Saturday 27 May 2017

Remapping Remembrance onto Memory Lanes: The Sydney-Canberra Remembrance Driveway and Mt Ainslie's Kokoda Trail

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Hume Highway

The Murray buses plying the Sydney-Canberra route take 3 hours each way. 3 hours during which the bus - adhering to a strict policy of producing a peaceful environment for the passengers - does not allow music or radio to be played during the ride. As I arrived with just a few minutes to spare before the bus journey was to begin, I had no recourse but to slot myself into the front of the entire bus - located closest to the bus driver, a very friendly driver who had "Derek" written on his name tag.

All the other passengers seemed to immediately settle into various sleeping positions, but I was forced to sit bolt-upright because of the massive bag of books I was carrying on my lap, wide awake and at attention, contemplating the prospect of having 3 more hours of this. Besides the driver's introduction and farewell at the start and end of the journey, there were basically to be no other sounds except the sounds of the bus being on the road. So I began a conversation with Derek. "Isn't it boring to drive for 3 hours without being able to listen to anything?" "What do you think!!" He chuckled.

I found out he had been driving this route for over 17 years, and after he learnt that it was the first time I was taking this bus, he began pointing out some of the invisible "landmarks" of the Hume Highway. The old highway. The old river. Trees that had been specially planted in Australia to be used to make matches. Lake George. And of course, he pointed out the endless VC stops. I assumed at first they were just rest stops which were perhaps abbreviated to as Visitor Centres, until Derek explained they were memorial rest stops named after war heroes who were Victoria Cross recipients from the WWII period onwards!

A couple of the rest stops:

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Kibby VC
Sergeant William Henry Kibby
Conflicts/Operations - Second World War, 1939-1945
VC Citation

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Derrick VC - Lieutenant Thomas Currie Derrick
Conflicts/Operations - Second World War, 1939-1945
VC Citation

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Badcoe VC / Major Peter John Badcoe
Conflicts/Operations - Vietnam, 1962-1975
VC Citation

That was the first time I heard about the Remembrance Driveway, a 320-km memorial driveway spanning the main highway connecting Sydney (Australia's largest city and the state capital of New South Wales) and Canberra (the national capital of Australia). The road begins in Sydney's CBD at Macquarie Place and ends in Treloar Crescent at the Australian War Memorial.



Excerpt from the documentary "For Valour" - "The Australian stories of the Men And Actions worthy of the Victoria Cross, Australia's highest Military Honour"

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Road Sign for Treloar Cr Australian War Memorial / Remembrance Park

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Remembrance Driveway Symbol

The official Remembrance Driveway Website notes that the very idea could be traced back to the time right after World War I when in the UK, the office of the King's Highway isued a pamphlet entitled "Roads of Remembrance as War memorials".

It appears the main argument was to combine memorialisation together with improvements to local infrastructure, allowing monuments to be both functional as well as dignified commemorations of war heroes. I haven't had the chance to locate or read the booklet in person, but from the British Library Social Science blog there is an extract here:

"It seems to us that the first principle of a war memorial should be that everyone can participate in any benefits which it confers; Secondly and hardly less important, that it should be of a permanent character-something that will last of all time. Roads and bridges comply with these two conditions."

Interestingly it seems that the actual building of memorial avenues and roads of rememberance was largely taken on by Britain's former colonies rather than in Britain itself. An article on Canada's WWI memorials:

"In November 1918, Canadians turned from waging war to the duty of commemorating the dead. This traditionally meant statuary: thousands of statues, obelisks, cairns, steles, shafts, cenotaphs, and crosses were erected in Canada in the years following the war. There were those, however, who believed "the time when it was the custom to place bronze effigies of soldiers on granite pillars as an excuse for forgetting deeds of valour is happily past." They promoted instead practical memorials such as hospitals, schools, halls, and libraries. These memorials were "designed with a view to their being of service to the communities in which they will be erected." From this school of thought came the idea for Roads of Remembrance."

A lot of these booklets and websites about roads of remembrance also speak of these roads being lined with trees and the significance of the tree as the symbol of life triumphing over death; that bombed-out splintered tree on the battlefield springing back to life amidst human conflict", although for the most part I find that if you're a driver on the road, one's eyes are glued to the road; that hard tarmac road as memory lane itself.

Likewise, perhaps this is how the Kokoda Trail makes sense. Early on in my trip, I climbed to Mt Ainslie's Lookout point via the Kokoda Trail, a beautiful and scenic pathway up the mountain which has been mapped over with waypoints telling the harrowing story of the Kokoda Trail 1942 World War II battle between the Australians and the Japanese.

