The battle over the Australian War Memorial

It has been described as one of our most sacred places.

The “heart and soul of the Australian spirit”, a national shrine to sacrifice.

It is a memorial, a museum, and a mausoleum.

For more than 80 years, the Australian War Memorial has stood solemnly as a monument to those who gave their lives in service in conflicts around the world.

But there are fears that this unique institution will be destroyed by a more than half-a-billion-dollar expansion.

The redevelopment has been condemned as an “abomination”, an attempt to create a “Disneyland of war”, and has been dogged by questions over contracts and possible conflicts of interest.

While some believe the nation’s true foundational conflict is missing from the memorial’s halls.

Gem of its kind

The concept of a war memorial was borne out of the industrial-scale slaughter of World War I.

Australia’s official correspondent in the war, the journalist Charles Bean, had followed Australian forces from the disaster of Gallipoli to the horrors of Europe’s Western Front.

It was at the Battle of Pozieres in 1916, a wasteland of killing where the Australians suffered a staggering 23,000 casualties in less than seven weeks, that moved Bean to propose a memorial to the carnage of war.

“He walked that battlefield after the battle had moved on and he thought to himself, ‘Nobody back home in Australia will ever understand what these men went through. And they should’,” former war memorial deputy director Michael McKernan said.

Bean envisaged a memorial that would not be colossal in scale, but rather a “gem of its kind”.

“He thought there has to be a place back in Australia where families can come and grieve and mourn loved ones because … these bodies were not going to be coming home,” war memorial director Matt Anderson said.

The Australian War Memorial was finally opened in 1941, in the midst of another global conflict.

Over the decades, as the number of names on the memorial’s Roll of Honour grew, Bean’s simple, solemn vision was honoured.

In 1993 one body did come home. The body of an unknown Australian soldier was exhumed from a WWI cemetery in France and entombed in the memorial’s Hall of Memory.

‘They can’t be serious’

Almost a century to the day after the guns of World War One fell silent, then prime minister Scott Morrison announced half-a-billion-dollars would be spent expanding the memorial.

He made the announcement before an $11-million business case into the redevelopment had been completed.

The expansion was championed by the memorial’s chairman, the media mogul Kerry Stokes, and its director, the former Liberal defence minister, Brendan Nelson.

They wanted more space to tell the stories of recent conflicts and operations, in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.

The massive redevelopment will increase exhibition space by 80 per cent, allowing large military objects such as fighter jets and armoured personnel carriers to be displayed.

Former senior officials from the memorial were shocked by the announcement.

“When I heard about that, I immediately thought, they can’t be serious. Because half a billion dollars is an awful lot of money to spend on something that nobody’s discussed,” the memorial’s former principal historian Peter Stanley said.

Former war memorial director Steve Gower said the price tag was “an absurd amount of money. I couldn’t believe it.”

While the expansion had the backing of the prime minister, it hit an early hurdle. The government’s own independent heritage adviser — the Australian Heritage Council — came out against the project.

“Regrettably the Council cannot support the conclusion that the proposed redevelopment will not have a serious impact on the listed heritage values of the site,” wrote the council’s chair, former Liberal cabinet minister David Kemp, to the war memorial and the Environment Department.

Despite this internal dissent, the government signed off on the half-a-billion dollars for the redevelopment.

When the agency that oversees planning and development in Canberra — the National Capital Authority — sought submissions on the expansion’s early works including the demolition of buildings, only three out of 601 responses were explicitly in favour. This didn’t stop the NCA or parliament’s public works committee backing the expansion.

“It was a dodgy process,” Peter Stanley said. “At every stage it was waved through.”

‘Architectural vandalism’

The bulldozers moved in.

To make way for the expansion, 140 trees and the architectural award-winning Anzac Hall — built just 20 years earlier — had to go.

Former director Steve Gower described the process as “architectural vandalism”.

“It shows a total disrespect for quality architecture, the sort you should have on a major Commonwealth institution so important to the Australian people as the Australian War Memorial,” Gower said.

Former deputy director Michael McKernan said he couldn’t understand why it had to be so big.

“The new building will dominate the memorial, which is one of the most loved icons in Australia.”

Current director Matt Anderson said the “historic silhouette” of the memorial wouldn’t be lost.

“It won’t affect what people know and love, the iconic nature of the building, because it’s not just a Canberra landmark. It’s a national symbol.”

To critics it wasn’t just about architecture, it was what the size of building represented: a fear that Bean’s vision of a simple “gem” would be consumed by grandiosity and become a celebration of militarism.

