Denis Moriarty | Australian War Memorial should help us understand conflict

If we didn't have a war memorial already (and if we weren't proposing to spend another half a billion dollars on the one we've got), why would we want one? It's not as if just being one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse qualifies you for a display: Death, Famine, and Pestilence have so far had to wait for official recognition.

Actually, if we're memorialising tragedies, Pestilence should have a reasonable claim. Spanish influenza in 1919 killed about 15,000 Australians, twice as many as died at Gallipoli. COVID has killed 21,000 Australians over the past three-and-a-half years, about half what World War II killed in seven. Lung cancer dwarfs everything, of course, taking out 170,000 Australians in the 29 years the Australian Bureau of Statistics has recorded data, but as that's mainly a result of human agency in the form of greedy tobacco company executives, it may be closer to war anyway.

If we're looking for a rationale for the Hall of Memory, however, it's this, from the official website: "The Memorial forms the core of the nation's tribute to the sacrifice and achievement of the more than 103,000 Australian men and women who died serving their country, and to all those who served overseas and at home ..."

We're proud of what our country did in its wars, and we're commemorating the heroes who did it. Explicitly or implicitly, there's a positive sign in front of every entry in the catalogue.

Up to a point, that's fine - and accurate. Australia has had heroes, lots of them, and we are proud of them. The risk, though, is that after a day's spectating through an enormous semi-ecclesiastical building devoted to ennobling fighters in war, we may lose touch with what war is really about.

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At best, war is a necessary evil. It involves investing an enormous proportion of a nation's resources to diminish the productive capacity of another country. It improves nothing, and its investment goals are rubble and more rubble. War can't produce anything good, although it can sometimes avert something worse.

If art galleries were like war memorials, we'd value Van Gogh for how many Gauguins he'd been able to slash or burn in his most productive years. Mozart would be famous for stabbing the first violin in an attempt to disrupt the performance of a Salieri opera. Jane Austen would have burnt Wordsworth's house down, twice.

To do justice to Roberts-Smith, his bravery isn't in question. It's just that it's quite possible to be a hero and a disgusting human being. The horrors of war are just about summed up in the observation that it's when heroes - people who are, by definition, good at violence, destruction, and radical insensitivity - come into their own. Almost everything that a soldier does in a war would be a crime if there wasn't a war on (conduct calculated to bring about a breach of the peace, if nothing else).

We don't fear wars enough, and the War Memorial is not helping. Displays of VC memorabilia are, in a way, rather similar to last century's cricket sponsorships by tobacco companies - an attempt to divert the viewer from the deaths that inevitably underlie the enterprise.

Some people object to the Roberts-Smith uniform because they see it as sanctifying his apparent war crimes - because, that is, of the positive aura that surrounds everything in the building. It'd be more sensible, surely, to remove the aura rather than the uniform. Why don't we try for a museum that helps us understand war, rather than celebrate it? Something closer to the truth?

Recognition of the Frontier Wars against First Nations people is long overdue. An Afghanistan uniform would be an essential element of the War Crimes gallery, unless it was on loan to the enormous new Counterproductive Interventions gallery.

There needs to be a table at the front of each section of the War Memorial listing what the politicians said would happen compared, in a second column, with what actually did happen. There should be a machine where you type in your name and have it print out a telegram telling your loved ones that you are missing in action. When we display a WWII bomber, there should be a mock-up of a foreign street after a stick of thousand-pounders have gone through.

Historian CEW Bean, who did as much as anyone to build the Anzac myth, "drew up a list of exhibition principles, suggesting among other things that the galleries should 'avoid glorification of war and boasting of victory'."

Judged by this standard, the War Memorial is in the wrong bloody business.