From Black Hawks to $2 pool noodles: Inside the new Anzac Hall

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

Private Matthew Clarke had been deployed to Afghanistan for less than three weeks when an IED exploded under the armoured personnel carrier – a Bushmaster nicknamed Debbie – he was driving along a dry creek bed.
The explosion broke 14 bones in his legs, ankles and feet. Another soldier was also badly wounded. Clarke was the first from his deployment in 2012 to be shipped home, but not the last: others would be killed or have limbs amputated.
In uniform and wearing his medals on his first Anzac Day back home, Clarke was astonished when a woman stopped to ask him what medals he was wearing.
Clarke replied he was one of 26,000 defence force personnel deployed to Afghanistan – Australia's longest war – from 2001 to 2021.
Yet, the woman was confused. 'We'd been there for nine or 10 years, but she only related medals to World War I or II,' he said.
When it opens in 2026, it is expected that a million visitors to the new Anzac Hall in the Australian War Memorial will be able to hear Clarke and fellow soldiers tell their stories, and see the battered Bushmaster on display in the new Afghanistan gallery that has been expanded from 60 square metres in the old hall to 700 square metres.
The crew's unopened boxes of blue Gatorade (now filled with blue resin) can be seen on its roof racks with, among other objects, a makeshift sink.
'I've never seen anything like that in a museum,' Clarke told the Herald.
In the late afternoon light of what will be a new peacekeeping gallery, the nose of a C-130 Hercules protrudes from a wall, as if it has plunged and crashed, a ghostly sight.
But it is the F/A-18A 'Classic' Hornet, A21-022, that is the star of the show, displayed under a large opening that allows visitors to view it from above.
The Classic is an earlier model than the 'Super Hornet' that starred in the movie Top Gun: Maverick.
Shipped intact through Canberra by night, it was dropped into place in one piece using a 150-square-metre lift pit, an innovation designed for the project.
The Hornet may have survived 6000 flying hours over Iraq and Syria in patrol and combat missions, but it is now wrapped in plastic and its tips protected with red pool noodles ahead of its debut appearance in the memorial.
During its installation, Australian War Memorial logistics manager Kassandra Hobbs bought the pool noodles as a cost-saving measure to protect the old workhorse and reduce the chance of injuries to workers from its sharp edges, capable of taking out an eye.
She bought 75 red, green and blue Funsafe pool noodles from the local Bunnings at $2 each, plus a couple of rolls of tape. At $162.44 all up, this was the best value in terms of collection protection, and would be reused. 'This cost is not exorbitant, considering the cost of having to fix objects if they were damaged,' she says.
To prepare the large objects for display, and tell about 100,000 stories in the new hall, took some Anzac ingenuity, as employed by Hobbs, said deputy project director Christopher Widenbar.
They also invented a 'rocket on a stick' of a kind unlikely to be found at the next Easter Show. When the museum was trying to conserve a WWII German V2 Rocket, for display on the top floor of the new hall, the cylindrical shape made it difficult to handle. So a spindle was fitted, allowing it to be rotated, rotisserie-style. Widenbar said this reduced the risk of injury, winning a safety prize along the way.
Anzac Hall is the most ambitious in scale and size of the changes under way at the memorial. Initially proposed by former prime minister Scott Morrison, Anzac Hall is the third stage of the $548.7 million expansion.
Creating a space to display 43 large technology items such as the Hornet and Debbie the Bushmaster, and cover Australia's involvement in Afghanistan, the Middle East from 1990, as well as peacekeeping from 1947, has meant soldiering on despite criticism.
Executive project director Wayne Hitches gave this masthead a hard hat tour of the new Anzac Hall's column-free spaces.
There are two floors comprising 7000 square metres of exhibition space, and Hitches said the team turned to a bridge manufacturer in Newcastle to build reinforced precast concrete Super-T beams, eliminating the need for columns in the 100-metre-long hall. The beams, each 33 metres long to span the hall and weighing 64 tonnes, made their way into the lift pit via an 800-tonne crane.
Designed by Cox Architecture, which won an architecture competition, and implemented by project architects DJAS, the plan for Anzac Hall eliminated columns so that there would be no constraints in moving large objects.