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The real Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea is apparently really hard and harsh, consisting of a track that can only be walked single-file. Even without the horrors of war, the conditions of the track are already trying - "hot, humid days with intensely cold nights, torrential rainfall and the risk of endemic tropical diseases such as malaria make it a challenging trek." Its obvious that Mt Ainslie with its easy footpath and gorgeous scenic viewpoints looks nothing like the original Kokoda Track that has been mapped over it.

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Kokoda Trail, Mt Ainslie, Canberra

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"Kokoda Village" (note the YOU ARE HERE arrow on this plaque, and all of the other plaques on this walking trail)

So how is a trip down a modern road/trail and the memory of war related? I suppose if I had to rationalise it, there is something to be said about the road trip - the long car/bus/road journey - as something which forces the traveller to take the time and space to reflect and remember things from the past. The journey is punctuated by the appearance of these road signs telling us of the names of war heroes (although on an aside I do wonder, if we remember the names of war heroes, then why not the names of prominent scientists or artists or people in other occupations who have also contributed to nation building?); and as one clocks more and more mileage and progresses closer and closer to one's destination, there is an idea of having to find closure or to mentally 'complete' that internal journey into the past.

Another significant place located on the side of Mt Ainslie is the Aboriginal Memorial Plaque, a memorial (established privately by local residents rather than by any govt) which pays respects to the important yet oft-overlooked contributions of Indigenous service personnel in Australia.

Perhaps one of the most complex and difficult challenges for the Australian War Memorial today is to help reconcile Australia with Australia's long and dark history of rendering Aboriginals and other indigenous people invisible in its military and in its histories.

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For could you not also describe the colonisation process from 1788 as a kind of war waged by the white settlers against the black Aboriginals? - which has ultimately been the deadliest and longest 'war' that has been running throughout Australia's history?

Friday 26 May 2017

DBBD Does Documentation: Now on Youtube!





A new development over the last month! I've rather belatedly discovered the joy of doing lots of video documentation! For a person who seems to have struggled inexplicably with slow internet or intermittent wifi/internet for years now (damn you telcos and inconvenient travelling plans!) it does take me more time to edit and upload these morsels, but I think the effort is well worth it!

Here is what my time in Australia looked like - featuring: Australian War Memorial, Anzac Day, Last Post, Changi Quilt, Science Museums, Natural History Museums, dioramas, holograms, magic lanterns, pepper's ghost, parallax barrier grid, lenticular prints, vr goggles, aerial views, optical illusions, transparent OLED touchscreens and other projections and reflective things. And also lots of bugs and birds (because I like bugs and I like birds). Maybe it makes no sense to others (George thought it was "exhausting"??) but surely that short-attention-span 2-second-jump-cut format is still recognisable to all who use instagram/vine/fb?

It was only halfway through my visit that I realised that using video made a lot more sense than using photos to collect visual references (I kinda regret not doing it throughout my entire trip!). So I have to admit that the selection of clips here shows a rather random slice of my time there that just so happened to be caught on video, rather than being representative of my whole time in Canberra/Sydney/Melbourne...

In addition to discovering the joys of video documentation, I decided to make a new youtube channel! But since the channel looked really sad and boring when it only had one video on it, I decided to re-upload a bunch of old videos I've made, and then one thing led to another, and now I've given them some ALL NEW AND HILARIOUS DESCRIPTIONS!.... (please read descriptions before watching)


THE DBBD YOUTUBE CHANNEL

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCynhKJ773XGc5gqvis0ZaRg

BLENDER SPEED MODELLING




"Hi Everyone. Here is me speed modelling the MBK-12 a few years ago, also known as the B.E.A.R. You might have seen something like it in Battlefield 5. I made my own changes to it, and I have released this as a game asset which is available for free download on the Unity game store. Quite happy with this one, but admittedly its really not my best work considering the evolution of my 3D skills since then."


CG ANIMATION EXPERIMENT




"Hi guys, here's an experiment in crowd dynamics made with Miarmy for Maya, which I made as a previs for this personal CG animated short film that I'm trying to finish in my free time. It's going to be a thrilling Post-apocalyptic Zombie-Alien-Invasion-meets-Counter-Historical-Fantasy science fiction thriller with lots of drama and emotion, and mental acrobatics. You can probably see where I'm going with this example."