“What we’re seeing really is a pumped-up memorial. A memorial on steroids, not a memorial of the kind that we needed, and we had,” Stanley said.

A director of the Centre for Public Integrity, Geoffrey Watson said he was “appalled”, fearing the expansion would detract from the war memorial’s purpose.

“This is a conversion of it into a kind of celebration of war. It’s a kind of Disneyland of war.”

But Anderson said honouring Bean’s vision meant the memorial must continue to evolve, to ensure it’s a place where people can understand the experience of war “up to and including today”.

“I don’t agree with the criticisms where they say ‘it was meant to be a gem of its kind’, and therefore you stop,” he said.

“Bean also said, ‘We were out to create, if possible, the finest … war museum of its kind in the world’. You don’t do that by stopping. You don’t do that by remaining static.”

Red flags

As the memorial’s massive new hall rose out of the construction site, troubling information emerged about how the redevelopment was being managed.

The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) found one redevelopment contract was awarded for $999,999, one dollar below the threshold that requires ministerial scrutiny.

Both the memorial’s director and chairman acknowledge the contract was not a good look.

“The auditor told us that sent a red flag,” Matt Anderson said. “It certainly could have been executed better.”

“It was not clever,” chairman Kim Beazley said.

The ANAO also found possible conflicts of interest in the awarding of contracts for the redevelopment were not adequately documented and declared.

The war memorial official in charge of the expansion project, Wayne Hitches, worked in a high-level role at the developer Lendlease months before it was awarded the first of two multi-million-dollar redevelopment contracts.

The ANAO found Hitches failed to complete a conflict of interest declaration about his prior employment with Lendlease.

“Does that pass any kind of scrutiny pub test? I think everybody would reject it. And the ANAO rejected it,” says federal Greens senator David Shoebridge. “This is an obvious conflict of interest that should never have been permitted.”

The war memorial’s chairman, Kim Beazley, denies Hitches had any conflict of interest.

“When he was appointed, the minister of the day announced it and announced the fact that he had worked for Lendlease,” Beazley said.

However, the war memorial’s own probity adviser was unaware of Hitches’ history with Lendlease.

In a statement, Mr Hitches did not answer Four Corners’ question as to why he did not fill in the declaration, but said his former role with Lendlease was known by the war memorial executive and by the then-minister.

Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh says his former employment should have been documented.

“The process was deficient. And when those processes are deficient, you can find yourself that there were conflicts of interest that no one knew about.”

‘Missing’ from the memorial

When the vastly expanded war memorial is completed in 2028 critics say a crucial part of our history will remain barely acknowledged in its halls — the conflicts between Indigenous Australians and white settlers known as the Frontier Wars.

Tens of thousands of First Nations Australians were killed in the Frontier Wars.

Under current plans, what the memorial refers to as “frontier violence” will sit in the pre-1914 gallery, which takes up just 1 per cent of the building’s floor space.

Defence force veteran and Gunditjmara man Richard Frankland has campaigned for 20 years for the war memorial to recognise his ancestors, Indigenous warriors who fought back against the white settlers.

“These are First Nation Australian unsung heroes who died bravely fighting for their country, fighting for their families, fighting for their land and waters, fighting for their dignity,” Frankland said.

“The nation needs to heal. The only way that we’re gonna heal is if we examine the past. And if organisations, very important bodies, like the Australian War Memorial step up. They need to lead the charge in this.”

Long-standing member of the war memorial Council Greg Melick said the Australian Museum was the more appropriate place to recognise what he calls the “pre-federation conflicts”.

“The war memorial is more appropriately devoted to uniformed conflicts, fighting enemies against Australia, rather than internal conflicts which I think is better dealt with in the overall history of Australia,” Melick said.

Filmmaker Rachel Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman from central Australia, said the lack of recognition was “deeply hurtful”.

“Greg Melick should walk in our shoes. My family were run down by men on horseback with Snider repeater rifles and murdered in their hundreds,” she said.

“Those warriors who are involved in trying to defend their families and their country in that moment, do not get recognition in the war memorial. Explain that to me.”

Perkins, wrote, produced and directed the award-winning documentary series, The Australian Wars.

“The war memorial to me is one of Australia’s most important places. It is sacred, but it’s missing a profound element.”

“Until it truly comes to terms with the foundational war that made this country what it is, it will never be truly whole.”

Watch ‘Sacrifice’, Four Corners’ full investigation into the war memorial’s expansion and how it is increasingly entwined with the global arms industry, now on ABC iview.