Curated by Fiona Davies, Looking at Others explores notions of memory, displacement and remnants of the invisible. The Death project will be a series of exhibitions, performances and lectures around the vast topic of death, held at Parramatta Artists Studios, 45 Hunter St Parramatta.
War graves is my contribution to this group exhibition. I am proud to be showing alongside: Brigit Anderson, Fiona Davies, Jamie Eastwood, Sari TM Kivinen, Aaron Seeto and Martin Smith.
I have an interest in death and grieving. During my 20s had a lot of friends who died: fifteen in a decade. Only one was in a car accident, so that is not my motive for the project - more a sort of generalised interest in grief as an emotion. Part of the reason roadside memorials seem so important to me is that they are usually commemorating a young man, someone like me, so there is a certain sense of “There, but for the grace of God…” when I pass them. Often they are erected by the parents of the victim. As I am a parent now myself, this gesture elicits both sympathy and fear in large measures.
Most importantly, however, I have noticed a pattern to them. Wherever you put a population of young men – say, a beachside suburb – at one end of a road, and all the entertainment at the other (be it the pub, a cinema, whatever) you will see dozens of these markers. The road to Victor Harbour in South Australia is one such place. The Central Coast of New South Wales is also littered with them.
Their numbers increase vastly every year. Driving to Canberra a few weeks ago, I counted eleven new memorials set up in the eleven months since I last made the trip. In the 23,250 km I have driven since 2003 in making this project, I have seen thousands.
If we know this, why do we pursue transport policies that increasingly cut young men off from safe, cheap ways of getting home after a night on the tiles? The first roadside memorial I saw was a simple white cross commemorating Norm Yee on the corner of Minogue Crescent and the on-ramp the the (then) Glebe Island Bridge in about 1985. There were very few in the late 80s and then in the early 1990s it seemed to take off. Now they are everywhere. Perhaps seeing the breadth of the problem described not in hard stats but in images will help to change that pattern.
Unlike many other emotions, grief doesn’t fade well with time. You have to do something active to dispel it. Mourning, the socialised processing of grief, is a traditional way of doing this. The ritualistic aspects of mourning help us normalise, and from there assimilate and lessen, our grief.
Markers have been traditional tools of mourning in many cultures, giving the bereaved a site to release their emotions, perhaps to begin their one-sided conversations with the dead, and a sort of fetish object to address in their place. In Western culture we have usually marked the grave of the departed: the site of their actual body. This tradition was ruptured by WWI. New technologies of slaughter pureéd most of a generation of men . Millions of people were simply gone, evaporated by artillery or shot into unrecognisable bits by machine guns. Mourning without a body to mourn over was all of a sudden very commonplace. War memorials were established against this problem – public places where the bereaved could go to “visit” their lost loved ones.
Since the takeover of the Australian funeral industry in the 1980s by American corporations whose profit motive exceeds their intent to serve the community, cremation (a cheaper alternative in light of the absurd land prices created by runaway property speculation, and one with fewer overheads) has become the norm. Of the fifteen friends I buried, there is not one grave to visit. Hence, a need for other markers.
It is this fact, along with the bald statistic that we lose approximately the same number of people (and largely from the same demographic) every year on the roads of each state of Australia as we lost in the entire Vietnam War, which prompted me to name the project War Graves. I do not intend to trivialise war memorials by the comparison, but rather to impress upon the viewer the gravity of meaning in the increasing numbers of these markers.
So why are they placed by the roadside rather than in the home of the bereaved? Partly it is because the bereaved may occupy several homes, necessitating some neutral ground be established; partly it is because the process of lessening grief is not helped by having such a reminder in the back yard where you will see it every time you feed the cat or hang out the washing; and partly due to the significance afforded ths sites of deaths in history. It is not graveyards which are traditionally occupied by the spirits of the deceased, but the sites of their deaths.
Our annual losses to the road toll in Australia are similar in number and in general demographic to a medium-sized war, and these memorials are public in a way that cemetary markers are not. In these ways I am reminded of war memorials by these markers, hence the title.
The War graves project is my personal exploration of the growing phenomenon of roadside memorials. I have arranged it state by state as that is how the road toll is enumerated. I am shooting the images on 35mm colour film using a Nikon FM and am scanning the negatives at high resolution and printing them using a Gicleé large-format inkjet printer on Hanmüehle acid-free etching paper at full sheet size in the final version; a maquette has been made for the Death exhibition at the Parramatta Artists Studios to fit allocated space. Digital manipulation is limited to colour correction and a very small amount of cropping.
It is not so much a documentary survey as a personal response, something a bit obsessive. I have kept the precise details regarding name, location, story and so on vague for this reason: it is the sheer number of them that is interesting, not the individual stories behind them.
Kay Orchison
7 July 2008