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Matt Anderson is the director of the Australian War Memorial, which is about to open its new galleries, once derided as a “Disneyland theme park”.
Fitz: Matt, I do want to explore this week’s opening, as well as the issue of continuing to have the Ben Roberts-Smith Victoria Cross display, but let’s start with your recruitment. Your predecessor in the role, Brendan Nelson, told me that you first came to his attention as a great candidate when, as our ambassador to Afghanistan after a successful career in the army, you’d apply – when home on leave – to come with your son and quietly wash the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier, as part of the regular cleaning program that usually was open to parliamentarians?
MA: That is true, though I had known Brendan previously a little through the diplomatic corps. And as a matter of fact, I remember when I was deputy high commissioner in London, Brendan came through as director of the AWM, and made the pitch for the memorial’s expansion. And I said to him, “Why? Mate, I think the war memorial is perfect.” And his response was, “No, mate, it’s unfinished.” And then he spoke about the need for the expansion of space to tell more stories.
Fitz: Fast forward to 2020, and Brendan successfully pushes for you – despite having no experience of running cultural institutions of any kind – to take over as director of the AWM and be his successor.
MA: I was quite stunned at the opportunity, but yes, Brendan and the then chair, Kerry Stokes, convinced me to apply and it all went from there.
Fitz: That joint background as ambassador to Afghanistan and a former captain in the Australian Army certainly gives you some good credentials to cope with the current controversy over the continued display of Ben Roberts-Smith and his VC, despite him being already judged on a balance of probabilities to have committed murder, and now facing formal charges of being a war criminal. This must be, for you, an absolute minefield?
MA: [Quietly.] You’re talking to a former combat engineer who was a mine warfare instructor and a demolition supervisor, so for me, it’s not a minefield. But it is a case in which the Australian War Memorial has found itself sitting right on a fault line of a very strong national conversation. So it is something that we need to treat as a minefield, where we need to tread very, very carefully, thoughtfully and precisely through.
Fitz: Go on …
MA: Ben Robert-Smith’s VC has a date engraved on the back of it, and that’s June 11, 2010. Now, beyond that, a legal process is underway, and in my mind, that doesn’t alter the actions for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. And a plaque beside that display now records that he has been so charged.
Fitz: You and I will, of course, let that legal process take its course without fear or favour, but if the absolute worst came to the worst, and he was convicted of war crimes, would that display remain?
MA: His actions of June 2010 are not erased by any subsequent court process. And I’m quite sure I’ll get lots of free advice on what I should and shouldn’t do in the event you describe. But whenever the truth is known, we will tell it.
Fitz: As you know, I very much admire Brendan Nelson, and I think he was absolutely outstanding in the role of director of the Australian War Memorial. It is, nevertheless, my respectful view that Brendan made an error, given his role as director, to make such strong public commentary in support of Roberts-Smith – “there’s no national interest in tearing down our heroes”, “Ben Roberts Smith is, by any standard, one of the greatest Australian terms of heroism of the country produced” – as that risked politicising the AWM. Your thoughts?
MA: I think everything Brendan did, he did for a reason, and I’m quite sure that Brendan holds to those views about Ben Roberts-Smith to this day. I don’t think he’s changed his views. And I think Brendan is a very, very loyal and thoughtful man who wants to ensure that Ben Roberts-Smith’s bravery on the battlefield is recognised nationally.
Fitz: OK, so this Anzac Day will see you opening 80 per cent of the massive rebuild and expansion of the AWM to the public. My friend, the journalist and author Paul Daley made a famous and now oft-repeated criticism of the expansion, writing: “We demean our history when we turn the Australian War Memorial into Disneyland.” He argued “the expansion would turn a place of solemn reflection into a theme park spectacle that prioritises hardware displays and celebration over uncomfortable truths.” Your response?
MA: [Coldly, firmly.] My response is: we don’t. The Australian War Memorial has always told stories through objects, and we have since the days of the founder, Charles Bean. I look out the window now and see the Amiens Gun. We have the Lancaster Bomber. Those who criticise the expansion are OK with us using a Lancaster Bomber to tell the story of Bomber Command. But somehow they are not OK with me using the classic Hornet from 75 Squadron, the first Royal Australian Air Force aircraft to drop bombs since the Vietnam War, to tell the story of Australian service in Iraq in 2003 all the way through to Syria in 2017? It doesn’t make sense to me. And Brendan was right: sadly, the memorial has always needed to expand.
