EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: The Avenue of Honour – anatomy of a monument 
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 1995
Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne 2007
ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra 2008
Each tree stands as a silent sentry representing a gallant soldier. The trees are protected by well-made timber guards, affixed to each of which is a neat sheet-copper embossed name plate, giving the soldier’s name rank and Battalion.  The soldiers have been placed in alphabetical order and numbered, placing the members of one family together.
                                                                                                 -  Bacchus Marsh Express 17 August 1918
On the 17th  of August 1918 the Bacchus Marsh Express gave a detailed and moving account of the community effort and what it meant to the one thousand people who gathered together on the day to erect the memorial to the soldiers and nurse, of the district who took part in the war.  Recruitment for the First World War was local.  Soldiers from a particular town or region stayed together for the duration of the war for as long as they lived.  Casualties would have had a major and visible impact on small communities such as Bacchus Marsh.

It was while travelling through the Avenue at dusk on a late winter day that I was struck by its symmetry and stark beauty.  As the last watery light of the day illuminated the commemorative nameplates and deepened the silhouetted tracery of the rain darkened branches against the sky, it’s history and place in the landscape seemed equally illuminated.  My decision to create the artwork was inspired by a recognition that the members of the district’s community responsible for planning, planting and dedicating the monument would have done so knowing that they would not live to see it reach it’s mature beauty.  It reminded me too, of my Grandfather, Gordon Eaton, who served in the trenches of France.

The original work was conceived and developed as an installation-based work consisting of two hundred and eighty-one panels: one representing every tree that constitutes the body of the memorial itself.  It was first exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Dallas Brookes Drive, during the Australia Remembers Celebrations of 1995.

Important as historical cultural markers, the avenue memorials constitute a rich repository of information, encoding both myth and meaning, and a palimpsest of physical changes that have occurred over time.  As an artist with a background in archaeology I saw an opportunity to bring a cross-disciplinary approach to the making of the work.  My idea was for it to function simultaneously as an installation-based artwork and as a ‘documentary text’ of the Avenue as it stood in 1993.

The visual character of the panels was arrived at through a process consistent with methods used in field archaeology, namely: survey, description, visual recording, and ‘retrieval’.  In this case, ‘archaeological  retrieval’ became ‘artistic process’.  Survey and description required walking the Avenue examining, photographing and recording the peculiarities of each tree.  I employed ‘frottage’ as a method for visually recording the tree’s external physicality.  This techniques provided a precise surface ‘mapping’ of each tree trunk and name plate.  Each frottaged panel acts like an ‘echo’ of the skin of the tree.  Many variations have been recorded in the documentation process.  For example, since 1918 some name plates were lost;  their replacement at various intervals over seventy-five years has resulted in five different styles being represented.  The text on the plates also varies from the original choices made by relatives.

Tree by tree this ‘trace’ of the Bacchus Marsh Avenue of Honour monument re-locates a narrative;  one that records the passage of time and human agency.  Within the repetition of technical and artistic processes, and aesthetic decisions made, further variations accumulate.  The artistic intervention itself adds to the Avenue’s narrative history.         

-  Janenne Eaton - information banner at the Shrine of Remembrance.