This storeroom was destroyed by fire in 1925.
Designing Remembrance may not have been possible at all if images of all six shortlisted entries had not been published in a 1924 Art in Australia journal article titled ‘The designs for the Victorian War Memorial’, by Australian artist Blamire Young. Copies of each of the shortlisted architects’ ‘statements of intent’, meanwhile, have survived in the private papers of General Sir John Monash.
Young’s article remains our only visual record for most of the designs featured in the exhibition. The team behind Designing Remembrance hope that the new exhibition will help uncover other competition entries, plans and images that may lay hidden in forgotten archives and family collections.
The roads not taken
Designing Remembrance features several interesting unplaced competition designs that showcase important early 20th architectural movements. The American ‘Prairie School’ designers of Canberra, Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony, entered the competition with a young Australian protégé Eric Nicholls. The trio envisioned a glittering modernist edifice comprised of rows and columns of five-foot modules that could be ‘increased or decreased at will by adding to, or subtracting from, the five feet’. Arts and Crafts champion Louis Williams, meanwhile, created a grand medieval tower of flying buttresses and Gothic arches.
However, all of the entries that were eventually shortlisted, including the Shrine of Remembrance, employed Classicism in formal or abstracted form. Consciously derived from the architecture of ancient Greece, Classicism stresses symmetry and proportion. It dominated Western architecture, particularly monumental architecture, from the Renaissance to the Second World War and the style appears to have resonated strongly with the competition judges.
The competition runner-up, William Lucas, an Imperial patriot, employed an abstracted classical style common throughout the British Empire in his design, ‘Place of Remembrance’. The vast open-air Greco-Roman-style theatre sought to accommodate rituals of mourning and cultural rejuvenation. The circular plaza faced what is now the intersection of Domain and St Kilda roads and its northern edge terminated in large sculptural groups and broad stone steps. Behind these, and oriented towards the city, a large stone monolith pierced by an archway. A stone ‘Seat of Remembrance’ beneath served as a semi-private place for the contemplation of the ‘Tomb of an Unknown Warrior’, lying at the plaza’s centre.
The third-place winner, Donald Turner, was, at the time of the competition, serving with the Graves Detachment at Gallipoli. His ‘Pylon’ incorporated a tapering vertical form, anchored to the ground by gently curved colonnades. Its sweeping curvature echoed the contour of St Kilda Road to the west and directed the pilgrim’s path. Turner’s design brought Gallipoli’s cemeteries home to Melbourne, evoking the state’s war dead ‘lying in foreign fields’.
Roy Lippincott and Edward Billson’s fourth-placed ‘Sanctuary of Peace’ comprised a towering campanile with a forward-projecting colonnade. Its forms were informed by Classical Greece, the Prairie School, but also Australia’s unique botany—indeed it was the only shortlisted design to explicitly reference the nation to whose dead it was dedicated.
‘Sanctuary of Peace’ is the only shortlisted design, other than the Shrine of Remembrance, for which Designing Remembrance’s curators have uncovered original visual records. There is a photographic reproduction of a competition drawing and a pencil tracing, donated to the State Library by the Billson family, which likely dates to the drafting phase.
The partnership of Arthur Stephenson and Percy Meldrum submitted the two entries ranked fifth and sixth—‘Cenotaph’ and ‘Victory Arch’ respectively. A collaborator on the latter design, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, appears to have been the main creative force of that design.
Among Designing Remembrance’s outstanding exhibits is William Beckwith McInnes’s dark, tonal portrait of Harold Desbrowe-Annear—the first-ever winner of the Archibald Prize in 1921.
Fifth-placed ‘Cenotaph’ comprised a shrine surrounded by colonnade on three sides, which Stephenson and Meldrum described as holding out ‘welcoming, all-embracing arms to pilgrims to the holy of holies’. The ‘arms’ cupped a central mass rising 175 feet above sea level. This ‘sublimated burial mound’ containing an inner chamber housing a ‘Stone of Remembrance’—the ultimate focal point of pilgrimage.
‘Victory Arch’ was, as its name suggests, a memorial in keeping with the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Placed at the intersection point of The Grange site, the arch would not have permitted cars but been accessible to a steady stream of pedestrians. These pilgrims would have approached from multiple directions and moved unimpeded through and around the landmark’s pathways. Symbolically, it implied a second procession—an army of the dead—marching victorious through the arch’s massive portals.
A difference of opinion
The Shrine was, by all accounts, a popular winner of the competition, certainly among visitors to the 1924 exhibition—but not universally beloved. The month-long information vacuum between the announcement of the winner and the Town Hall exhibition had upset many influential stakeholders.
The war memorial committee judges had always intended to release authorised photographs of the winning design to newspapers at the launch of the exhibition—so that ‘the public…might be able to estimate correctly the great beauty and artistry of the winning entry’. The Age broke the photograph embargo, however, putting chief editor of The Herald, Sir Keith Murdoch, in a retributive mood.
Murdoch initiated a public vote on the design in February 1924, encouraging dissatisfied readers to publicly vent their disapproval with the winning design—and disapprove they did. Construction of the Shrine of Remembrance was held up for years. The Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia pushed to build a war memorial at a proposed ‘Anzac Square’ near Parliament House and in September 1924, the Prendergast Labor state government indicated it might not honour the previous government’s funding pledge of £50,000.
It wasn’t until the influential head of Legacy, Colonel Sir Alfred Kemsley, and Lieutenant-Colonel Donovan Joynt VC, persuaded General Sir John Monash to publicly support the Shrine at an RSL reception for the Duke of York on 24 April 1927 that the Shrine project gained the necessary traction. The Governor of Victoria laid the foundation stone for the Shrine of Remembrance on Armistice Day the same year.
There was one stand-out critic of the Shrine, however, whose opposition to the winning design demonstrated just how contested the competition had become. Second place-getter William Lucas absolutely refused to accept the worth of the Hudson and Wardrop winning design and almost immediately resolved to bring others around to his viewpoint.
Lucas authored a document evaluating each of the exhibition entries in turn, which he deposited in the Melbourne Public Library (now State Library Victoria). He heaped scorn on Hudson and Wardrop, accusing them of architectural plagiarism. The allegations, and Hudson’s responses, were sensationally reported in the press.
Ultimately, Lucas’s efforts to convince his peers were poorly received. He was removed as editor of the Journal of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, convicted of professional misconduct and expelled from the association. Records of Lucas’s sensational hearing are featured in Designing Remembrance, as is his competition precis. These documents demonstrate the passion and competitive spirit that accompanied the design competition for the National War Memorial for Victoria.
Visitors to Designing Remembrance have the opportunity to reflect on the Shrine of Remembrance they love and imagine the alternatives that Melbourne might have had in its place.
DESIGNING REMEMBRANCE IS ON DISPLAY AT THE SHRINE UNTIL AUGUST 2025.
Neil Sharkey is a curator at the Shrine of Remembrance.
