'Sacred Places' has won many accolades since it was first published in 1998, including the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History, and 'The Age' Book of the Year.
This insights of this landmark work have influenced the way Australian communities value, display and protect the thousands of war memorials scattered through the parks and main streets of our cities and townships.
More than 60,000 serving Australians perished in the slaughter of the First World War. Afterwards, the nation embarked on a remarkable programme of war memorial construction, enshrining the Anzac experience in bronze and stone.
In this moving and beautifully written book, Ken Inglis traces the development of the Anzac tradition. He examines how in the secular, peace-loving nineteen sixties and seventies, commemoration began to wither away, as veterans passed and the memorials themselves crumbled. And he carefully maps the acts of cultural creation, the government planning and community feeling that kept the tradition alive to flower again in the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
Contents:
Foreword
Introduction: Holy Ground
1. Colonial Monuments
- Memorials ancient and modern
- A privilege for posterity
- Civil conflicts
- Statues
- No shrine
2. Soldiers of the Queen
- Distant graves
- For the Empire
- The makers
- Statues
- Ceremonies
- Remembering and forgetting
- Missing monuments
- The Commonwealth landscape
3. The Great War
- ANZAC
- The dead
- The bereaved
- The monument as recruiter
- Division
4. The War Memorial Movement
- The right way
- Raising the money
- Choosing the site
- The sacred and the useful
- Experts and artisans
- 'Their name liveth for evermore'
- 'Lest we Forget'
5. Anzac Days
- Red letter day
- Ceremonies
- Messages
- Dissenters
- The post-war landscape
- Uses and abuses
6. In Foreign Fields
- Graves
- Memorials
- Pilgrims
7. Capital Monuments
- Slow movements
- Tasmania
- Western Australia
- Queensland
- South Australia
- New South Wales
- Victoria
- Dawn
- Canberra
8. From World War II to Vietnam
- 'Never such innocence again'
- The triumph of utility
- The persistence of monuments
- Names and inscriptions
- Women
- Prisoners of war
- Aborigines
- Overseas
- Korea and Vietnam
- State updates
- The Australian War memorial
- A sacred way
9. Australia Remembers
- Operation Restoration
- Ceremonies old and new
- Sacred sites
- Aboriginal presences and absences
- The Unknown Australian Soldier
- Civil religion
- Meanings
- Multiculture
- 'All graves are one'
Sources
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Review:When we utter those words "we will remember them", Ken Inglis helps us to understand not just why, but what we ought to bring to mind. This book transcends history, and we are all the richer for it - Dr Tom Frame, Angical Bishop to the Australian Defence Force