Fitz: You sound very passionate about this.
MA: Yes. Unless we start closing down some of the earlier galleries because we need to create space for the newer ones, we must expand. It was conceived as a WWI memorial, but it wasn’t opened until November 1941, when we were involved in WWII. It was expanded again when we went into Korea in 1950, and additional wings were added, then for Vietnam and so on. Overall, there’s been 11 different expansions or developments of the memorial because we have to continue to tell the Australian experience of war, and we continue to find ourselves in conflict.
Fitz: I think we all get that. But does it need over half a billion dollars of expansion?
MA: The fact that we can now tell the story of 69 peacekeeping missions means that I need new space to do it, but this idea that I’m celebrating is offensive. What I am doing is commemorating. This is a place of commemoration through understanding. And I encourage anyone to walk into the peacekeeping galleries and the first thing you’ll see is the rusting, battered remains of a Land Rover being driven by Sergeant Ian Ward on November 12, 1974, when he drove into a minefield in the buffer zone in Cyprus to rescue a Turkish family and was killed. He’s a Vietnam veteran, and what’s left of that Land Rover is on display. It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the galleries. We reflect on the Kibeho Massacre in Rwanda, we reflect on the difficulties of Timor-Leste and the Balibo Five. This is not a place where we do anything other than want people to commemorate through understanding the gritty, awful nature of war.
Fitz: And in the entire collection, nothing is more sacred than the holy site which first made Brendan regard you as his possible successor?
MA: Nothing. When I first arrived, one of my staff responded to one of my queries and said, “Oh, you’re the boss, you can do anything, ‘cos you’re the most important person here.” I said, “Hold that thought and walk with me.” I walked with him down to the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier and said, “Tell me again, I’m ‘the most important person here’?”
Fitz: OK, I seek your counsel on this. I was honoured to be on the council of the war memorial for two terms. Is it permissible for me to delicately raise a particular bug-bear I had, or does that betray confidentiality?
MA: You may. The passage of time means there’s no longer a code of silence.
Fitz: I raise the subject of honouring those who fought in the frontier wars against colonisation. In my last meeting, circa 2015, I put a motion that Indigenous warriors should be recognised as the first Australian soldiers, and received one vote of support. Where is that up to, and do you support the notion?
MA: Well, they were certainly the first “battles for Australia” – I think that’s the way I would put it – Australia’s wars, the first wars included the resistance that they put up against the colonisers. So there’s absolutely a place, and there will be a place in the new gallery for the recognition of frontier wars at the Australian War Memorial. Because, you know, it was warfare, it was guerrilla warfare and they should be given the dignity of people understanding that they formed war councils, that they actually fought a war of manoeuvre. They were outgunned, they were outmanned, but they still resisted, and they resisted in war-like ways, and that’s the story that will be told in the galleries.
Fitz: For the frontier wars display, there is one thing I’d like you to put a deputy sheriff badge on my left lapel and say, “Go and get it, son!” Something I think that is most important. Can you guess what it is?
MA: [Wryly, I think.] No. I don’t know what that object would be, and in any case, it will be the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who tell me what that is, not a middle-aged white man …
Fitz: It’s the Gweagal shield! It’s the very shield dropped by one of the two brave warriors who stood on the shores of Botany Bay, trying to defend their land against the landing of Captain Cook, only to receive a burst of buckshot for their trouble. It’s in “Cabinet 198”, in the British Museum, and it is a disgrace that they have it. I say that next time you and I are in London together, we break in at midnight and we take it back, because it is “stuff the British stole” and it’s ours.
MA: [In calming tone.] Well, you’ve identified something, but I think let’s just do baby steps. Let’s just make sure we begin by having a conversation with those communities involved in this frontier violence, and we can ask them what they would like to see on display and the stories they would seek to have told through the display of those objects. I’ll start that. That will be the process that we go through, and let’s see where it goes.
Fitz: Let’s say, and hope, you serve another two or three terms. What do you want your legacy to be?
MA: That today’s veterans can see their service told in the same way and in the same place as those generations that have marched before them. You know, when I arrived at the AWM, during COVID, I could walk from the Vietnam Gallery to the Tarin Kowt Wall – in an exit corridor – in 15 paces. So in just 15 paces, we were trying to tell the story of 69 peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and so forth. With this opening, everything will change. I want my legacy to be that I have brought a new generation of service into that very rich vein of service that started from our first wars.
Fitz: Thank you.
Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via Twitter.
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Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X.From our partners
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