National War Memorial (South Australia) - Design

Design

The rules of the competition limited the space for the memorial to the "one half acre" of land that was excised from the grounds of Government House. The design submitted by Woods, Bagot, Jory & Laybourne Smith easily met this requirement, as the memorial was designed to fit on an ellipse with a major axis of 18.3 m (60 ft) in length and a minor axis of 15.5 m (51 ft). Standing at a height of over 14 m (46 ft), the structure was carefully placed back from North Terrace to provide space for "public gatherings of a ceremonial nature" and to allow for the proposed widening of the street.

The monument has two sides, referred to by the architects as the reverse and the obverse of the work, which they likened to the two sides of a coin. These two aspects represent the prologue and the epilogue of war. Each side features a relief carved from Angaston marble and framed by the "rough-hewn" arch carved out of marble from Macclesfield, while the granite steps leading up to the monument are constructed of Harcourt granite, as specified in the original proposal. (The architects had preferred the local West Island granite, but acknowledged that the Harcourt granite was "the best available" unless the government would agree to reopen the quarry on West Island). The materials were chosen in order to provide continuity with Parliament House, located a short distance away along North Terrace.

To represent the prologue to the war, the obverse of the monument (the side facing North Terrace) features a relief of the Spirit of Duty appearing as a vision before the youth of South Australia, represented in the work by a sculptural group consisting of a girl, a student and a farmer abandoning the "symbols of their craft". The three are depicted in normal dress, as they are not yet soldiers and are currently unprepared for the war that is to come, and they are facing away from the world as they look to the vision before them. In Bagot's original plan, submitted for the 1924 competition, there was to be but a single nude figure kneeling before the vision (for which Bagot posed while in Europe), but Laybourne-Smith's 1926 submission became grander in its scope. In addition, Bagot's original designs were naturalistic, with the Spirit of Duty depicted as a female figure, but under Hoff's direction the figure was changed to male, and the style of the reliefs was changed to Art Deco—a "radically new" art style for Australia at the time. Hoff, however, presented the sculptural group in the original naturalistic style, thus providing a "bridge between the Renaissance-style architecture and the Art Deco of the reliefs".

On the reverse side of the monument, facing away from the traffic, is a relief carved into the marble representing the epilogue of the war and depicting the Spirit of Compassion as a winged spirit of womanhood bearing aloft a stricken youth. Beneath the figure is situated the Fountain of Compassion, the flow of water representing the "constant flow of memories", while the lion's head from which it emerges, (and which bears the Imperial Crown), is representative of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

The designers acknowledged that the symbolism—especially that of the reverse side—does not represent "victory" in the traditional sense. They stated that the "Arch of Triumph which was built in honour of a Caesar, a Napoleon, no longer expresses the feelings of modern democracy after an international struggle". Instead, the memorial represented a spiritual victory, in which was displayed a "willingness to serve and to sacrifice".

Within the memorial the architects added an inner shrine, or Record Room, in which could be recorded the names of the South Australians who fell during the war. While the design did not specify the exact form that this would take, in the completed memorial these names are inscribed in the bronzes that line the walls. The design also allowed for a cenotaph within the inner shrine, which the designers suggested could either be used as a symbolic representation of the unknown soldier or as the marker to an actual grave, although this aspect was never realised.

The monument is designed to honour both the war dead and all who served in the war—one face being inscribed to those who died in the war, while the other is dedicated to "all who served". On the obverse side is inscribed the words "To perpetuate the courage, loyalty, and sacrifice of those who served in the Great War 1914–1918", while the reverse states "All honour give to those who, nobly striving, nobly fell that we might live". Above the two entrances to the inner shrine were to be inscribed the names of the major theaters in which Australians served in the Great War. Originally it was suggested that this was to be Egypt, Gallipoli and Palestine on one side, with France on the other, but in the final work Belgium was added to the list.

Although the central square mile of the City of Adelaide is designed to the points of the compass, the monument sits at a 45 degree angle to North Terrace. The architects provided two reasons for this. First, it was observed that "monuments suffer materially from monotonous lighting" when they face to the south; and second, the placing of the monument to face a north-west direction allows it to be in line with both the Cross of Sacrifice and St. Peter's Cathedral. In addition to these two arguments, Richardson also notes that the diagonal positioning of the memorial permits the dawn sun to fall on the facade.