Australian War Memorial puts faces to names

Antipodean Andy · Apr 17, 2008

I would think we can help with this.

Memorial puts faces to names of fallen Australians - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra is seeking individual photographs of every man and woman listed on its Roll of Honour.

The Roll of Honour lists 102,000 Australians who have died in conflicts. But the memorial only has about 6,600 photographs and wants to put faces to the names of the remaining 95,400 service men and women.

Senior curator of photographs Shaune Lakin says photos make a personal connection between the names on the roll and their stories.

"Actually having a face to put to that name adds a lot of significance to the record of their service and sacrifice," he said.

Mr Lakin says the photos will be used on the AWM's Roll of Honour online database.

"We're now talking about the possibility of attaching photographs to each of those records. There's a whole bunch of researchers and families right across the country who will be able to look at these photographs as well as people who come into the Memorial and can also see them on display inside galleries," he said.

"We're just asking people to basically look through their own collections and to see if they've got photographs of family members who ... died at war and whose photographs could become part of our national record."

The AWM is also encouraging Australians to search its online database for possible relatives.

"We're finding lately that a lot of young people are not necessarily aware of the fact that ... they might have a great-great uncle that died on the Western Front, for a whole range of reasons. That knowledge is not necessarily being passed down through the generations," Mr Lakin said.

Founding vision

Mr Lakin said AWM founder Charles Bean had envisioned having a photo for each Australian who died in World War One.

"He understood the power of the photograph and how important it would be to attach an image to each of those names to just remind people that we are actually talking about people, they're not just names, they're not just inscriptions on a brass plaque," Mr Lakin said.

"They were young, they looked a certain way, they had particular mannerisms and family characteristics and Bean was very conscious of the fact that photographs were going to play a very important role in the way people remembered."

But for various reasons Mr Bean's vision did not come to fruition.

Mr Lakin says digital technology has now made it possible to have an online version of Mr Bean's vision.

"We can make copies of photographs that are in family collections, we can scan them and we can upload those scans onto our electronic or digital Roll of Honour," he said.

"So we do in fact have a sort of form of what it is that Bean first envisioned but was unable to see through."
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spidge · Apr 17, 2008

What a mammoth and wonderful undertaking.

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