DIY SLIME TUTORIAL




"HI EVERYONE! TODAY'S VIDEO IS A DIY SLIME RECIPE TUTORIAL, ITS SUPER EASY AND FUN. SORRY ABOUT MY VOICE, MY MIC IS A BIT OLD SO ITS NOT PICKING UP EVERYTHING, I'M JUST TURNING 12 AND MY MOM WON'T GET ME A NEW ONE TILL CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR. THANKS FOR WATCHING! ITS GONNA BE AWESOME! LOVE U GUYS"


IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PLZ SUBSCRIBE TO THE DBBD CHANNEL FOR MORE:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCynhKJ773XGc5gqvis0ZaRg

(Sorry my channel is only 1 day old / not yet 30 days old / so it can't have a custom URL yet)
Clearly I've watched too many youtube / slime videos / speed modelling videos / cg experiment videos...

Tuesday 9 May 2017

The Changi Chapel in Canberra

I've been in Canberra for two weeks now as an artist-in-residence with the Australian War Memorial; walking and exploring all around Canberra, as well as looking into its vast archives. Over the weekend, whilst looking around Google Maps for directions around Canberra I saw something very interesting...



The Changi Chapel.

THE CHANGI CHAPEL???

THE CHANGI CHAPEL IS IN CANBERRA

I was very puzzled: why hadn't I heard that the original structure of the Changi Chapel was in Australia?.... Not once did I read in any book, pamphlet or material in Singapore that the "original" Changi Chapel was in Canberra! (and mind you, as a "completer-finisher" type of person, I thought I had read every single caption there was to read...)

Just a few weeks ago, me and Angela visited the replica of the Changi Chapel in Singapore, a simple and modest wooden chapel that sits within the courtyard of the Changi Museum. At the Changi Museum, the informational signboards do write clearly that it is a replica - but I have to admit that I blithely assumed we were seeing a replica because it had to be moved from its former Changi Prison site - and not because the original had been relocated elsewhere!

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Outside the Changi Museum, Singapore

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The Replica of the Changi Chapel inside the Changi Museum, Singapore

According to the Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture (by the Australian Institute of Architects), the Changi Chapel (RSTCA No: R055I) is a "rare surviving structure built by Allied prisoners of war from World War 2. A feature of the simple but refined chapel, which reflects the adverse circumstances of its construction, is the use of scrounged building materials."

More from the Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture:

In October 1945 the War Graves Unit, including Corporal Max Lee, spent a few days by chance in the Changi Camp, en route to Sumatra. Corporal Lee made a request to the British to save the chapel, which was one of the few structures that had not been destroyed by fire. Permission was granted and after extensive photographs were taken and measured drawings and sketches were made by Lee, the Chapel was dismantled by a working party of surrendered Japanese personnel. It was crated to Australia in 1947, with the intention that the Chapel be reconstructed as a fitting memorial for “prisoners of war who had little recognition for the extreme adversity under which many had lived and died” (attributed to Lee).

The crates were stored in the Australian War Memorial where they remained for 40 years. The chapel was finally offered to the Australian Defence Force Academy and in 1987 reconstruction work commenced. The work was undertaken by the Royal Australian Engineer Corps. Following an unsuccessful application for Bicentennial funding, the Army launched a nation-wide public appeal for funds. In consultation with the Australian Heritage Commission, a site at Duntroon was chosen in the centre of small parkland close to the ANZAC Memorial Chapel.

It seems that I was confused because in 1988, two things occurred: (1) on the bicentenary year of Australia (1788-1988), the original Changi Chapel was reconstructed and dedicated as a National Memorial (to all Australian prisoners of war) in Duntroon, Canberra on the anniversary of the end of World War II (15 August 1945-15 August 1988), and (2) the replica of the Changi Chapel was constructed by the inmates of Changi Prison, as part of the Changi Museum built by the Singapore Tourism Board, situated outside of of the Changi Prison grounds. (The Changi Museum in Singapore was built in February 1988, according to this page containing research by Kevin Blackburn).

What a coincidence! Why was the Changi Chapel replica built in 1988 in the same year that the original was put back together in Duntroon? Was the decision to build the replica triggered by the reconstruction efforts of the original Changi Chapel over in Duntroon in 1988? Or of course a simple answer could be that 1988 was simply chosen precisely because of the significance of the year 1988 to Australian war veterans who would have wanted a memorial site to be constructed in Changi. But later again, the Changi Museum had to be moved because of the expansion of Changi Prison (as a prison for serious criminal offenders), so it was yet again moved to its present-day site at 1000 Upper Changi Rd North on 15 February 2001.