Hitches said: 'It's a bit of an engineering marvel, but they're also in line with what you would see underneath a bridge or a freeway.'
A new roof shaped like the rays of the rising sun badge worn by the army is in place.
Loading
A giant wall made of sandstone from the quarry near Gosford faces the original facade of the heritage buildings, but the two are not allowed to touch. A Black Hawk helicopter will hang above the cafe.
Criticism of the project included opposition to the unnecessary demolition of the existing Anzac Hall, built in 2001 and designed by Denton Corker Marshall. It won the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for public architecture. It was also criticised as too big, that it flaunted normal approval processes, did not do enough to consider the heritage status of the old building, and The Guardian journalist Paul Daley likened it to Disneyland.
Australian Institute of Architects national president Adam Haddow says the politics are similar to those surrounding the sale of the Sirius public housing block in Sydney's The Rocks to turn it into luxury accommodation.
'You get to a point where the project is the project, and you need to judge it based on how well the architect has responded to the brief and the delivery of a building,' Haddow said.
'We can still disagree with the original premise. And we can always believe that the original national award-winning building Anzac Hall should never have been demolished, but the politics is the problem. Not the design.
'There's the importance of the building after the argument.'
Haddow said both Sirius and the War Memorial had turned out better than expected. The completed underground southern entrance, with its oculus and parade ground, by Studio SC (formerly Scott Carver) won four architecture awards in the ACT. The project was shortlisted last week for three national awards.
War Memorial director Matthew Anderson said Herald war correspondent and historian Charles Bean envisaged the AWM as more than a memorial. 'He didn't just want us to know what they did and where they did it – he wanted us to know how they felt when they were doing it,' he said.
'There is an unbroken line from those who leapt from the Ascot landing boat at Gallipoli on the afternoon of April 25, 1915, to those who now sign the Tarin Kowt wall to record proudly their service in the Middle East Area of Operations.
'That is our 'why'. Today's veterans are owed nothing less and, frankly, they have waited long enough.'
Australian War Memorial senior curator Dr Kerry Neale said the large objects, such as the Hornet, would not exist without the servicemen and women.
'We needed a space that would keep the memorial true to its mission, true to what Bean wanted, which is to interpret and share the experience of Australians at war. We can't end that at Vietnam … because that's not when Australia's experience of war ends.'
The displays were far from a Top Gun: Maverick approach, she said.
'We look at the devastation that air strikes cause, to the coalition, the enemy, it's all compounded, and we're saying that the Hornet as a piece of technology is quite impressive, but all the people who work on them, and all of the consequences and repercussions, are part and parcel of the Hornet story.'
To show the human elements, the Hornet display includes a mannequin wearing the flight suit of a tall pilot like Group Captain Michael Grant, who had to fold himself into a small space for 10 hours or more.
It includes his P bag – a pocket-sized emergency loo, which folds up like an adult diaper and uses the same crystals. Neale said: 'They had them in their flight suit pockets, and would need to use them to relieve themselves. There was no pulling off to the side of the road.'
On the ground nearby, a mannequin represents a soldier dressed in shorts in 50-degree heat who works to repair and refuel the plane.
A large image of Dave Burgess' anti-war slogan, No War, painted on the Opera House sails in 2003 is portrayed near the Hornet.
Widenbar said the larger galleries allowed the memorial to tell a more comprehensive story. Take Afghanistan: for the first time, it would include the voice of the diaspora community, and Afghans who were helped or hurt by what Australians did. The new galleries will tackle war and peacekeeping through stories, and will touch on the allegations in the Brereton report including Ben Roberts-Smith, and Isis brides.
'Why the hell did Australia go to war there? How is it connected to terrorism and 9/11? So we can actually talk about what Australians did in the various stages,' he said.
Loading
That ranged from combat, reconstruction and then the evacuation, which Widener said was happening as curators were finalising the selection of objects. 'We were almost trying to capture the end of a story that was happening live.'
At the end of the tour we cross the walkway across the atrium that connects the new Anzac Hall to the original heritage building.
Everything is designed so that the dome can be seen from every point, including from Parliament House, Hitches said. 'If you opened all the doors of the prime minister's office, you'd see the war memorial.'
He said it is to remember the cost of sending people off to war.