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From the Collection
BY TOBY MILLER
Alexander Colquhoun’s painting of the Shrine of Remembrance under construction was purchased for the collection in 2022. Read on to explore Colquhoun’s personal connection to the Shrine.
Sometime around the middle of 1932, Scottish-born Australian painter and art critic Alexander Colquhoun made a painting of the Shrine under construction. It is not surprising that Colquhoun, a ‘well known as a painter of Melbourne streets and buildings’, should choose the nascent monument for a subject. The rising mass of brick and stone in the middle of the Domain was in the process of altering the ‘landscape’ of Melbourne.
Colquhoun’s small sketch-like painting, acquired by the Shrine in 2022, reveals this transformation in progress. A scotch derrick, used for slewing stone and other materials to the upper level, is located where the North Tympanum now stands. A thin scaffold extends vertically through the middle of the painting, indicating where the Shrine’s now-iconic ziggurat roof will reach.
In the background, rendered by a stroke of paint, is the main tower crane. Horizontal lines across the middle of the painting depict what remains of the scaffolding around the colonnade. The Shrine’s external façade would be completed by year’s end and the first formal ceremony, featuring the Shrine’s iconic ray of light, would take place on Armistice Day the following year.
The painting may be Colquhoun’s Building the Shrine, which was exhibited at Grosvenor Gallery in December 1932 alongside 33 other modestly sized urban scenes. Blamire Young, himself a skilled watercolourist who, like Colquhoun, wrote art criticism for The Herald, commented:
…it is possible that the Shrine was more paintable when broken with the elaborate scaffolding that surrounded it during the earlier stages of its construction than it appears today when the scaffolding has been removed. At any rate, Alexander Colquhoun has seized upon a satisfactory subject in Building the Shrine. His management of the greys and the contrast of the heavy shadows makes a pleasant picture. Like many of Colquhoun’s late works his painting lends the Shrine a restive quality while still capturing its monumental presence as it rises out from the Domain.
Harold Herbert, another fellow painter turned critic, noted in The Australasian that Colquhoun’s ‘appreciation of greys is well exemplified in a sketch of the Shrine of Remembrance’.
Such early painterly interest anticipates the transformative effect the Shrine would have on Melbourne’s physical and psychological geography. C.J. Dennis, writing under his pen name The Roustabout, suggested the Shrine finally furnished Melbourne with a European-style boulevard, comparing the new building’s prominent location on the Domain, facing Swanston Street, to the view from the Rue Soufflot towards the Panthéon in Paris. Dennis even suggested that the Panthéon’s revolutionary inscription – Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaisante –which Dennis translated somewhat freely as ‘The grateful motherland pays homage to her illustrious dead’, would be fitting for the Shrine.
However, Melbourne in the 1930s was a far cry from revolutionary Paris. The collective suffering caused by the First World War was deeply felt, dispelling any notion that the Shrine might be dedicated to an illustrious few. Instead, General Sir John Monash’s words, inscribed on the east wall, succinctly captured the community’s sentiment:
THIS MONUMENT WAS ERECTED BY A GRATEFUL PEOPLE TO THE HONOURED MEMORY OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF VICTORIA WHO SERVED THE EMPIRE IN THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-1918
As skilled with a pen as much as a brush, in December 1914 Colquhoun penned the following reflections about the early course of the war.
…the world is caught in the black war cloud, so dense, all-pervading, it cannot be lifted or pushed aside from home or hearth. A mother puts a wee babe in my arms, and the thought comes “And the child has come into the world at this dark time”…Nations fight nations, statistics lately given show that a third of the inhabitants of the globe belong to belligerent countries, battle lines extend over snow, ice and slush for hundreds of miles –the old world has changed from summer to winter since the sound of the first war trump, changed also in our hearts, which are trenched even as the miles of land.
Towns lie in blackened ruins, death-dealing machines are dragged over God’s fair earth, so many acres now have become cemeteries to cover the bodies of fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons; thousands of men have been disabled for life. Men kill as fast as their machines will work, motorbuses have left their well known routes and are whirling along strange lanes carrying armed men and equipment. One reads in the paper “The lines were quiet yesterday, only shelling continued”! A rare day for these times. Unless an isolated and striking event occurs, such as a warship being sunk or a whole army corps annihilated, the sensibilities are too blunted to react, and one reads in a stupefied way of so many thousand being killed, men fighting behind the piled-up bodies of comrades, rivers choked with dead.
Less than two years later, Colquhoun would learn that his own son, Private Quentin Colquhoun, had died on the Western Front. As they did for many Victorians, details of his son’s death arrived slowly, facilitated largely through correspondence with the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau. ‘Queenie’, one eyewitness report stated, ‘was not in my platoon but he had come up to see his friends. He was standing in the trench, when a shell exploded between him and another man killing both outright’. Buried where he fell, his personal belongings, consisting of a can opener, shaving brush and tin, were all that was returned to his parents. In a letter to the Victorian Barracks in July 1917, Colquhoun reported that they would be grateful if someone could try and recover his son’s diary, carefully written and up to date.
It is doubtful the Colquhoun’s received any such final moment of intimacy. But it is another question whether any of this finds expression in Colquhoun’s painting. Stylistically, the painting owes much to Colquhoun’s friendship with fellow Scot and renowned pacifist Max Meldrum. Colquhoun’s simple sketch-like construction employs Meldrum’s much-vaunted use of tone to create mass and perspective without resorting to academic design. The result is a scene imbued with quiet dignity; given what is now known about Colquhoun’s personal experience during the First World War, it is perhaps more than just a ‘pleasant picture’.
Toby Miller is the Collections Coordinator at the Shrine of Remembrance.