Standing on an area of 3.6m by 4.8m in Duntroon, the "original" Changi Chapel is clearly much larger than its "replica" in Changi - but then no one said it was going to be an exact replica. I suppose the main point is that there is indeed a transnational memorial at which people can come together to pay their respects and remember those who suffered or lost their lives during World War II.

I was thinking that another easy misconception to make if one just skims over all the material is that one might assume that the Changi Murals painted by Stanley Warren were in THAT original outdoor Changi Chapel, when actually the Changi Murals had been at the ground floor of Block 151 in Roberts Barracks - which had been converted into a chapel dedicated to St Luke the physician. I suppose its not very useful to call everything "Changi", since Changi Gaol had been pretty large actually.

There had been 3 army barracks within Changi Gaol, namely Selarang Barracks, Kitchener Barracks, and Roberts Barracks. The Australians were sent to Selarang Barracks, and the British to Roberts Barracks and Kitchener Barracks. Roberts Barracks was later converted into Roberts Hospital. Stanley Warren was suffering from a severe renal disorder complicated by amoebic dysentery and was recovering in the dysentery wing of the hospital at Block 151, close to where St Luke's Chapel was set up at, and he began painting the murals soon after the Selarang Barracks Incident.

This photograph taken during the Selarang Barracks Incident gives a sense of the sheer scale of Changi Gaol (which might come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with how huge it had been):

Source: Australian War Memorial
Photo Taken: September 1942
ID number: 042307
Description: Photograph taken during the Selarang Barracks Square Incident when Japanese General Fukuye concentrated 13350 British and 2050 Australian prisoners of war because of their refusal to sign a promise not to escape. The picture shows external excavations for latrines made necessary because of overcrowding in the barracks.

The Changi Chapel in a black and white photo, taken October 1945
Source: Australian War Memorial
ID: 043124

Source: Australian War Memorial
Murray Griffin
Second World War, official war artist
St Andrew’s chapel
pen and ink and wash over pencil on paper
drawn in Changi, Singapore, in 1945
acquired under official war art scheme in 1946
ID: ART26460

Australia! You win at the collecting of Things! Not only do you have the Table, you somehow also have the Chapel too! But then again, I suppose that without the lobbying of Australian politicians, even the last bits of the original Changi prison wall would have probably disappeared (See also: ABC News (2004) - Singapore to preserve Changi prison wall)...

So the question that comes to my mind is... what is a country to do with a "transnational" memorial like the Changi Chapel - or Changi Gaol as a whole for that matter? If we think of World War II as a thread that has deeply entwined and shaped both Singapore's and Australia's individual histories and national identities, Changi Chapel and Changi Gaol is always going to be a part of Singapore's history because it happened right here in Singapore, and as a former British Commonwealth army garrison and British Commonwealth PoW camp, it is deeply embedded in the memories of all of the 15,000 Australians soldiers who were forced into the PoW camp. Yet to describe it straight-up as a site of "shared memory" without any caveat seems wildly inaccurate; the Changi Gaol is really not a part of the Singaporean civilian's personal wartime story. (also: I don't know but can someone tell me what shorthand term I can use to call "the Singaporean" before WWII and before Singapore's independence?).

I mean, before I began this residency I never even realised there was actually a whole thing, an entire pilgrimage tour wherein many British and Australians (war veterans/survivors/families of survivors/families of those who died in WWII) make this pilgrimage to visit the various WWII/PoW sites in Singapore... with the #1 site on the list being the replica of the Changi Chapel (in Singapore) which is confusingly not built to the original scale or design, and even twice removed from its original site!

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The Changi Chapel in Duntroon, Canberra

It seems to me the Changi Chapel exists so vividly in the memories of the Australians to the point that the original has finally been brought back "home" and resurrected here in the nation's capital, Canberra.(And perhaps that is why there has been no need for anyone in Singapore to mention that the original Changi Chapel is in Canberra...)



Also I should say at this point that I first saw the above images and photos in The Changi Book which I am reading right now. I could have slapped myself for not reading the whole Changi Book earlier - its big! and contains tons of stuff! and was seventy years in the making! - it has been amazingly edited by Lachlan Grant and contains the writings, drawings, paintings, and photographs created by prisoners of war in Changi - as well as lots of other essays by contributors from the Australian War Memorial. Many of those random questions I have asked out loud over the last few days have been answered in the book!

Eg: "Why was there a yeast production centre in Changi??"(Answer: Yeast contains vitamin B1 which was in short supply because of the POW diet of milled white rice which often resulted in vitamin B1 deficiency aka beri beri! So a yeast centre was built at Selarang to produce yeast from rice polishings, sweet potatoes, sugar and hops, which was then issued out to internees) "Then why did they knowingly build a rice mill and continue to polish all their white rice whilst in Changi?" (Answer: Because that was the only way they could get the rice to keep longer...)



On the issue of becoming obsessed with Rice whilst interned at the PoW camp: I don't often like to quote the Daily Mail as a credible source of information but in this one respect I remember how they did carry a story about a couple who were both Changi Prisoners of War, Donald and Isobel Grist, and how Donald Grist "later became world authority on rice after becoming fascinated by how it could sustain humans for so long". Reading the Changi Book I can now see why people became obsessed with food and rice. Grist's name is also so apt, considering how the word GRIST refers to grain that has been separated from the chaff...

On the issue of becoming obsessed with food whilst interned at the PoW camp: IN THE NEXT POST...



Note: As I have a lot of notes to push out I'll be backdating my posts to the approximate date of my visits to various sites and places, because I think it would be more useful to date my posts to when something happened rather than when I finished writing the posts in the random future... However, in case you are wondering, I did visit the Changi Chapel in Canberra today on 9 May 2017! And actually it is just a mere 9 minute drive from the Australian War Memorial!

Thursday 4 May 2017

The many names of acrylic glass: Perspex, Plexiglas and Lucite

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Recently, whilst on a visit to the Australian War Memorial's storage facility in Mitchell, I had the opportunity to get up close with one of the Boeing CH47 Chinooks, or "chooks" to the Australians. The Chinook is surely also a familiar plane to most Singaporeans as two chinooks are used every year to fly the Singapore Flag during the National Anthem on the televised National Day Parade. I was admiring the round windows when I was told they were made of.... plastic! A hollow tap confirmed it! I was surprised to see that the window were all made of something akin to Perspex! Well, I said Perspex, but then being unsure of what the Australians called acrylic glass here, I felt obliged to rattle off a series of possible plastic names! Perspex? Plexiglas? Acrylic sheet? Polymethyl methacrylate?? Perspex?! What do you call it!

Later in the week the question of where perspex got its name from came up again in a random conversation. Indeed, Perspex is such a wonderful name when you think of it - it reminds us of perspective, or spectacles, and has the futuristic letter X at the end! So why don't we use the term "perspex" as often these days to refer to acrylic glass?.... so I duly went and googled it.

It turns out that "Perspex" itself is a registered trademark of the British company Imperial Chemical Industries (The "ICI" of popular Dulux paints), which is possibly why the use of the term may have fallen out of fashion - since the use of the trademarked term "perspex" would have its legal constraints. However, in America the same type of acrylic glass (Polymethyl methacrylate) product is sold as "Plexiglas", which has also been trademarked and produced by another company.

Running the words through Google Ngram viewer (which allows you to compare the 'yearly count' of any Ngrams/words/phrases from the Google text corpus of 1500-2008), this confirms that in British English "perspex" is by far the most commonly used word, but in American English then it is more popular to call it "plexiglas"!

British English

graphing the terms: perspex,plexiglass,plexiglas,lucite,acrylic glass


American English

graphing the terms: perspex,plexiglass,plexiglas,lucite,acrylic glass


You'll notice that interestingly for the American English ngram chart, "lucite" is revealed to have been the most popular term once upon a time, peaking in 1951.

Lucite is the trademarked term by the American company DuPont - which does a lot of material science development and also developed neoprene, nylon, teflon, mylar, kevlar, kapton, tyvek, lycra, and even Freon (the CFCs used in fridges).

If we had to trace the origin of Polymethylmethacrylate/PMMA/lucite/plexiglas/perpex, they were first used on a large scale in WWII for military applications such as aircraft windshields and submarine periscopes - in both the Allied and Axis sides! Wartime contracts boosted the R&D of new plastics. Materials like PMMA was lightweight, durable, and resistant to wind, water, and UV rays. Another consideration was that flying shards of PMMA (as opposed to flying glass shards!) was less likely to blind or cause serious eye injuries to airplane pilots.

And in the postwar period, the task for all these companies producing acrylic glass were to find everyday uses through which these plastics could be marketed to the wider consumer market...

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Today the Chinook's windows are made with another proprietary special aerospace acrylic glass that is made to withstand bird-impact and ballistic impact.